Flowing
Posted on April 3, 2009 in Originality & Creativity Zoos
A cloud ran into our hilltop last night and left a slick of rain that weak sunlight and gravity pulled off the pavement by noon. I opened the front door to a chill pushed by a gentle wind. Fiona stuck her nose out for the briefest of moments, satisfying herself that the outdoors was not for her. I passed a yellow lily growing in a clay bowl on the porch. The stairs invited me to a further exploration of the cool world. I tugged at the hem of my camouflage green pullover and stepped down the flight without-much thought to the individual puttings-of-the-foot-forward. I flowed to the street.
While the drizzle still wet the streets, I complained to my Twitter friends that I felt like there was a numbing hole in the top of my head. I identified this as exhaustion from creation, but in retrospect I think it was exhaustion from the lack of creation — interruption of the flow. At the zoo, I had struggled to capture shadows and colors in my camera for the first hour without much success. Then I found my eye while pursuing the hues of brown on the back of a grizzly bear. The fur ranged from beiges to sincere browns to gold. I snapped several shots until the bear and I connected. A brief climb took me to Elephant Mesa where I interviewed meerkats who stared up the open tube of my camera, still trying to figure out the strange box that hundreds directed toward them every day.
Every day the same thing a novelty — that is a goal for life isn’t it? Without brain damage, though, it can’t be achieved by humans. Zoos excite us, I think, because they proffer a break from cubicles and bucket seats, an opening of new enclosures. I ignore boundaries as I go or I just forget to sense them. When I get to the tedious start-stop process of uploading photos which is rife with borders, despair cages me. I see a drastic end to things. The stairs lead to a blind alley and I break my nose on the wall that greets me there.
Gray Day
Posted on April 2, 2009 in Weather Zoos
The sky is blank. Not the kind of blankness that lets you pull out a pen and write across it “This is my story and I am going to take up calligraphy just to scribe it ever so beautifully across your hearts.” No, this day vibrates with silence. It buzzes into your head and gives you a headache. The little white factories that produce dullness as their principal product soak it up, store it in their worker’s hearts. People in gray and white cars — that spew the stuff of which gray days are made –slow for yellow lights and pick their noses waiting for the green. I see pink flowers but I don’t care about them. There’s a tremble in the back of my mouth that won’t become a voice. The day is full of knots that I can’t untie.
Oh for a blanketing fog — at least there would be comfort in that, chilling and birthing. Yesterday when I went to the zoo the sun came out-and applied a little tan to my arms. The luminosity and the shade annoyed me but that was because I had my camera. Animals chose the places that were both shadow and light. The light meter in my camera could not decide on an exposure in Bear Canyon so I climbed onto the highest mesa and took photos of the rhinos who were sunning themselves. Though the same color as the dust, they stood out clearly. I could disassemble them – head, horn, back, rump. The dirt pretended they were one with them. The breath of one scattered the particles in front of it, letting the sun illuminate its respiration. Gray days resist manipulation of any kind. From this comes their sadness.
Later in the day, it begins to drizzle. My mood picks up. At last the atmosphere is showing some character.
Giraffe Color
Posted on April 1, 2009 in Photos Zoos
Photo from an expedition to the San Diego Zoo, which is to zoo and animal lovers like living in Belgium next to a chocolate factory.
Went with my long-time friend Gareth — who I have known for nearly nine years and yet today was the first time we met. Is there significance to it happening on April Fool’s Day? Only if you mean fun by that.
Settling
Posted on March 31, 2009 in Calm Encounters
I see more when I am at the Rancho Santa Margarita Library.
Mildly annoyed as a patron and a librarian get into it in the mildest, most gentle way. He cant get the computer that he wants. The librarian says “Sir, this one has the Internet.” “I’ll come back tomorrow,” he warbles from his gravelly throat. Such a martyr and a whiner. I straighten and peer over the scanner, printer, and other peripherals that share my table. Is there a pretty woman that the old man wants or is he just avoiding the teenager sitting next to the open spot who pulls his lips?
A fat kid comes by and mumbles to a grave-looking librarian “Where is my brother?” “He’s been kicked out,” she says peering at him over the tops of her reading glasses. “Oh,” he replies stupidy, and goes off to look for his kin. The matron follows him to the door.
So how do I feel about this, what is happening to me in the moment? I felt angry or irritated at the commotion. It felt too much like yesterday when I had that tutor conducting a lesson at my table.
This time, however, things settle down. The people walk away. The clicks of keys, the turning of pages, and the roll of the cash register at the circulation desk are all I hear and none of them are drumming on that place in my shoulders that makes me want to box the air.
The security guard struts his rounds, hands clutching his wrists behind his back. The world feels settled.
Waves lay down sand, forming smooth beaches that are only broken by the passing of feet or the landing of a sharp shell. That’s my best metaphor for the feeling of calm that I cherish. Feet jump when they find a butterfly shell or a corkscrew shell hiding amid the streaks and foam. So, too, can I be aroused by a jerk answering his cell phone in the quiet of the library.
Settling is a process, the calming of the sand. Each day there is a cycle, a turning — a rise and a fall. Each variation in the rotation leaves its flotsam, pieces that I rediscover as I examine the moments. Details become lost to me as I think about other things. The foam causes me to lose things – memory is like that. As the brain’s cholesterol of the brain grows thin, I lose bricks to build a remembrance of daily tragedies and comedies. This short woman wearing a cotton polo shirt and blue jeans – will she be there, walking in my mind’s version of the library, looking at numbers until she finds her book? The tutor’s young and sharp face got laid down because my anger rippled the sediments. That fossil won’t be lost to me soon, nor will the high, lightly freckled face of her student. There was a man typing behind me. Our plugs shared an outlet complex in the floor. He’s there along with the woman wearing a burgundy track suit parading her white dog. I don’t understand why some things cling and others get dragged out to the place of the missing.
Bombardier Beetle
Posted on March 31, 2009 in Daily Life Hiking Insects
Drake, our [[Boston terrier]], sees every outdoors adventure as an opportunity to explore odors. On Sunday afternoon, he found a [[bombardier beetle]] ((The western variety, quite common in the foothills and mountains, is jet black.)) crossing the trail. Drake sniffed. The beetle sprayed its virulence up his nose. Our dog staggered away then corkscrewed his nose into a tuft of grass. His pain and his shame was brief and he trotted off.
Across the Recovering Chaparral
Posted on March 30, 2009 in Biomes Hiking Photos Santiago Fire Video
The mustard leaves spread like lettuce on a tree, shivering in a wind that blew up presumably from the sea. It dwarfed my dog. He didn’t trust it. Sometimes he hovered at the commencement of a stand of it, letting me go through first just in case a bobcat or skunk waited to mug him.
Lupines bent and danced, morning glories trembled. Only the coast paintbrush maintained it’s stiffness, choosing to splash red against the carpet of newly freed annuals. Here and there a knot that had been the trunk of a chamise or a buckwheat sprouted from the humps at the sides of the abandoned road. I was tempted to pull them just to see what rope tethered them to the earth. Christmas berry exploded from rootstock that had not been killed by the conflagration of two years ago. Scrub oak refused to abandon the trunks, though many wizened branches remained. A gully of Mexican elderberry, untouched by the fire, exalted in pale yellow. The greatest miracles were the many pale fronds of Our Lord’s candle that sprouted in the rocky areas. They had the gawky look of weak-stemmed asparagus. The only wildlife we saw were a pair of hawks hunting the mice who came to harvest the new-grown grasses.
More photos and videos in my Flickr photo stream.
Also check Paths of Light.
Shoutout about Vox Nortona
Posted on March 28, 2009 in Site News Video
This is to note that I am resurrecting my podcasting site Vox Nortona for the purpose of accumulating all of my video work. While now and then you will see something here from those productions, you can get the most complete collection of my creations at 12seconds, Seesmic, Youtube, and Flickr over there. So be sure to add it to your RSS feed!
Upside down
Posted on March 27, 2009 in Creatures Reflections Writing Exercises
This is a writing exercise based on this picture.
The jellyfish face each other in a peculiar position that must signify a mating ritual. Their diaphanous blood orange beanies hang upside down. Their tentacles trail upwards, spurts of milk twirling in the cobalt-blue water. Their captivity in an aquarium is certain: nowhere else on earth is the water so impossibly blue as this. They ignore the barriers to unhindered free-floating. Their tank could be the sky or the lagoon of an atoll. What matters most to them now is love. Not the kind that spurs those who feel it to exalted declarations of feeling toward one another but that which calls on one to release oneself into calm waters and make a graceful turbulence. Love is, at the root of it all, the same for all. I doubt that jellyfish couple in the way that higher life forms do. The constituents that will spark the chemistry that will become their offspring must enter the water. They lack eyes to appreciate one another’s lacy beauty, ears to hear the alteration of the current cleaved by their wakes, and they probably do not smell. Their awareness of one another’s proximity mystifies me , yet I am certain that they know another is near because they begin to swim up and down in the dance of love. I would not be a jellyfish because I like to think. The life of drifting with only the slightest of movements to cut a keel through the water suits them just fine, however. Up and down, letting gravity hold them upright until the moment of ecstasy bids them to drive the sky to the place of the earth is what they loiter for. Or do I reduce things? Does the water massaging their caps cause them to scintillate states of consciousness that challenge our thinking in the pleasure and the pain it brings them? I don’t know what it is like to be a jellyfish because of the clutter of words and images in my head. The only thing that I can do is watch them, barely thinking “Look how they float with their tassels now below them, now above them. What a nice dance.”
Black Star Canyon Road
Posted on March 26, 2009 in Hikes and Trails Photos
After a disappointing weekend of events abandoned thanks to rain and high winds, I promised myself a midweek adventure. The problem facing me was that I wanted to take Drake. The two local trails we could walk together were closed thanks to the fires of two years ago. I scryed the online maps hoping to find a path that the usual books did not include. Baker Canyon looked a likely candidate – its road led onto the north slopes of Silverado Canyon. Satellite imagery revealed a few buildings but most of its sidings were covered by thick stands of chaparral. The one problem I surmised from the map was that the roads crossed one another in a mess that reminded me of tapeworms mating. I printed out a map of the annelid network, packed my things, grabbed Drake, and headed for the foothills.
A sign the size of Kansas at the entrance to Baker Canyon Road warned outsiders off: this was a PRIVATE ROAD. Intrusion was conspicuously forbidden but there was no explanation of what would happen if I did. Still vision, of shotguns kept me to the county’s asphalt commons. I drove a quarter of a mile past the entrance to a large, pocked rock next to an iron swing gate. This barrier only blocked cars. I knew from guides that I could walk it.
Drake and I only saw one cleanish pickup truck – twice – the entire five mile trip. We crossed a broad meadow then hung a right into [[Black Star Canyon]]. I plodded while Drake sniffed the grass at the side of the road. Bicyclists passed us — always coming towards us. They didn’t faze Drake except for once when a family had a dog running after them. He made a ninety degree turn as the shepherd mix passed. I called him back and we kept going.
Sycamores shaded the dirt avenue with greater frequency as we ascended. After 2 l/2 miles, Drake jumped at the sight of a tiny, rusting yellow earth mover. I stopped to photograph it, then moved up a little farther. A few paces past a spot where a school bus had gone off the road and overturned, I fed Drake an early dinner. We walked back to the truck onto whose passenger seat he collapsed. Except for rising to enjoy a second, smaller dinner, he slept in a ring, snoring to the amazement of the cats who might have walked back and forth over him without his waking.
Pollen
Posted on March 24, 2009 in Plants Pulmonary
We celebrate the flowers and the grass as we sneeze at them.
I can see it floating on the wind out there, big white seeds that we used to swat, crush, or knock down — that we called fairies — a-riding the wind. Under the microscope you can view its lesser kin: big yellow cannonballs broken out in the pox. This the season for these particles to ride up your nose and massage your nasal passages until your sinuses gather wind to expel them in a hard, sometimes vainglorious, sneeze. The sacrifices we must accept for clear spring days….
I can’t say that I stand for the abolition of pollen because that would mean the extinction of plants especially grasses which wear their hearts on their sheaves and conduct their sex lives where all can dip their noses in it. My eyes itch and my nose tickles because the local oats cannot keep their affairs private.
I do not know much else about pollen except it also resides in flowers where bees or moths must douse themselves in it. Shoddy evolutionists speak of it as a conscious contract when it is nothing more than luck, a pattern repeated over the centuries that ensures reproduction mostly because of an initial stroke of fortune on the part of the first flower and the first fly who found it. Still if the hairs on the bee’s leg do not carry the gold dust to another flower of the same species, the flowers will not bear new seed and there will not be new sources of honey next season when the children of the male and female sprout and call “to me, to me” to insects on the wing. Starvation ensures no more bees and butterflies. No more bees butterflies ensures no more fields of yellow mustard and no spots of pinkish [[Mariposa_lily|mariposa tulips]].
It’s easy to forget this when you’re rubbing you eye with a half fist and preparing to catch a sneeze with cupped hands. Misery occludes these comprehensions but no one but zealous realtors call for the abolition of meadows and the brush and then not for the purpose of alleviating suffering but for the singular pleasure of their having enough money to enjoy tennis and sail off the coast or on blue lakes on weekdays. The [[bunchgrass|bunchgrasses]], the oaks, and the [[chamise]] are permitted to exist for the sake of the sense of beauty and openness that they bestow. Were it not for this mitigating factor — this memory, perhaps, of [[savannah|savannahs]] and forests — we might well scrape the earth to mineral soil to save us the drudgery of constantly minding and cleansing our eyes and our noses as best we can.
Dream
Posted on March 22, 2009 in Dreams
I’m wearing my pajamas in the middle of Highland Avenue in San Bernardino, California. It’s six lanes wide. There’s traffic coming on and I’m waving my arms at it as I try to cross. As I make it to the last lane, a driver pulls over and chides me. When he drives away in his white Camaro, I see that he is from Georgia. I am trying to get home, it seems. I slip into a drainage canal next to Del Rosa ((It’s not this way in real life. The canal is about a block east.)) where I meet homeless people walking down the canal, going to fetch their medications. “What’s your diagnosis?” I ask a smallish Latino and he says “Bipolar”. “That’s me, too!” I say. A friend of his says they have to get going, so I continue ascending the ditch, looking for a gap in the chain link fence they have erected to keep people from going into my neighborhood. I get to the end of it and cross near a liquor store, then walk over a field that leads to Golden Avenue near my home.
My mother has a pair of African American attendants come to visit me every day. They check my blood pressure. I am in a deep depression, laying on the floor beneath my bed. My father comes, gives me a lecture about laziness, and kicks me with his shoes in the head. I watch a game show in the other room. A little girl has got the answer right. My father appears from under a chair to give her a hug. I try to figure out how he appeared there, then I realize that he must have a room where he was hiding. I know where this room is and I know that it is forbidden to me. When the attendants come, I tell them about him kicking me. I hope that they will take me to the hospital. They take my blood pressure. My arm has turned the color of the darker of the two nurses. They say that I need to drink more water because my lithium levels are getting too high.
20 Minutes in the RSM Library
Posted on March 21, 2009 in Daily Life Writing Exercises
This is an exercise in which I wrote about what I saw at [[Rancho Santa Margarita]] Library as I scratched at my [[pen tablet]] for about 20 minutes. Could be done anywhere.
Before me on the burgundy-colored table: a printer, a maze of surge protectors, and an ankle-high tower into which eight plugs have been installed. To my left, the bookshelves; to my right, several computer stations, some with users attached. Here a most rotund man wearing a mocha-colored dress shirt explores the net. A mother leads a crying child down the line of computers and through the stacks, keeping a book just out of her reach. Now the mother arrives at the front desk and gives the book to the kid who begins to laugh. The little girl sticks one of the white corners into her mouth. The object has been acquired — the mind-suck can begin.
The security guard comes by. Here’s an interesting fellow. Not very tall, maybe five four. Vietnamese. Wears the official blue shirt and black pants of his office. Black hair sticks straight up on all sides. Dark glasses. Can expect him to appear every ten minutes or so, his hands clasped behind his back. Heavyish but not fat. I saw him outside when I came in, eating a sandwich. He walks by again, flashing his watch. Has a radio in his belt. Walks fast now. Usually he is slow. When kids get chatty at the computers, he stands behind them until they notice his presence and desist. The large man is advising a woman with a silver-blonde pony tail how to access her terminal. Her tiny son knows the tricks already and has locked in. The security guard has stopped to watch her as she chats in Spanish on the phone.
Now who is this? A bald handyman raises an orange ladder and does something with the light over my table. He takes out the old lamp and puts in a new rod. A pained look crosses his face as he fiddles with the cover. Now he climbs back, sure of his balance, stands on the second to the top step – he’s read the [[Occupational_Safety_and_Health_Administration|OSHA]] warning. Puts light cover in its place with a noise not dissimilar to the creak of a squeezed balloon except louder. Grabs his ladder and the new box of bulbs, then goes a-hunting between the stacks for the next item on his agenda.
