Who knew? I sure didn’t.

I read somewhere that the full moon meters (photographically speaking)
pretty much the same as daylight, so I gave it a try.  This is a hand-held shot
with a zoom lens, just cropped and sharpened (not enlarged).

I’ve got this deal going – in my head anyway – with the Three Fates. The Greeks called them Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, and they spin out, measure, and in the end cut the thread of our lives. We are literally in their hands.

My deal is, I get to stay alive for some unspecified number of moments after the liver cancer and transplant. I get to be conscious, occasionally functional, and once in a while I even get to thrive. I also get to experience each and every sensation of a body running down its weave.

I’ve started and not finished a dozen posts on my health trials of the past year. One did refer to my struggle last summer just to learn that I’ve comedown two impossible–for-a-transplantee autoimmune diseases, but that’s it. I feel guilt for not having posted more. Continue Reading »

I’ve always been intrigued by ravens.

I’ve got pictures of them on my bedroom walls; behind one
is feather a raven tossed to the ground near me when grooming.
The Haida story of trickster raven creating the world and
dumping humankind into it just to amuse himself
has always seemed a more realistic description
of our condition than any offered by organized religions.

This one was hovering over Otto, her spread wings twice Otto’s size.
Fortunately she decided Otto wasn’t a threat (0r qualified as dinner)
and left him alone. I do wonder if any chihuahuas or yorkies
went missing that day at Fort Funston.

The blue eye isn’t a photoshop add-on, it’s a reflection of the sky.

I just posted this picture on Flickr. I took it yesterday in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park after a visit to UCSF Medical Center. The morning was misty and cold, the grass and trees a delightful winter green.

Winter green?

Many other flickr photographers (from the Northern Hemisphere anyway) are posting pictures of ice storms, whiteouts, buried snow plows, and barren windswept fields. And here come the Californians showing snapshots of green.

California’s coastal winterscapes can drive the ice-bound crazy. Once again we’re seen as Violating All The Rules and Just Not Making Any Sense. But there is a logic to our seasons, even if it’s obscure. It helps to remember that the planet’s largest heat-sink (aka the Pacific Ocean) is just to our left.

So as a service for those who just don’t get all this green, here’s a short guide to our seasons.

Winter

Every hillside is green. A ridiculous, Irish/New Zealand green. So green your eyes hurt looking at it, especially when the sun shines. Green? In the land of perpetual drought? Continue Reading »

What better way to start a new year than finding what’s true?

Unfortunately, this one truth just led to another, then another and another,
finally to the end of the building.

All true, but no answers.

Maybe next year.

Two photos from a short trip to Sonoma County. Above, the Russian River in morning mist, Monte Rio. Below, the Sonoma coast looking south from Goat Rock Road.

I finally got my H1N1 shot today at a big inject-a-thon held in San Francisco’s Bill Graham auditorium. Out front, mimicking event volunteers right down to their day-glo vests and friendly manners, the anti-vaccine, it’s-a-government-big-pharma conspiracy! folks were greeting everyone, handing out official-looking yellow papers. Reading this you found not info on what to do to get your shot, not the who-gets-what-and-why of vaccinating, but furtively hinted-at, semi-argued, conflicting pleas to avoid this vaccine – all vaccines! – at all costs. Especially if you want to “Save The Children”.

I stuffed the thing in my pocket and went in.

After rolling up my sleeve and getting the poke, I dug out the crumpled paper, went up to one of the anti-vaccine guys and tapped him on the shoulder. He turned around. I silently held out the crumpled paper and stood there. Staring at me quizzically, he finally extended his hand. I dropped the crumpled yellow sheet into his hand and walked away. He looked at me and at the paper, confused.

You can’t argue with these folks. But you don’t have to carry their garbage.

I saw the movie 2012 Sunday. No better way to get your mind off your own problems than to watch a big, messy Hollywood disaster flick where pretty much everybody’s fate is worse than yours.

2012 is exactly like every movie catastrophe you’ve ever seen: an estranged family fights for survival and the meaning of “family”; do-gooders shriek justice and compassion while everybody else panics and stabs each other in the back; heroic rescues give the audience – and the characters stuck in the mess – something to cheer. Bad guys get called-for comeuppance and sacred institutions (religious and secular) are reduced to richly deserved rubble.

Oh, and of course L.A. is destroyed. Again. Poor L.A.; no other city comes close to suffering as much cinematically as the womb of the entertainment industry. Kinda makes you wonder about the folks who run it…

There’s a lie in 2012’s marketing though, and I’m not talking about the bogus science. The movie isn’t really about the end of the world. It’s about the earth – more to the point us, humans – getting a chance at a makeover.

Sure, a good three-fourths of us are knocked off. “Civilization As We Know It” ends. Continents realign, the poles shift (to Wisconsin?), tsunamis scour half the land mass, and on. But by film’s end Things Stabilize and A New Dawn arrives – literally.

In other words, the earth – remaining humans included – gets an upgrade: a chance at a reboot to version 2.0.

And isn’t that exactly what all of us really want?

Our planet’s a mess. We’ve overpopulated it like rats on a sinking ship. We’re running out of resources, we’re only still eating because of hideous meat factories and genetic tricks made to our crops. To keep folks from thinking about all this education’s been turned into pop-culture quizzes and we’ve made a religion out of shopping.

But way down in our limbic brains we all know we’ve fucked up and hell’s to pay. Doesn’t matter who we blame – ourselves, our neighbors, those people over there, the rich, our gods or saints or sinners or politicians or just the roll of the dice – we know we all contributed and we’re all screwed.

Probably the biggest laugh in all the buzz around 2012 is the guilt some critics mention of rooting for John Cuzak et al while 6 billion other earthlings are being offed. Get real, critics! No one laments those people. Too bad about them, we tell ourselves, but when the apocalypse comes we know we’re with the elect. We will survive. This certainty isn’t just in our religions; it’s in our DNA.

What are movies like 2012 really about? What do we really want?

Another chance. And that’s what we want.

What we want is to toss away everything we’ve screwed up – in this case the whole damn world and everybody (else) in it – toss it all out like last year’s iPod and upgrade to the next version. Something newer, something trendier. More intelligent. Something like Earth, 2.0.

And we want more: we want something to force us to act, to do the right thing. Something like the realignment of the earth’s crust in 2012, say. Heaven knows we can’t do it on our own initiative: we can’t even agree whether Arctic ice is melting or if we should choose paper over plastic. Somebody – mommy? Are you there, mommy? – has to make us.

What a movie like 2012 offers is something to force us to act.

There’s another post-disaster movie out right now, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I haven’t seen it yet but I’ve read the book. Bleak, gray, filled with cannibals and hopelessness, strewn with wreckage, it offers no beginning to the catastrophe and no end. There are no shiny arks of salvation, no secret cooperation among nations. Just forage, disease and death.

The Road’s apocalypse is much more likely than 2012’s.

Which is why 2012 is packing the theatres and The Road will disappear in a week.

Who wants to fix problems when you can just upgrade and reboot?

I’m in San Diego for a bit of R&R. It rained yesterday – lots of big puffy clouds – and I happened to be in La Jolla for sunset. Here are three shots, all taken within a half-hour of each other near the children’s pool, now better known for the harbor seals – and law suits – that hang out there.

About 10 minutes before sunset.

At sunset.

Looking east and north. The sun’s setting behind me; the orange light shimmering on the water is bouncing off the clouds.

Otto and I made it to the beach for sunset for the first time in many many months. I paid for it the next day, but not too badly and oh, it was worth it.

This is a shot taken at Fort Funston, the southernmost coast side of San Francisco, aka Dog Heaven. The area’s one gigantic canine playground, with sand and birds and cliffs and seaweed and smelly rotting stuff and lots of other happy dogs and dog-happy people. Otto, busy sniffing something nearby, passed on participating.

Fort Funston sunset

Looking south towards Pacifica, where the Bay Area keeps the fog machine.