Discoveries of the evening:

1) I just realized that I smell exactly like my dad. Well, at least my headband that I've been using for 2 months without washing it does.

2) Duck gizzards are delicious! Well, if they have been stewing in duck fat they are.

3) I need to take a picture of that house between Luynes and Gardanne that has like a hundred doll carcasses hanging on it. Creepy.

I am the Great Cornholio

Usually when I get home after nine hours of tromping through mud, I have a beer. We eat shortly thereafter, and then I feel like doing nothing at all. But today it's raining, and it looks like it will continue all day (very strange for summer in Provence), so I have some time to be alert and write.

The weather has actually been very cooperative lately. Not too hot, cloudy, nice breezes.


There've been a few car related problems lately. A section of the highway near Audrey's house was closed for roadwork, rerouting a ton of traffic onto a winding country road. As a result, there have been a ton of accidents. Just imagine Week End (1967) by Jean-Luc Godard. One late-night goofball was going 100mph, and somehow didn't manage to properly execute one of the many hairpin turns on this road. He and a friend then bounced three times in one of the corn fields we work in, thouroughly breaking their car and themselves in the process.

Then, a week or so later, we found out that three good friends of Aurelie (of Aurelie and Brian fame) were killed in a horrible car crash on an expressway in Marseille. A drunk girl somehow got going the wrong way and slammed into them head-on. Only two people survived, including a little girl who emerged with just a few bruises and scratches.


On a happier note, at the end of September I will start a Masters program in Anthropologie Biologique at the med school in Marseille. I'm really excited. There are only about 10 people accepted a year, so I should get a lot of access to the profs. That said, the director isn't responding to my emails regarding a piece of information I urgently need for my visa process...


I hope to keep writing on a more regular basis and I hope everyone is well.

-Andrew

WTF MTA

Sleeping shit

Tonight me and Audrey went to a great Mexican restaurant right in our neighborhood and ate huitlacoche for the first time. When I saw it on the menu, I knew we had to order it, since we had both had intimate encounters with this fungus in the corn fields of Puyricard. It was delicious! I'm now ashamed that at one time I thought this black, sickly, tumor-like growth was a thing to avoid at all costs. Once I broke a piece of huitlacoche off and its juice squirted in my eye. I was horrified that my ocular membrane might be infected with this ugly black fungus! Now I wish that this had happened, so I could harvest a delicious earthy black paste from my eye daily and spread it on a warm corn tortilla. Mmm... eye fungus.

Say what you will about wikipedia, but going from corn smut to sotolon (a compound found in corn smut) to maple syrup urine disease in three clicks was magical. Pee that smells like maple syrup is no laughing matter mind you. That shit'll fuck you up!