Month: March 2009
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.
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.
San Clemente Pier
Posted on March 21, 2009 in Photos Travels - So Cal Video
We really need to get out more. I took this a couple of weeks ago when we went down to the pier at San Clemente. Richard Nixon used to live a couple of miles south of here. We walked to the end of the dock and then loitered beneath the restaurant, taking pictures of the surf and wooden scaffolding that upheld the structure. Lynn oggled a girl bravely wearing a bikini. She hasn’t put her pictures up yet.
I also took this video showing the Amtrak Surfliner coming into town:
Check Paths of Light for more pictures from this and other trips.
Grace and Illness
Posted on March 19, 2009 in Depression Journals & Notebooks Writing/Darkness
Energetic gloom — the kind you get when you try to pummel your low temperament — poses a threat to life when it rises to anger. It’s tough to be graceful when you charge against lethargy with your head dropped like an angry bull. Plus you can end up with a broken neck. There’s no dancing except moshing — is it strange that I find heavy metal music depressing in the sense that it batters my heart and smashes my cranium with every twang of the guitars? Those voices — made to sound as if they came out of the throats of reanimated corpses – don’t frighten or enervate me: they bounce off me with all the pleasure of that water gets ricocheting off a hot frying pan. Depression smoulders. Spirit tries to get you moving, but for all the beating of the drums you don’t move again until the blessed morning when the music is silent and the spot where your spinal column meets your skull doesn’t sag from the weight of your scarred brain. How can you be graceful under such conditions? The body lacks a head, the head is at odds with the body ((This is one of those things literally at odds with itself that makes perfect sense when you are in the mood.)) . There’s an argument going on. The two sides are too busy thudding around that you can’t congeal into anything more detailed than a hot fog.
This is an exercise from [amazonify]1587613190::text::::Writing Through the Darkness: Easing Your Depression with Paper and Pen[/amazonify]
The Hardest Part
Posted on March 19, 2009 in Mania Writing/Darkness
The hardest part of mania is the grandiosity, the overconfidence in your brilliance. Of course, it doesn’t feel so bad at the time.
