Friday, September 15, 2006

Gassing Up - Wednesday 9/14/2006


The brainwashing is complete. It was $2.89 a gallon and I actually thought, “Wow, what a great price.”

And then I was standing there wondering where my next photograph was coming from, and I thought, “Hey. Who knows? Maybe this will be the most exotic and sign-of-our-times photo I take all year.”

Maybe my grandnephews and grandnieces will be all impressed that I actually put flammable liquids in a private pod and drove it around at 70 miles an hour.

Thursday, September 14, 2006

Gus and His Cow - Tuesday 9/12/2006



I don’t know. He just seems like a Gus. He and this cow are out on the sidewalk outside a place that sells—

Hmm, I don’t know what they sell. Maybe they sell cowboys. And cows.

I really want to make a project of photographing all along Sierra Highway, because I think parts of it must be like what Route 66 was like in some places in its heyday.

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

New Old Road - Monday 9/11/2006

I love driving down a road I have never been on before. It’s one of my favorite things to do on a weekend. Go drive somewhere and know I have never seen this place before.

There are a lot of little roads leading off the two-lane highways or roads around where I live that I haven’t explored yet. I took this one on Monday afternoon. It winds down about 600 feet to what looks like an abandoned farm after crossing the railroad tracks.

It was a very narrow but nicely paved road, so I wonder if it’s maintained as an access to the tracks. If I’d met anyone with a car any bigger than my little Echo, one of us would probably have had to back up.

This is the view from about half way down. You can see the train tracks at the bottom and the tunnel where Soledad Canyon Road passes through the mountain on the upper left. The farmstead is just to the left of the tracks.


It was slightly creepy at the bottom… Maybe just tapped into some reptilian part of my brain that knew that there was just one really viable way out with my car.

Here's a shot of the falling-in barn, for those who are curious enough to have followed me this far.

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Monday, September 11, 2006

43 Books That Have Influenced Me - #5 Winesburg, Ohio - Sherwood Anderson

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Another novel in the form of short stories, this time about a small town. I love this idea of cumulative information forming a picture of a place.

Also, my writing prof at UCLA compared my writing to Sherwood Anderson’s in a letter of recommendation. I was bowled over.

43 Books That Have Influenced Me - #4 In Our Time - Ernest Hemingway

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This book blew me away. It’s such a great, early example of making a novel out of short stories. It’s so brilliant to put these seemingly unrelated stories together and let the reader be smart and figure out that taken together they are a view of an era.

This book excited me very much about writing, because it showed me that there are other ways to put a story together.

Would That I Were a Cat - Sunday 9/10/2006


Kitty is demonstrating the appropriate reaction to the board meeting of a nonprofit organization. I cannot begin to express how much I wanted to assume a similar posture by about 4:30 in the afternoon.

We left the house at about 7am to visit Auntie Em, who was in the hospital again for observation. We love seeing her and spending time with the cousins. But after having lunch with the cuzzes, we had to go to a board meeting of our acoustic music club Songmakers . We didn't get home until after six p.m.


It’s not often that I’m this jealous of a cat.

Straw Flowers - Saturday 9/9/2006


I took a few pictures at the birthday party we went to Saturday night, but the lighting was weird and everyone looks like tired devils in all the shots.

Since I treasure these friends and would not want to attract any demon hunters to their lairs—er, homes—I am deleting the photos from my camera and the rest of the universe.

The important thing about Saturday, then, seems to be that we went on a hike in the morning. A coyote followed us half way around the trail. It was up on the hillside, stopping every so often to look at us as we stopped every so often to try and locate it.

It decided we were harmless. We’re okay with that.