I was at the Sunnyvale Library on Wednesday night, I gave a talk about my life as a writer, read a short-short story “Panpsychism Proved,” and did some Q&A. I recorded the evening (with some fan noise in the background) and broke it into two podcasts, click the button below to hear them.
My neighbor Gunnar had his 73rd birthday. Gunnar is very New Age. He’s even been to India! He’s a fanatical coot like me, we both think everything’s alive. I fed him lunch in my back yard. We ate tofu. And then we went for a hike at Castle Rock.
This is getting to be one of my favorite parks. There’s a whole hidden zone that you can find if you buy the rock-climber’s map for the park. These rocks each have names. This is the Castle Rock itself. I’m glad I live in California.
Some idiot drew UFOs on a bunch of the rocks. As if you needed to draw them—when people like Gunnar and me can clearly see them anyway. This rock is called Platypus Rock by the way. Gunnar’s Norwegian, he’s never heard of a platypus.
The branches are ideograms spelling out the code for the rest of my novel. I can’t quite decipher them yet, though. It helps to take naps.
If you relaxed enough, maybe you could turn into dust. And turn that into something else. As my brah Sonic says, “If you push it far enough, your atomic silps lose it—and your molecules fall apart. They’re like, ‘Never mind that H-2-O jive, we wanna just be two H’s and an O.’ And then if you knife right in, the dust congeals into a tree.”
Shapeshifting for nice skin.
March 8th, 2007 at 6:04 pm
Are you sure that’s a UFO? Looks more like a sombrero to me.
March 9th, 2007 at 10:05 am
Well, there were stars and planets drawn nearby as well, so I’m thinking UFO. And I’d hate to think someone is actually going around painting rocks with Sombreros! Those lines around the ege for doors and windows, not a buckle, and the shade underneath is a force field. This is a fairly common Rull FLZ-17 craft from the Great Attractor zone of intergalactic space.
March 9th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
Before Rudy enlightened us I thought it might be from M-104, the Sombrero Galaxy:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060115.html
I think his explanation is far more plausible. Certainly more entertaining.
March 9th, 2007 at 6:35 pm
The “cave saucer” on your blog is a recreation of an actual prehistoric image. There’s a fuzzy image of the “UFOs” in question at the bottom of this page:
http://www.ufologie.net/htm/picanc4.htm
Author Ronald Story vouches for their authenticity in a good “debunking” book about “ancient astronaut” maven Erich von Daniken. Whatever the drawings are — or aren’t — they’re certainly fascinating, and appear to show objects straight out of the annals of modern ufology.
March 10th, 2007 at 2:17 pm
Professor:
Although I am never without a “bad hair day” in the lab and I regret to inform you that my continuing speculative research in “teleportation and sneezing” has now become somewhat of an addiction, I can assure you that the large “lines” that I am fervently sniffing are 100% pure laundry detergent…. nonetheless, I will boldly continue on this profound and dramatic path concerning this controversial “discipline of sneezing….” and remember…. sneezing is an energy!!
—- Dr. Quackenbush [aka linus]
March 11th, 2007 at 4:49 pm
The sombrero was originally worn to denote that the wearer had witnessed one of the countless UFOs that visited Mexico in the 1700’s, so we are both right!