Today’s post is photocentric, and the theme is Nature’s perfection.
Kicking it off is this nice shot of a sunset at Pigeon Point lighthouse on Route 1 south of Half Moon Bay. I like how the roughness of sea echoes the clouds. And the vertical shadows of the clouds along the band above the horizon.
Backing up a week, I went to see the Oakland Raiders with some of my SF writer friends. This dude shown above is not, so far as I know, an SF writer, he is, rather, the ultimate exponent of a certain type of pregame festivity. Note how his sunglasses are adjusted to hold the empty 12-pack in place.
Cecelia Holland organized our outing. She’s published about 40 novels, some with warriors and Vikings, and she feels at home in the endzone “black hole” seating in Oaktown. I really get a kick out of her. A full-on writer.
Lively, passionate fans all around us. Imposing, but friendly. We were all in it together.
I dug this hat, which was in effect a football.
Very loud in the crowd and I forgot my ear plugs. I tore off the margins of a draft book proposal for Million Mile Road Trip that I had in my pocket and chewed them up to make something to put in my ears, and when that didn’t de-decibel-ize me enough, I tore strips off my handkerchief. At one point the Blue Angels few by overhead as well, but you could hardly hear them. Peaceful in the BART car riding home.
A few days later, my daughter Isabel and I spent the afternoon along Route 1 driving from Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz. Isabel was visiting from Wyoming. Our initial goal in Half Moon Bay was to find the 1,969 pound biggest pumpkin of the year 2015. It’ll be the star of the annual Pumpkin Festival on Oct 18, 2015, but it’s already in place there, a captive alien, on a stage in front of a building called I.D.E.S. We had to ask around for awhile to find it, but it was wonderful to see it there, and nice to be there before the crowds arrive…all these years I’ve wanted to see the Great Pumpkin without the crowds.
Here’s me posed as city-slicker alien-hunter with his big-game trophy. A slain Freeth. Soon to appear in Million Mile Road Trip. “You…you made my sister into pie?”
Maverick’s wave mural in Half Moon Bay. Click here to see larger version.
Isabel spotted this life-size (?) Mavericks wave mural. Dig how the surfer has a 3D lightbulb in his path. Very Magritte, especially with the window on the wall. SFictional flash: mappyworld (or maybe even our own world) is a hypermural “painted” on the 3D hypersurface of…some 4D alien structure…and you notice—huh?—a 4D dvoornik’s 3D cross-section hanging in the air in middle of the room, the dvoornik being part of the underling hyperobject that our world is “painted” onto. And the window is a hole into unspace. Obv, right?
A few miles south of Half Moon Bay we came to a sheer roadside bluff with the Tunitas Creek Beach at its base. The path down was so steep that there’s a fixed rope that you have to hang onto. It was basically insane for an old man with a bad hip like me to follow Isabel down the path, but I did.
Click here for a larger image.
Wonderful to have all this space to ourselves. That’s Isabel in the middle, and that giant puddle is where Tunitas Creek pools out.
We walked around for quite awhile there. Nature on her own is so perfect. The artful disorder, not too regular, not too random, on the edge of chaos, ever-changing, the waves, the ripples, the birds scattered just so, and in motion as well, and don’t forget the clouds, it’s an endless dance of beauty. “Nature is god!” I exclaimed, trying to express what I felt. “Totally,” agreed Isabel, who’s known this all along.
It was getting dark and we still had a way to go. We scored some halibut chowder and “Mexican coleslaw” at Duarte’s tavern in Pescadero, and stopped by the Pigeon Point lighthouse hostel at sunset. One of these days I’d like to spend a couple of nights there. So fully off the grid.
A whale bone was hanging there by the ocean in a wood frame with the sunset in the background.
The lighthouse is kind of rundown…they’ve been raising money to refurbish it for about 10 or 15 years, but it’s fine as it is. Better than fine, perfect. Everything’s perfect, okay?
Perfect? Aren’t there still all the problems in the newspapers? And the issue that each of us is going to age and die? Well, you could, on a given day, and in a certain mood, suggest that we live in the best of all possible worlds—“possible” relative to the various ineluctable physical, statistical, and sociological constraints of it having to be a real world.
Perfect for that afternoon, anyway. An afternoon of peace.
Great to see you, Isabel!
October 15th, 2015 at 6:18 am
Lovely, delightful photos! Thanks for sharing them. Of course this is a perfect world, even beyond Leibnizian metaphysical possible world arguments, there is the narcissistic argument: of all the possible worlds in all of space-time, this is the one I exist in. That makes it more perfect (from my perspective) than any world which might have cooler things (say, flying bio-cars) but where I don’t exist. Of course the argument holds for any value of “I.” The Narcissistic Ontological Argument for a Perfect World.