Last week I paid a visit to Nick Herbert, the sage of Boulder Creek. I always like to talk to Nick when I’m starting a book. He has such a unique way of looking at the world that I can usually glean some inspiration. The photo here shows him with his ghost partner from the alternate world.

When I took this picture were looking at the raging waters at the “Turkey Foot” where three streams meet: the San Lorenzo River, Bear Creek and Boulder Creek. “The existence of liquids is so surprising and unexpected,” remarked Nick. “Nobody could have predicted liquids from first principles. The gas and solid states, yes, but—liquids that stay in a cup? Amazing.”

We found a graffiti image of Cthulhu on a fence near the Turkey Foot.

Amazingly funky old cars in Boulder Creek. It’s where the beaters go to retire.

Cthulhu’s car was parked nearby.

Astonished, we repaired to Boulder Creek’s only remaining coffee shop, Jenna Sue’s cafe. They have good pastry, and a small yarn mola artwork on the wall.

Nick was in his element, merging into quantum wavicles, incalculably strange and wise.

Finally the rains cleared and the King of Oaks called to me from on high.

Two worlds, two trees, always present. In Flimsy everything is a plant or animal, with no machines. And everything can talk—just like here.

I was part of a reading called LitPunk last night, organized by John Shirley, whose image is posterized above. The reading was a mixed bag, as some of the readers weren’t so much writers as punk musicians or other kinds of SF undergrounders.

Rain Graves writes poems, often in a dark vein, she read some good stuff. Great name for a writer, too.

Charlie Jane Anders read a great psychedelic UFO story that may appear in the next Flurb.

This character Charles Gatewood mainly takes kinky photographs. He read a piece about having sex with one of his models, it reminded me of a letter to Hustler. I was, like, how have a I reached a point where I’m on a bill with Gatewood, when I’d once dreamed of reading for, like, the City Arts and Lecture Series? But he was fun to talk to, and I ended up buying one of his books on the street outside the nightclub.

I didn’t shoot many photos, as I only brought my Canon G10, which doesn’t actually work all that well in low light conditions. Also I’m still learning to use it. This is Paul Mavrides wearing a t-shirt of his own design. I like how you can see a lot of other stuff in this picture too. I’m beginning to be intrigued by the photographic practice of including chaos instead of zooming on a detail—which is what I more commonly do.

I’ve been getting into the photographer Gary Winogrand this week, who often has cluttered frames, I’ll write more about him on some other day. Just this morning I put my old Leica 28mm lens on my Canon 5D to start playing with ways to fill up a frame. Winogrand shows us that, when shooting wide angle, it livens things up to go for a tilted frame.

Back to SF! I’m thinking about what kinds of technology I can build up just by folding and gluing little regions of space…this follows on the heels of my Zickzack blog entry.

Wall: Take a slab of space like a sheet of plywood and fold it so the back touches the front. And then anyone who runs through the slab bounces right back into themselves—so they stop. It’s a zickzack wall. It keeps out the rain and the bugs. Call it a helloby, short for “hello goodbye.” No, call it a zwall.

Furniture: You can use those zwall things in any shape, of course, so you can use them like lumber or like cushions. But how to make a zwall be soft? You could make a pillow-case-shaped zwall with air inside it, and it would be somewhat elastic, provided that you put wrinkles into the pillow-case zwalls. Or fill it with a bunch of smaller zwall pillows to get a foamy effect.

[I picked up my Gary Winogrand book at the great Recycle Bookstore at 241 E. Campbell Ave, in historic downtown Campbell, CA this week…I sold them a lot of signed author copies of my recent books, too, so go there if you want a bargain on a Rucker novel.]

Light bulb: A sunball is a ball with its outside connected to the inside of a ball that’s high up in space where it’s always sunny. You can make the light as intense as you like by making the input ball increasingly large relative to the input ball.

Weapon: An eatball is a similar to a sunball, but you throw the input ball at someone and it eats through them, spewing a fountain of guts from the output ball.

Fast Travel: Standard magic doors or space portals or hyperjumps. Step in here, come out there. Call it a spacebridge.

Slow Travel: I’d like something like a bicycle that moves me along at a nice brisk pace without the dislocation of a spacebridge. I’m thinking of…call them slideplates or, better, skids. I put skids on my shoe soles or on some little skis under a seat of a device called a skidder. The top of the skid is mapped to the bottom of the skid, which is consistently a certain distance ahead of the top. The greater the distance, the faster you move. How do you turn a skid on or off? Maybe you have a lever to warp the skid’s shape, making it more like a rectangle (motionless) or more like a parallelogram (moving).

Cloth: I could make a kind of quilt from two thin zwalls and fill it with fiber. But that’s crude. I’d like to see spinning and weaving, too. I suppose you could spin with a tapering tube that has an intrinsic rotation built into it. And for weaving you might have a woven region of space tubes, exactly congruent to the threads of the desired cloth, and your threads are pulled through this matrix by little skidders.

Cell: I think of a flat torus, that is, a cube which has each of its faces glued to the opposite face. How does a cell like this interact with the surrounding space? In a way, it seems to be essentially cut off, like a torus floating beside a plane. So it disappears? But a spacebridge can get you into it. Or what if I wrap the cell up in normal space. It’s like the hollow liner of a Thermos bottle. You could use this as insulation.

One last thing on my mind. More and more gas pumps in the Bay Area have horrible noisy TV screens on the top spouting advertising and government propaganda. I’ve always thought of filling up my car as a meditative time, a little break in the day’s rush, and now the greedheads are putting a disgusting mind-scrambling ad stream in my face. It’s a safety hazard, even, in that it’s hard to concentrate on the task of filling the car without spilling gas.

Is there any hope of banning gas pump TVs? If not…how might one best sabotage them?

Not that every form of screen art is bad. See, to wit, this wonderful 1947 Donald Duck cartoon on YouTube, “The Plastics Inventor,” which Paul DiFilippo hipped me to.