May 31st, today: the last day of May. And thus, everyone needs to go out and eat some sage. Because, or so it is said, that if ye eat sage in May, ye shall never die.

I realize that I probably should have mentioned this earlier in the month. But, I forgot. Sorry. ; (

The ancients, they were enamored with sage. So am I. The ancients, they believed that sage could confer immortality. What I believe: who knows? I do know that I eat the stuff, and I'm still knocking around.

"Why," demanded one Latin commentator, "should a man die who grows sage in his garden?"

Beats me.

Among the Britishers, it is believed that the plant's immortalist properties, they are most pronounced in May:

He who would live for aye
Must eat Sage in the month of May.

Or maybe it's okay to wait until next month. For over there in Provence, says Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, folks aver "[i]t should be picked on the dawn of Midsummer Day when the first ray of sunlight strikes the highest mountain."

Provencal proverb: "He who has sage in his garden needs no doctor."

Sage, it is one of those plants that just feels old. Even when a sage plant is young, it looks and smells and tastes settled and aged and wise. Rub it between your fingers, and you can sense from whence springs the legends. Compare it with, say, Hall's honeysuckle, which, no matter how massive it gets—used by pioneer white people out here to cover whole hillsides—and how large and gnarled and twisted and woody its trunk, in its leaves and its buds and its abundance, it rings forever fresh and springy and new.

Sage is native to the Mediterranean, but it is embraced wherever it is introduced. When it reached the Chinese in the 18th Century, it was soon so valued that a crate of sage would be exchanged for two crates of the finest tea. The Chinese, they have diligently pursued immortalist decoctions for four millennia, and so in China too it was accepted that infusions of sage leaves would make a person immune from "the ill effects of old age," enabling enjoyment of "full muscular strength, brightness of vision, and youthful appearance all of [your] days."

John Evelyn in 1699 firmly pronounced that sage "[t]is a plant endued with so many wonderful properties, that the assiduous use of it is said to render man immortal."

And if someone around you does happen to die, it is said that "for that most grievous of maladies, the sorrow caused by the death of a loved one, sage [i]s a comforting cure."

Sage is said to strengthen the brain, aid in memory, eliminate nervous disorders, detoxify the liver and kidneys, remove stones from the gallbladder, ease coughs and colds and asthma, heal infections of the mouth and throat, banish epilepsy, serve as an antidote to "the bitings of serpents," cure heart trouble, assist in pregnancy, and banish sunburn, worms, gray hair, and stained teeth. It can also wash the car and feed the cats. It's an insect repellent, that will repel wee unwanted beasties out and about in the garden. On the other hand, it attracts bees—Good People.

There are many ways to get this wonderment into your body. The Spanish and the people of Provence and Languedoc use it to flavor fatty dishes, particularly pork, which, so sayeth Toussaint-Samat, "is more easily digested accompanied by sage." The English stuff sage into sausages and use it to flavor cheeses. Various humans use it with poultry and veal and quail, and drink it in tea. Meself, in the month of May, I sprinkle a bit in everything I happen to eat.

I have seen with my own eyes sage restore life to a person. A person worked like a mule into a state of collapse, then beset by waves of viral marauders. All my other food cures had failed. So I brewed some l'aigo bouido sauvo la vido, or "the life-saving boiling water." Which is peeled cloves from an entire head of garlic, 4 sprigs of sage, 2 tablespoons of olive oil, and a little salt, added to 1.75 pints of water, brought to a boil, and then simmered for fifteen minutes. Strain and imbibe. The sufferer, she was cooed to consume every drop. And, within hours, was on the mend.

Then again, the dried sage I mostly for many years consumed once belonged to my brother, who died some years ago. Maybe he stopped using it himself, and that's why he passed. Of course, I think of him every day, and so in that sense he is immortal. As is the sage plant, which propagates through cuttings.

Cuttings like this:

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLbIZhDQYh8]

I don't think this sage reached the American continents until the white people showed up. Unless it earlier floated over on some seawood raft, arrived via bird dung, or hitched a ride with Jesus of Nazareth, when the fellow dropped by, post-Golgotha, to ride buffalo, eat jerky with the Indians, and yammer a word or two to the angel Boni Maroni, that might later be vouchsafed, in the golden plates, to Big Joe Smith. I suppose I could look it up. But I don't wanna.

In any event, there is a different-one sort of sage that is native to the Americas, which is sagebrush, a whole different human: sacred to the Indians, waved around in burning wands by hippies, and renowned for its ability to make the desert seem tolerable, in the wonderful smell it pumps forth after the rains. My favorite evocation of the latter, it is contained in the true-life documentary film Melvin and Howard.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vD8AdmjHGaU]

Warren Beatty, it is said he will soon be releasing a Howard Hughes film. I hope it is not embarrassing. Like that three-hour manic blow-fest The Aviator from Martin Scorsese. I just can't fathom it, what might have attracted Scorsese to that material. Except maybe that Scorsese too lived holed up in a darkened man-cave for some years. With Robbie Robertson, down in Los Angeles, doing nothing but watching movies, and snorting all the cocaine Colombia could churn out. Until, after a couple years, they both decided they would die, if they kept that up. And so, they blinked out into the sunlight, and went out and got some wives.

I don't know why these people persist in making new Hughes movies. Because Melvin and Howard, and that brief appearance by Dean Stockwell as Hughes in Tucker: those say, about the man, about all there is to say.

And that's it for this week. The usual logorrhea, it must needs here be truncated, because I'm tired, and the law world, it is coming up close, and in just a few hours.

But first, I will retire with a confession. And that is that I have shamefully descended into some tubes containing hideous tabloidism about this Johnny Depp/Amber Heard business. But my sins, they were redeemed, because I found there a marvelous factoid. And that is that back in 1994, when Depp was experiencing tsuris with a previous woman, the heroin-powered human-stick Kate Moss, he raised such a hotel-room ruckus that another guest, Roger Daltrey, he was moved to management to complain.

Think about this for a minute. Roger Daltrey. Who, for more than a decade, traveled the land with Keith Moon. A man who destroyed more hotels and motels than Genghis Khan. Who would commonly race up and down the halls spraying people with fire extinguishers, explode the toilets with dynamite, and drive automobiles into the swimming pools. Moon, he became banned from many of the world's lodging chains, and probably eventually would have been banned from all of them. Except that, at age 32, he expired. Because he forgot to eat sage.

Given all that, just what sort of planet-shattering racket, must Depp have been making? To move Daltrey to officially Complain? Either that, or, already, back there in the early 1990s, Daltrey, he had become Old Man Shouts At Cloud.

If so: I forgive him. Because, many a day, I have survived the law, by chanting variations on his:

inside outside
leave me alone
inside outside
nowhere is home
inside outside
where have i been
out of brain
on the five-fifteen

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TiAJoJ6sD8]