Rudy’s Blog

Did I mention that I’ve been rereading some Jack Kerouac? I read The Dharma Bums over the last couple of weeks, and am working on Tristessa and Desolation Angels now.

Jack was a great gloopy nut, a fanatic wordsmith, a one-man army of the night.

Publishing obscene Etruscan odes on the dumpsters of yuppie Californee.

I’m happy to be out and about with my camera again. Seeing things more clearly.

I was tired of photography last week, I was preoccupied by a (fortunately) temporary health problem. Today I’m starting to feel like myself again. Off and on I have this sense of rebooting.

Like looking at the brake light on my car, I’m all, “Ah, yes, the brake light. An electrical filament illuminating a hard plastic lens.” I mean, I knew what the light was, sure, but last week I’d dropped the maintenance routines of daily facts like that, I was too busy worrying.

But, yeah, I’m back, and all the little niggling objects are still here, all wanting their attention share. The radio remote control, the knitting basket, the glasses cases, my three pairs of glasses, my hair, my clothes, the pillow, the lamps, the food in the fridge. It’s like the world is this array of male and female snaps, and I’m a plastic sheet of female and male snaps that need to be matched up with the reality array. The lights flow through me, and my piezoplastic wriggles. Yubba gleep.

Looking around Borders Books today, I was thinking about what kinds of memoirs get published. David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs have a whole thing going with rueful tales of personal dysfunction. Back in the 1930s, Robert Benchley, James Thurber and Dorothy Parker were doing something similar. That’s not exactly my bag, the Kerouac quest account is a little closer to what interests me.

Another angle is to present yourself as the Witness to History—for me, this might be the Silicon Valley thing or the cyberpunk thing, though people aren’t responding much to SV idea when I suggest it. It’s like people are sick of Silicon Valley. Maybe if I could clearly cast the memoir as evocations of a bygone era—which certainly it would be. As I’ve mentioned before, in this context, I think of the Vanished Wild West. But I could spin it as the Godfather of Cyberpunk thing.

The point of writing this would be to entertain myself, and to gain a bit more self-knowledge here in the Desert of the Real. To have some fun. I can’t face grinding away on another novel right now. But yet, I do want to write.

All I have to do is cross the street.

Winding up our Wild West road trip, we visited daughter Isabel with her husband Gus and new dog Rivers in Pinedale, Wyo. Rivers is a cute li’l guy.

Gus has his nice old stringed instruments hanging on the wall.

We went canoing on Green River Lake near Squaretop Mountain. We parked the canoes in some reeds and hiked into the back country to spend a night.

I love the big granite rocks in the flowing mountain streams. It’s kind of Zen, the stillness and the motion yoked together.

We found a great Forest Service bridge made of two logs. Somehow you wouldn’t see a pristine bridge like that in California. It would be whipped or vandalized somehow.

Where we camped there was this lovely flat river winding across the high valley, a series of S-curves with the range in back.

Gus boiled water for dinner; he uses an empty tin can for his light-weight cooking pan.

Rivers was only two months old, but he was very competent at getting around. Like you wouldn’t let a two-month old human baby romp around on a cliff edge!

Isabel and Gus managed to climb Squaretop last summer, it took them two tries. It was hard for them to find the way up to the top, none of their friends had ever been. Everyone was like, “walk up the back,” but that leads to a dead end. You have to climb the side. Now we know!

I saw some really big ants by the lake. This picture’s pretty blurred but I SmartSharpened the hell out of it with PhotoShop.

Our last night in Pinedale we had supper at Fremont Lake and went up on the ridge for the sunset to see the glistening ponds. I love Wyoming.