A rare Clarence without his sax at a gig with Bruce and the E-Street Band at McNichols Arena in Denver, Colorado sometime in 1980.

pushing back the deep im-pressions of attention-diverting noise is the primary task I undertake in a learning situation: to the degree that the actual subject of inquiry is secondary. it is more the practice of facing the unknown which is the core of learning. attentively facing the unknown. mediating technologies tend to wrap us in a cocoon of dis-awareness of our own senses and from the flows that we are immersed within, making it impossible to focus attentions on the flows to begin with… ach! it’s such a pervasive problem. It becomes a powerful motivation to engage (young) people and to push back these im-pressing forces and watch them begin to breath freely again and then, to watch them begin to wonder what it is that they would like to learn about, then participate with them as they approach the unknown and engage it…

It’s been years since Gary and I were sitting in a car for a road-trip, but when he called me a few days ago saying he would be in Yuma and had to drive from there to the Bay area for a few days for some meetings, then back to Yuma, I figured, what the hell! We’ll head for Nancy & Steve’s place, and surprise Loki in the process. So, up extremely early for the four hour drive to Yuma. Pretty damn cold and plenty of snow on the road– moonset, icy fog, snow deep in the National Forest, until I drop down 3000 feet to the Sonoran Desert then it’s warmish and dry. Along with scenes of military-industrial development and other realities.

Meet Gary in a part of Yuma that is not on Google, 1000 yards from THE southern border. He had to talk me in — very strange place, hard-core crop-raising every other section line alternating with new or seemingly abandoned California-style suburbs. I drop my car at his friend’s place and we head out in a rent-a-car. West along the border, to the Salton Sea bypass (used to be only a rail access frontage, a bad one! Now it’s fully paved! Bizarre. Gary and I had last been on this stretch of Interstate almost 35 years previous. I remember it was 125°F so we sat in a MacDonalds for several hours before going to camp near the sea. Between the flies, and the earth re-radiating copious amounts of IR energy all night, it was a bad night, then we drove straight on through to Orlando Florida in somewhere between 48 and 52 hours. But that’s another story.

We have a constant conversation from the moment we cross paths. Last time crossed paths was in Missouri last year, spring with Nick, Karen, and Deb. And before that, it was years. Although we’ve talked by phone every few months. So we talk our way past the Salton Sea, through Palm Springs, Yucaipa (used to live there ages ago), Riverside, Santa Clarita, over the Grapevine and gun barrel north on Interstate 5 to the I-650 Bay turn-off to Livermore. Surprised Loki.

portrait, Bruce Springsteen, McNichols Arena, Denver, 1980

digging deep into the 35mm archive, from 30 years ago now. 18,000 images. back from the time I covered around 150 concerts in two years, as well as being the photo editor for the yearbook, special editor for the newspaper, and doing some advertising photography — at the same time as slogging through one of the toughest engineering schools in the country, argh. hard days … but much fun: our motto was work hard, play hard. doing all that with good friends, what more can one ask?

this archive will surface in some form in this thesis project, possibly, and if not within that framework, it will simply surface as possible. the (life)-time required to do this is significant. and perhaps that time is short.

with a truckload of stuff, it’s too complicated to camp extensively. and, in retrospect, not much to say anyway. got to get back in Prescott to get organized for the ensuing departure.

dislocated, and wind-blown to another place (in the night). retrospecting from a great distance. not a travelog, but a long narrative story in pieces. a different kind of writing, but not too different: carrying some mapping of the movements imposed by life as it is/was. question: would all the fragments, displayed, end up having a meaning? or would they remain fragmented, and infinitely far from the lived life? can the flow that one feels while passing through this immediate temporal region be truly experienced by an Other, or not.

the San Andreas Fault dominates the feel of this place, though it is only a scarp of low hills cut by displaced drainage washes. I didn’t get to a focal point of the flat valley floor, a complicated outcrop with a sizable pictograph/petroglyph wall up near the entrance to the Monument. it has restricted access, and was closed when I came into the valley. but today, head further south to the southern exit from the valley, where the dirt track parallels the fault scarp a hundred meters to the east. the displaced gullies cannot be immediately decoded by their odd shapes — where the topography is shifting north/south 33-to-37 mm per year. ya’ gotta run to keep up!

Follow the fault scarp east-south-east across the Grapevine and down into the Mojave near Victorville, and end up in a very isolated area of the near Mojave — up at altitude, so it’s very cold and very windy, though that’s nothing new in the High Mojave in December. Simply unload the back of the truck enough to curl up and sleep.

The argument may be made that a fence, a window, an article of clothing, a wall are — one-and-the-same — as deflectors of the extant natural flow of energies out there. They represent a set of energy deflectors imposed by humans on their environs.

The other issue, tied to this is the production of waste (unusable) heat energy which impinges on a locality after the use of high energy sources which are subsequently rendered into usable and unusable forms of energy with varying efficiency. The primary source of this unusable energy is in the actual production and maintenance of the energy deflector systems: making and installing a fence, fabricating a window (glass being an extremely energy-intensive manufacturing process), building a wall, a building, a dam.

So: two major mechanisms and the second is responsible for the construction of the first. It takes an energy (depletion) to create these barriers which subsequently carry and direct energy flows as prescribed by their particular socially-mandated configurations.

[This all goes back to the hypothesis about virtuality -- where virtuality is (merely) the presence of a situation of attenuation of 'natural' flows (and here, tool-making is a key component). The question of what is 'natural' may be approached from a couple way, but more on that elsewhere.]

And all the way, Coyote laughs.

The day spent in leisurely absorbing the energy of place. The campground is built under the only trees for miles, (eucalyptus, from Australia!) so there is raptor and other bird activity all the time. The owls at night contribute a fantastic dialogue to the silence.

A short hike west to some low hills, down a wash, ends up, with the recent extreme rains, at a cattle pond full to overflowing. As per usual, I do not do a ‘before’ image (note to self — do a before image next time!). The downstream side of the small embankment dam has been undercut to within a meter of the main body of water which is substantial. With a small stick, I scratch a small line across the top of the dam, gradually increasing its size, using the initial slight flow of water to clear the waste from the cut. After twenty minutes of play, there is a sizable gap in the dam along with a flood of water rushing through, further eroding the dam body. Monkey-wrenching? Nah, this is merely a slight acceleration of what is happening ‘naturally’ — the breaching of the dam will occur eventually unless there is maintenance energy applied into the system. It would have likely occurred with the next substantial rains.

I do take an after image, and then head back to camp circuitously. It is after I see Coyote’s paw-print in the rain-damp soil, walking on a trail, that I cross the wash on which the dam is built. I am surprised that the huge rush of water from the breach is just reaching this spot. It is first a trickle which then ramps up to a full-on rushing creek. Fascinating to see the water fill the bed of the wash, pooling in hollows, flowing over small water-falls. I see immediately this is a perfect audio situation to continue documentation of the ‘changing the course of nature’ or ‘changing the course of history’ project that I have undertaken in the last few years. I lope back to camp, grab the recorder, and race back, downstream, to the wash. The flood is proceeding slow enough that I can run further downstream several times to record the ambient audio and make some images of the process.

Then it’s back to camp for dinner.

Sky-worms bugger the clarity of the atmosphere, attenuation the flux of Light reaching the surface. Obviously this is under a major north-south air-route — the only good thing is that the planes are at 10 km altitude, so the sonic disturbance is minimal. The affect on high-altitude haze, however, is profound. Long vision (at the sky and at the landscape) refocuses eyes through these worn diffracting glass into another focal point. Eyesight goes bad with all the reading and writing. The next year will make all that has gone before (go pale in comparison, argh!) as the PhD takes shape. No life, no sight left.

I have not seen another human the entire day with the exception of a well-armed ranger cruising through the campground. A droll chap, probably 30 or so, from the East Coast, a Federal employee, dislocated.

Around sunset, a car pulls in, first they park in the next slot, but then pull out and park across the campground, 50 meters away. There is a couple, they mill around, looking like they are setting up camp, it’s cold, getting colder, sunset. I’m sleeping on the ground. They turn on a radio playing pop mariachi music. It gets louder and louder as time goes by, getting later and later. They are sitting in the front of the car probably drinking, smoking, whatever. At one point well after 2300 I yell over to TURN IT DOWN. That has no effect. I honk my horn, also to no effect. I contemplate going over, but also realize the odds are that the occupants are armed. I instead pack the car up, fuming, and drive to a side-road further south in the valley and find a spot there. Faugh, why would somebody drive all this way — it’s at least 50 miles from the nearest town — to sit in their car and play loud music? Sorry, I don’t get it. [expletives deleted!]

Later, Orion drags his belt and sword from the sludge of Light pollution that sits to the south: Los Angeles, more than 150 km away or so. To the east, light from Taft and Bakersfield. A strong wind arises late in the night, there are no trees where I have moved to. Uncomfortable night after the luxury last night.

If you look for the truth outside yourself,
It gets farther and farther away.
Today walking alone, I meet it everywhere I step.
It is the same as me, yet I am not it.
Only if you understand it in this way
Will you merge with the way things are.
– Tung-Shan

Loss, and the new. Preparing for the forward-fall to engage the conditions that hydrocarbon burning precipitate: back on the road, hydrocarbon flaring, with a slow drive down to Carizzo Plains via the “Petroleum Highway.” Along which are the still-operational fields of California’s early oil boom. Drive by the Kettleman Dome area, a structure that I examined as my first exploration review at Unocal back in 1982. I had to gather all alternative methods data, produce some maps and structural interpretations, and an exploration strategy that correlated seismic and well-log data sets.

Tracking the San Andreas Fault. The knife-through-birthday-cake-icing scar that runs from the here to the there of California. Rupture zone riding. Making images and writing. The usual. Or the unusual. Beginning or Ending.

This after the Solstice lunar eclipse last deep night which hung in a cleared sky slowly transforming eye-socket receivers into Light-cups, catching a burnt sienna flux from every sun-rise-and-set on the limb of the planet, at the moment. Very fine. And gone for this life’s time. On Earth as it is in Heaven.

On this movement, at this time, cars fill Interstate-5 everywhere, all the time. The pavement is uneven and shattered in some places from the heaviness of the truck traffic as well as the bankrupt state of the state of the Union. wads of toilet paper fill the grass at the scenic overlook like albino poppies. Later, I leave the interstate for less travelled roads, much less travelled, I see very few cars at all. But then there are oil pumps and pipes.

gurls, dogs, and Christmas lights on display. somewhere in California.

I join the panel Social Energy with Zita Joyce, Caro McCaw, and Sally McIntyre along with a Skype from Eric (Kluitenberg) from late nite NL, half-way around the globe. It’s funny to cross paths with him here, but appropriate in the sense of the networking practice.

There was one point in his presentation that I had a serious disagreement with — when he posited that the remote half of a connection (in this case, a tele-presence ‘wall’ in a working environment), was ‘fantasy’ in the sense that it wasn’t ‘real.’ If I understood this correctly, I would totally disagree. It is rather a situation of sensory attenuation — the ‘presence’ of the remote Other is real, but attenuated (by the communications protocols between here and there). And it is in this attenuation where the loss and alienation from remoteness (and ultimately the frequent dysfunction of online events like ElectroSmog) arises. We didn’t get into it too far as there were other issues to talk about in the panel, but this one really was problematic. When assigning a ‘fantastical’ label to a real techno-social deployment we remove any (human) agency from it and push it into a phenomenal realm where it does not rightly fit. What is implemented is an expression of a human techno-social system — manifestations of this system are never fantasy.

Many good presentations, especially the comments from Mike Poa, the founder of the One River project with the waka on the Whanganui River. It’s hard to hear of yet another river suffering from the typical exploitation/development which ends up wasting the life of the entire watershed and its people. But then the efforts to revive the river culture seem to be pretty successful. The Maori are by no means quitters, and their cultural strength is significant. A couple days ago I spent part of an afternoon talking with a group of Maori women who were reviving/continuing the tradition of weaving baskets, they said that there was a very positive engagement from the young people.

It’s over, so, cleaning up the space and trucking everything back to the Green Bench or the house at the end of the afternoon.

The day closes with another delicious barbie at Don and Ana’s place, with the slow and mild twiLight falling.

Can’t wait to get another dose of NZ!

The ADA Symposium officially starts up, fueled by some excellent, tasty grub for breaks and for lunch. (sorry, no comprehensive notes here… no time at the time and no memory ex post facto.)

Julian and I do an impromptu dialogue on Energetics and Informatics in the stead of Graham Harwood’s keynote, as he’s quite ill right now and couldn’t Skype in. As Julian and I have been talking so much in the last week, it is a natural extension of that dialogue.

The day is full, ending with Doug Kahn’s talk, dinner, and a video screening. Packing things up and taking them back to the house, and I crash.

Can’t remember which evening Julian fell down his stairs after getting the girls to bed, dislocating his toe, and requiring Sophie to drive him to the hospital to have it reset. Ouch!

Workshop day begins: first the waka time on the river. Morning cycle down the river to the Putiki boat ramp, get there a little early, and feel the nerves as to what is possible with the workshop. There have been numerous anticipatory conversations in the last days about what I will be doing. I take a small paper with thought-notes and put it in my life-jacket pocket.

I am fighting with the impression that there is a superfluity of input for the participants — some have not been on a river or so. My dilemma becomes a question of when to jump in and alter the flow of events and protocols which accompany the waka and the enveloping and powerful Maori cultural scenario. It makes no sense to do anything other than participate. Where full participation is a position, an approach to an eventuality of contingent life-flow. I am observing the processes and vibes that are coalescing, seeing if there is a auspicious moment to intervene, but I see none. Back to participating. Enjoying it all. The newness, but also the familiarity and comfort which the Maori protocol applies to that (community-facing) unknown, and The River. (more …)

Cycling down the river to first the boat house, then downtown and The Green Bench for more work, stopping to photograph the river in the brilliant sunshine and I see a huge cloud rising from the direction of Taranaki. could it be an eruption? I ask a woman walking down the bike trail, but she looks and seems completely indifferent, seemingly not recognizing that it is a smoke, not weather cloud. Weird. Turns out that it is likely just an agricultural burn.

Up early again, before all the girls are off to school, the morning routines are quite entertaining to witness. Compared to similarly-aged kids in other places (the US!), all the kids I’ve met here seem quite relaxed. Is it the culture here, or? There is a laid-back quality, but I haven’t been here long enough to see how it suffuses through the society. There have to be substantial social issues, with colonialism having left such an influence on things. The stack of histories of NZ that Kerry loaned me before traveling told of savage open conflict until around the time of the US Civil War which is quite recent. Though no longer in direct living memory, it is still quite close. It’s is obvious, from the clear-cut timbering alone, seen from the air, that there is an ongoing and deep conflict over land-use, with powerful development and/or exploitation forces. On the other hand, there are definitely strong voices for nurturing the environment (and human lives on the island) back to something more sustainable.

We take a visit to the waka (canoe) boathouse to check on things — there is a crew of young gals who are practicing waka racing for the national championship. A group of absolutely charming young women.

Mike, our main Maori host comes by, what a expansive and powerful spirit he has! Julian has really cultivated some amazing connections with people here. Everyone met so far has been friendly, open, welcoming, relaxed, ready with a smile, along with some challenging/enLightening conversations.

Hardly time to make any entries now that the road has come up to meet my feet, so to say. Prepping mentally for the symposium coming up in a few days. But there is still so much indeterminacy that I will really have to improvise, and simply go with the available and auspicious energies of the moment. Many stories are already told about energy and informatics.

Towards sunset, an impromptu picnic on river turns out to be a neighborhood gathering, yet another example of a relaxed bunch of folks. Such a (WELCOME!) contrast to Sydney!

There’s quite some stress around the catering for the symposium as the person who was to do it had a terrible family trauma arise in England. There will be around 50-75 people coming from around New Zealand along with a few foreign presenters, and the food requirements are vegetarian, vegan, lacto-ovo, etc, etc … complex on limited resources …

Turns out that Gregers though, was the cook and manager of that anarchist vegetarian dining room near Bjorn’s house in North Copenhagen — I’d even eaten there a couple times when visiting Bjorn — so between Gregers and Jonah from the local community, along with volunteers, things will come together. It’s a challenge!

Oh yeah, and it’s Gregers’ birthday dinner in the evening. I work on a big fruit salad, and get the opportunity to introduce Freya to pomegranate seeds.

Julian, Gregers , Heidi, and I do the drive up to New Plymouth to check out the Puke Ariki exhibition/library and museum complex in New Plymouth, on the north west coast. There is a street festival and some electronic media installations as well.

We meet Ian Clothier eventually for a beer and a tour of the data-installation connected to one of the Museum installations in Pukekura Park. He’s teaching at the Western Institute of Technology at Taranaki

On the way back, Mount Taranaki is wreathed in a morphing cloud hat. We take a bit of time to drive to the Egmont National Park visitor’s center halfway up the east flank, and take a short walk into the forest. Marvelous vibe under the trees. The exotic feel comes from the strange vegetation.

The drive crosses mostly land that was originally forested, but is now stripped dairy farm land, the product of which is shipped to China and elsewhere. There are milk-trains crossing the land every few minutes. The Fonterra dairy factory is reputed to be the largest of its kind in the world.

I’ll be back to Taranaki, someday.

check out the town farmer’s market before noon, it has a good assortment of food and such. Julian picks up a remote-control-helicopter for the girls (well, ostensibly for them!). back at the house everyone gets a chance to fly it until it dies an unceremonious death. an afternoon swim in the Quaker compound pool is refreshing.

barbecue in the evening, more great food, energized dialogues, tough queries: What are you going to do at this workshop? Ahh, ummm, it’s a long story… got a few minutes?

New Zealand is very fine. The dialogues with Julian and others range all over the place. Hanging around with the rest of the family, along with friend’s of Sophie’s who are on an extended sabbatical from Denmark is stimulating with a healthy dose of good humor. And, with plenty of kids around, well, that keeps the proceedings well-grounded.

Today is completely packed and busy: cleaning, organizing, and installing the show at the Greenbench for the gallery opening this evening. The title of the show is BURN and the show is obliquely or directly about hydrocarbons — plastics, production, consumption, distribution. Julian had tracked down a collection of oil samples from an early and now spent New Zealand (oil) field nearby (name?). I am surprised, oil — with the tectonic regime here, the foreshore of a plate boundary subduction zone. Ah, maybe the heat flow is actually lower when considering that because the immediate crust is double thickness with the subducting plate, so there is a lower heat gradient from the mantle. Shallow oil, guess I’d never thought of the genesis of such plays.

I use embodied energy to organize and clean the gallery kitchen for the opening, along with having numerous conversations with folks introduced from Julian’s extensive local network. He asks me if I will talk at the opening sharing some anecdotes about working in the oil business. Completely impromptu, though I had a minute to sit with a piece of paper before and write a five- or six-point list of things to remember to talk about. I am not the best story-teller, especially in such a situation, but folks politely listen to a few minutes of my rambling.

Later in the evening, raucous preparations over wine precede delicious dinner back at the house. Definitely some good cooks around!

The question for me becomes — how to keep track of the dialogues, and the warm humans encountered? Julian mentions there is an artist-residency possibility in town. It would be great to hang here for a time. Somehow, it reminds me distantly of Tornio, in Lapland, half-way ’round the world, literally, in the sense of it being a littoral backwater along a river in a small country, but the community here seems quite activated, and the differences between Finns/Lapps and Kiwis/Maori are complex and significant. Similarities do exist — it would be good to have the time to explore. It looks like there will not be any spare time in these 11 days for much autonomous explorations, although this is okay, as the people immediately surrounding Julian and Sophie’s lives provide a rich environment for encounter. And a site for the exchange of inspiration.

Up at 0400 to make the hugely early flight to eNZed. Had to be totally packed for the US as well, as I’ll have only another 20 hours back in Sydney, in transit between Auckland – Sydney – San Francisco.

A new country, a new place to visit. The national memorial service is happening when we land, so I manage to record a minute’s silence in the baggage claim. Some people were oblivious. People are watching the ubiquitous flat-screen teevees rather intently. The cost of extractives, but only the most obvious one.

The jump flight from Auckland down to Whanganui reveals both sides of possible landscapes. Massive clear-cut forestry in the highlands, and intensive farming in the more level areas — both with the attendant geomorphology of erosion features marring the terrain. Much has changed since colonization, surely. Then there are the remaining highland forests which are not yet decodable, having not met them on the ground.

Finally get into Whanganui, Julian picks me up at the airport in their 1988(?) Honda named Buzzy Bee (?) — a vehicle with a history, too bad I’m writing this in far distant retrospect, or elsewise I could relate the story. It was funny. Great to finally meet Julian, and we immediately start up a substantial dialogue as I am dropped into the whirlwind of family life surrounding the community effort aimed at the Greenbench (Gallery space) and the ADA Symposium. I tell him that I am at his service, and that, officially, my workshop starts now. It’s all about energy, presence, be-ing, and raising these topics in whatever contexts that arise in the next ten days.

The evening starts with a rousing performance of Aladdin by the children of the Brunswick School located in the countryside near Whanganui. Julian and Sophie’s three daughters recently started attending the school. This was followed by some photo-ops — meeting more of Julian’s family and other folks in the community — in the playground, as the soft, mild summer twiLight closed in.

brutal day, too late to change it: deciding to go out to the closest bush access — the Blue Mountains National Park up at Katoomba to check it out — bad weather, but this is the only opportunity to go before leaving for New Zealand on Friday. I suppose it is the rough equivalent of hitting Yosemite or so (not near the grandeur of Yosemite, but the proximity and intensity of being a tourist attraction, they get three million folks up here every year). a 90-minute train ride from Sydney Central up the hill to Katoomba Station. decide to fuel-up at a cafe in town first, do some writing, pick up on the vibe. then head south from town on foot to the edge of the main escarpment of resistant Triassic Hawkesbury sandstone that Katoomba sits on. pouring rain by the time I get an hour out. thankfully I have full Goretex on which is useless. so, drenched to the point that it makes no difference.

along the escarpment picking up the energy, not seeing a soul. clouds lower before I leave town, so visibility contracts to 1-200 meters or so. dense, rich, empty, wet. a bit taken aback at the emptiness so close to town, but not in a negative way. I decide to make about an 8-mile loop hike, down the Golden Staircase, and along the base of the escarpment through the muck and rain. hang out in a small cave-overhang for a time, meditating on the dripping sounds, and why I hadn’t been up here before now. I had always been reading adverts about travel to the Blue Mountains with tour companies and the prices were prohibitive (for my budget), more than AUD 100 for a day trip, so I simply eliminated it from my list of possible things to do. now I discover that it costs a AUD 5.50 train ticket, and a mile walk to get into the park boundaries. another 5 miles and I’m in pretty rugged country. dang.

wet. continue the long loop, crossing a landslide area which was quite a chore to get across, especially exposed to the now constant pouring rain. unfortunately no decent photos, though the clouds wreathing the escarpment were dramatic. still no sight of any other humans. but absolutely not used to this wetness, since the long climb in the West Elk Wilderness in 2009. continue along, a bit unsure if I’ve taken on too much of a walk after being rather out of practice. eventually get around to the re-ascent point, meeting a couple just off the funicular rail that descends to a touristic overlook — they are in dress shoes and no rain gear. hmmmm. won’t get far in that! finally slog up the long sets of stairs back up to the top, boots sloshing, and with any luck, no damage to my electronic gear. long, tiring walk back into town where I stop for a glacially-served burger, fortunately it doesn’t impact getting to the train. in exchange for lame service, I leave a substantial wet region at one of their tables. back on the city-bound train, I look down after a time to see a leech writhing on the floor. I then discover two bleeding holes in one ankle. hmmmm. wonder if those critters are dangerous, or are just plain old leeches. I leave a sizable wet spot on the train as well. finally make it home after a 14-hour day, finding my boot and sock soaked in blood. so much for the first (and perhaps last) foray into the Blue Mountains, into the Oz bush.

meander down to Roger and Neil’s place in Marrickville to observe the live Ethernet Orchestra network music collab that Roger is doing as a part of his thesis research. Neil whips up a delicious meal beforehand.

started down George Street on my way home late tonight, intent on doing some Halloween portraits, but got overwhelmed by the social noise only shortly after doing this first group portrait of these young Chinese gals. what more can I say?

over to Serial Space to meet Ian and see a screening of early works of his — tape-to-tape media collage works which work remarkably well, especially given their age. very interesting conversation ensues afterward with folks. a good sign of pro-vocative work.

back in the CMAI office a few weeks ago thanks to Meghan — UTS Ultimo, the place hadn’t been touched (not even the white board) since I was here last December. the organization is in deep hibernation or simply decline. such organizational configurations are generally, here as elsewhere, armatures for funding projects.

the sense of departmental decline extends to the plants on the window sill: somebody’s plants, were dead or almost dead. so, begin triage by re-potting the living ones and continue watering them daily. they flourish with the attention.

Meet Mauri and Pia in Berkeley for a hike and lunch along with one of their colleagues, Phillip, at the Minerva Foundation. We head out to the Mount Tilden Park and climb through the invasive Sycamore (and poison oak!) to a view of the entire Bay area.

head down to the coast, fighting mid-day traffic, to Soquel, for a day with Mike and Isabelle. after catching up over a delicious blackberry upside-down cake and tea, we head down to Santa Cruz for the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music for an afternoon open rehearsal session — Rewind Rehearsal with Jennifer Higdon: Percussion Concerto (with Colin Currie, percussion); Mark Anthony Turnage Chicago Remains; and Anna Clyne: rewind. the day ends with delicious but probably artery-clogging pizza on the Capitola Esplanade Park. Isabelle tells me she is to be included in an exhibition at the Prescott College Art Gallery later in the fall, so I pull out a bunch of maps for them to use when they road-trip down there to deliver the work (from the incredible Span series in September.

head towards Livermore via Amboy and Tehachapi. somehow over-conscious about this being a road-trip as I follow former pathways, familiar, horizons both distant and near are recognized at many various moments, rocketing down the defense inter-state. and the emblem of Route 66 stenciled on that pathway between Needles and Ludlow. the once-abandoned Roy’s gas station and motel in Amboy now a neo-post-modern stop-over, huh? and seeing a few monuments to the patriotic dead along the way. and finally, closing in on Tehachapi near sunset, a major fire happening in heavy wond immediately south of town in rugged hills not two miles from where I camp for the night in Tehachapi Mountain Park. hardly anyone around, surprisingly enough. the road in is steep as are the individual campsite slots. I set out a bed on a tarp on the powdered and dusty ground. nose is aware of fire all night, it Lights dreams, though the wind is carrying the force of the blaze to the north away, away, towards Death Valley. houses burn.

run by Todd and Amy’s place in the ponderosa: a full-on straw-bale home he’s been working on for the last year or so. a monsoon thunder-boomer rips through and drops enough catchment water from the roof to completely flush out the raw granite cistern — a fortuitous inch of rain in a few minutes. the house will be a great place, the straw-bale walls give it an incredible interior ambiance. I’m curious to see the final result … someday!

the yurt raised, a futon installed, some clean-up work left, remediation, a stove for winter, in this glorious location. the month almost gone, and now heading south. coming down from Glade Park, Rock Ridge Lane. and doing the Western Slope: en route Glade Park – Durango and Richard and Holly’s place there, via Ouray and Silverton. classic Colorado drive. hard to leave this place.

and my Self wandering away from everything again, to Oz. this does not seem to be auspicious, ever, for whatever reasons. I do not know what to think of this anymore. the desire to live in Colorado truncated by the inabilities to re-frame the self and the skills possessed in order to work / to live. or is it merely a change of perspective that is necessary? I would suspect the latter as there are more than five million people living in Colorado right now. Most of them manage to live. Given, of course, that 11.2% of them are below the poverty level, that leaves 88.8% that keep at least one nostril above the water line. Of course, I could survive there, without any other degrees or knowledge-bases: it’s all in the (internal) perspective.

whilst the travelog shudders along, firing on less than four cylinders, knocking on too much ethanol, and not going fast enough. (I post this more than six month into the future from the now in the images, damn.)

drop by Lynne’s and end up picnicking for the whole afternoon down at the Platte in downtown Denver. watching the constant stream of human drama passing by.

drop by EJ’s to get a group pix, but Bridget isn’t around, but after a round of some very fine Tequila with EJ, hanging on the back patio, I get Nora and Eliott to find a spot (Nora took the lead on this task, heading right up the tree in the back yard. Not surprising in Light of the memory of her shimmying up the 12-foot steel supports in the kitchen like a little monkey when she was, like, six years old.) Eliott is packing for six weeks of summer camp near Estes Park starting tomorrow, lucky!

Pick up the kids over at the Alexander Dawson School, meeting Craig Angus, their teacher for a wood-working course. Craig is a former student from my first years of teaching Master Black and White Printing at CU waaay back in the 1980s. He’s now the teacher with the most seniority at Dawson!

The kids made some pretty fine bedside table/cabinets that were still wet with polyurethane. Fortunately I had room in the truck to stash them safely for the ride home to Boulder.

drive back up north, preceded by a stop at the old CF&I siding and parking lot in the middle of Pueblo.

long cycle ride with Bill first down the Ark which was partly over the bike path at one point. that made for a challenge going back up against the current in a foot or more of fast moving water — the river is definitely at spring flood stage! Then all the way back upstream to the Pueblo Dam which was open and blasting snow-melt downstream. pretty damn hot, but along the river in the shade of the huge cottonwood trees, all is chill. at the end of the ride, I was tuckered, but also impressed with the urban green-space development that Pueblo is undertaking.

dinner with John, Chris, Wendy, Harry, Jimmy, and Bill, all us old-time School of Mines guys. well, except for John, somehow he got tangled up with us, bully fer ‘im!