"so what would you like for breakfast? a rabbit? or a goat?"

from pammukale, astrid and i took an overnight bus back for one final night in burhaniye. breakfast now includes summer fruit jam and also the lovely thick spreadable cream that i afraid i won't be able to find back home. for dinner, rabbit.

an early morning goat roast

the next morning mo woke me so early i thought i was dreaming, and we packed our thinkgs and went back up to the village to start in on the ram. i did not know that the roast began so early, but it did, almost at dawn, and by the time we arrived at mehmetalan the roasting fire was already burning low in its white ash. there were tomatoes and cucumbers and peppers and cheese on the little varnished coffee table that stayed outside with the plastic chairs, and some juicy meat on a wooden cutting board with legs to serve as a low cutting table. there was a knife on the cutting board. water dripped from the outdoor faucet. altogether the fire looked too low to do any serious cooking, mo placed the quivering cuts on a wire rack and suspended it over the ash on bricks, and shortly the smell of roasted meat poked through, and we ate with knives.

meanwhile the girls arrived one by one or two at a time and ducked through the bead curtain into the house. then they would emerge in ornate turkish costumes with jangley decorations sewn around the borders.

we lingered for only a few short minutes before sabile was wiping the table down and moving things inside. mo emptied out the pickup truck, moving four bags at a time two per arm, and the others carried out plastic bags of picnic food including the baklava i'd bought from the kipa. the girls all climbed into the back of the truck where there was a blanket down. one of them had bright red lip balm in flat metal tin. another watched her put it on, then took the tin and put spots of the red on her own cheek and smoothed out the colour. the rest of them did the same. then mo and emir and ruchan got into the cabin of the truck, and i did too, and asked mo where we were going, and he said plainly that we were going to for a picnic perhaps down by the cemetary. and so we drove off slow down the bumpy road, heading for a picnic perhaps down by the cemetary.

a boy, five girls and a would-be goat

astrid kerr arrives in five days and i am still learning how to be myself around women, of which there were five, and carnivorous, at the goat roast.

the roast was wednesday. tuesday night we rolled into mehmetalan, four of us, ruchan, ugur, mo and me, and our bags, and cassius (dog) in the back of the pickup.

"but unfortunately," said mo, "it is not going to be a goat roast, we are going to roast a ram."

"isn't a ram a goat?" i asked, having much to learn about a great many things.

"no, a ram is a sheep," said mo.

it's true. a ram is a male sheep. and it _was a little unfortunate: i was hoping for a nice tender baby girl goat so i could at last take in some of that divine feminine energy i tend to go on about. but no: a big smelly male sheep. by the end of the event, when most of the ram was gone, mo would say: "we certainly smell like a sheep."

mehmetalan is a turkman village without a mosque and therefore without a prayer call. there are two sharp turns you need to negotiate going down the mountain road leading to. as you go into the town, you pass the antique olive oil factory, then you pass the house of a man named emir and his wife sabile, where we'd stopped once or twice before to say hello. later we would take one more sharp turn and head down to the campground where we would be staying that night. for now, the party was at emir's and we arrived with a square four litre tin of mo's wine.

emir doesn't speak english but he told me through an intermediary that when i learn turkish we are going to drink raki together. then he said "ah!" and remembered something, and drew me by the arm through the bead curtain leading to their kitchen and kind of tossed me in, where three girls sat at the table eating first-course salad and rolling cigarettes, and a fourth was shuffling pizzas in and out of the wood stove, and a fifth sat behind.

"ingilize," he said -- the girls spoke english.

"hello," i said and they said hello back.

this is where my mind starts to spin, always starts to spin. "where are you from?" i said and two of them said, "turkey?" and the other three nodded.

shortly i was to discover that the house bookshelf was all in turkish. luckily mo arrived with a bag full of prawns that needed cleaning and called me over. we stood side to side in the cramped kitchen with a full dish rack to the right and to the left a wall unit with little bowls of spices and a bottle of aromatic bitters, bundles of herbs, and also little bottle of apple rum seemed to have been forgotten. mo tore the shells off the prawns and had me slice down the convex side to remove the nerve-and-gut tubule. from there into a pan of hot olive oil where they cooked from grey to white to pink.

outside we had hot the prawns on hot bread and there was a fire and wine and lots of smoking and the air was cold. the girls were inside and every now and then one of them would come out often with a full wineglass and pick up the camera and take a few shots, or sit and say a few words while smoking. everyone seemed to know each other from sundance -- they could tell that mo's dog was a sundance dog, with a half-length tail, and also they knew the temper of the dog that bit me. to one girl (mo prodding me with his foot and whispering "she spins fire") i got to show off my scar. but that was all. i was prodded a slight bit more and i wanted to be more outgoing but also i did not. and so i was not feeling myself the whole night. i liked the wine, though. and when i walked out having forgot my backpack, i made to go back and get it and mo called after me, "ah yes, go, get her number."

(like this: "hi. would one of you five girls like to leave with me tonight?")

so i picked up my bag and left again and down we went to the campsite which was past the cemetary and over the running water. there we had a fire and tea and i put a new string on the campground guitar and played for a bit. cassius kept bounding around and aggravating the campground dog, who was greying and fat but snarled and bared her teeth. cassius is a puppy but he is a huge puppy and at six months as already the same size as this other dog, and they wrestled as mo went to his cabin to get a jacket.

"cassius!" i said. "know when to say enough."

they continued to grapple. the puppy was not letting up.

"cassius!"

"look at him," said mo when he came back. "he is a _warrior!"

then without further thoughts of his puppy having problems defending himself or for that matter causing trouble, he went in to sit by the fire, leaving the dogs to be.

then everyone went to bed except for me who stayed up a little longer to think and drink two glasses of water (too few) from the pitcher on the table. and knowing that i couldn't have hit on those girls but still somehow thinking i should have, and wondering what it means to be a warrior or to try and teach people to be one, i went to bed myself, and slept and slept.

scenes from a wednesday goat roast

in my paws, baklava.

it is the day before the goat roast.  

this morning i was up early, before mo, after a night of watching guitar instructional videos that i loaded onto my computer before coming here, knowing it'd be a long time i'd have to spend with no instrument of my own to play, but there is a guitar at the campground where we are spending the night.  today i went into town to get a string for it, and also some baklava from the kipa.

today we drive to the nearby village of mehmetalan which is backwards from mo's house, across a dusty field, through the town with the stone-age olive oil factory, and into a ravine that runs along a creek, then across the creek and down to where the creek joins the river.  there is a forest cemetery on the way in but water from the creek runs over the road to get to the river, so souls can wander only that far and no farther.  

man does not live by bread alone.

from the Dharma Bums:

<< I wondered why Han Shan was Japhy's hero. "Because," said he, "he was a poet, a mountain man, a Buddhist dedicated to the principle of meditation on the essence of all things, a vegetarian too by the way though I haven't got on that kick from figuring maybe in this modern world to be a vegetarian is to split hairs a little since all sentient beings eat what they can [...] [...with some onions, garlic, a little pepper and salt...] [...]." >>


1. last night moving over the grill to mo's house for lamb chops and kebabs.



2. tonight, again tripes. actually, to be precise these are not tripes, which are the outsides of the small intestines; these are the insides of the small intestines. they get wound up like a rope on a skewer and pressed together into, like, a sausage. mince and cook til crispy.





3. working on a shortlist for this week's goat roast.