As of today, March 22, 2010, I’m 64! This is two-to-the-sixth-power or 1000000 in binary, or, as my old mathematician/computer-scientist friend David Slater puts it, “one million base two.”

Speaking of feeling like I’m a million years old, about six weeks ago I started having a pain in my chest when bicycling up a hill or even climbing steep stairs.

[“Heart Exam” Oil on canvas. 24″ by 18″. March, 2010. Click to see larger image.]

My doctors gave me a series of increasingly ominous exams which revealed that some of the arteries that bring blood to the muscle of my heart were clogged. My heart muscle was hurting when I exercised because it wasn’t getting enough oxygen. I did a painting, Heart Exam, to dramatize my anxiety.

(Re. the materials for this painting, it represents a switch back to oil instead of acrylic paints. Looking through my old tubes of oil paint, I found an oddball tube of metallic gold paint that I’d bought as a kind of joke. But I used that whole tube on this painting, covering the canvas with an underlayer of gold paint, and leaving the gold exposed for the empty part of the background. It gives the picture a nice icon-like quality.)

Back in the so-called real world, I discussed my options with several doctors, and in the end we settled on my getting some stents installed to open up the clogged arteries. This is a fairly routine procedure, not requiring any long hospitalization. But I had to wait a few uneasy weeks to have the procedure done.

[“Giant Octopus with A Silly Hat,” Oil on canvas. 24″ by 18″. March, 2010. Click to see larger image.]

While I was waiting and worrying and (inevitably) second-guessing our plan, I kept on painting. Painting’s a good way to turn off the voices in my head. My most recent painting, Giant Octopus Wearing a Silly Hat, helped put me in a better frame of mind.

Giant Octopus Wearing a Silly Hat emerged almost at random. I was simply fooling around with shapes and colors until I found something that I liked: a giant octopus in a silly hat that might be a washtub or a lampshade. It was only after I’d been working on this picture for a couple of days that I realized the red octopus was in fact a symbol of my heart with its troublesome arteries.

Once I’d painted myself shaking hands with the wacky octopus, I developed an inner feeling that I’d be okay.

So I had some stents put in last week, and I came home feeling lively. And now my heart doesn’t hurt when I climb a hill. So far so good—not to sound overconfident. At my age, I could still drop dead tomorrow. But that’s always true for any of us.

I’m happy today, I like my birthdays. I made it to 64, and it’s been a good run, better than I’d ever hoped.

“Thanks for everything.”

Some good news on the painting front. I’ll be having a six-week show of my recent paintings and prints in San Francisco from Friday, April 9, through Saturday, May 22. The show will be in the Variety Preview Room on the first floor of the Hobart Bldg. at 582 Market St., near 2nd St. and Montgomery St., San Francisco.

We’ll have an opening night party at the Variety Preview Room on Friday, April 9, from 6-9 PM—I’ll be posting more info as the event draws near. The room is generally open during weekdays as well, so you can view the paintings at other times. And we’ll have a closing event on Sat. May 22, from 6-10 PM, where I’ll read with author Michael Shea as part of the SF in SF author series.

Paintings and prints will be for sale at the show during the opening and closing events, or via my painting website . Thirty percent of all sales during the show will go to support Variety Children’s Charity of Northern California.

I found an interesting page that creates a free map of a webpage, such as this blog page, on the fly. The applet was made by an energetic Stanford grad student named Marcel Salathé. Here’s a shot of one version of the map of www.rudyrucker.com/blog. Those “flowers” at the top left are the individual posts on the top page of my blog which is, I think, the main page that is being mapped. That dandelion of yellow dots is, I think, for the comments boxes.

I got curious about website maps this morning because a 78-year old lady from the Pacific Northwest sent me a link to her sprawling website called “Hello Out There”, which documents some of her notions and illuminations regarding synchronicity. She also maintains a blog called “Me, On This Planet”.

Focusing on the “Hello Out There” site, I kept finding new links among her rather interesting observations and anecdotes, and I was curious if I could find an app to make an on-the-fly diagram of a website. When I put the page into Salathé’s mapper, the process went on and on, in a visually interesting but not all that useful way.

Be that as it may, the webmapper is cool, and so is “Hello Out There.”

Speaking of synchronicity, I found a piece of eucalyptus bark shaped like a Zhabotinsky scroll on my back deck the other day! Longtime readers of mine will know of my love for this ubiquitous and naturally occurring shape.

In fact my memoir, due out in 2011, is scheduled to be called Nested Scrolls.

The Zhabo scrolls graphic above was made with the CAPOW software that I wrote with my SJSU computer science students with a grant from EPRI, the software is still available as a free download online, and features a nice screensaver mode.

CAPOW works with Windows platforms up through XP, and I plan to check it out on Windows 7 soon—I’m scheduled for some upgrades to my hardware, software and wetware in the coming weeks. Wish me luck.

I feel odd now, between books. Like I just got out of the pen. (Pun!) Or out of the cave. Trying to relax, to slow down the art factory machine. I should be paying attention to the world while I can. Enjoying it. Doing nothing. It’s surprisingly hard, that.

I did put out the new Flurb. And I spent one evening listening to some of my old vinyl records. I came across a great oddball pscychobilly LP, Destination Zululand, by a group called King Kurt. And I’m taking a few pictures (like those shown today) with my new Canon S90.

I finished a new painting, Flower Dream, last week, acrylic on canvas, 40″ by 30″. I think this picture might be the “dream” of the somewhat ordinary flower at the lower right corner. The picture arose fairly spontaneously. The first thing that went in were those two big red shapes, the fork and the hook. I combined the paint left over from my previous picture, At the Core of the World, and filled in the background. And then I kept on adding stuff to make it jungly.

I spent a couple of days retweaking the design of my art book, Better Worlds—I put in my latest pictures, and thought of a way to lower the page count by putting the picture notes all together at the end of the book. The book’s a mere $26 right now, and you can get an e-book edition for a laughable $5. We’re givin’ this stuff away!

The other day Sylvia and I went to the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in San Francisco, we hadn’t been in the city for awhile. MOMA has a 75th anniversary show on, featuring pictures from their permanent collection, not all of which I’ve seen on their walls before. I admired a really nice painting from 1962, James Weeks Looking West from Spanish Fort – Baker Beach #3.

And I saw a wonderfully red pre-figurative California abstract painting by Elmer Bischoff. I liked this particular work so much that I’m going back to oil paint (instead of acrylic) for my next painting.

After MOMA, we split up for awhile, and I walked through the back streets to the Hobart Building on Market Street near 2nd Street and near Montgomery Street. There’s a space on the ground floor in there called the Variety Screening Room, it’s like a small film theater, but can also be used for spoken word presentations. The space is managed by the Variety Children’s Charity, and is rented out by various other groups, including my pals at SF in SF, that is, Science Fiction in San Francisco.

I’ve read at SF in SF several times, and will be reading from my upcoming Ware Tetralogy on May 22, 2010. I’ll also be reading from the same book at Borderlands on Valencia Street a month earlier, that is, on April 24, 2010.

[Detail of James Rosenquist, Leaky Ride for Dr. Leakey, a sexual (in my opinion) painting at SF MOMA.]

The redoubtable Rina Weisman of SF in SF also arranged for me to have a two-month art show in April and May, 2010, in the smallish lobby and bar area off the Variety Preview Room. The reason I went there the other day was to estimate how many paintings I could fit in. Probably ten or maybe twelve. The lounge is unprepossessing in the daytime, but in the evening, with a crowd of people and drinks on sale, it warms up. I’ll be posting about the opening night party as the time draws near.

It was a cold, windy day and I was worrying about some health problems. Walking to the Hobart Building and then on towards Union Square I felt weary and old. Looking at the clusters of pedestrians, I imagined our dead selves as mirror-images walking upside-down underground, our ghosts shadowing us, all us barely afloat on a quicksand of death, and me, in particular, more than half-dead already. The flame of life flickers; we fret and strut for naught. I wanted to be home lying on my couch. Or at least kvetching to someone. Kvetching always makes me feel better. Another reason to write…

On a whim, I walked into the Mechanics Institute Library, a San Francisco institution I’d heard of but never visited. It’s on Post Street near Market. The Mechanics Institute Library is a very cool place, it’s a private library that you can join—like you might join a gym. If I lived in San Francisco I’d definitely sign up, if only to have a pleasant place to hang out downtown. And they host a word-famous chess club.

Jim Flack, a friend from college, works there as a director, and had mentioned once that I should come see him. Being at a psychic low-point, I was glad for a chance to reconnect with an old friend. Good old Flack.