Getting fully caught up now. It’s all about the images.

Great winding stabile Richard Setta sculpture at the Stanford art museum. Those hyperbolic trianglges and the clouds, the digital and the fractal, ahhh.

Nature is the best designer.  We try and do random designs, but we can’t match Gaia. Natural shapes have an inner “logos” built in, that is, some kind of law-like natural process.

Waterfalls of wires. Those were the days. At the Computer History Museum in Sunnyvale near San Jose. Rewarding plcace to visit.

It’s my first novel, duh.

Happy on Four Mile Beach, which is on Rt. 1, four miles north from the last traffic light in f Santa Cruz. I was here with Barb.

It’s been over two years since dear Syliva passed. And now I have a steady girlfriend. My life is coming back. A new life.

Saint Joseph’s hill near where I live in Los Gatos. The wonderful harmony of the landscape and the trees. I’ve been walking up here at least once a week for forty years. Half my life in California. That’s two thousand walks. The beauty never pales.

Son Rudy, with me at Stanford watching granddaughter Althea play “Ultimate,” a soccder-like game using a Frisbee instead of a ball.

Wonderful giant octopus I saw with Barb at the Monterey Aquarium. I sharpened the image with a product called Topaz. I might try and paint this image.

Arriving  in Pacific Grove with Barb for our two-night Aquarium visit. Nice to see a heart on the sidewalk as soon as we parked.

And here’s Barb out af Fouir Mile beach with me.

Terrific composition of mussels and stone, at Four Mile beach with Barb.

Years ago Bruce Sterling and I wrote an SF story called “Big Jelly.” Bruce kind of imprinted on our collab and likes to send me not only images of jellyfish, but now a very cool jellyfish shirt from the resort and grazing island of Ibiza, where he sometimes lives. You can read the story online in my Complete Stories, or in my collection with Bruce Transreal Cyberpunk, or you can hear Bruce readaing it aloud.

Speaking of my Complete Stories, over the last couple of weeks I spent perhaps forty hours in updating the two volume collection so it runs from 1975 – 2024. Paperback, ebook, web page.  Call it a hundred stories in fifty years.

As well as the multiple fomrats, another reason the update took so long is that I wanted to fix the webpage so that the links to the specific stories within would work. About five years ago, the links started jumping too far, at least on desktop platforms. Due, it seems, to something called lazy loading. I found the solution on Reddit in in the form of a block of script code to insert after the </head> tag in my completestories.html page. The script was discovred by evanvolm. Believe it or not, his fix code was written by ChatGPT at his behest.

Went to San Franciso with Rudy’s family to see granddaughter Jasper perform in a school musical version of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” We had dinner beforehand in a nice Chinese restaurant. Dig these colors. I ordered Peking Duck, which I’ve only recently learned to do. Ah, those cut-up squares of crisp, fatty duck skin.

Back to nature. The triangles! Womanly.

Penny and Rudy at the Big Wheel rally on twisty Vermont Street in SF, afternoon of Easter Sunday every year. Deeply San Franciscan types bring tricycles or toe trucks or bettered old Big Wheels and ride them down the hill, over and over, not really a race, with over a thousand on-lookers cheering.

Did I post these guys before? Lions mane nudibranchs, or sea slugs. Cleaned up by Topas. The critters creep around and close those soft little jaws over prey and eat them. At the Monterey Aquarium.

Afternoon light in the big kelp tank at the Aquarium. Sharpened and denoised with Topaz. Stupendous.

The Big Wheelers.

And needless to say the Big Wheelers wear costumes. Penny says that’s why she knew she wanted to move here. Because people like to dress up.

Rudy very happy at Four Mile beach with Barb. To me, in a way, this photo is heart-breaking. I was so sad for so long…and now, as I say, I’m coming back.

My ninth and final version of my “What Time Is It?” painting. I’ve hardly ever worked so long on a painting. I kept seeing things I wanted to fix until eventually nothing was bothering me anymore. I like to outline things and make them pop.

Topaz-treated shot of a shell I found. Dear nature,  so intricate and chaotic, in the mathematical sense of the word. A pattern that does have an underlying rule, but the working out of the rule is incompressibly complex. And unpredictable. But always remember, “chaotic” is not the same as “random.” Chaos is life. Chaos is health.

Walking along the now-closed Great Highway near Judah Street in SF with Isabel and Rudy. This artist Zachary Coffin installed a five ton boulder, so well balanced and mounted that you can rotate it. I thougt of Sisyphus, god of writers—who roll a mass of words up the hill, release the blob and whoosh—no money, no publisher, and it’s time to start again!

I call this one the Challenger jellyfish disaster.

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