Added November 11, 2015.

I finished that painting I was talking about in this post! Love this picture.

“Diego’s Hunhunahpu” acrylic on canvas, November, 2015, 36” x 36”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

As always, more info on my Paintings page.

And now back to the original November 3, 2015, post.

That new hip I got in March, 2015, didn’t take, that is, its cup never bonded with my pelvis bone. So day before yesterday, on Monday, October 26, I had my third artificial left hip implanted. There was the usual jump-cut in consciousness. I’m lying on the operating table with an IV in my arm, and then I’m waking up in bed in the recovery room. I couldn’t move my feet at first, as they’d given me a spinal block injection to paralyze the lower half of my body. I could hardly talk.

“Is the operation over?”
“Yes.”

And then I’m looking around the room, lying there for maybe 45 minutes, a large room with other patients, nothing very interesting to see, nothing alive except for the humans, just steel and white, cloth and plastic. Now and then a nurse. And then they wheeled me to my room, and Sylvia came in, and my life began again.

A hospital is the opposite of Guanajuato. Knowing this operation was coming up, I’ve been feeling kind of down for the last few months. The day on Route One with Isabel, and the four days in Mexico—those were breaks that gave me a much-needed lift. And Syvlia and I went to see The Magic Flute opera in SF the day before the operation, so uplifting.

But here I am in the post-op present tense, venturing out once again into the psychic surf, wanting to get back on my board and ride some painting and writing waves.

On my last day in Guanajuato, I toured Diego Rivera’s childhood home, right next to my hotel. They’ve made it into a museum with replica/reconstructed furniture, and a few of his smaller works.

I hadn’t really grasped how great an artist Diego Rivera was—in the US he’s mostly known for his murals, which are wonderful, but he could do really lovely fast stuff at smaller scale. Like this one here is a 1943 painting of an exploding volcano called Paricutin—Diego was sent there as part of a journalism gig. There’d be no good way to get a photo, so they sent a painter. Wonderful brush strokes.

Maybe the most interesting works on display are drawn from a set of 24 watercolors that Diego made, intended for use as illustrations in an book based on the legends in the hieroglyphic Mayan codices, a book to be called Popol Vuh, never published, to have been edited by one John Weatherwax—I wonder if William Burroughs knew this guy, Bill was always talking about the Mayans and the codex.

Re. the codices, in an amazingly evil act, the conquistadors and the Spanish priests burned most of them. Writing in July of 1562, Bishop Diego De Landa wrote:

“We found a large number of books in these [hieroglyphic] characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they [the Mexicans] regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.” Such codices were primary written records of Maya civilization…

Anyway, back to the good Diego, you can find the manuscripts for the book he was going to illustrate for this John Weatherwax guy, a 1930’s Communist pal, online in the Smithsonian collections. I get the impression the texts are more or less public domain at this point. It would be cool if some small press could finally publish the book with Diego’s illos.

Wonderful, wonderful images by Diego, like alien cartoons. Mayan gods, yes! So gnarly. I’m going to work them into Million Mile Road Trip. A number of gods cooperated (or competed) on creating our cosmos and on creating human beings (shown above). Think of a Hollywood movie, or big budget videogame. Hundreds of people are involved, contributing to it. Graphic art, CG, makeup, costumes, sound, cinematography, casting, actors, and numerous directors. Not just one director. No boss, no top director, no head producer. Like some Hollywood movies will have a “second unit” filming stuff. And a universe emerges.

Here’s Hunhunahpu , the tonsured corn god, making humanoid shapes on this calabash(?) plant, including perhaps a copy of his head.

Later a woman lies under the bush and the head drips spit on her crotch and she gets pregnant, and I think bears twins, one of whom is just plain Hunahpu, with Hunhunahpu the dad. At this point I know next to nothing about the Mayan cosmogony.

As part of my post-op physical and psychic rehab program, I’m working on a copy of that first Hunhunahpu painting. After three days in a daze, I kicked the oxy meds and went, more or less, back to being Rudy. And then I wanted to do something creative, and I wasn’t quite ready to write, so I started painting. I’m using acrylic paint instead of oil paint, as the clean-up is easier this way. And acrylic paint dries so fast that it’s easy to paint over things and revise. That’s a working mock-up shown above. The colored part is my painting thus far, and the Hunhuhahpu is just a collaged-in copy of Diego’s version that I still need to paint in. [You can see the finished version at the start of his post.]

There’s a harsh, saturated, Mexican-wall-paint quality to the acrylic colors that I like.

Cool composite painting of Don Quixote. Artist’s name is Trigos? (Correct me if wrong.) Click for a larger version of the painting.

The last touristic type site I saw in Guanajuato was a surprisingly interesting museum of paintings and statues of the character Don Quixote—from the Cervantes novel.

I’ve never managed to read much of the novel, so when I was home I sought out a couple of translations, and give it another shot, but to no avail. To me, the character Don Quixote is just an idiot.

But you could say there’s a sense in which Don Quixote stands for writers. His lance is like a pen. He’s surrounded by books at home—which is like having a manuscript you’re working on. He goes out on missions and gets everything wrong—because he’s overlaying his transreal novelistic notions upon the world. Tedious, long-winded, overbearing.

Out in the surf.

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!

Here’s my latest painting, Vlad and Monika. This was technically difficult for me—trying to make those circles look like translucent colored bubbles. This is meant to be a kind of spacy and intimidating alien world, a part of my novel in progress Million Mile Road Trip.

“Vlad and Monika” oil on canvas, Oct, 2015, 30” x 24”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

At first I was going to call the painting “Bubbleman,” and have the viewer imagine that the two eyes belonged to a single alien creature, but then I decided there were in fact two of them. But “Bubblepeople” didn’t seem interesting as a title, so I decided these characters speak in Polish accents, and their names are Vlad (short for Wladimir) and Monika. I usually give my alien characters oddball accents so that, in reading the novel, it’s easy to tell them apart.

Technically speaking, this was one of the more difficult paintings I’ve done. It was hard to give the bubbles the effect of being colored, translucent spheres—and I’m still not sure I got it entirely right. But I’ve done about eight layers on the painting now and I’m going to stop. Those volcano-like mountains took me about five or ten minutes each, by the way, as did the cliff, the sky, the patches of grass, and the two eyes. It was just the bubbles that were hard. More info on my work on my paintings page.

So what else is new? My son Rudy and his wife and kids were down here over Labor Day weekend. One of the girls took my photo with my good camera. Note how my expression is much kinder than usual.

This is a heavy-duty valve on a water pipe that runs from a hidden reservoir in the Santa Cruz mountains to Los Gatos. Freshly painted. Love the colors. The pipe runs along the public, and nearly dry, Lexington Reservoir next to Route 17. I like to go out walking or biking around Lex Reservoir,

I’ve been writing really a lot, like maybe a thousand words a day, pushing forward on Million Mile Road Trip, getting into that bloodlust frenzy that you get when you can sense that the end is in fact attainable. I mean, it’ll still take me till early next summer, but by now I’ve got a lot of the plot wrinkles worked out, and the characters’ personalities have settled down, and, on a good day, I can just sit there “dreaming while I’m awake” and write down the scenes I’m seeing, and transcribe the funny things that my characters say.

But I get worn out, and I get the need to escape the house and the coffee shop, so now and then I make an expedition into the Great Outdoors. The most interesting thing I’ve done lately was to go up near the west end of Lexington Reservoir near Los Gatos, like I was just talking about. I clambered down a slope to an exposed stream that runs through the somewhat green upper end of the reservoir, and hike up along the stream in my Keene’s shoes. And here’s a shot of some standing-wave type ripples where the stream goes under a log.

Patterns like this entrance me. To my way of thinking , that’s what my physical body is. That is, I am a moving, persistent pattern in the bustling cloud of matter in this world. Surfing Schrödinger’s wave equation, you might say—only I’m not on a surfboard, I’m a bump in the wave. Or, from a spacetime viewpoint, a macrame pattern in the weave.

I do like the image a feather floating on life’s stream. But, again, I don’t really see it that way. I’m a ripple, a part of the whole.

I saw a nice cattail. I’ve always thought cattails look like hot dogs on sticks, right? That you’d roast over a fire. The first time I saw a cattail was at a cookout on a family friend’s farm in Kentucky, we just drove out there across the pasture. And we had a fire, and we roasted things, like hot dogs and biscuit dough wrapped on a stick and of course marshmallows. I was five. I was sure that if I could manage to yank a cattail out of the pond, it would roast up just as good as a hot dog. I mention this in my recent, curiously neglected, novel The Big Aha.

Last week we went up to the Union Square area of San Francisco. Amazing how many stores have come and gone over the thirty years we’ve been living here. Saw a couple of guys tap dancing.

We hiked up the hill to the Grace cathedral. Saw a nice painting of Mary Magdalene. I like how she’s pointing at that egg. It gave me an idea for my novel: put a magic egg inside each of the big flying saucer, and if you kill a saucer and you can get hold of that egg—which is really a ball of smeel—well, then you’ve got something very valuable.

There’s a fountain in a tiny park in front of Grace cathedral. Got a kind of obvious shot here of the fountain, an sprite’s hand, and the Flag. Sort of a Robert Frank shot.

Here’s another standard kind of shot—the world-holding convex mirror by a parking lot entrance. I liked fitting in the dwindling grid perspective as well. And I think it’s good that I don’t show in the mirror. I’m the invisible man. A ripple in the cosmic sea.