There’s some woods near Los Gatos where I’ve been walking for twenty-eight years. Ever since we moved here in 1986. I always see new things.
Like these pinecones resembling (to my eye) rabbit ears. The broken wood is the rabbit’s face.
We had a nice Thanksgiving and Christmas with the family. It always does my heart good to see the grandchildren. The wheel of life—I’m on the way out, my children are middle-aged parents, and the new crop is coming up.
Dig this oak leaf resting on the gnarly leaves of a red hot poker cactus. Maybe my mind is like the oak leaf, resting on the cosmic, living biome-swirl.
My wife and I are always going down to Santa Cruz, looking at the ocean over and over. I like these stairs, on West Cliff Drive near the statue of the surfer. The stairs go right down into the water. Something richly symbolic about this photo, too.
I put out The Secret of Life as a single-volume ebook the other day. It’s also a part of the three-books-in-one Transreal Trilogy. But I wanted Secret out as a single, in case anyone is looking for specifically that book As usual, I used one of my paintings for the cover; this one is called “He Enters Her Room.” It works as a cover for Secret, as the guy looks like he could be an alien in a human body. With that small head. I myself have a head the size of a grapefruit, or a satsuma, or a Meyer lemon—it gets smaller every year.
We went to see the Keith Haring show at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco. It’s quite good. Keith did some remarkable things—like he drew five or ten thousand large chalked graffiti pictures on rectangles of black paper in the NYC subway system over a period of five years. The rectangles of paper were in place to cover up ads whose space-rental time had expired. A very nimble guy with a small head. I’m planning to look at some videos of him.
The picture shown above, drawn on a prefab urn, has some nice aliens, he didn’t draw these particular figures over and over, and it’s fun to see them.
He draws a certain kind of dog a lot, also UFOs. I think of the series of drawings above as, “Keith Haring Explains It All.”
Keith’s UFOs look different from the way I like to paint them. That’s one of mine above.
I’m on the verge of starting to write a long story or a novella with the working title, “Million Mile Road Trip.” I was calling it “Endless Road Trip” before, and saying it would be a novel, but that felt like too long to walk on my bare feet. I’ll just do a million miles for now.
It’ll have a couple of aliens in it, and I already painted them back in September. These days I think these two aliens are called Yampa and Pinchley. My outline for the story was too complicated before, and I’ve been making it simpler and simpler so it’ll feel easy enough to actually write.
I’d been puzzling over how the two aliens manage to show up on Earth. Probably at first one of them is chasing the other. The boy chasing the girl, right. Or vice-versa. And today I had the idea of making their arrival really simple. There’s a ladder that tapers up to a point. It’s like “forced perspective,” the point is, like, a thousand light years away. Or in another dimension. And the aliens come climbing down that ladder. Which I saw while walking near Lexington Reservoir. Gift from the Muse. Took the photo with my iPhone’s feeble camera and really it’s not bad. Just don’t zoom on it or you’ll see the quantum space-foam speckle.
And I saw a second magic rabbit in the woods. Maybe put the magic rabbits in the novella too. “The Million Mile Road Trip,” yeah.