Panning for Zen

There's probably some Zen in a pan of frying crickets, but I have no interest in looking for it. My interest in a pan of frying crickets is not getting popped in the eye by a drop of boiling olive oil. Eating the crickets once they've been cooked, all the way through the guts to kill the tapeworm larvae, is also on the list. That's pretty much it.

The main Zen deficiency of a pan of frying crickets is that they don't chirp. Sizzling, popping and whistling like chitinous little teapots is a poor substitute for chirping. The sizzle, the pop, and the whistle are produced by phase changes in the stuff that crickets are made of, but these changes occur without any deliberate participation by the crickets themselves. Chirping is different. Chirping rate is a neuromuscular response to the cricket's physical environment. A male cricket chirps faster when the air is warmer. This change is probably not a very deliberate act on the cricket's part--it's a function of poikilotherm physiology--but the act of chirping itself directly affects cricket reproduction. It attracts female crickets and warns away competing males. A popping, sizzling, whistling cricket in boiling oil does none of these things.

So where is the Zen in a pan of frying crickets?
I don't know. If forced to look more deeply into that skillet, I might say we need need not assign meaning to every whistle and pop we hear, nor to every drop of hot oil that stings our eye, in order to appreciate the connection between the change we impose and the change we experience. But that would probably be a bunch of crap. I suggest you consult Steinbeck or Huell Howser, because I have no answers for you.

© Pseudocognitive



Apologies for the out-of-focus picture. It's the only original one I had, having lost the others.

Plucking the Stone

The deep mind underlies the superficial mind. Much as the stones on the bottom of a clear, swiftly flowing stream are blurred by the rushing water above, the deep mind can be detected, but not directly experienced except by tactile sensation. It forms the substrate over which the everyday mind blithely and blindly courses. When the irregularities of younger, less polished rocks–perhaps recently kicked into the stream by a startled deer or careless hiker–produce increased friction with the water, creating a minute disturbance of flow almost too small to detect and perhaps bloodying the plantar surface of your wading feet, you take more notice, but the visual input is no more clear than before. Mind you, the water is extremely clean, but the current obscures detail.

Imagine now that you could halt the downstream flow, just for a second or two. What would you see? That’s the deep mind. You can find it by carefully moderating your relentless speed-surfing of neural circuits. Slow, or even stop the current, and pluck one smooth stone from the bottom.

•  •  •

Note: None of this applies to Petaluma. 

© Pseudocognitive

Five Dead Riders

“This marks one of the worst tragedies in motorcycle history. The purpose of this memorial is to never forget those of us who have fallen, and to remind us how precious life is and how quickly it can be taken away.  Live to ride, ride to live, God speed and please be careful.”

I first read that plaque on an unseasonably cool Monday in early August, 2009. High sky, no clouds, 77° at noon. Perfect riding weather on NorCal’s west Sierra slope, and the road we’d been following after bailing from US 50 near Pollock Pines was nearly devoid of traffic. A few weeks earlier, I’d jacked-up my rotator cuff falling down a mountain near that same road, trying to save my Nikon after tripping over some rusty barbed wire. That day, my brother and I continued on to Virginia City, where we ate fish tacos, visited the dead in a dusty 19th Century bone yard, and saw a drunk chick ride a little Ninja down Main Street.

On the way back down the hill we spotted a row of five large crosses sheltered by pines on a roadside embankment. We were racing the sun with no time to stop; I had witnessed the effects of deer on the motorcyclists who’ve smacked into ‘em, and I had no intention of letting one claim me. Just as well, as I was also feeling the need for something stronger than Motrin for that damned shoulder after riding several hundred miles using my other arm to lift my hand to the throttle. We sped past the site and made plans to follow up on it sometime later.

Later wound up taking a few months to materialize. Having failed to win the lottery, I was forced to allow work to interfere with other, more important pursuits. On August 3rd we returned. I wasn't prepared for the intensity of my response.

I am a lifelong, tortured agnostic. I don’t believe in any god, but I don’t actively disbelieve either. There’s a switch in my mind, painstakingly installed and subsequently maintained by the usual combination of genetics and environment, which redirects questions about the alleged persistence of non-corporeal consciousness to an out-of-the-way mental crawlspace. Sure, I think about such things, but when the intractability of the problem wears me down, I just stuff it in that fortified thought locker so I can continue to function in a semi-normal manner.

I had some trouble flipping that switch at the memorial. Memories of riding dirt bikes with my dad when I was a kid, thoughts of my own wife and sons and how my death-by-fiery crash would affect them, the history and physical qualities of the site—all of this contributed to a state that felt like the presence of something bigger. I can do a reasonable job of explaining this with my limited knowledge of neurology, but in this case I'll allow the undefined to remain undefined—to a greater degree than it needs to be—because I like it that way. As long as I make that distinction consciously, it’s cool.

Five stout wooden crosses stand as sentinels for this place that memorializes the lives of five motorcyclists who died on Labor Day weekend in 1989. These crosses line the ridge of a ten foot red dirt embankment along the south side of a sparsely traveled road that gains 4,000 feet in elevation over a distance of about 30 miles as you ride east.

To reach the memorial beyond the crosses, you either scale the embankment or walk along a dirt path threading through the trees from a turn-out half a football field west. Either way, when you get there, be prepared for conflicting emotions. This is a peaceful place, and even the occasional passage of vehicles on the roadway below won’t distract you from contemplating the duality of that peace and the violent collision and fire that claimed five lives. The riders were part of a larger group, maybe 30 or 40 bikes strong, en route to Hope Valley on a bright September morning. The young, inexperienced driver of a west-bound truck hauling wood lost control on the downgrade, and when it was done, James Carter, Jeff Pearl, Jeffrey and Debbie Sund, and Doug Wall were all dead.

Echoes of terror are there if you want them. What would you feel, watching a one-ton flatbed coming at you sideways with just enough time to know your fate but not evade it? Which is worse, blunt force trauma or immolation? Would your thoughts—in that brief interval between threat recognition and fate realization—have any coherence, or would all your energy be spent trying to react? You can ponder those questions when you visit this place, but you’ll also notice how calm and removed it seems, despite the proximity of the road below. You can hear ravens and Steller’s jays. Beds of pine needles, sun-dappled shade, a tree with a trunk and dead limb that forms a big dollar sign 50 feet up. In the summer there are plenty of grasshoppers just outside the perimeter of the little clearing, and western fence lizards skitter around on fallen branches. Life amid the remembrance of loss, the juxtaposition more profound and elemental than what you’ll find at a cemetery. Evidence that not only is Zen something you bring with you and discover more readily when distractions are minimized, but also that a ten foot dirt bank is more than enough mountain to scale in search of it.

In a clearing under the pine canopy there is a simple concrete base supporting a pewter plaque that tells the story. Also mounted on this low pedestal is the engine of one of the bikes, and damage from the extreme heat of the fire can be seen in the parts that melted. Touch it. That V-twin power plant once moved a rider through space and time and spiritual awareness just as your bike moves you now. Examine the bits and pieces of tribute left by other riders. An American flag patch. A laminated card of an artist's depiction of Jesus. Cards bearing the logos of several MC’s and riding clubs. A half-smoked cigar and a sticker with the grinning skull logo of Ironworkers Local 118. Some coins. An old digital watch, cracked and burned and stopped forever. Some .38 Special and .45 long Colt brass. A small brown and white teddy bear. A tiny, bent redwood seedling, nurtured by an elderly couple with a can of water, survivor of winter snows and inadvertently placed boot soles. The old collar and tags of a long-dead, beloved dog.

Leave your own tribute, but respect the tone and nature of the spot and the memory of those whom it honors. Let yourself absorb the detail and the generality, the physical objects, their natural surroundings, and the atmosphere they produce. Don't force it, just let it. If there’s enough of whatever it is to register in the undefined zones of my agnostic mind, it will definitely affect you.

© Pseudocognitive

An excellent memorial-themed ride report from NorCal with some compelling photographs can be found on the John Is On The Road Again blog.


Memorial to Five bikers on SmugMug

I obtained some of the information about the crash from the plaque at the site; the rest of the background information about the incident is from an interesting article by RJ “Cowboy” Carter of the BoozeFighters MC.

Note: In the realm of motorcycle riding, there exist distinctions among the various classifications given to and used by the operators of the machines. It is beyond the scope of this article to examine the differences between those who truly are “bikers”and those who are not (not to mention trying to dispel whatever misconceptions some readers may have concerning various stereotypes). For that reason, I have chosen to refer to the people who died in this crash by the more general term “rider,” no offense intended to anyone at all.

More ticking in my head

a cross of dirt

the hot summer sun

fingers, frets and gut

¬

cold fish, midnight sky
pulls the stars across his gills
the moon in his eye
¬

heed nothing, no one

venison, ravening dogs

no more ants patrol

¬

good massage gone bad
look up, surprise! leaking shards
moe green’s red glasses
¬

deserted off-ramp in the dark
a cooling engine
tick tick tick
no occupants
but
the radio
plays
¬

sanguineous ops
median cubital jab
vacutainers slaked
¬

black ribbon through green woods
leaping deer, squeezing calipers
asphalt peels my face
¬

in the ditch
pupils fixed and dilated
staring up at nothing
¬

larvae in my head
my stagnant noggin puddle
mental mosquitoes

¬

asphalt under waxing moon
brake lights flash
an arm extends
my doom
¬

blanket on the floor

decline, pain, merciful death

old good-dog is gone

© Pseudocognitive

The Undiscovered Country

The Undiscovered Country is not a Shakespearean death metaphor, and it’s not a future where humans and Klingons get along. The Undiscovered Country is a place inside your head, a tenuously-held position that is periodically shelled by the forces of doubt, worry, and amorphous anxiety. It’s not a comfortable place, but it’s better than retreating or blundering forward in a clumsy stumble toward doom. Fortify, plan, act, and bring that zone of creative tension along as you make a coordinated advance. Avoid the extremes of complacency and fear to the point of inaction. Don’t get caught doing nothing, but don’t do any old thing just for the sake of doing it. Make it count.

© Pseudocognitive

Donut holes and space

This picture is unrelated to the subject matter below.

Defining "nothing" without contextualizing it with something or anything at all might just be impossible.  Today I considered the problem as it relates to fried doughy snacks. They don't sell donut holes. Those greasy little sugary lumps are donut •balls.• A donut HOLE is the empty space in the middle of a donut. It is made by punching out the donut ball with a steely implement. The hole is left behind, wholly defined by the donut around it. The hole does not exist in the absence of the donut. This is either disturbing or comforting.

Next: A tall, horizontally displaced donut as an analogy for the alimentary canal's location outside the body.

© Pseudocognitive

Old miseries, myth oxen, and the pungent piss of feral longhorns

On the thirteenth of May we went down the mountain for the last time. Passing quietly through long shadows, our route led us in painful divergence from what we’d once believed we were, offering nothing in place of those beliefs except a more desperate tendency to preserve and defend old miseries. Along our descent, we chewed and snapped at the imaginings of our common fate, like manic dogs unhinged by fleas or pin worms they cannot reach. Farther down, past the place where the creek bends double and tough grasses thrive under the urinary and fecal onslaught of feral Texas longhorns,

the secondary ridge fell off abruptly, so we followed instead the rusted old Union Pacific tracks, all the way around to the south exposure, into a zone where dry grass and scrub predominate more severely the farther down you go. Here, but for the dust and rock and crackly brown plants, there is nothing worthy of careful notation by any but the most desperate chroniclers of human folly in wild places. The truly sobering influence of these lands is best left to others to ponder. None of this would matter anyway, not once we reached habitation, because we would soon be made dead at the hands of self-righteous fools and those who do their bidding. You may have resigned yourself to a similar fate as the likely outcome of the current mess you’ve blundered your way into, but you should remember that I was of a similar mind at the time, yet here I am still.

Continuing down-slope, furtive creatures—perhaps refugees of the last county war—were sighted ahead, shifting in and out of our bleary plane of focus. These were far less substantial than a dusty old boar taking a dirt bath. A man can shoot a boar and eat his muscles and tender parts and use his tusks to beat back the inexorable myth oxen. Not so with these undefined forms flitting about before us. They held fast to no spot for longer than half a moment. We chose to ignore them, and in that manner we passed without further imperilment into town, where the plan was to spend our last night on this earth in stuporous inebriation.

•     •     •

This was the first installment in a senselessly continuing series of fractured ramblings by an old man who’s outlived his usefulness, and it was set down on paper while traveling through the badlands bordering the state of Fugue. The second installment will likely never be set down on these pages. I do not expect nor want you to make any sense of it. Anyone attempting to do so will be consigned to the corners of my mind reserved for blathering media whores like Michelle Rhee and Andrew Breitbart and Tom Tancredo, to name but a few.

About Pseudocognitive:
Meta-nonconformity consultant for a large public agency.  Married father of adult children with autism. Motorcycle rider. Quasi-photographer. Irascible curmudgeon. Get off my fescue. Moved west with the Giants in ’58 but forgot about it until recently. My head grabs a bunch of stuff and doesn’t like to let it go. It has been determined that I should escalate my efforts to rid myself of some of these extraneosities. There is no pattern to be found in the scope or sequence of the topics I post except whatever patterns your own mind creates. Any attempt by the reader to impose his or her patterns on me will be met with apathy. I am a strong and active supporter of the Establishment Clause. Keep your religion out of my publicly funded agencies. I have nothing to do with any ads you may see here; direct your ire elsewhere. I am in favor of eating animals if a person so desires. Save the winter-run Chinook salmon. I post first and proofread later, making numerous edits. I no longer rudely pick my nose in public. No one reads this; you probably shouldn’t either.

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© Pseudocognitive

The Banality of Futility

This is us. Scurry around!


© Pseudocognitive

Goosfraba

© Pseudocognitive

Tunnel through banality

Nothing new to report here, nothing to see—yet. Keep moving.
If necessary, go faster. 

Bypass consideration of the inherent banality of tunnels. Fool yourself; embrace the standard symbolism. Your passage out of comfortable amniotic insulation into the ultimate big air. Transition from one role or station into another. Attach some meaning, or you will suffer despair. Ride into the light. No, not the hypoxic endorphic light touted by anti-agnostics. The actual light. It's time for lunch.

© Pseudocognitive

Not nailing down reality on Morgan Territory Road. And a vulture.

Morgan Territory Road snakes its way over dry ridge lines and through a brief respite of shady oak woodlands and past old chaw-cheeked rednecks fixing you with menacing but impotent stares from astride their half-dead tick magnets. After a final stretch lined by homes of millionaires, Morgan Territory joins the terminus of Marsh Creek Road--a more interesting path in its upper regions--and dumps you unceremoniously into the town of Clayton. Nothing happens in Clayton worthy of examination; in that regard it is almost worse than Petaluma.

A full examination of this road would cover a lot of ground, but I favor prosciutto-thin slices of real-space, and if you require more I suggest that you get some travel brochures or go to a blog that people actually read. I don't try to understand or describe a road's true nature (if there even is such a thing). It would accomplish nothing to emphasize any particular aspect of what I think it is, or what it says to me about our place in an impersonal cosmos, or how it relates to the Way of Ants Crawling on Oak Bark.

This turkey vulture did not want to leave Morgan Territory Road just to provide me with an opportunity to record him as he took to the air. I don't have a GoPro or any other mountable camera. Riding while holding an iPhone in one hand is stupid. This is what we have, then--a stubborn carrion eater, a fixed wide angle lens on a cell phone, and a road. Infer nothing else. Sometimes, the search for meaning renders it moot.

© Pseudocognitive

Telegraph City and the Abbreviated Legend of Chicken Boy

Flies own Telegraph City in the summer. Flocks of fat, bumptious flies. Regular old house flies, every one of them, with no valid excuse for occupying the place in numbers such as these. These flies are not pictured here because they are too small and too fast, but you don't care because you've seen a million already.

Although the last human residents fled about a century ago, there’s a functioning windmill and a well in this deserted nowhere. A trickle of clear water flows into an algae-lined concrete trough, next to stone building shells that look like left-overs from a Clint Eastwood dynamite scene. Two mules for Sister Sara? Hell, with all these flies you’d think the 5th Calvary quartered here.

You cannot locate—by sight or by smell—rotting carcasses big enough to attract such a horde. And like I said, this population consists entirely of house flies, Musca domestica, with nary a blowfly or any other carrion specialist in the lot. They behave in a salt-starved manner and will assign several squadrons to follow you around and steal your sweat wherever you go. Within a few minutes of climbing off your steely mount, you'll receive a welcome the likes of which most people never get the chance to experience. Walk a hundred yards across the yellow-brown grass and they provide an escort cloud. Ride the same distance and they beat you to your destination. The only reasonable thing to do is to accept their presence and refrain from judging them. If you can do that, you’re ready for the mystery of Chicken Boy.

Chicken Boy really lives here; it’s no myth. According to Chloride Jones, a local resident and ghost town researcher of some renown, Chicken Boy is a visionary oddball, a graduate of Oakdale High a generation or three ago. He is rumored to have researched connections between the ancient ways of Freemasonry, 19th Century copper prospecting, and stone walls erected by cattle barons. His keen analysis was perhaps facilitated by a chemical expansion of consciousness.

A few scattered ruins are all that’s left, loosely bordered by stone walls built by the old cattle mafia. And thousands of holes everywhere from bullets, shotgun pellets, and grenades. And an old bra discarded near the entrance to Chicken Boy’s house. And the flies. For these reasons and many more, I heartily recommend a visit to Telegraph City, Gateway to Historic Calaveras County.

To find Telegraph City, follow these precise directions: Take SR 4 out of Stockton. Go east. Pass through Farmington--do not stop at the saloon there, for you will surely regret it. Keep going a while. Look for a road. If you get to Copperopolis, you went too far.

© Pseudocognitive

A clumsy search for Zen

Apologies to Steinbeck

Big Oak Flat in Tuolumne County in California is not a poem or a habit or a dream. It does, however, emit a definite stink if you stand too close to the portable toilets in the gas station parking lot, and if you happen to be there at just the right time on a fine spring afternoon, the quality of light may indeed evoke a peculiar nostalgia for a time when you still believed  that making sense of life was something  in the ballpark named Possible. That’s about it, though; as far as deep philosophical pondering and the like, no matter what knothole you look through, I doubt you’ll come away with any insight into the human condition beyond what you already have. In fact, I am not at all certain that new insights have been possible since about 1945. So if you do look through that knothole, you’re just gonna see the same old wooded area behind the fillin’ station that’s always been there. Bring your own Zen in a sturdy steel vacuum flask tucked into your right saddlebag.

If you were to ask me how it was that I came to lose my mind, I might give you some obfuscatory answer like, “Don’t burden me with your extraneosities.”Or “Melvin eats blubber.” Or “Define mind.” Maybe I’d even try to answer truthfully, but the sad fact is that I simply do not know. So if you were to ask me that question—how did I lose my mind—I would simply say, “Yes.”

I came to terms with my loss of that which cannot be empirically proved and subsequently grew tired of my old gig—the one I’d been working at for a quarter century—so I quit and decided to become a private investigator. Not an officially licensed P.I. like Thomas Magnum, but one who looks into things without the strictures of state oversight or the constraints of having to answer to a client, or of even knowing what it actually is you’re investigating.
I decided to start this new line of work immediately, so on a brisk Saturday morning, I and my brother left Herd City and headed up into the hills. I will spare you any account of the places I have excessively described before, save for the mecca of western hemisphere truth-seekers, the wall at the Shell station in Jackson:

After searching in vain one last time for any small vestige of the old  Honda dealership where our dad bought our first dirt bikes back in '67, we left Jackson and headed south through some other wide spots. San Andreas was one of ‘em. We didn’t see much there except some tourists from Canada, and we were “aboot” to mock their vowels as needing to be voided, but I figured that would just be mean.

Southward, on to Sonora, and the mood there was edgy.
A kid in a straw Stetson flagged us down and said there was gonna be trouble in the center of town any minute, so we headed there directly. It turned out there was no trouble, really, just a few folks who took their talk radio a little too seriously and had trouble tracking reality (we were not yet familiar with their puppet masters, the Koch brothers, nor did we know the full extent of the vitriol and outright treasonous elements their movement would support in the near future). On this day they were just a small crowd jumping around trying to get vehicles to honk if they supported their bizarre cause.

It took us about ten minutes in heavy traffic to pass through town. I heard two people sound their horns, but one of them was just impatient at a couple of gawkers slowing down the line.  Most passers-by either ignored the protesters or gave them what is apparently the foothill version of the Bronx cheer. We put this case in the easy-solve column and concluded that although there are a few eccentrics (like anywhere else), most folks in Sonora are pretty level-headed. Little did we know then that nationwide, the numbers of the Koch brothers’ minions would continue to swell.

We got to Big Oak Flat later that afternoon, after stopping off in the Old West town of Chinese Camp to look at some deserted buildings. After filling up the bikes, we rode to the back of the lot to make use of the facilities. Ever since the big biker riot of ’06, the proprietors of the Big Oak Flat gas station have made customers use the outhouses.
I can tell you with near 100% certainty that these particular outhouses are the filthiest, most disgusting portable toilets on the west coast.

An old guy from the Goldwing riding club decides against opening that door.

The proprietors of this establishment will never get one more dime from me. If Tuolumne County could afford a health department, I’d call ‘em in on this. Sincerely. The one redeeming quality of that particular destination is the fence in the back. There you may find several different and conflicting views of the woods behind the lot. A comparison between these may yield higher truth. Or not.  Probably not, because I don’t think any of us can ever really know precisely where we stand on any continuum at any given moment, and the context we seek is, by necessity, embedded within contexts perceived and modified by countless others.  Still, pondering such things is what keeps me alive.

Post and photos © Pseudocognitive, with profuse apologies to John Steinbeck (and apologies of a medium nature to Robert M. Pirsig)

Dogs and autism: My son’s bond with a very special Labrador

There’s something about dogs and autism, or at least there’s something about dogs and the specific autism of my oldest son, Steve.  Today marks the approximate anniversary of the birth of a very special, unique dog, our faithful Labrador mix, Angel.  What Angel brought to our family, especially to our son, cannot be adequately described.

We never knew exactly when Angel was born; SPCA personnel estimated that it was in the last few days of December 1998 or early in the first week of January ’99, so this seems like as good a day as any other to commemorate her birth.

Lab puppies like to eat redwood trees.  The bark is their favorite part. Redwood trees can survive being stripped of their bark.  My wife didn’t really need those shoes.  Labs like to leap into the air and snatch mockingbirds and scrub jays in flight.  Labs are supposed to retrieve dead birds and carry them with gentle jaw pressure to people.  Angel’s method was a bit more robust; no birds survived, but the ones who were lucky enough to observe these antics from above quickly learned that our yard was a no-fly zone from ground level up to an altitude of about 7 or 8 feet.  Similarly, a salesman who ignored the sign on the gate to our enclosed front entry and foolishly trespassed by scaling the fence learned that standing very still with a heart rate up around 140 while a ninety-pound dog stares at you from a distance of a few feet, ears perked, tail erect and slowly flagging (not wagging)  is no one’s idea of fun.

Over time, Steve and Angel established an unbreakable bond.  He spent hours in his favorite place–the backyard–with Angel as his constant companion.  Steve has been almost completely nonverbal since losing his expressive language at around the age of two, but he trained Angel in his own unique way to respond to gestures and behavioral cues.  Her ability to sense Steve’s moods far exceeded the already impressive social hierarchy-related perceptive skills characteristic of the species. Steve found in Angel someone who seemed to anticipate his responses to the sights, sounds and situations that produced in him irritability, fear, or anger, and then provided a calming influence.

We all loved that dog, but Steve’s connection with Angel was something that, if a pet owner is lucky, he or she will experience once in a lifetime.  At times they seemed to respond to each other before the eliciting stimulus even occurred.  My strongly ingrained skeptical agnosticism is tested whenever I contemplate the relationship between my son and his dog.  I could apply Occam’s steely blade to the issue and come up with several simple models, but to what end?  Sometimes, for me at least, accepting mystery is the simplest path, and if the simpler path is also comforting, I’ll permit myself that indulgence from time to time, especially when it involves my family.  Does that mean I invoke some kind of metaphysical woo-woo explanation?  No.  It simply means that I don’t chip away at the emotional importance of the phenomenon by dissecting and examining it in detail.  It’s enough to say, “I can’t completely explain it, and in this case, that’s okay.”

Angel died peacefully on the bright autumn morning of October 20, 2009.   It took Steve time to understand, and we still cannot know with anything even approaching certainty what his specific conception of death might be.  For weeks afterward he looked for his dog, and our attempts to comfort and explain may or may not have helped ease his path to acceptance. Several weeks after Angel died, as I drove Steve through our neighborhood on the way to the store, we passed a park where a man was throwing a tennis ball to his dog–a black lab that bore more than a passing resemblance to Angel.  This upset Steve greatly. I won’t describe his specific response, because his obvious anguish at the time still haunts me, but it seems clear that he thought that dog was Angel and that she now lived with someone else.

Steve is resilient.  We have two new labs (just over a year old now).  Steve likes them, but he hasn’t yet shown signs of establishing the kind of bond he had with Angel.  Perhaps he will, eventually, or maybe once is enough for him.  Meanwhile, we wait and hope.

Angel, 1998-2009

(Originally published on 1/1/10.)

Post and photo © Pseudocognitive All rights reserved, forever.

BLOGGING UNDER THE INFLUENCE. Jenny McCarthy's insanity. I said Jumanji!

I haven’t had distilled alcohol since 1986.  This Old No. 7 is good stuff.  One cup is enough.
(Slightly edited 9 February 2014.)
Lots of people, lots of blogs. Here’s where to get a good burrito.  There’s a place to avoid in the event of a tsunami.  I’ll show you how to promote your business and make money from domain names named after 14th Century philosophers and 70′s porn stars.  Grow your mustache and lead the invasion of Normandy as you wound your heart with a monotonous languor. Sell your house this way. Flip your house that way and join the ranks of the rich bastards. Drink these berries from the foothills of the Himalayas.  Feel like an activist by following me on Twitter while twirling with Mylar-festooned ears in the moonlit streets on a quiet night in Mill Valley.  Beware of cell phone antennae–they might fry your ‘nads in the event of seismic activity. I’m a guerrilla marketer, pay for my drink. Lock up vandals. Graffiti artists are not vandals. Yes they are. No they aren’t. Ban guns! Guns for tots! Liberty is just another word for nothin' left to lose. Ron Paul Rand Paul Ted Cruz! We're the Good Guys With Guns! We're the Good, Caring Humans With No Guns! Petaluma is a great place–visit my pro-Petaluma blog.  Petaluma is a festering sore on the ass end of a syphilitic chicken.  Petaluma Poultry sells only free range organic chickens and is exempt from all negative Petaluma characterizations.  Rocky the Range Chicken is a healthy source of animal protein.  Republicans are bad.  Democrats are bad.  Democrats are good.  Republicans–pass the beer nuts.  Watch the cops–videotape ‘em when they violate your 4th Amendment rights.  Support the cops and give them your cell phone cameras. Stop whining about law enforcement officers and just quit being an asshole! Take back our streets from the criminals and gang members.  Gangs only exist because children need love. Lock up the gangsters.  Free the children.  Learn martial arts by watching this DVD and reading my blog.  I reviewed a book.  I read a book.  I wrote a book.  Read my Star Trek fan fiction.  I want to be an extra on Sons of Anarchy.  I have a story-line idea for Sons of Anarchy.  Sons of Anarchy is a TV show–it’s not real.  It is too real; I saw them in Temecula.  Rio Vista!  This movie sucks.  This movie is the best movie of the year.  Don’t contaminate our drinking water with fluoridation.  Autism is caused by vaccines and Jenny McCarthy is a powerful creature capable of shooting flaming napalm from her nipples at the eyes of people who dare to speak up against what she knows to be true because after all, post hoc, ergo propter hoc.  Lock up aggressive panhandlers.  Lock up Jenny McCarthy.  Lock up scientifically illiterate parents who endanger their kids and everyone else's by refusing to vaccinate based on their own voluntary ignorance. The Book of Eli is propaganda of the religious right, and I for one am surprised that Denzel Washington agreed to star in it. The Book of Eli is a cautionary tale about the dangers of pseudo-digitizing complex analog phenomena and actually has very little to do with religion.  Aw, you’re both full o’ crap.  Protect the panhandling community from aggressive cops on steroids. Tase the violent, freeloading panhandlers into submission! War is not healthy for panhandlers and other living things! I'll hit you with this cast iron pan if you try to pry my mobile device from my cold, dead fingers! Get US outta the U.N.  Frank Burns eats worms.  One nation . . . way messed up.  The best nation on Earth.  One nation under God.  One nation NOT under god.  One nation founded on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  One nation founded on genocide and slavery.  Hot dogs will kill you. It’s possible to make a fertilizer bomb using sausage casings.  Just kidding. NSA, please disregard. The British Navy stopped issuing rum and I blame Jenny McCarthy. The British Navy will kill you. Don't let the British navy kill you. I got sixteen hits on one of my blog posts today.  Fourteen of ‘em were from bots.

Cold fish, midnight sky
Pulls the stars across his gills
The moon in his eye

Jumanji, you rifle wielding wanker!  I said JUMANJI !




Bleary-eyed morning-after edit: Just so we’re clear, Jenny McCarthy should be billed for the medical expenses of every child who contracts pertussis.  Since there’ve been some some fatalities that wouldn’t have occurred if not for her exploitation of the disturbingly widespread scientific illiteracy of the American public, she really ought to be incarcerated as well.  Since no legal means exist to further that end, I guess I’ll just have to hope that one day she becomes smarter than a 5th grader.
                                 

Post and photo © Pseudocognitive All rights reserved, forever.

Two-paragraph picture: Lodi Man

This guy can’t possibly think that the woman he met a few hours ago can actually see him from the cargo container she’s hiding in. He has to know that even if she could see him, she wouldn’t bother to acknowledge his solitary presence on that gray beach. Look at him–his posture saying nothing so loudly as “defeat,” his bag full of whatever physical hooks to his history he considered important enough to pack when he fled the basement room back in Lodi. This guy should be tacked up on the office walls of high school guidance counselors everywhere as an example of how not to carry yourself if you want to avoid being bullied.

For God’s sake, man, you were nothing but a means to her end anyway.  Straighten your spine, throw away the cracked, useless condom you’ve been carrying in your wallet since 1984, and walk the hell out of there!  Start a new life. Get a boat and take people fishing for leopard sharks. Set up a fire-walking franchise on Mt. Tam; there are still plenty of harmonic convergers willing to part with some cash for the chance to believe in totally bogus bullshit. Something, anything besides staring at that ship. I can’t watch you any longer.
                               

Post and photo © Pseudocognitive All rights reserved, forever.

The Deep Mind

The deep mind underlies the superficial mind. Much as the stones on the bottom of a clear, swiftly flowing stream are blurred by the rushing water above, the deep mind can be detected, but not directly experienced except by tactile sensation. It forms the substrate over which the everyday mind blithely and blindly courses. When the irregularities of younger, less polished rocks–perhaps recently kicked into the stream by a startled deer or careless hiker–produce increased friction with the water, creating a minute disturbance of flow almost too small to detect and perhaps bloodying the plantar surface of your wading feet, you take more notice, but the visual input is no more clear than before. Mind you, the water is extremely clean, but the current obscures detail.

Imagine now that you could halt the downstream flow, just for a second or two. What would you see? That’s the deep mind. You can find it by carefully slowing the relentless speed-surfing of neural circuits. Slow, or even stop the current, and pluck one smooth stone from the bottom.
                            

Post and photo © Pseudocognitive All rights reserved, forever.

Meatball Photography

Valuable self-awareness, or a boatload of philosophical crap: An examination of why I actually like a few of my pictures...

I like this picture. I selected it from thousands of others I have that range from very ordinary to downright bad (with the occasional exception). I used to shoot these pictures during brief stops on motorcycle rides within a 150 mile radius of home. The geographical limit was not imposed by an ankle monitor and  parole officer, although my 99 year old grandmother was a parole officer for the State of California until her retirement in about 1975. It was and is a self-regulatory boundary that makes no sense to most observers.

In "M*A*S*H" (the Robert Altman film, not the TV series, which was okay for the first few seasons but went downhill fast when Trapper John left, Henry was killed en-route back to the States, and Hawkeye devolved into a sanctimonious caricature of Phil Donahue phony liberalism), they referred to their brand of intervention as "meatball surgery," a term that's been stuck in my head for decades. They operated on soldiers with horrific injuries under primitive conditions and did the best they could and then sent the survivors to a rear area for better treatment. I have used this as a metaphor for all kinds of completely unrelated processes throughout my life, mainly because once something gets into my head I can never, ever get it out of there. I call my style of picture-taking "meatball photography" because I do it with very basic gear under extreme time constraints. Once in a while, this method produces something that seems to be enhanced, rather than compromised, by my peculiar procedure. The gritty, contrasty qualities of the above photo were influenced by this method. It's a state of mind, I think. I want to really go off the deep end and make some connection to Steinbeck's peepholes and the perspective they provide on "...whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches," in other words, "Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men." I'll avoid that particular exercise in grandiosity right now, though, and simply say that once in a while my fractious mental processes work to my benefit. I count myself lucky if that happens for maybe one shot in every thousand. That's why I like this particular picture - its imperfections mirror my own.

© Pseudocognitive