Someone recently stole samples of fourteen distinct rare earth metals from a Stanford lab. Elements with wild names like ytterbium, praesodymium, and holmium.

Right away I think there’s an SF/Ufological angle to this theft. I think it’s obvious to any reasonable person that a saucer alien, time traveler, or cross-brane hopper needed this stuff to build a device to get back home.

Or maybe the aliens don’t need the rare earth metals to build a device, per se, but rather they plan to use them as a tonic so as to enter a certain quantum computational state of consicousness which permits a teleportation hop.

I recall that my my moldie character Andrea was getting high off rare earths in my novel Freeware. Quoting from the Freeware notes:

Andrea gets high on chelated rare-earth polymers. The rare-earth elements, also called lanthanides, are Lanthanum, Cerium, Praseodymium, Neodymium, Promethium, Samarium, Europium, Gadolinium, Terbium, Dysprosium, Holmium, Erbium, Thulium, Ytterbium, and Lutetium. Ytterbium was first found in a mineral called yttria in the 1890s near Ytterby, Sweden. “Ytterbium” was first applied to a substance found in yttria that was in fact a compound of the elements lutetium and ytterbium. Yttrium, though not a rare earth, resembles the rare-earth elements and is often associated with them.

And here’s a relevant quote from Freeware itself:

On the sidewalk outside the Boardwalk was Monique’s mother Andrea, spread softly out on the pavement like a Colorado River toad, but a toad in the shape of a giant book lying open on the ground. The Good Book. Big gothic letters scrolled across the two exposed pages. Just now the letters read, Thou Shalt Not Hate Moldies.

“Moldies are sentient beings with genuine religious impulses,” intoned Andrea. “I’m interested in pursuing a dialogue on this issue. Especially with single men!”

“Mom,” said Monique in an encrypted chirp. “One of these days a Heritagist tourist is going to pour alcohol on you and light you. A lot of Heritagists are Christians. Do you really think they dig seeing you, like, imitate their sacred book?”

“Greetings, Monique,” squawked Andrea cheerfully. “I am in an ecstatic state of consciousness today. A potent yttrium-ytterbium-twist compound was provided to me this morning by cousin Emuline. It’s made right here in California, they call it betty, I don’t know why, maybe because ‘betty’ is almost ‘ytterbium’ spelled backwards, well that would be ‘muibretty’. Monique, your mother is lifted on fine, fine, muibretty betty. But what is your request, my dear daughter?”

That’s all….for now. Meanwhile, keep your eyes peeled for those rare earth element thieves!

I’ve been working on the second panel of my Postsingular triptych. My new picture is based on a particular oak tree that I’ve been looking at for twenty years. It’s on the edge of a gully on St. Joseph’s hill. I used to think it was about to fall down, but it seems pretty stable. This is a photo patched together from two shots, but there’s nothing fake about it.

Here’s the current state of the painting I came up with; it’s called Postsingular. That’s my character Thuy Nguyen there with the pigtails, looking down off the cliff at the nanomachines and at some demonic dancing subdimensional subbies. Need I say that I’ve been studying my Hieronymus Bosch of late?

The central painting of the triptych is Hylozoic, I did that one at the painting workshop in France. When I stretched it, I lost a little of Thuy’s neck, but I’ve gotten used to that. She’s looking at a Hrull flying manta ray with Chu riding inside the ray. I’m not sure who the artist is. Either Bosch, the character Jayjay, or me.

Although the book Postsingular is volume one of my trilogy in progress, and the book Hylozoic is volume two, I’m going to hang the “earlier” one on the right of the “later” one because the patterns match better that way. So you read it right to left, fine. And what goes on the left? That’s gonna be a painting called Transfinite, which will be based on my plans for volume three.

I’ll probably base the third one on this painting by Hieronymus Bosch, The Ascent of the Blessed.

Most scholars think Bosch modeled his image of Heaven’s gate on the reflection of one of the numerous arches on the Binnendieze river in s’Hertogenbosch — which did double duty as a sewer in our man’s heyday, right around 1492 or 1505.

I’m painting these days as I’m hung-up figuring out the rest of the plot of my novel Hylozoic. I have the upcoming Bosch chapter pretty well sketched out. But that damned pitchfork—it’s got me confused. What’s it up to?

I’m thinking maybe it’s not so evil. It’s pals with the harp. But why are these higher beings screwing with our world? I’m looking ahead at the story, figuring out what I’m gonna need to jettison to pull it together.

Zonnnnnngggggg.

I’m at that frightening black point that I always reach in the middle of a novel. Confusion and despair. I fantasize that I can stave this off by outlining, but the black point crops up anyway, heedless as a meteorite. It’s where reality meets dream, where the rubber hits the road.

As Dante puts it in La Commedia Divina,

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi retrovai per una selva oscura,
che la diritta via era smarrita.

I found an interesting web page exploring lots of ways to translate this. One version reads as follows:

Midway in life’s journey
I found myself in a dark wood,
and the straight way was lost.

Another translation might be:

Halfway through my novel
I know I don’t know
What the hell I’m doing.

What the hey, I’m going to the beach. Sooner or later, the Muse is bound to show up and extricate me. She always does. It’s probably just a matter of dropping a few of the candies I’m holding in my greedy monkey-fist.

One of my readers posted a comment about some recent UFO sightings right near where I live. And that made me want to take a UFO photo. So I phtographed a prehistoric stone saucer skimming above on the beach of Taholah, on the Quinault reservation north of Moclips, Washington, this weekend.

The reason we were in Moclips was to attend the wedding of the daughter of our old friends Lee and Susie, who used to live across the street from us in Geneseo, NY, some thirty years ago.

They had the wedding on the beach in Moclips; they built a little symbolic house of bamboo and tulle for the ceremony. It felt very human and classic. I like the symbolic feel of this picture. Gateway to a new life, the sea all unexplored. Rose petals on the pathway.

Afterwards we came up to a beach house they’d rented for a party. Life rolls on. We solemnize it, we witness, we celebrate, we wake up and see it as real.

I keep having to remember to think of everything as being alive, obvious as this is.

I love crows. Speculating about them, identifying with them. This fine specimen is a Pacific Northwest Native American crow on the Taholah beach in the rez. I’d love to be a crow.

But it’s good being an adept in the temple of gnarl.

Digital reality. On the other hand.

The Quinaults had stored their firework stands in a lot; the advertising slogans on these are kind of funny and ironic. Clearly these are the folks you want to get your pyrotechnics from!

Found a peaceful river mouth near the ocean.

Haystack rocks in the mist. Living haiku. Everything is alive.

And God is Love.