A few weeks ago my wife and I took two of our grandchildren to the Legion of Honor museum in SF, and then the four of us walked south along the clifftops towards Land’s End, and we sat for awhile on a wall looking out at the sea. The big sky. The future. A lady named Chloe, sitting on a bench behind us, took a photo of us and emailed it to me. She’d somehow attached her iPhone to her heavy-duty SLR camera. Wonderful shot.

Sylvia’s niece came to visit and we took her and her family out to the Boardwalk at Santa Cruz. (This isn’t the family in the photo.) I love going to the Boardwalk. It’s a park where you pay as you go, paying for each ride separately. So you don’t have to commit to a full day of pukeful chaos.

The only thing I rode was the Big Dipper roller coaster. When we hit the bottom after the first big down-swoop, about half the vertebrae in my lower back and in my neck made little pops. For lack of any other reasonable option, I decided this was good for me. Like a trip to a chiropractor…not that I ever go. I felt loose and wiggly. Glad to have survived yet another “my last ride ever on the Big Dipper.”

There is no ride more terrifying to me than a chair swing ride. For reasons unclear to me, I think of them as being “Swiss Swing” ride, but I don’t think anyone else uses this phrase.

I think I first got really really scared of them when Sylvia and I rode one at a small town Upstate New York carnival in, like, 1976, and the chains were totally puny, like chains you’d have on a swing in your backyard, and we were sure one of them would break. To make I worse, we were swinging out over a crushed, blood-stained “death-car” that the cops had carted to the carnival site to frighten potentially reckless teen drivers.

Look, Ma, no head!

Last week I was in SF for digi.lit, which is LitQuake’s conference about how to succeed in digital publishing. The talks (including mine) weren’t super interesting, although I did pick up a few tips, and I met some nice people. One suggested tactic that I might try, at some point, will be to pay to be part of a mass ad emailing by an outfit called BookBub. Publicity being the biggest prob for self publishers.

My new books, I feel I should mention yet again, are my Beat memoir/novel All the Visions and my SF Transreal Trilogy: Secret of Life, White Light, and Saucer Wisdom.

Skipping some of digi.lit talks, I went to the nearby Museum of Asian Art, where they have a really interesting show called Gorgeous. They’ve paired pieces from their collection with pieces from the temporarily-closed SF MOMA. I’ve always liked the big Koons sculpture of Michael. Koons really is a Warhol for our age. He employs, like, 120 people to fabricate his works, truly a factory process.

The Tibetan Buddhists have a wonderfully gory notion of art that makes you think about the end of the road. Dangling eyeballs, skull brimming with blood’n’brain, what more do you want?

Speaking of fabricating off-kilter works of art, I’m working (slowly) with Bruce Sterling on a new story.

Love the word “howdah.” It means the seating cabin that you set on top of a royal elephant. This was in that Glamour show as well.

The final room of the show is a really strong jolt, quite wonderful. In back, a dimly lit Rothko, in the front, a wonderfully crafted bronze sculpture of a Buddha of some kind. I opened up my head inside this room, forgetting myself or, rather, watching the pieces of myself float by. Best art-rush I’ve had in a long time.

Oh, one more painting I saw this month, this one at the Legion of honor. It’s a smoothly painted and equivocal rendering of Thalia, the muse of comedy. Given a choice (not that you always are), I’ll always choose comedy over tragedy.

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