| in america volume 26 part 5 - 2013 may-june | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
3 May (continued) [I've begun to think of a film based on the Ocean Beach Pier shots taken with the new camera.] Sea
It's landforms, cosmic structure, brain, and sea/see.
4
6 It's pouring. 8 The sky has a lid that comes down about a mile away - the pyracantha is in thick white bloom but only on a few branches - the fire's on - the slopes are motley tan and pale green - closeup they're threaded thick with purple vetch. Ken Burns Dust bowl. Timothy Egan. Colored talking head close-ups with dark background, brief. Side-lit - dressed up - shallow focus. Historical film black and white Historical stills black and white Contemporary film colored Historical text over contemporary colored Sometimes distant piano very quiet - they bring it up when it's violin - Tests I've passed:
Tests I failed:
9 Thursday morning - there's sun and I'm restless - need to go somewhere. 10 Richard Brody 2008 Everything is cinema Henry Holt American cinema after the war "depraving our children by the glorification of gangsterism or erotic images ... submission to religiosity." Communists said. Dispute about montage vs deep space long shots. At each instant it is a matter of loving or dying. From Rossellini "to make a feature film he needed only a pair of actors and a car." willingness to endure the disdain of his fellows Viewers' identification with the director rather than the characters. 11 Chantal Akerman saw Pierrot le fou: "I knew I would spend my life making movies." had been recognized in his time and was aware of the energy and the opportunities that recognition had brought him a lesson in looking at the world and the documentation of suffering Chaotic. Narratives grabbed from anywhere, pretexts for attracting money, young women of a certain type, men who'll listen intelligently when he talks. Keeps himself and everyone he works with off balance. Gambles on trusting himself every instant, no matter the trouble caused. - Reluctance until mid afternoon then sat with focus notes for the D800, then more of it online, eight hours straight? Understanding more about large sensor, max f-stop for depth of field and minimal diffraction. 12 I'm coming down some steps leaving a building. A work truck pulls up right in front of the steps - some kind of tank truck. Whole large family of Newfies gets out and swarms up the stairs past me. Maybe not Newfies but I think of them that way, provincials with almost incomprehensible accents. Someone says they're looking to hire a cook. I can see why they would, they all come in tired from work. I like them. I knock at their door. Someone opens it onto a brightly lit single room with crumbling yellow plaster walls. There's a big flat-screen TV on, four or five feet wide. I apply for the job. The daughters are interested but the mother turns away. I come closer to her, say I understand why she'd be doubtful. She blurts out that I'll think badly of them for the way they live. I say I grew up just like that but I worked hard. One of the daughters is next to me. She has a smooth fine-featured white face with clear eyelids. She asks whether I'm interested in prose. Of course, I say. She says would I like to go to a reading with her at 2 o'clock on Sunday. She tells me where. I say I would and that seems to be what I've actually come for so I leave. Then there's more about thinking how I'll get to the appointment, a bicycle chained to a parking meter, a car? I don't often remember story dreams anymore. I've written this one mainly because it's that. - The Dipper is hanging by its handle, straight down. Some of the foxtail goes purple before it dies. Dozens of moths at the window. A fuzzy black caterpillar on the shower room floor yesterday. It's the season of the long-legged things - they've gathered on the shower room walls. Window open tonight. 13 A hot wind from the west, is it. I'm in the iron chair surrounded by grass in seed blowing my nose. There are mosquitoes. Stationary high clouds. Am I hearing chickens. Squinting. The corner pines are sounding. Oaks are a good green now, most of them. I'm so bored with cooking meat and vegetables. Wd rather just eat cottage cheese and peanuts, but I'm out. Or oh bread and cheese. 14 Restrepo - Tim Hetherington born twelve days before Luke also in England - died at 40 - degree in English at Oxford - war photojournalism - his film is beautiful. Meantime Luke too idle and indecisive to feed himself posting bitter complaints about class injustice on Facebook. I've had so much confidence in his spirit. I hate that he's wasting himself in tractionless anger. He hasn't had a good platform in some ways - not all - but now I am starting to be more ruthlessly biological in my judgment. People have it in them to prevail or they don't. People begin well and a crack appears. The real test is the whole life. I've worked hard for students I think have a chance and then it turns out they don't. - In winter, if there are storms in the high mountains the wild pigeons come from Palomar and Volcan and Cuyamaca. Bobcats look at us as if they hate us. Judy van der Veer 1959 My valley in the sky Julian Messner Inc Chapter 7 she describes the Santa Ysabel valley and the mission. "An Indian graveyard as natural as the hills and valley." All Souls' night turned out to be warm and still. It had been a hot day and we had expected the night to be correspondingly cold, as often happens in November. We reached the mission just as the procession, led by a small vested cross-bearer, left the church. The Indians walked singing to the graves and gathered around a tall cross while the priest read prayers. The land was not all dark yet; it was that brief beautiful moment when the hills stood deeply against a pale sky. But it was dark enough so an Indian had to hold a candle by the prayer book. They listened to the voice of the priest. "May light eternal shine upon them, O Lord, with thy saints forever because Thou art merciful. Eternal rest give unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May the angels lead them into Paradise ... may the choir of angels receive them ...." By then the stars were showing. The Indians sang, and all the sadness and sweetness, all the despair and hope that any human can ever know, was in the core of that music. It surged against the hills, rose beyond the stars. We could smell the dead beneath the dry, gopher-riddled earth. A smell mixed with the smell of dust and dried grass, but very clearly the smell of death. And then the smell of candles burning as suddenly the place was gay with voices and laughter and light. We could feel the heat from all the little flames. The graves were heaped with paper flowers that glowed bright colors now that so many candles flared. Little Indians ran around, almost setting themselves on fire, laughing at all the gorgeous light and color, chasing each other among the blazing graves. "My, it's a fine night for it," we hear an Indian say heartily. And so it was, not a candle flickered, and they burned so bravely that the stars looked faded. We stayed a long while, not wanting to leave the merry little graveyard. Now I looked longingly in the direction of the mission and felt unreasonably sad, but in a gentle, almost enjoyable way. The dark sky out of which no rain would fall made the landscape look melancholy; there seemed to be no gayness anywhere. - Paul writes that Mary when she went for a walk on the weekend got lost. Stanley Escalier is going to cut the grass. Half Pechanga he says. Where are the Pechanga people from? Temeculah. An old-fashioned woman driving the car. He'll cut up the oak branches that came down the winter before last - he was elated by that gift. Is $225 a good price? I don't know. Barbara, who recommended Joe last spring, when she was sitting on my bench on the way to look at Angelo's house, said "He took you." I posted a photo that has the brown grass in the foreground. It's nothing special but it's taken by the new camera. 15 Had to go to SY to get cash money for Stanley. Took the new camera and stopped on the grade and a couple of places higher up to try photos. A very small blue butterfly floated into view among the weeds. It looked good in the viewfinder, a perfect blue, but turned out to be washed out and not quite sharp. Good enough though to find its name, it's an acmon blue. .75 - 1 inch, feeds on buckwheat, lupin, etc, its larvae tended by ants. The three peaks are Cuyamaca, Middle and North, Stanley said, and the one I can sometimes see further back is ----. 16 Not well today, not sore like yesterday but feeble and what I think of as heart-stressed, not able to work long (while two old people chopped at my field), nothing to read so I went to AG. So turbulent. 17 Stanley and Carol finished clearing the field. It's bare and brown. Cold wind from the south. I like the shaven field because I can walk without thinking of snakes, ticks or foxtail barbs, and for the way the oaks and house look with clean space around them, grander as if set in a park. Stanley and Carol this afternoon angled for a big tip by pole-sawing and dragging off the lower couple of dead stone pine branches. There are still a lot too high to reach but the shape is better than it was. I'm still thinking a bit about Sweetgrass, not the film so much as the idea of it, mics on herders, horse, sheep, dogs, which could be three miles apart, 4 mics coming in at a time and later a surround-sound mix on 5 or 6 channels - wow. Video camera strapped onto a harness that had it hung onto his shoulder every waking hour so no one knew when he was filming. Camera batteries powered by solar panels. He heard an old coot talking to his horse and dogs and another much bigger man crying to his mother on the phone after cursing the sheep in vilest misogynistic terms. 2001-2003. Then they were editing it for 7 years. He was in Boulder at Brakhage's salons. I wondered when I saw his black passages with sound over whether he'd seen Trapline there. In interviews an articulate Englishman, Luke's age?, who was speaking for what I'd have spoken for if I were that, cross-over avant garde - documentary in the service of love of physical world. - That's two good docs in a week, Restrepo and Sweetgrass. I thought maybe I could do something about embodied cinema at the res. It's 11:17, I've done the going to bed things, shower, Premarin, lotion on arms and legs and neck and chest, olive oil in my nose to help eyes not dry out, glass of water with 2 cal-mags and 2 C's, and a cranberry, before that the sat plugs pulled. Am playing On land, will turn it up a notch before I turn out the light. 21 Rowen was just leaving for work. We talked all the way from Nanaimo and Hastings to First and Clark. He was overjoyed. He'd met someone on the bus who'd kickstart-raised $130,000 to develop a game. Benji said come game-test. Rowen showed up four hours a day after his 12-hour shifts. Last week he said to Benji I'm going to have more time, I'm going to quit my job. Benji said, I'll have to give you a contract then. And he'd pitched an idea for a 3-d printing of game figures that Benji said he'd finance. He's 28 tomorrow. Girlfriend called Arly, a little redhead doing psych at SFU. - Loving Eno's three variations on the Canon in D major of Johann Pachebel. 23 We must love them for themselves and not for the best of ourselves in them. trait that is foreign to his or her parents ... a horizontal identity ... horizontal solidarity This child is expressly different from most of his or her peers as well, and therefore broadly less understood or accepted. change how we assess the value of individuals and of lives Parents will usually take home a child with a life-threatening internal defect, but not one with a minor visible defect. Manifest disabilities affront parents' pride and their need for privacy; everyone can see that this child isn't what you wanted. The cycle of life runs in actuality from disability to temporary ability back to disability, and that only if you are the most fortunate. suffer chronic sorrow throughout their lives Caretakers had shorter telomeres which meant that they were aging more rapidly. having a selfhood that others perceive as undesirable an existential aloneness Andrew Solomon 2012 Far from the tree: parents, children, and the search for identity Scribner 24 I was talking to the rock woman in Dudley's - Judy. A tall narrow-shouldered man in boots, dark jeans and a black shirt put his arm around me. He'd let his hair grow. Fine silver hair to his collar. I said Every time I see you you're a different man. Tom is contented. He loves his house. He sits in the kitchen with the French doors open reading. He's teaching himself to cook. He has discovered the cast iron skillet and is making himself rice, black beans and hamburger. Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays he's at the Seniors Center: breakfast and lunch, phone minutes, a Ralphs food card. He often walks there or back. All his supervisors are women and they're all nice to him because he's a senior and they believe in empowering. Half the old people in the cafeteria are Golden West people. He's their king. He's phoning often, sometimes just for three sentences if his minutes are low. He makes sure he has the money to visit. "I want to be a good daddy" he says. He listens, he asks questions, he holds back his floods of talk unless I invite him, which I did last night because he wanted to go to sleep and I didn't want him to. We were lying together in the dark with moonlight at the window and I had my hand on his chest to feel the vibrations as he went on fast and loud about Obama's second term. He's dark under his eyes, though, which worries me when I see it. We were driving Mesa Grande Road this morning taking him back to the bus, seeing the country spread resplendent, hills and vales, the place where we come over the brow of a hill and see ranch buildings in the hollow, such a picture, tawny hills all round, and he was saying what an adventure we are having together, and I was feeling it's an adventure I'm financing but it's true he's in it with me. When he visits he sees and feels it with me. Watched the moon from my bed, kept praising Stanley's grass-cutting job, stands at the kitchen window gazing, always says how beautiful the drive is from Lakeside on. My Tom. We've been mastering the art of short visits I say. I gave him the headphones and showed him Wild oats first with natural sound and then with the first track of On land. He wanted to see it again and then again. He was breathing hard. - This room is 16x24. Golden section wd be 16x25.888. 25 Dream about fire. It was a bright day and then all dark. I could see from this window a curved line of flame coming toward the house. It died down. There were people around, it seemed the neighbourhood had chosen my house as the gathering place. I was walking through rooms seeing that women had set up a dining room. When I came back to my front room it was upstairs and there were people 5 or 6 deep at the window all looking in the same direction, presumably toward another line of flame advancing through the snow. When I first saw the fire I tried to phone Tom to see whether he'd seen anything on the news. Then he was just there next to me. 26 Dorothy's 100th birthday party on the 16th. David sent a link to the New West News Leader. - Beethoven ... his music is totally true .... That's why he can console in real pain ... redeems the world by viewing it like a hero, as it is. [Wittgenstein after his Nachlass, 2010] 27 Think about process at the end of 50 days: three zones of work: Work & days, M&L/mbo, and (Orpheus/grain/myth), the last with brackets around it because it's the neglected zone of hope and fear. Beauty, heart dilation, rapture, the undaily, cosmos at the level of invisible principles, being, 'spirit', what I found in the Valhalla house, and PRC photos, fairytale, as if feeling to step over an edge sideways - to the right - into a diaphanous land - it's a territory for sound and painting. Finding the task, believing in it.
What do I need to work there:
I have to rely on uncon for recognition and intuition so I do need to do things to be more attuned. I lie down and close my eyes, hoping to sink into vision and that never happens. I love the visual quality of liminal seeing. 29 "I think there is something about the white, middle age woman cloak of invisibility that perhaps is my secret weapon." Medea Benjamin - Sitting with the footage I have for Sea - trying it over kinds of sound - realizing I'll need to be patient, sit with what I have to understand what to do with it, keep slowly noticing it. This morning I've thought maybe frame it within a frame. It maybe looks better or different smaller. The frame could be a way of bridging from language into full grok. Today I'm feeling ready as if the skills I've built can make something sophisticated now. Prepare with voice/text on grey. Once through small size, once through full frame. Intimate direct address.
I'm hearing Jeremy [Rigby] saying Trapline is the best Canadian experimental film. I don't think it's true but the fact that he saw it and marveled in some moment is helping me now. That a community has sort of welcomed me. I mean patience with long unknowing, which I'm up against now that I'm actually thinking toward finishing something. Some worried about money, I don't have a lot of cushion left. I still need a long lens and to fix the jeep and a tooth would be good - two teeth, fix the one that has slid sideways. 530/mo now, 709 if I work till I'm 70. I can go on living here. Sigh. - Wow. Listening through the headphones to what the Rode picks up through the curtain in the guestroom is like an audio magnifying glass, this quiet bloc of space above the stone floor, under the oak, is thick with buzz and outcry. Trying to hear it I feel blind because I can't stop it at a frame and see what it looks like - the frame being whatever length of time audition uses to see whole sounds, ie shapes of sound. - My synaesthesia if I can figure out how to use it. Eno is such a true worker, I love his company in work. 1 June San Diego Haircut at Paul Mitchell, new 501's and a Levi shirt that suits me. 3 Was dreaming we were camping together in the Western Cape, on a monkey reserve. Hot wind, evening clouds, so many beautiful things. It was good to see you. XL I dreamed that I made fresh flat pan biscuits for us there. So I got up and made some here, the kind I learned to make when I was camping in the Amazon, with hibiscus tea I made too. Last week I had a dream with the most amazingly exotic perfume in it. It was the smell of a beautiful family home, late afternoon sunlight, jasmine and orange, lilies, Asian hardwoods, linen. Exquisite. - Someone on email who had been reading Aphrodite's garden was wanting to say she knew Tony Gordon-Wilson when she was young, and Josie and her kids later. I find Jo Cook on Mayne Island making artists' books and Siobhan a branding consultant in Van. - Thomas I sort of adore you. I said. Later there was a little poke. I had been telling him stories and he had been telling me mostly stories he hadn't told before. I left here suddenly Friday morning. He came with me to the social security office where I got the application completely done - Tea tree lavender mint shampoo and conditioner. Styling treatment oil wild ginger, Awapuli line. 4 Trying out the sunroom table. Bothered by the Italian pine's dead branches sticking down into the view. He has been liking to lie in our beds talking at night, which he didn't use to. We were talking about his old days and how he's different. I said You're a real boy now. He said Where's my nose. Louie's photo so poetical I am wondering whether I can set it as a little animation with sound and text. 5 Mouse gnawing assiduously at the hall door corner much of the night. I have set up a night network of Brillo pads to pen it in the sunroom. Pan of poison near its path. - Note from Ruth this morning saying the enrollment crisis means she'll have to cut a couple of fac. She'll decide which by the end of the month. I'm thinking up contingency plans. There'd be one-semester severance pay. $14,500 about. August-December. I'd have to clear out of here before Frank's no-quit period, which begins Nov 1 - ie notice by Oct 1 (to Jan 31). Could put everything into storage in SY. Could go to London for a month. [money notes transcribed onto work sheets]
- SS deposit $3357 yesterday. Checking into social housing in Van - 3 seniors' places downtown. Europe Hotel isn't seniors. [notes on real estate in Spences Bridge] Thinking of living on $1460/mo. I want:
I love the thought of a tiny house on the south-facing bench above the river at Spences Bridge, whose population is said to be 138. [mortgage calculations]
6
What wd be the advantage of working two more years - if I stay living here, only the advantages of living here, which are Tom, health, film and photo sources. If I left here after a year, bit of savings but not $14,500. If I saved soc, $12,720 - about 10,000 in two years and orderly transition. [page of D800 notes] 8 Saturday aft, hot. There's a dove now. I've attracted it, I feel. This morning recorded 11 minutes of a squirrel cheeping. Glass of wine in Angelo's new house with his guests last night. We sat on buckets on a bare concrete floor in his huge empty room lit by a couple of construction arc lights. I was next to an open door and seemed to be eye level with the stars, which were big and brilliant. Angelo has a naturalness, I feel easy with him as if he's a peer. He's emotional and pragmatical, not shut down. He doesn't have the smallest knowledge of what I'm good for, and probably sees me as a frail old thing, but still I'm not confined with him. He loves and suffers and has a policy of helping when he can. I liked that he said when he was digging in his lower field he'd look up and feel he couldn't believe he really lives here, really owns this land. - He'll be able to go on living here when I can't. At the moment I'm listening to his dead wife singing - in half-second bits as the cache fills - a song she wrote. - Three days of intense house thought. It's over today, I think. What else do I know. I want something in the country or v. small town, not less than 600 square feet, not junky, with at least 40x40 of vegetable garden. Lazuli bunting! It's small, passerina amoena, "small finch". The male's head is turquoise blue - Angelo wanted to tell me yesterday that he'd seen a pair in the pasture so I looked them up this morning. They like wild oat seeds it says. - And then this late aft there they are at the water. I've been scattering seed too. Lazuli bunting white bars on wing, orange throat, white belly. Western bluebird blue wings, more orange on belly over blue, orange shoulder. Different blue.
I'm really going to have to leave this place?
9 Looking at real estate - peoples' so-depressing décor - the fact that most of what's in my price range are trailers - it isn't obvious I'll find anything - then I look out the window to perfectly open clean hills and say I'll never have that again. Then I stamp my foot.
It will have cost me $30,000 to live here for 2 years. I've been frantic today - feeling how house mania has held me frenetically steady in times when I've had a separation blow - last time I broke up with Tom was the housetruck, first time I broke up with him was the house in Point Loma, one of the other times - I should check - was Mac's round house in the grassland. Was the first house the one I set above the creek at home. The poet's house - two versions - was about Robert MacLean. The London rooftop, David MacAra, was Dave and Rob. [And 44x16 when leaving California.]
Even if this plan works I'll be somewhere without a community, alone. This is the only place I strongly want to be, now. I've looked at a hundred images in these days, imagined myself in their houses. It was all a mess, people's stupid messes in their stupidly built houses in their stupid junky towns. [page of floor plan sketches] Even with the best planning, another two years scrimping, I won't have enough of a mortgage to buy anything that's right. So will it be social housing in Vancouver? - And all this has interrupted work. 10 I set a mousetrap two nights ago and another last night in the kitchen and haven't seen or heard the mouse since, but this morning there were a few black mouse seeds on the side counter so I looked in the drawers below. Second drawer down a thick manilla envelope gnawed more than it was yesterday. Third drawer down in my pen box a loose nice nest made of shredded paper with bits of red wool from the mudroom, from washing the plaid blanket. In a deep well in the nest one little blind baby. There's still mouse poison here and there, and the two traps, and this mouse has evaded both. - Is tinnitus caused in the spine? I leaned back in the work table chair so my upper back - where I'm tight - was pressed against the chair back. Immediately heard something in my ears. Leaned forward, it stopped. Tried again. Same. It says no, neck. This morning a silvery pitch in the L ear. - And then: I'd left dishwater in the pan last night. This morning it was still grey and a bit foamy. Whisked my hands through it to check for spoons before I dumped it. Felt something and plucked it up. Drowned mouse. Screeched before I knew I was going to. - Luke writes he'll help with my house whenever it will be. - Red-shafted (Northern) flicker - like ants - spend a lot of time on the ground eating insects. Western red, eastern yellow. Oregon tribes favoring flicker feathers for ceremony. Migrates. Males have a red moustache. Colaptes auratus cafer. - The College Corp wants: 8% wage reduction, elimination of retirement matching, cap on travel reimbursement, layoffs fall 2013, no severance pay. Benefits will continue until new contracts. - Found something tonight - played a short bit of OBpier7 on cycle and applied a time filter. Three things: 1. the audio of pier noise repeated so after a while I noticed it was a man whispering And I kno-ow in the midst of a faery hubbub of voices, shreds of music; 2. I'd overlaid a faint grid which at some magnifications showed in some areas and not in others, could be used to catch detail; 3. with strobe at a high value a version became solid, held in the background as if underneath a thin wash of fluid moving at real speed. 12 I told Angelo I haven't seen turkeys lately, maybe because they are clutching. He said he didn't know that word. As I said it I was wondering whether clutch exists as a verb. It does but it's transitive. ME clekken to hatch. - Went to put on my pants and found ants feasting on the protein in the crotch. Corona Borealis - Arcturus - Leo. The Northern Crown contains a famous cluster of about 400 galaxies more than a thousand light years away. Curving handle of the Dipper points to Arcturus, brightest star in the northern half of the sky, orange giant 27 ly. Lower is Antares in Scorpius, red supergiant. 13 It was cold last night, 10 o'clock in the chair. I had on my pea jacket. The most recognizable figure was the almost-oval of the Northern Crown, with Arcturus to its right. Farther west Leo's big question mark. For the rest a lot of bright little unknowns. The transfers from Analog-to-Digital came in the mail, the box I shipped brought down to six DVDs in paper envelopes. The DAT tapes sound well recorded. Ed and Mary, Opa and Oma and I singing, made me cry - small Luke made me laugh. My voice in the Notes in origin tape sounds so light and young, unimpressive. Then was parked by the wild oats trying to film, recorded with the mic in the jeep, mic stand over the back of the front seat. It works. A loud sudden crow. Was set up to film and had forgotten how - 14 Best yesterday was climbing a slope lightly in the old way. Furry rabbit photo. I went out at twilight and the rabbit didn't run away. Camera set to landscape so the flash didn't go off. I haven't figured out how to set exposure for twilight. But like the photo's furriness as if is a kind of subjectivity. 15 The simple truth is that not all of us become the men we once hoped we would be. Heartsore for Luke. I keep erasing. He's hanging by a thread. He said yesterday that it's my fault he has not trusted women and has hurt them. Yesterday he believed for the first time that he'll never have children, and that is my fault too. He doesn't want me to say the first 6 years were worth something. He accused me of condescending. He ended by saying Go be smart with someone else. He believes I dumped him because he wasn't a girl. That's his grief but it was never true. I let him go, I didn't fight to get him back - I did what my mother did to me. The ground truth is that I let him go because I was a mess, there's no other because. I've addressed the mess, I've done what I had to do to address it. I've been where he can keep talking to me though he's been threatening and blaming me. I've tried to be honorable and take what responsibility is mine. Yesterday he was saying none of that matters. I think I've done what I can and now it's up to him, he has to fight it through.
He's bitter and angry and paranoid and lonely and in despair at not succeeding or thinking how to succeed. He hasn't got a disciplined mind - he's smart and feeling but he hasn't learned to track something steadily. He's leaning toward conspiracy theories.
He has let Jill and Sean go because he isn't proud of himself. He's in pain.
He's mad at the hippies for their irresponsibility. He doesn't understand what that generation's work was.
16 When he accuses me I want him to understand two things, how derogated women were then - more derogated - and what the costs of deformity have been. He doesn't budge on either of those, is brutally dismissive. But it's not his job to be empathetic with me and I shouldn't even mention those things to him. I didn't do well in that conversation. He just seemed schlimm the way he was on the tape in 1973. I wasn't remembering to keep a distance enough to see what to do. Nothing there should be about me. I'm pissed off too, that he's wallowing and blaming rather than looking after himself. This end of June ends (and might bring a climax in) home, reality, domestic, security and retirement pursuits. An income source might end now to July 13 - if so it will likely be replaced by a source from your past. That said, Thursday begins a month - and year - of lucky and happy passion, beauty, pleasure, self-expression, speculation and creativity. Your career will respond to this happiness, and grow also. Romantic, creative, speculative or other adventures due to come from mid-2013 onward. - "On the verge of an epic win" - why we're better in games than we are in real life - motivated - inspired to collaborate and cooperate - likely to stick with a problem as long as it takes - "we feel overcome ... we never have those feelings when we're playing games." characters who are perfectly willing to trust you with a world-saving mission ... a mission that is perfectly matched to your current level ... tons of collaborators ... inspiring story ... positive feedback ... it's so satisfying to be on the verge of an epic win ... we're changing what we're capable of ... we have an entire parallel track of education going on ... 10,000 hours of effortful study by the age of 21 ... virtuoso gamers ... what exactly are gamers getting good at ... urgent optimism ... extreme self-motivation ... weaving a tight social fabric ... blissful productivity ... happier working hard than we are when we are relaxing ... gamers are willing to work hard all the time if they're given the right work ... epic meaning ... super-empowered hopeful individuals ... a mass exodus to virtual worlds ... we have to start making the real world more like a game ... we're using games to escape real world suffering ... imagine the best case scenario outcome and then we want to empower people to ... gamers are a resource that we can use to do real-world work [Jane McGonigal TED talk] 17 He is startlingly uninterested in himself. an orchestrator of experience [Turrell] - Am I a bit freaked. Yes, my heart hurts, is scared. I'm thinking of jumping.
Bad weather. City noise. Uncertainty that interrupts my work. A former life without excitement.
18 Warm west wind - southwest. Over there the buckwheat blooming white against a creamy froth of wild oats. - How many more weeks do I have here, ten? - O warm wind. Oh pines. Oh dearest air. Oh wideness. Oh best possible vista. Dear oaks, dear golden land, dear blue mountain. Dear visitations - oriole, bluebird. Dear turkeys! California sisters. Dearest white sage. Dear road and rocks. - Why are there no grasshoppers this year? Dear large room with green work bed and big monitor and pink chair. White butterfly over the buckwheat. Could I stay in the neighbourhood till spring? On $1146/month? - 400 food, 600 rent, 50 gas, 41 phone. For 9 months? Insurance and registration - I'd go a bit into savings. Distant whistles. What I need to do while I'm here - lot of film - film the mountain in Borrego. Work for 10 weeks steady. - The power went out while I was studying FCP on the big monitor - go sit outside - what's that rumble - continuous dark rumble from the southwest - the air is milky especially toward the Mexican mountains - two rabbits down beyond the oak shrubs - cattle crying - look at the leaves against the sky, moon above them - so finely cut - the gegenschein, band of baby blue, above it a band of baby pink fading into cream - a headlight moving on the ranch over south - now it's getting too dark to write. 19 Airglow, light emitted by atoms high in the earth's atmosphere as they recombine at night after being separated during the day by energetic sunlight. Phainopepla nitens female, grey. Oak foothills. Ragged crest. Foraging for berries in bushes and trees. A silky flycatcher. A crested songbird of the southwestern US and Mexico. Comes from the Greek shining robe. Late aft, 6 o'clock, watching birds through the screen door, sitting on the floor. Black-headed grosbeak, and the lazuli bunting again, with towhees, woodpeckers sometimes four at a time. Anna's hummingbird come to drink. We're having a conference call tomorrow and now I am worried I won't be fired. Lise is squawking because without embodiment studies work will be worse for her. Jim meantime is on my side, saying maybe he'll withdraw his offer to take a leave so we won't have enough leaves to forestall a firing. 20 The union is saying I can't ask to be laid off. This morning I know I'm not going back. If Ruth won't fire me I'll quit. I have all my lists of numbers and I can do it. Have another 6 hrs before I can say so and till Monday before Ruth has to act. - These people consider Greece to be a country under Christian occupation. Solstice between today and tomorrow. New journal tomorrow. I'm stressed by uncertainty - heart stress - but I know it's right. Louie says: I'm excited for you. - I don't easily see birds, I mean well enough to identify them in the book. Where exactly was the white on the wing, or the black strip on the head. And I often don't remember their names, for instance from last year, or even from day to day. That's temporal lobe in decay. - Yes - it is the black-headed grosbeak. Woodpeckers are the cops. They allow the finches but dive-bomb the jays. I'm on the outside bed feeling something like liberty. It's a different feeling than between packets. Supermoon of 2013 - Saturday night, closest the moon will be in 2012 - perigee full moon - "the crest of the moon's full phase and perigee fall within an hour of each other." Perigee full moons bring the highest and lowest tides. 7:56pm. - Are two kinds of purgatory ending now?
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