I spent yesterday and today in San Francisco. Friday afternoon I hung out in North Beach, one thing I wanted to do was to check out this place called Tang Fat Hotel. I’m thinking of setting a scene in my novel there, the crazy mathematicians are hiding out there, it’s not really a hotel, more like a boarding house.

Stopped by Washington Square Park, I always remember Jack Kerouac’s description of taking a nap there in Big Sur. Here’s a little flock of drinkers.

Some odd stores on Grant Street a block away, this window was especially spooky.

Then I got together with Rudy Jr., who lives in SF. He has a kind big dog named Slug.

Slug is vigilant.

We went to a little art opening at the the Atlas Cafe and saw Linda, one of Rudy’s friends, she’s almost always cheerful. She says she’s a yea-sayer to life.

We went to a surprise birthday party for one of Rudy’s other friends. She had nice boots.

Rudy’s friends Jericho and Rafael were there. Jericho organizes these art-carny events involving bicycles, it’s called Cyclecide. Rafael and Rudy go way back, he's also one of Rudy's co-conspiritors at Monkeybrains.

This morning I walked around with Slug looking at the Mission. An interesting mural next to the Southern Exposure gallery.

Lots of nice stencil spray-painted graffiti around; used to be I only saw those in Europe. Here’s three in one square. With Slug's paw.

This head was in front of the eyeball mural.

This infinitely regressing menacing snowperson is fractal and Mandelbrotian. Nice background too.

They had a Mission flea market starting up.

In the afternoon we went to a very small-scale rock festival in McLaren Park called the Mindzap Festival. They had a big cardboard model of a roach with dry-ice smoke. This band here is called Weed Wolf. I said to the woman with the accordian, “Now all those years of lessons pay off,” and she said, “I just started playing it two weeks ago.”

I got a free Mindzap headband from Rafael! To keep my brain from falling out, natch.

Good old San Francisco. Thanks for showing me around, Rudy and Penny.

Cone shell of the day: Conus Auratinus, photo by Scott Johnson. This shell is greased and ready to kick ass, as Sha-Na-Na used to say.

I was gonna write an attack-of-the-cone-shell scene today, but went rambling in Castle Rock park instead.

There’s these giant smooth rocks piled up here and there. Moss in the trees from all the fog.

My hair is getting so long I was wearing a pony-tail today, to the disgust of my family members. Haircut soon.

Some kids tore the moss off one of the rocks to write a certain number ( I won’t state the number here, as it seems to attract bots), which means, like, “hooray for a certain herb!”

All the madrone and manzanita trees were blooming. Buzzing bees. This was a good place to sit. I have this tendency to do something and then think “Now what,” and move on too quickly. Once you're somewhere as good as this it doesn't get better. Your on a local optimization peak. I sat there awhile.

Madrone trees have great smooth fleshy bark. Note the crotch bulge.

I saw a spot on some bark that looked like a dog. Bark dog.

Then I got lost. A rock like an Easter Island tiki. Apparantly this special weird gnary hollowed out rock that you get in Castle Rock Park is called “tofini.”

Ended up down in the San Lorenzo River Valley. Water carrying our gnarly paracomputation, yes. Note the living checkerboard.

I worked my way up the stream to reach the base of the big Castle Rock Fall that I knew was there. Some green plants said, “Hello.”

A rock poised beneath a log on a ledge in a waterfall. A living koan. I may never make it to this spot again. All this perfection out there.

I reached the heart of the big fall. A rainbow in the spray.

This week we’ve been spending some time with Elena’s husband Gunnar and her son Gerry Hadden.

Biking and walking the hills. Gerry’s a great photographer; he took the three pictures posted today.

The evening of the day that Elena died something spooky happened. We turned on one of our computers, which is coupled to an ink-jet printer that we rarely use. And this one time, as the system powered up, the printer unexpectedly kicked into life and printed out a single sheet of paper.

And on the paper was a single ASCII heart symbol. Like a last message from Elena.

Do I really think that her spirit left her body, and hung around for awhile and sent this message? Not exactly. But I do think that our universe is patterned like a novel, with synchronistic and meaningful correspondences built in. These correspondences establish themselves a-causally, as described in John Cramer, “The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics”, Reviews of Modern Physics 58, 647-688, July (1986).

I'm aware that, by switching the discourse to science, what I’m really doing is holding up my little mumbo-jumbo fetish-doll against the yawning uncertainties of the spirit world.

Seeing that heart really gave me goosebumps. The printer whirring in the twilight basement room. One symbol, bam.

Way to go, Elena!

I’m teaching a course in the Philosophy Department at San Jose State in Fall, 2005.

Here’s a link with more information. Philosophy 115: Computers and Philosophy, Fall 2005. If you feel like it, print this handy one-page announcement and post in a suitable location as a reminder.

In short, the class meets once a week, 4:00 – 6:45 PM on Thursdays. I'd like to have as many people as possible enjoy this class, so even if you're not a fulltime SJSU student, consider taking the course through the SJSU Open University. Maybe you can get off work a little early on Thursdays this fall! And I know it overlaps with suppertime, so feel free to bring a sandwich.

In this course we'll discuss the philosophical meaning of computers. The presentations will be non-technical. We'll use in-class lectures and demos, and about a third of each meeting will be devoted to group discussion.

I’ll be using my upcoming book The Lifebox, The Seashell, and the Soul as the textbook.

***

There was an article in the New York Times about R. Crumb, hero of my youth. He did a public interview with the art critic Robert Hughes, who’s compared Crumb to Bruegel. Crumb modestly demurs.

[Picture from the recent book,The R. Crumb Handbook, by R. Crumb and Peter Poplaski (MQ Publications Ltd.)]

I’ve often thought of the Crumb/Bruegel connection;if you look at Bruegel’s few remaining sketches from life (admittedly the attributions of these are shaky), they look for all the world like Crumb drawings. I mailed Crumb my Bruegel novel As Above, So Below a couple of years back.