The Big Aha is out in ebook, paperback and hardback now. I’ve ordered a bunch of the paperbacks and hardbacks to mail out to my Kickstarter backers. Still waiting them to arrive. This whole process has more steps than I’d quite imagined. But I’m almost done.

Late-breaking news: A great review of The Big Aha by Giulio Prisco, published in Skefi’a and reposted in io9! The book’s first review and it rocks. Whew.

Early warning: There will be a release party and an art show for The Big Aha at Borderlands Books on Valencia Street in San Francisco on Friday, December 17, 2014. I’ll be mentioning this again…

What next? Over the last few months, I got back the rights to my three old “transreal” novels White Light, Secret of Life, and Saucer Wisdom . What is transrealism, you may ask? Read my 1983 manifesto on the topic.

I’ll probably be republishing those three novels via my Transreal Books early in 2014, as ebooks for sure, and probably as paperbacks as well.

While I’m at it, I might as well republish my old memoir/rant All the Visions . I originally typed All the Visions on a giant long scroll of paper, emulating the divine Jack K. working on On the Road. My usual activities.

Keeping the ball in the air.

Another project I’m looking towards in 2014 is to assemble my electronic journals into a fat book. I have about half a million words on disk for the period 1990 – 2012. I’m editing that and pruning it down. Maybe I can squeeze it into a single 800 page volume. My role model here is the phonebook-sized Andy Warhol Diaries of 1989. I read that sucker for about a year, a couple of pages a day. Would be nice to make a book like that.

Some of today’s photos are from an recent outing to the fields and cliffs above Four Mile Beach and near Davenport, north of Santa Cruz. This is a Davenport photo. The shot-up-sign archetype. “Words suck,” as Beavis and Butthead used to say.

There’s a nice balance between agriculture and ecopreserve on the coast above Santa Cruz. Fields of, like Brussels sprouts, fine. The point is that there’s no McMansions, no hotels, no roadside attractions. Just the cliffs and the beaches. Although, of course, there is the Whale City Bakery in Davenport, always worth a stop.

We saw a huge number of pelicans out there. There’s been a vast school of anchovies in the Santa Cruz Bay lately, and the birds, seals, dolphins and whales have been gorging themselves.

There’s always some surfers around, sometimes quite a few of them, but as it cools down and gets windy, you don’t see many people actually walking on the beach. If you’re willing to take a little trouble by, like, walking a half mile from your car, it’s not that hard to find solitude in the unpopulated zones of California…and, really, most of the state is unpopulated. The cities are just small spots. Our beloved anthills.

Something heavy and cosmic about seeing pelicans against a sunny sky. People used to wonder where the dinosaurs went, but now it’s commonly said that the thunder lizards didn’t “go” anywhere. They just evolved into birds. Pelicans are pterodactyls…but with feathers. Pterodactyls 2.0.

My cinemetographer/photographer friend Eddie Marritz was in San Francisco, and we had a tapas dinner with him, his daughter Leda, and Leda’s husband Tim Conkling. Tim’s a game programmer who recently started writing games on his own. Among other things, Leda runs an interesting writing blog with her friend Steph: Small Answers. A new post every Monday. I love the Marritz family—I got to know them because I went to college with Eddie’s brother Don.

This is a photo of Eddie that I shot on film, developed, and handcolored—sometime around 1970. I was in grad school. Had a lot of free time back then. No computers.

What else? These are some of the roots that my wife mashed for a Thanksgiving side dish. Handsome fellows, no?

Beautiful little slough behind Four Mile Beach. Very hard to even see this hidden bight of water, the topography is kind of weird. I love that S curve. Nature gives us so much, everywhere, all the time. When I remember to notice.

But, like I always say, we humans are part of nature too. Building our intricate hives. And those can look cool, too. This chandelier in the new Los Gatos library is made out of a giant wood shaving that’s knotted around on itself. The highlight is that slanting plane of sunlight. I rushed this shot, not wanting to alarm the library patrons, but you can improve a slightly blurry shot in Lightroom. Not necessarily sharpen it to death, but play with the sliders till the picture’s effects look intentional or preordained.

This was an easier shot, bang, it jumped at my eye. The back of a building along Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz.

I’m having a sale on my paintings this month, and I’ve managed to sell three of them in the last week. Check out the insanely low prices if you’re interested in a special New Year’s present for yourself or for a loved one.

I took a walk up on St. Joseph’s Hill in Los Gatos yesterday, bringing my camera along. The camera is always good company on a walk. You show things to it, and it helps you see.

I’ve been going up in the Los Gatos hills maybe once a week for the whole twenty-seven years since we moved here in August, 1986. So I’ve taken this walk about a thousand times. It’s always new. That’s the thing about nature.

Nature is a fractal, that is she has endless layers of detail, which bloom out faster than a mere linear rate. That is, if you look twice as close, you see three times as much.

Also Nature is alive, and always changing. As is the sky. Always the same, always different. Chaos.

The perennial Dover Books company reissued my 1987 popular science book Mind Tools last week. I’m happy to have good old Dover keeping one of my titles alive. When I was a boy in Louisville, I used to send off for Dover books on science.

I wrote Mind Tools in Lynchburg, Virginia, right before I moved to San Jose and became a computer scientist. I was gearing up for the transition from math to CS. In Mind Tools, I looked at the four main areas of math from the viewpoint that “everything is information.” The areas? Number, Space, Logic, and Infinity.

I drew a lot of illos for the book. While I was working on it, my little rented office in decaying downtown L’burg was like a mad scientist’s lab, with all these little models I was building. I had this idea of finding dot-diagrams to illustrate the “shapes” of most of the numbers less than a hundred or so. I wanted to have a supply of these images at my hand for drawing on friends’ and relatives’ birthday cards. You can find these particular “Mind Tools birthday dot” drawings of mine online here.

Here’s a phone pole near my house. I like the natural collages that we humans put together. You can look at cities or human development as being natural artifacts like anthills or beaver colonies or wasp nests or seashells—we’re living organisms, and we assemble this stuff. We’re part of nature.

There’s this one ancient shed that I often walk past in the hills of Los Gatos. I love its peeling pale green paint, and I hope the owners never fix it up. Beautiful branching crack here, and to make it lovelier, the paint is arched up into mathematically rich concave surfaces.

I always love looking at treelines along mountain ridges. The nice thing about natural curves and surfaces is that they don’t accord with any really simple algebraic formulae. They emerge as processes, not as graphs of simple equations. But the processes themselves do have mathematical qualities, but the details of the end results are unpredictable.

It’s chaos, in a good way. In a chaotic process, you can have simple natural laws that are producing results that are even in principle unpredictable. Why unpredictable? Because there are multiple systems involved (rocks, geology, trees, wind, rain) and because the systems are interacting over extended periods of time. As a rule, the only way to “predict” a natural process it to watch it run, and when it’s done, that’s your “prediction.”

We travel into the future at a rate of one second per second. No shortcuts.

More human colony-organism type activity here. Apparently the humans cap their “rebar” metal rods so that they don’t poke out their own eyes. Faint strands of symbiotic spider silk augment the “warning” tape. (See this higher-resolution image of the photo for the spider silk.)

Back to that weathered old pale green shed I love. Dig the hinge, isn’t it perfect? A semiotic heft to it. Hello, god.

A eucalyptus branch lying on the ground. Blown down by the wind. The plants don’t mind. They’ll rot into the ground, be eaten by ants, whatever. The endlessly cycling fountain of life. We’re part of it too. Your body will cycle, but your life is an “eternal” pattern in spacetime.

Hazy light on this winter day. Already looks like sunset in the mid-afternoon. The laurel trees grow in clumps.

Selfie shot for the day. Weird thing about iPhone camera: If you’re taking a horizontal shot of something in front of you, you have to have the “volume” buttons down, but if you are taking a selfie shot you have to have the “volume” buttons up. Otherwise the image appears upside-down on many (but not all) viewer apps. No use raging at these kind of things—you just learn about them and deal with them. Like an insect gathering seeds.

My self-deprecating “self-portrait,” called Louisville Artist, used as a chapter illo in my new novel The Big Aha , which features a new psychedelic era…only this time the drug is quantum mechanics. Jam your internal One/Many oscillator all the way over into the mystic mode! Check out the book for free (or buy it rather cheaply) online.

I’m pretty much done publishing The Big Aha now, although there still keep being little tasks. It’s easy to put a paperback on Amazon via their CreateSpace. But it’s been slow getting the final version of the paperback edition on Lightning/Ingram so that retailers other than Amazon can distribute it. I have a feeling that Lightning is a little overwhelmed these days, with the still-cresting wave of self-pubbers.

[I took some photos near Bernal Hill and 24th St. in the Mission recently. I always wonder about shoes on the phone wires. Love this shot. Did the Witch of Oz crash here on Halloween?]

Indeed Ingram now has an alternate interface to Lightning which is called Ingram Spark (Spark as in baby Lightning, I think.) See this page for some comparisons of possible earnings via Lightning, Spark, and CreateSpace.. The main financial difference between Ingram Lightning and Ingram Spark has to do with the discounts that you can offer to retailers. (As if there was any real money in these quixotic ventures.) Self-pub maven Aaron Shepard doesn’t like Spark, see this post and scroll down to see his earlier ones as well. All very chaotic, as usual.

Anyway, let’s look at some random snaps.

Our son Rudy Jr. and his wife Penny had a Halloween pre-trick-or-treating get-together. This young hipster woman Annalise, she was wearing a dress with a lift-up flap labeled “Hello Titty,” and the flap covered a plastic window revealing part of her breasts. She told me she’d made a satirical superhero video called Hello Titty, and you can see it online. San Francisco art.

Another time, in mid-November, my wife and I walked from Bernal Heights down to Precita Park with our granddaughters. I saw a nice California chestnut tree, laden with fruit. Always an easy move to silhouette things against the ubiquitous wires.

It was a sunny day. I’m always into shadows.

Later we were in a playground on 24th Street, which is in some ways like Mission Street, very Mexican and Latino, but it’s a narrower street, and homier. One of the swings was like a flat UFO, I dug how it looked against the buildings in the background. The cube and the triangular prism.

That particular playground has a huge Aztec-type serpent sculpture that snakes all around. A little girl running next to it here.

There’s a very cool alley with murals off 24th Street near Harrison, it’s called Balmy Alley. Some the murals are kind of disconcerting, as they express the locals’ growing discontent at the potential gentrification of their neighborhood. The cops busting Mexicans and having coffee with white tech workers. The developers tearing down low-rent Victorians to put in glossy condos. You can see an evil invader monkey with a dollar sign in this amazing mural. I forgot to note down the muralist’s name, but maybe somebody can tell me.

You can see a ton of Balmy Alley images via Google Image search. And you can get higher level info from the muralist organization Precita Eyes, which has an center on 24th St, and even gives tours.

Other venues…here’s a cell-phone shot of the sun glaring on a Target Sign near Union Square in SF. Merry frikkin’ Xmas.

A lady with her T-Bird in Los Gatos. Old California.

The Precita Café. I like those festive colors and lights against the night sky. Kind of European, somehow. SF is a bunch of other countries.

So now I’m slowly getting my life back, after the frenzy of putting together the various editions of The Big Aha and Notes for The Big Aha…see the book’s website for more info on all that.

Today let’s dig down into my remaining stash of photos from our trip to London and Oxford in early October, 2014. Come with me to Oxford by way of yon quaint and elegant Christ Church College garden gate…

Saw this lady frosting custom cakes all day long in a bakery within a roofed market. Felt a little intrusive to be taking her picture. But, wow, a cake factory.

I love shadows of odd shapes. Chains for manipulating the shutters of an Oxford dress shop. Very smart outfits on sale, rather dear.

Ah, giant lily pads. The SF fantasy of living on them, like a frog. You’d want to be fully amphibious for that. Last night, dropping off to sleep, I was imagining people who were somehow gene-tweaked to swim as fast as Jet-Skis. In the waves off Kauai.

The chapel at Christ Church College in Oxford has this cool window. The jigsaw-looking panels were pieced together from shards recovered from church windows broken during WWII. A nice symbolic thing. Shards of our personalities reconstructed into bopper minds someday, perhaps.

The last hotel we stayed in was the Pelham, right across the street from the South Kensington tube station in London. A really nice place, with a great view. Expensive, but not quite as bad as some of the other places we came across. On our last night, I watched a BBC showing of a documentary movie of the Stones playing a 50th anniversary concert in Hyde Park this year or last year.

It was great how happy the Stones were, Mick and Keith so jubilant, at peace, plying their trade. I’d like to write like that.

I’ve seen this big statue of a pharaoh in the British Museum before. The striking thing here is that—wow, the pharaohs were Black! Africans, my man! Such a lovely sculpture, so smooth and, what, over a thousand years old.

Another cool piece in the British Museum, shows some Assyrians swimming. They’re holding inflated bladders to help stay afloat. Dig the fish.

The British Museum was insanely crowded, a rainy Sunday, as full as Times Square on New Year’s Eve almost. You have to feel a bit ambivalent about the pieces in the museum as well—all of them looted from weaker nations by Imperial Britain back in the day. But, whatever the details, it’s always amazing to reach back in time and see the endless flow of human craft and intelligence. We really haven’t changed all that much in the last few thousand years.

Mandatory Ionic column outside the British Museum.

What’s this photo doing in here? It’s a hallway on the Stanford campus. Oh, it’s the tunnel leading from my British experience to my next level of existence.

Here comes God! A dodecahedron.

And now, tracing a long smooth gyre, I drift down to my home planet. But which part is land, and which part is sky…or is it sea?

What? You haven’t been to the BIG AHA page yet?