Italy’s All-Natural Antibiotic
Not just a pizza topping or an ingredient in red sauce, oregano — in the form of an oil — is an advanced multispectrum cure for infection, including zits, earaches, worms, parasites, and the flu.
It appears in the Book of Exodus as “hyssop,” and is named as an essential ingredient in purification rituals.
Dioscorides, the Greek physician, pharmacologist, and botanist who traveled as a surgeon with Nero’s army, was also a fan.
Fifteen years ago, when I first moved to Montana, I made friends with a woman named Trish, a talented collage artist who owned a boutique across the street from the building where I lived with my then-boyfriend, now-husband. Trish was in her early fifties at the time, but her tiny shop was a haunt for women of all ages, especially for female artists. I spent many afternoons in that meticulously curated jewel-box, exploring all the beautiful objects she’d lovingly assembled — little cups and saucers in bright hues, French hand creams in floral tubes, silver necklaces and earrings, paintings by local artists — but mostly I sat chatting with her and the other interesting women who gathered there. We’d talk about books and art, the vicissitudes of female hormones, and the capricious weather conditions on the mountain pass out of town. We’d share local gossip and hash over our relationships. From Trish, I …
Folk Bitch Trio
Them’s some True Blue folk bitches from Australia with a recording contract, mate
Three divas from Melbourne visit Elliott Smith’s old late-night haunt, then return for an encore
You’ll remember their songs
Shuffling into our booth, Gracie Sinclair marvels at the drink menu with her big, green, Betty Boop eyes. “Question: Is that a happy hour price?” I assure her $7.00 is the cost of an average cocktail in Portland, Oregon — the 32nd stop of Folk Bitch Trio’s debut world tour. “Old Crow whiskey, Baileys, and coffee topped with whipped cream…” she croons. Her bandmates Jeanie Pilkington and Heide Peverelle nod agreeably. The few rusty patrons at the bar crane their heads at the sound of their Australian lilts. They order tea and orange juice, but reassure me it’s not too early for a beer. “We’re a cheap date,” says Gracie.
I have brought the Melbourne-based outfit to Elliott Smith’s old haunt, My Father’s Place, a dimly lit brick diner straight out of a Lynchian daydream. I gesture over to the red vinyl stool, the one in front of the taps where Elliott used to sit, which piques the interest of Gracie, …
Kerouac Dreams
Yeah, I did it. I slept in Jack Kerouac’s bed in the spring-training town of St. Petersburg, Florida, and smoked in his yard with the pinwheeling moon above my head as bright as a one-eyed headlight on a south-bound freight train.
In this way, I drew closer to my God.
BONUS: The secret of how Jack Kerouac died can be found below.
The odometer broke, thousands of miles and a lifetime removed from the all-night neon hustle of Times Square and the evergreen Zen of the northern Cascades, the pagan thunderclap poetry of the Big Sur coastline and the redbrick sadness of smokestack Lowell. In his final sighs, Jack Kerouac found himself unmoored from the moonlit amphetamine rambling of his own fables. No more thumbs out hitchhiking in ’49 Hudsons, past apple pie diners and the lonesome shadows of grain farms in the flat Midwestern infinity. To riff on a phrase from an Aquarian band inspired by the Beat Generation avatar: This was the end.
In the last year of the sixties, the On The Road author had become a bloated phantom, chasing Johnny Walker with half-quart cans of Falstaff beer while secluded in St. Petersburg, Florida — a slow-motion suicide in a spring-training town, about as far away from Route 66 as you can get. …
