Time to catch up on my photos. Here’s May and June, 2025. A lot happened.

Here I am in North Beach with Barb, back in May. Love the display sign of a big fish!

 

Fab four-color fan. Usually I line myself up so that the horizontals and verticals are straight, but this time I got crazy and went off on an angle, and it looks better.

I happened to read the excellent new biography of cartoonist and folk-hero R. Crumb. Great book. And he’s a long-time hero of mine. I dug out my collected Zap Comix and came across this truly wonderful cover by our man. Like you’re halfway through doing something crazy, and then you forget how to finish.

Another Rudy painting. And Another f*cking masterpiece as I like to say. AFM for short.

I’m imagining a pair of lovers spiraling down toward­—a cosmic gateway? Ultimate ecstasy? Who knows. They look like they’re getting a little smoother on the way down, like rocks tumbled in the sea. I like the way the two lovers are cruising along. I did the yellow background with finger-painting, an effect I sometimes use. That is, I squirted blobs of four different yellows and smeared them around, wearing my latex painting gloves.

Getting the right reds and blues for the lovers took me some time. Shade, saturation, and value­—all three have to be in harmony. Another challenge for The Lovers was to get the geometry right! I would say they’re moving along a helix that has increasing torsion—in the sense of being more and more stretched out, like a Slinky being pulled straight. I worked it out by eye, with plenty of do-overs.

I’ve been painting a lot over the last few months. Sometimes I go right from one to the next, using whatever I see as inspiration. I did the  one  after Barb and I visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium once again. We went straight to the octopus tank. Instead of lurking in a corner, the creature was right up against the glass, with a zillion suckers attached, head hanging down like a blank blob.

I called the painting “Here I Come.” And I gave it some strange eyes…not really accurate for octopus eyes, but I wanted the sense that it’s looking at you.

Making a tough-guy face in the mirror for a photo. I’ve been doing this since I was sixteen. I call these my “Wall Street” pyjamas.

Gary Hughes is an artist friend of mine who lives in Santa Cruz. He’s a very unusual person. He’s in the “Church of the Subgenius” and is a friend of Paul Mavrides, as am I. He and his research biotech scientist wife live quite near the beach and they go surfing every day. He ran a sign-painting shop in Oakland for a number of years. His paintings are incredibly intricate and take months to complete. You can find some people with his name online, but most of them aren’t him. Here’s his awesome website.

We had a big family together that ran across two weeks. Rudy Jr’s twins Jasper and Zimry were graduating from high-school. Here’s Jasper  with mother Penny at Jasper’s graduation.

Here’s grandpa being a flower child.

A sample of the great WPA murals inside Coit Tower. Reading comics!

Grandaughter Zimry in her graduation robe, and wearing a family signet ring.

My girlfriend Barb was along for the event. She and I  stayed in a really good and inexpensive old-school motel in North Beach at the edge of Chinatown. The Royal Pacific. We like to dance, it’s near the Saloon, which is the oldest saloon in San Francisco. They have two great live bands every day. They’re on Grant Street, half a block uphill from Columbus.

This is what Barb and I call a “Rudy photo.” I’ve been taking these for yours. Barb is a big photographer—she posts on various stock photo sites—and we enjoy walking around shooting, and discussing our shots.

Here, once again, I’m painting for the sake of painting, and emptying my mind. Waiting to see what develops. I ended up with something like a rose bush, and you’re looking up through it toward the sky. Even though, okay, there’s no main “trunk” on the bush. It also reminds me of how much I like to lie under a tree and look up through it, a traditionally decorated home Christmas tree in particular, and, come to think of it, that could be a whole other painting. To give this one more texture, I added thorns, and shading on the roses, and then bumblebees. The three green breaches might also be thought of as a woman jogging to the left. And of course the title is goof on the band name, Guns ‘N Roses. I’ll take whatever the Muse gives me!

Isabel had an art show opening up in Fort Bragg, California, just north of Mendocino. Georgia, Rudy Jr, and I made our way up north for the show after the graduations. I got a cool panorama shot with Isabel’s husband Gus in the mix as well. Each of the kids appearing more than once. Check out Isabel’s
site.

Isabel took us to an amazing spot in the redwoods. Love this waterfall. I used a fast shutter speed, and a vignette effect around the edges.

My three children. All over fifty now. Life is amazing.

Found this sweet sand-art piece on the beach.

My old running-mate R. U. Sirius (aka Ken Goffman) put together some kind of show or festival in the Grey Area building, formely a Mission movie theater. I knpw R. U. from the Mondo 2000 days. I actually helped edit their big best-of compilation, Mondo 2000: A User’s Guide to the New Edge. How to organize the chatoic sea of excerpts? I gave each one a title and put them in alphabetical order. And I made sure they paid me before I started work.

At the get-together, I read a transreal story about an eccentric SF author. “I Arise Again.” It was a very noisy crowd, especially from the folks in the back. I think it’s possible that some of them were…high?

A few days after all this, Barb and I took off for a week in New York, staying in Manhattan near Madison Square Park, which has become a very civilized and pleasant spot. It’s next to the classic triangular Flatiron building…which was the home of my SF publishers Tor Books during the heyday of my career. A number of classy stores along Broadway here, including ABC Carpet, wheein this man is changing a lightbulb in dizzying space. In the 1800s this block was called the Ladies Mile, as it was suitable for shopping.

Barb was curious about the ubiquitous “steam stacks” to be found in the streets of NY. I’ve seen them my whole life, but didn’t in fact know what they’re for. Turns out the cunning natives like to use a single power plant to heat several large building as once. Live steam is channeled to a bunch of buildings from a single monster furnace. And for whatever reason, plumes of extra steam may need to be released here and there.

We hit the Met, saw the van Goghs, then headed to the insanely great Egyptian wing. I tend not to see Egyptian art very often, and can forget how stunning it is. We, like, think we invented modern art in the 1800s, but let’s try a thousand years BC! This little goddess is called Hathor, and is sometimes found on pillars. I love her elfin, triangular face. Up for anything.

Anything at all! Turns out Hathor is associated with the god Atum, who is said to have created the universe by masturbating. And there’s a special goddess associated with Atum’s hand. She has various names…but one of them Hathor!

“Hi boys, I just got in from Memphis. Any of y’all want to have a good time?”

This stone crypt looks like it weighs ten tons. And, yeah, it’s three thousand years old. They knew how to build things to last, those Egyptians.

This drawing seens to be on the inner surface of a sarcophagus. Looking at it, the modernity of Egyptian art really hits you. This drawing could be in a zine or graphic novel printed this week. Why the red dot? Is she shackled down? Is she human or a god? Queries for today’s zine.

Speaking of women, here’s a nice shot of Barb. She was really enjoying herself at the Met.

Love the eyes. Like…why do we even bother to try and make art after the Egyptians? Oh, well, what else is there to do! More art, forever.

Our Uber was passing through Times Square, so we jumped out. Gotta show this to Barb. She’s a California girl, with relatives in the NY boroughs, but she’s never done Manhattan. The lights get smoother every years. It was raining…I bought a cheap hat in one of the souvenir stores, a Yankees hat no less. Perfection.

In my college days, they were starting to send guys my age off to die in Viet Nam for no good reason at all. Sometimes we’d be in New York and we’d check out the skeevy scene in Times Square — as it was back then. An unforgettable Army recruiting booth stood in the square, adorned with an electric flag … and it’s still there. I always had this fear that the booth might get me. Like I’d be drunk and stoned in the city, and heart-broken over something like a lost love, and just before dawn I’d stagger into the booth — and they’d sign me up, and it’d be next stop is ‘Nam.

But the booth never got me. And eventually I had job teaching computer science to Vietnamese students at San Jose State University. I got to like them a lot. Even so, the booth still awaits. Gives me a shiver just be near it. Like I’m a lobster near a lobster trap.

We visited ground zero as well, with Maya Lin’s stunning “footprint” monuments. Two vast square holes matcthing the bases of the gone towers. Water flows down from the top of each hole, like tears, down into a big pool, and into a black square hole in the center.  (The central hole doesn’t show in this photo.) The central hole is like death’s door. Incredible.

And the new tower soars upward, lost in the mist.

Wall Street a must-see as well. Love all that heavy old stone in these structures. The epitome of solidity. What’s even inside there anymore? Isn’t it all in the cloud?

An odd French luxury department store right by the Stock Exchange. Printemps (means spring). I liked the magic soft chair with red light.

Near Wall Street stands a large statue of a brass bull. Symbol of financial gain, as in bull and bear market. This bull has a big pair of brass balls. An extremely large and animated crowd seethed around the bull, taking turns photographing each other in the act of caressing the balls. What word might adequately describe these jubilant tourists waiting in line for their photo  ops?

I wanted to show Barb the Battery, that is, the shore at the lower end of Manhattan — but it was completely fenced off. Seems that, ever since the monster storm last year, with its ten-foot waves, the NYC engineers have been constructing some kind of flood wall. So now you get down there and you can’t see. No fond touches of that classic film Desperately Seeking Susan.

By standing on a bench by a chain link fence next to a tour-boat boarding ramp, I did manage capture an image of our good old Statue of Liberty. Protect us, dear Lady.

Barg has an interest in photographing synagogues. We made our way to the Lower East side where a synagogue functions also a museum of the history of the Lower East side. Wonderful interior.

We saw a display of torah-related items, and I was struck by this pointer, called a yad. You’re not supposed to touch the torah when you read from it, so you have a yad to guide your eyes. Great word.

Eventually we made our way to the wonderful NY MOMA. The piece here is a slice of a house, mounted as an artwork. Playful Barb is pretending to walk up the slice of stairs.

Then up to the Plaza Hotel on Fifth Ave by Central Park. Dig the mysterious man with a briefcase in the steam stack fog.

A perhaps annoying new feature of the city is the prevalence of these new “pencil” or “needle” buildings. Ten or fifteen years ago there were only a few of them, but now they’re all over. Like porcupine quills. Each floor holds, I suppose, one or two condos for the ultra-rich. The locals insist that hardly anyone actually lives in the condos. They own them as investments, or vacation spots. Somehow this reminds me of crypto cash.

Walking along Saint Mark’s place in the East Village, Barb and I saw a great Nepalese god mask…I forget the name of the god in question. Rudy?

We were down there to have lunch at the classic Ukrainian restaurant Veselka. We met an old SF pal of mine, Ellen Datlow, one-time editor of OMNI, and known for the horror anthologies she edits.  What with the deaths of my long-term agent Susan Protter, my editor Dave Hartwell, and my fellow Kentucky beatnik SF writer Terry Bisson — Ellen’s the one! It was cozy to be with her.

Here I am with my college pal Roger Shatzkin, on the top floor of the Whitney museum. Seems like I meet Roger at the Whitney every year. It’s comforting. But how the f*ck did we get to be eighty?

Barb and me in the same spot. I may be eighty (more or less), but life is still good. After lunch we two walked on the insanely futuristic High Line, a walkway buitl in place of an old elevated railroad track.

And we checked in with my current literary agent John Silbersack as well. As always he took us to a classy NYC club, and as always these days, his assessment of my literary prospects was less than salubrious. Long story short, he feels I might as well self-publish my recent masterpiece novel Skinks. A small press would pay no advance and sell only about five hundred copies. Plus I’d have to wait on line for a couple of years, and they might use a bad book design. So I’m thinking that, as I’ve done before, I’ll do a Kickstarter for the new novel and publish it under my Transreal Books imprint. Watch this space!

Back at home I did a new painting. “Hvalfisk.” Abstraction again. Color harmony. I added the two eye-circles at the end of my process. I always like painting eyes and flying saucers and tentacles. And once the eyes were in place, I was thinking of sea creatures or, more specifically, whales. The title? In Norwegian, “hvalfisk” means “hval fisk” or “whale fish,” or simply “whale.” And this happens to be a word I sometimes like to yell when I’m alone on the beach, using the accent of my Norwegian friend Gunnar. See my curiously neglected video, What Is Gnarl? .

The video is from, wow, eighteen years ago. I was so much smarter then, I’m dumber than that now.

I saw this view from a plane while flying east from San Francisco at the start of our trip. Passing over the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta. The multifarious winding streams in this area have oxbows, that is, bulges where the river may or may not pinch off into an oxbow lake. Fan of gnarl that I am, I love looking down at this area from a plane. And I got a photo.

And after the trip I painted the hoto. The supreme modern California artist Wayne Thiebaud painted this region many times. But it’s an inexhaustible motif. One thing I like here is the contrast between the orderly polygonal fields and the twisty river streams­­—mirroring the split between the digital and the analog, the computer and the soul, the word and the image. Gnarly, dude.

Getting fully caught up now. It’s all about the images.

Great winding stabile Richard Setta sculpture at the Stanford art museum. Those hyperbolic trianglges and the clouds, the digital and the fractal, ahhh.

Nature is the best designer.  We try and do random designs, but we can’t match Gaia. Natural shapes have an inner “logos” built in, that is, some kind of law-like natural process.

Waterfalls of wires. Those were the days. At the Computer History Museum in Sunnyvale near San Jose. Rewarding plcace to visit.

It’s my first novel, duh.

Happy on Four Mile Beach, which is on Rt. 1, four miles north from the last traffic light in f Santa Cruz. I was here with Barb.

It’s been over two years since dear Syliva passed. And now I have a steady girlfriend. My life is coming back. A new life.

Saint Joseph’s hill near where I live in Los Gatos. The wonderful harmony of the landscape and the trees. I’ve been walking up here at least once a week for forty years. Half my life in California. That’s two thousand walks. The beauty never pales.

Son Rudy, with me at Stanford watching granddaughter Althea play “Ultimate,” a soccder-like game using a Frisbee instead of a ball.

Wonderful giant octopus I saw with Barb at the Monterey Aquarium. I sharpened the image with a product called Topaz. I might try and paint this image.

Arriving  in Pacific Grove with Barb for our two-night Aquarium visit. Nice to see a heart on the sidewalk as soon as we parked.

And here’s Barb out af Fouir Mile beach with me.

Terrific composition of mussels and stone, at Four Mile beach with Barb.

Years ago Bruce Sterling and I wrote an SF story called “Big Jelly.” Bruce kind of imprinted on our collab and likes to send me not only images of jellyfish, but now a very cool jellyfish shirt from the resort and grazing island of Ibiza, where he sometimes lives. You can read the story online in my Complete Stories, or in my collection with Bruce Transreal Cyberpunk, or you can hear Bruce readaing it aloud.

Speaking of my Complete Stories, over the last couple of weeks I spent perhaps forty hours in updating the two volume collection so it runs from 1975 – 2024. Paperback, ebook, web page.  Call it a hundred stories in fifty years.

As well as the multiple fomrats, another reason the update took so long is that I wanted to fix the webpage so that the links to the specific stories within would work. About five years ago, the links started jumping too far, at least on desktop platforms. Due, it seems, to something called lazy loading. I found the solution on Reddit in in the form of a block of script code to insert after the </head> tag in my completestories.html page. The script was discovred by evanvolm. Believe it or not, his fix code was written by ChatGPT at his behest.

Went to San Franciso with Rudy’s family to see granddaughter Jasper perform in a school musical version of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” We had dinner beforehand in a nice Chinese restaurant. Dig these colors. I ordered Peking Duck, which I’ve only recently learned to do. Ah, those cut-up squares of crisp, fatty duck skin.

Back to nature. The triangles! Womanly.

Penny and Rudy at the Big Wheel rally on twisty Vermont Street in SF, afternoon of Easter Sunday every year. Deeply San Franciscan types bring tricycles or toe trucks or bettered old Big Wheels and ride them down the hill, over and over, not really a race, with over a thousand on-lookers cheering.

Did I post these guys before? Lions mane nudibranchs, or sea slugs. Cleaned up by Topas. The critters creep around and close those soft little jaws over prey and eat them. At the Monterey Aquarium.

Afternoon light in the big kelp tank at the Aquarium. Sharpened and denoised with Topaz. Stupendous.

The Big Wheelers.

And needless to say the Big Wheelers wear costumes. Penny says that’s why she knew she wanted to move here. Because people like to dress up.

Rudy very happy at Four Mile beach with Barb. To me, in a way, this photo is heart-breaking. I was so sad for so long…and now, as I say, I’m coming back.

My ninth and final version of my “What Time Is It?” painting. I’ve hardly ever worked so long on a painting. I kept seeing things I wanted to fix until eventually nothing was bothering me anymore. I like to outline things and make them pop.

Topaz-treated shot of a shell I found. Dear nature,  so intricate and chaotic, in the mathematical sense of the word. A pattern that does have an underlying rule, but the working out of the rule is incompressibly complex. And unpredictable. But always remember, “chaotic” is not the same as “random.” Chaos is life. Chaos is health.

Walking along the now-closed Great Highway near Judah Street in SF with Isabel and Rudy. This artist Zachary Coffin installed a five ton boulder, so well balanced and mounted that you can rotate it. I thougt of Sisyphus, god of writers—who roll a mass of words up the hill, release the blob and whoosh—no money, no publisher, and it’s time to start again!

I call this one the Challenger jellyfish disaster.

In January, 2025, my girlfriend Barb Ash and I took a two-week trip to Quintana Roo and the Yucatan in Mexico. I only got around to finishing this post on April 28, 2025. And note that a few of the photos are by Barb.

The hand of the woman sitting in front of me on the plane looked like an alien flesh-crab. Those nails! What if it hopped loose and scuttled around? The spacetime of air travel is otherness.

We landed in a Quintana Roo jungle, a new airstrip hacked out from the trees. About thirty miles from Tulum, a popular tourist site known for its ruins. We toured the ruins, quite awesome.

Barb’s Hollywood nephew was getting married in a casual resort nearby, it was fun. Met an interesting woman Taffy Brodesser-Akner, and ended up reading her recent novel Long Island Compromise. The title has three meanings. Very funny and jaded, maybe a bit like Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint.

Barb and I wanted to get away from it all, and we headed south along the coast for an ecological preserve that contains a tiny village called Punta Allen. Caution is the better part of wisdom, and I had not rented a car. We took a cab down to the edge of the preserve, where we found a boat among the mangroves.

It was small launch, sent by the resort where we’d be staying, Grand Slam Fishing Lodge. The boat ride took about an hour, winding past completely deserted salt keys with amazing birds.

The lodge was almost completely empty, the beach was unbelievable.

This seemed not to be the best fishing season for bonefish, permit, and tarpon — a trio which makes up a fisherman’s “grand slam.”

Insane clouds and water.

Rudy alone on the beach in front of our room..

Barb and I walked down the beach a couple of times, reaching little Punta Allen itself. Tiny worn adobe town. Casual setting in Punte Allen.

Hard to be sure if this particular venue was abandoned or not. Maya there, many of the families generations old. Most spoke no English at all, but a lady at a sort of travel agency spoke English. Not that it was a “travel agency” as you’d imagine.

We wanted to go on a boat ride and do some snorkeling. The lady phoned around and found a local man with a boat, and he took us out.

Took us straight out to sea, as a matter of fact, two miles to reach some shallows where I could snorkel, although at that point I was in a state of error. A spooky rain cloud hung over the sea like a stage curtain, ready to unveil the end of the world.

And then that first boatsman brought us close to shore, a zone of clear water and white sand, with no other humans in sight, and the view like a giant Rogthko painting.

We spotted an abandoned lightohouse on the shore nearby. So—bright idea—for our second outing, we got young Punta Allen local to drive us along a sand track through the jungle near water’s—so Barb and I could check out the crumbling lighthouse. The older men didn’t want to drive there. They were right.

The young man’s car sank into  axle-deep sand by lighthouse and got totally stuck. I was thinking about how an older Myaya man had warned Barb and me about a very large crocodile living in the mangroves by the lighthouse. A man-eater.

Barb and I paid off our struggling and perhaps terrified driver and walked back through the jungle to the village, a couple of miles. Utterly primitive houses along the way. Ate some local shrimp in Punta Allen,  then walked the final bit up the beach to our vast, empty Grand Slam Fishing Lodge.

Wonderful day, in a certain sense of the word. Not like staring at my screen. Glad the crocodile didn’t eat us.

We moved on, catching a local bus to Valladolid in the Yucatan. In the past, I’d ignorantly imagined that a Mexican bus might be sketchy, but far from it. They’re quite luxurious, with large, comfortable velour seats. No piled-up crates of live chickens, no waving bottles of tequila! You go to a local bus station to catch one, and you buy a reserved seat. Not especially expensive. If the bus is all booked, you sit around for an hour for the next one. Time means nothing anymore.

Valladolid is a charming, other-worldly town, completely off the grid, save for the fact that it’s near the famed square-topped pyramid Chichen Itza.

Prices very low; we got an extremely posh room on the top floor of a top hotel, in an old building with a large private patio overlooking the cathedral and the “zocalo” square. The Mesón del Marqués.

The Mexicans revel in making images of skulls and skeletons. This one is especially fabulous.

Most of the walls are painted in wonderful warm colors. And the low evening sun casts entrancing shadows.

We got a taxi from Valladolid to Chichen Itza. It wasn’t especially expensive, and a lot simpler that getting a bus or *ack* jointing a tour to herded around. The site made a profound impression on me. So alien, ancient, and strange.

The pyramid with tourists, for a sense of scale. But is wasn’t super crowded.

The old-time Maya had, of course, a snake god. Love this guy.

There’s a lot of talk about the Maya being into human sacrifices. Supposedly when they had a tournament in a game something like lacrosse, they’d sacrifice the best player on the winning team! Offering a really good soul up to the gods. Chichen Itza contains a huge (hundred meter long) ball court with glyphs carved into the walls. This one shows a star athlete who’d just had his head lopped off. And snakes of blood are leaping from his severed neck. Takes a little study to properly see this.

So here’s Barb pretending to be a sacrificial victim about to get her head cut off. Seeing her do this made me like her a lot. I myself did exactly the same thing for daughter Isabel’s benefit on a trip to Quintana Roo many years ago. I wrote a big Maya sacrifice scene into my second novel White Light — basing my research on an Uncle Scrooge comic book. Donald gets his heart cut out, to be held aloft in the rays of the setting sun, and Donald’s last thought is that he should have been nicer to Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

A monument at Chichen Itza with a hundred or two hundred skulls carved into the wall. I like how each one is different.

We spent most of the day at Chichen Itza—with its wealthy of strange and uncanny history. Some great hawkers too, Maya with authentic-seeming goods.

Hot from the sun and the walking, we stopped at an unexpectedly great cafe on the Chichen Itza grounds. Barb and I began idly squabbling over nothing, who knows what, and the Mexican waiters were enjoying the show, laughing in a friendly way, and, I’d like to think, admiring our chic looks. I tend to get this feeling when squiring the attractive Barb.

I felt cosmopolitan, as if living in a Federico Fellini movie, which is of course where I’d most like to be. Marcello Mastoriani and Claudia Cardinale in a Via Veneto nightclub in 8 ½ or La Dolce Vita. Nothing to quarrel about, nothing at all.

After Chichen Itza we caught a bus to Merida, a larger town in the Yucatan. Check out this flamingo-pink Merida hotel with a Vegas/Fifties/Art-deco design. And dig the elegant building to its left.

Given that the prices were so reasonable by California standards, we went and got a room in a hotel that’s a former palace, the Mansión Mérida. The ceilings in the rooms were about thirty feet high, and everything was made of amazing old stone.

As a mathematician I was delighted to see dodecahedral stone newel post on the entrance bannisters.

Our deluxe marble-halls Merida hotel did have one minor drawback. The only window looked out on a very busy street. But there was a complicated multi-panels-of-fine-wood shutter over the window, which was in fact floor length, and which opened onto a tiny balcony. Insane view of the street with brilliant cloud-dotted sky, and odd telephonics building across the street and its weird windows. Mexico has all kinds of architectural styles. I liked looking out there, and a crowd of kids gathered in the alley across the way, doing who knows what. Another country.

Great shop of Mayan crafts in Merida near the zocalo.

When I got home I made a painting based on the Mayan glyphs that Barb and I saw in Chichen Itza. I worked on the painting for about forty hours, doing the layers over and over, getting the colors right. I found a couple of websites with simplified images of the pictographs. I put in a couple of crocodiles, pals of Kukulkan and regretting that they hadn’t devoured Barb and me in the lighthouse mangroves. Also some skulls. I called the painting “Mayan Codex” because there exist some so-called codex documents illustrating Mayan and Aztec temple art. My beloved beatnik author William Burroughs revered these records. For more info see my Paintings page.

One last image, I think this photo might be by Barb. A little museum in Merida had some inspiring pieces from the Maya days. Especially this incredible stone Maya lad. So modern, like a Picasso. In a way, the word “modern” doesn’t mean all that much in art. Each creator and each era finds their own idiosyncratic way of representing things.

The people we encountered were friendly and relaxed. Nobody, but nobody, mentioned US politics—it seems they’re not interested in our national obsessions. The Mexicans have their own world, their own culture and history, their own lives. Viva Mexico!

Barb and I went to Mexico for a couple of weeks in January, 2025, on the Yucatan peninsula. I’ll blog some photos from there later, but today I want to write about this trip we just took to visit with my daughter Isabel in Fort Bragg, up in northern California, on the coast near Mendocino.

What were Isabel and I up to? Well, we did a performance on the theme of what Isabel is calling “The Time Ecosystem.” Here’s a YouTube video that Barb filmed and I posted…you can look at that and poke around in this post to get a general idea.

Isabel says that there are all different kinds of time–mechanical, celestial, tidal, migratory, now-moment, tree rings, heartbeat, generational, helical, dream, screen, emotional—and how they mix together into an psychic ecosystem of sorts.

I mixed in in some comments about the fourth dimension, which Isabel is also interested in.

About 40 in the audience, on rows of low benches, outdoors, at sunset, bundled up, philosophers all. Outside the Larry Spring museum in Fort Bragg on the northers California coast The event was backed by the Redwood Time Project of the Spring Museum.

Fort Bragg is kind of a shaggy town, a mixture of hippies and Latinos and country people and crafts people and devotees of the redwoods and the sea. Mellow and unpretentious.

Amazing bluffs.

We talked a little about how there’s a still time or a no-time or an all-time that you get into when you’re totally absorbed. Hiking or making something or focusing on something. For me, writing and painting are my favorite kinds of no-time. I’m the real me then.

Isabel’s sketches for the painting of a hypercube that she made for the art show that went with our presentation. The idea is to draw two cubes and connect the corners. Like how can draw a cube by drawing two squares and connecting the corners,

One style of time. Another style is the very famous Jackson Pollock work called “Lucifer.” It’s at the Anderson Museum on the Stanford campus. The Anderson family used to have all these plantings in their home, and for kicks, the curators assembled some of the family furniture and put it beside the plantings.

I posted this, and someone asked if I really had a signed Jackson Pollock in my home. I wish! I like looking at this one for a long time, at least fifteen minutes, and I get into it, into that tangled Pollock time, the tangled space, and his body gestures. Price tag on this baby? Estimated at half a billion dollars.

Isabel is a pro jeweler, and I love looking around her studio. So very many kinds of time in this image. The hammering, the snipping, the letter-stamping, the polishing.

And I’m crazy about her pliers. I take t heir picture every time I’m in down. Pinch!

“Science” sort of bullies us into saying that time is line with numbers on it, to be measure by some boring clock. Oh yeah? Look at this path. The graceful organic curve. The pace I take going uphill or down. And my overlaid body images of the times I’ve walked it, at least once a week for about forty years. Two thousand weeks, two thousand walks.

How did I get go old? Where did the time go? But is it really gone?

In the special theory of relativity, and in other branches of physics, we talk about a four-dimensional spacetime. A stack of 3D moments, if you will. With all the old moments forever there, and perhaps future one’s there already. Look at that nice cliff. A flat person’s spacetime.

And here’s a nice image of the 3D spacetime that goes with the 2D world known as Flatland. Squares and triangles live in Flatland, sliding around like coins on a table top. And their spacetime selves are prisms..

And now here’s a deep rap from my best-selling book ever, Geometry, Relativity, and the Fourth Dimension. I published it when I was 31, via Dover Books. The editor imagined I was a wise old man. She came to have a look at me. But I was just a hippie. I did not in fact get royalties for the book, due to the contract I signed for a one-time fee of one grand, but there are several hundred thousand copies of it out there, and that’s good enough for me. It was my start.

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If we accept the spacetime view of the world wholeheartedly, the question becomes, “What causes the illusion of the passage of time?” David Park’s article, “The Myth of the Passage of Time,” insists that we are in fact at each instant of our lives. Every moment of past and future history exists permanently in the framework of 4-D spacetime. The illusion of the passage of time is a consequence of the structure of the universe; in particular, it is a consequence of the fact that the memory traces of an event are always located at spacetime points whose time coordinates have greater values than the time coordinate of the event.

This fact cannot be explained; it is simply an observable property of the universe. That is, you are going to have memories of thoughts or events only at times “later” than the times at which these thoughts or events occur. Each point on the individual’s life-worm finds its place in relation to the other points on the life-worm by comparison of memories. There is no paradox in the claim that my earlier self who drew that image till exists. I will always be drawing that picture, typing this sentence and meeting my death. Every instant of your life exists always. Time does not pass.

You might argue, “Look, I know I am existing right now. The past is gone and the future doesn’t exist yet. If the past existed it would be possible for me to jump my consciousness back five minutes.” But there is no consciousness to jump back or forth; you are always conscious at each instant of your life. The consciousness of five minutes ago is unalterable. Even if it were meaningful to speak of “jumping back five minutes” and even if it were somehow possible to do this; you wouldn’t notice that you had done it! For if you entered back into your body and mind of five minutes ago, you would have no memory of having been in the future. You would think the same thoughts and perform the same actions. You could jump back over and over, read this chapter up to this point 50 times, and not notice.

Not that I think the idea of “jumping back” is meaningful. For this idea implicitly includes the notion of a consciousness that “illuminates” one particular moving cross section of spacetime-and this is the illusion that I am arguing against.

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But, you know, maybe that’s wrong. When I was getting my Ph.D. in mathematical logic at Rutgers, near Princeton, I managed to befriend the king of logicians Kurt Gödel , a mathematician and philosopher at the level of Einstein. This fp;;pwomg passage is taken from my august tome Infinity and the Mind, also online.

I managed to ask Gödel that same question, “What causes the illusion of the passage of time?”

Gödel spoke not directly to this question, but to the question of what my question meant — that is, why anyone would even believe that there is a perceived passage of time at all.

He went on to relate the getting rid of belief in the passage of time to the struggle to experience the One Mind of mysticism. Finally he said this: “The illusion of the passage of time arises from the confusing of the given with the real. Passage of time arises because we think of occupying different realities. In fact, we occupy only different givens. There is only one reality.”

And then I wrote my novel Software, with robots eating people’s brains.

As Isabel says about time lines, we don’t want to get so far into math and logic and science and *ack* computer science that we forget the hydra-headed times that pullulate around us.

The world really is not digital at all. It’s not made of numbers. It’s made of …what? Smears? Jiggles in infinite dimensional Hilbert space?

Great redwood stumps in the woods where the road back from For Bragg leaves Route One and rises into Anderson Valley. Each branch is a time line of its own, each breeze is a kingdom of Oz.

I love the Fort Bragg stores with their utterly non-standard items on display.

Isabel enjoys the all-but-incomprehensible teachings of the late outsider scientist or artist or TV repairman Larry Spring, whose shop is a still-beating heart of Fort Bragg.

Why “Fort”? Why “Bragg”? Political history is a timeline I steer clear of.

While we were doing our show, I was looking at the phone poles and the wires and admiring how multidimensional they are. So cute here, like looking into the 1950s. Time machine!

Such fun to be presenting with dear Isabel! I think she’s onto something with her Time Ecosystem.

Excellent murals in Fort Bragg. Consider the timeline of a squid tentacle, yes!

Isabel has turned me onto two great works about the sea. One is the first-person film, My Octopus Teacher, and the other is the amazing book, How to Speak Whale by Tom Mustil.

Our cinematographer Barb Ash. Amazing how well a phone works by now. A video is a whisker of time.

Over in Mendocino they have this sculpture, “Time and the Maiden,” carved from a block of redwood about a hundred years ago. Supposedly it represents some stage of progress in becoming a high-ranking Mason. I always though the guy was about to cut the woman’s throat, but supposedly he’s just helping to braid her hair.

Hairs as time lines, of course. Time is everywhere, deeply intertwingled.

John Updike wrote a poem with the line:

“Time is our element, not a mistaken invader.”

In the end it’s all about nature. No numbers on a dial. The Calla lilies of spring.

The sunset clouds, never exactly the same, each sunset unique — like the time-line of your life.

And, ah, the gnarly roots beneath the Monterey pines by the Beachcomber motel above the Pudding River beach.

Our endlessly creative world. With time to spare.

And Isabel’s workbench is busy.