2020 Ball Rolled Wild Oolong

Gongfu!

Paired this with some sweet and creamy rambutan for yesterday afternoon’s tea session!! It’s been a while since I last had rambutan so I wasn’t as confident in this tea pairing as I usually am, but it’s working out alright. The tea is sweet and syrupy with notes of honey, overripe red fruits, and fresh baked bread to start – these notes worked pretty solidly with the sweet and somewhat floral rambutan. However, later steeps double down a bit on those grain notes, and get a bit more autumnal – sort of that “crunchy Autumn leaves” type of vibe you see in specific types of Darjeeling. It’s very tasty, but less cohesive with the fruit…

I have more rambutan to enjoy throughout the weekend & start of next week, so I’m open to suggestions for teas people think might be a bit more complimentary!! Hit me up with your ideas!

EDIT: I see someone added “raisin” to the flavours list for this tea and in reflecting on this session while writing this note I have to agree that it was realllyyyy raisin-y.

Photos: https://www.instagram.com/p/CSSEMApLigT/

Song Pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HouCH8ephW0&ab_channel=ALASKALASKA-Topic

This tea, what the fuck. And reading tea notes from Sierge, another what the fuck. Funny thing about the internet is the blur between man and machine.

Yesterday started the day prior. Maybe several days before that into last week. The sky drops a stone, Sierge drops a note, or in the case of what’s actually been happening in the Garden of Derk, a mosquito drone zips up up down down left right left right b a start in my airspace, hovers over my neighbors’, slowly pivots and snaps photos (a government operative so says neighbor-across-the-way), elicits a scream from me into the windstorm of the night. I can’t sleep with… that… buzzing… in. my. ear! The ribbon-scrawls of my vibrating chords out the sliding glass door get snagged in the beak of the raven that rains the fruits of the giant date palm upon our heads and the garbage cans below with dark comedic sounds of dullish thunk and plastic clunk. The operator is an operative; it cannot sense my anguish. My calls to the operator to cease and desist are truncated by the wind changing direction and the drone slicing up the night.

A drone drops a bomb, a raven drops a date, a hawk fights above with a crow and one of them drops a third bird in the bath below. And another, and another. A quiet war in an overlain world rages for our garden. We tip the bird bath several times daily toward the cat graves under the lemon tree. The residuum of war — a stew of sun-warmed water and remnants of tiny beasts — a bony wing, a clawfoot, a spinal cord, engorged entrails, waterlogged lucent lizard skin — nourishes the seed and cultivates the strange. Rinse and refill.

A derk drops a bean and it grows.

The tendrils of weird snake their way through the days, twirling and weaving, winding and binding the feet of unaware apes. You know the sound of a growing woody vine? It crunches the large, dry leaves on the floor in its slow wake. A sound one cannot discern unless one is tuned into their own insidious nature when surrounded by silence. An arthritic hand of earth assembles itself. “It’s time,” it says and reaches out to touch tips with a fallen Buddha’s hand and the two hands, snickering as one, pull the chain of monkeys to the ground.

Somebody passed, another was born, another took hand, another retired, many resigned, an innocent question rang a bell that nobody knew needed ringing. Raw energy oozed from the crevices of the earth, crept from the cracks in our collective being. The vine was tensed, the tail was tugged, the dog had bit and we all fell to our knees, stinging palms with rocks embedded, bruised egos pounding dirt. Still, so many felt the full force but did not register the complexity. And after, we all got up and brushed ourselves off.

This week was a weird one and I think this tea precipitated from my own vessel into a teacup all these fucking weird feelings and I must keep drinking of the earth and the dark beauty of nature in order to understand. And occasionally generate some clicking sounds into the void. Humans want to make sense of things. Funny, I cannot do that with this tea.