Perhaps the biggest blessing of living in San Francisco is the ironic quality of living in our little isolated paradise and constantly being exposed to a bigger world that most Americans will ever choose to know.

Today I am cooking medicine that should help my skin. As I mentioned, my herb doctor gave me a small paper bag full of various herbs (i.e., leaves, shoots, buds, mushrooms, bark, seeds, usw). Right now I am in the midst of cooking it for 20 minutes. I put the contents of the bag in a pot and covered it in water:

The smell is intensely pungent, that smell that when I first started going to Dr. Chon was an olfactory assault to my person, something alien and almost threatening in the way that the unknown can be to some people.

And now? Now I choose to leave the exhaust fan off, so that the smell permeates the house, creating a hopefully-lasting ataraxy throughout this fourteen-years-tomorrow fortress I live in.

What a world and such people in it.

UPDATE: Here's what the finished product looks like:

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