Year: 2009
Black Star Revolution
Posted on April 5, 2009 in Hiking Video
It’s no fun yelling at your dog because he is about to stick his nose in a patch of poison oak. We’re not coming here together unless Lynn comes along and helps me manage him.
There are better trails without the moist bottom that poison oak thrives in.
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
Settling is a process, the calming of the sand.
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
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?
Black Star Canyon Road
Posted on March 26, 2009 in Hikes and Trails Photos
Drake and I only saw one cleanish pickup truck – twice – the entire five mile trip.
Pollen
Posted on March 24, 2009 in Plants Pulmonary
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.
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.
