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.

<Begin quote.
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.

End quote>

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.