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.

And now came bad news from Louisville. My big brother Embry was suddenly dying of cancer. It came on very quickly. I flew back to Louisville, with my son Rudy Jr. along, and we had a chance to say our goodbyes to Embry. He was very weak. It was good to be together. I held his hand for a long time, and he told me his whole life was flashing before his eyes, bouncing around, and he liked that.

Embry’s son Embry III took this photo of me sitting by Embry Jr on his deathbed. He’s near the end. And I look so…pensive.

As I keep saying, where does the time time go. How can this be happening. So strange and sad to reach this milestone. I always knew it’s coming, but the reality isn’t like I imagined at all. Not even after seeing Sylvia die.

Embry and I were little boys together, seventy-five years ago — and I was thinking of us as little boys in the woods, with something scary drawing near.

Photo above of Stephen Davenport, Embry Rucker III, Rudy Jr, and Peter Graves. Stephen and Peter were two of Embry’s best friends in high-school. Lots of stories. The three of them had motorcycles and used to ride around together, not as hoodlums, but more just goofing around in the countryside.

Embry and Stephen took a famous spring-break trip to Florida, years ago, and they were broke, and hungry, and they went into a restaurant to order perhaps a single egg each. The family at the laden table next to them left the room. Instantly Stephen was on his feet, hunched over their table, and gobbling food. Then they returned. They’d simply stepped out on the deck to look at the view.

Rich, remembered laughter.

The day after I got back to California, Embry actually died, and I flew back to Louisville, this time with daughters Georgia and Isabel along. It was a big funeral, with many familiar faces from the old, old times. I got it together to deliver a eulogy…went though a lot of rewrites, making it be about him and not about me. Read it online at
Embry’s Eulogy.

It’s also worth mentioning that I published two memoirs by Embry under my Transreal Books imprint. You can buy them, or read them online at Embry’s Books.

Faces from the primeval past at the funeral. Shown above is Churchill Davenport (Stephen’s younger brother (their father was the rector of our church (where our father Embry Rucker Sr. became a deacon when he was 40))).

So much to unpack in family stories. Like a fractal, going deeper and deeper, with everything intertwingled. That’s why I called my autobiography Nested Scrolls! To write an auotbio, you have to know how to skim along, riding the sharp memories and the high-points. Like ice-skating.

Popping back up the memory stack: Churchill Davenport. He has truly a hero of my youth. He was very smart, athletic, talkative, persuasive, and with an artistic temperament, going off into side-alleys that nobody else would have thought of. A wild partier and a ladies man. And he did very badly in school. My opposite in nearly every respect. As I say, I greatly admired him. And talking to the 2025 version of Churchill was in no way a disappointment. It was like a reward for having done the eulogy. Seeing how our lives had unfurled.

My favorite memory of Embry is the time in 2005 when he and I went on a serval-weeks-long scuba diving trip in Palau, Yap, and Pohnpei in Micronesia, in the South Pacific, inventing the itinerary as we went along. Plus Jellyfish Lake! This shot is on a Sam’s dive boat from Palau, heading for the Blue Corner dive site, which I in fact mentioned in the eulogy. One of the greatest days of my life. Good old Embry.

And again back to lovely Los Gatos. At certain times and angles it feels like a mountain town. In the old days San Franciscans viewed it as a country resort. Love that clapboard in the photo, and that red, and the mountain—called El Sombroso because it’s shady.

I started this painting before I heard Embry was sick. Two of my go-to motifs are tentacles and flying sacers. I started this one with a giant tentacled creature from the sea. And then I heard about Embry being sick. And after he died I didn’t know what to do with myself.

Eventually I picked up this half-done painting and finished it. I tend to work from my subconscious when I’m painting, and not know exactly what the details mean. When the monster with the big teeth emerged, it made sense for me to paint that. But you might well say that the gravestone-shaped thing is Death.

I was reaching a point in the writing of Sqinks where I wanted a whole bunch of these blobby little sqinks to merge together into a super sqink. And seeing this fine yam, or sweet potato in the supermarket, I realized that’s what my super sqink should be like. A giant yam.

Years ago in Lynchburg, Virginia, I spotted a cardboard box for shipping a brand called “Playboy Yams.” And I wrote a ditty.

I’m eyeless and I’m waxed,
I’m orange all the way through,
I’ll be your playboy yammy
Now, what are you gonna do?
I’ll be your yam
I’ll do what yam boys do
I’ll be your yam all night
And in the morning too.

This is a spot on St. Joseph’s Hill near where I live. Sometimes I’ll bring a printed manuscript here and sit on a step, reading and correcting it. I’m lucky to have this view, I’ve been walking up here since 1986. Nearly forty years. About half my life. Nearly every day I ask myself: Where did all that time go? How did I get here? How can I be so old?

And here came Christmas again. The second without Sylvia. Even with her gone, I’m still putting up Christmas trees, at least so far. I do it for myself, really. It would be too sad not to get my little holiday treat. So I schlep out and bring in a tree on top of my car, as always, and dig out the ornament box from the basement.

Hanging the ornaments together used to be a thing. Last year the grandkids were around to help me hang them, but this year I hung them alone, and I wasn’t sure how it would feel. But it was fine, it even felt good. An annual ritual, honoring what’s come before, what’s to come, and where we are right now, putting our beloved baubles on our tree.

Rudy and Georgia, eccentrics in San Francisco!

Isabel and Georgia on Christmas Day.

The photo shows a crazed round of this multi-deck Hungarian card game that the family plays at holidays. Each player has a deck of cards, and the goal is is successfully play all your cards—with everyone playing on the same heaps at once—and when your cards are gone you scream “Stock Out” as loud as you can. And that’s the name of the game. Love how the wide-angle setting on the phone camera makes Jasper’s arm so frighteningly long.

Around now I scraped together my money and upgraded from my Leica Q2 to a new Leica Q3 43. It hurt to spend so much. But I had to have it. First picture of me.

And this is the first photo of Barb!

A traditional photo I like to shoot. The stuff on my desk near the computer, or to the side of it, or behind it. My desk is quite large, it’s a so-called Geek Desk with basically a table on top, and engines and levers underneath, and you push a button to move it higher or lower, so you can switch between sitting and standing as you endlessly work that keyboard, like a tattered person in rags working the Reno slots. Pull me a winnah! I won’t annotate the full panoply displayed, but the painted-upon sphere is a kind of sketch or model, by my genius artist friend Dick Termes. His finished works are big painted spheres more like a meter across.

Playing with the new camera, looking for things to shoot. Here we have a would-be Klein bottle, a skug, and George. The skug is a model 3D-printed by a loyal fan, representing a type of critter in my novel Turing & Burroughs. George was knit by my grandmother Lily von Klenck; I think she got the plastic head in a yarn shop. Our kids always liked George. Nice move on Grandma’s part to knit George so his arms point two different ways.

Always fun to photograph reflections.

And here I am, the empty man, with steady hand, the man of shade.

I see this oak tree every day, and every day I love it. All hail the gnarl!

In late September, 2024, Barb and I went to Lowlands for two and half weeks. This means Amsterdam, Brussels, and Antwerp. All are places I know fairly well.

Beyond the Lowlands trip, I’m covering this fall and winter, including the death of my brother Embry, and another Christmas.

Our first stop was Amsterdam, and the first place I wanted to go was their Van Gogh museum. Here’s a nice shot of Barb with one of the man’s self-portraits.

Most of his really well-known paintings are elsewhere, but on the top floor, there are some amazing works from the last weeks of van Gogh’s life. To be painting that well, and to want to die anyway…unfathomable.

We stayed in old, plush Art Nouveau district near the museums. Each house’s door was more spectacular than the next. I’ve always felt that Art Nouveau didn’t last long enough. Why not continue making houses and furniture look like this! Less isn’t more—it’s less. Photo by Barb.

Well, there’s always Art Deco. Saw this wall in a kind of lamp and furniture historical art gallery plus store by an utterly cozy and peaceful canal.

I didn’t happen to get many photos in Brussels. But here’s the supernal master Peter Bruegel’s painting, “The Fall of the Rebel Angels.” This appears on the cover of my novel of Bruegel’s life, As Above. So Below. The painting is in the Brussels museum, and I used to go look at it a lot when I as living in Brussels for a few months at one point.

I was thinking about that painting again while writing Sqinks last month when I described a collection of sqinks being like “a teeming horde of flying grotesques and chimeras derived from fish, birds, kitchen implements, plants, knives, and fungi.”

And here’s some Bruegel photos from Antwerp, details of a lesser-known Bruegel painting “Mad Meg” or “Dulle Griet.” It happens to have belonged to an Antwerp worthy, whose former house is now a kind of museum in Antwerp, with this marvel in it.

The painting is quite large, and the room is dim, presumably to save the colors from fading. The last time I’d seen the painting it had been very dirty, and hard to see. But now it’s clean but, as I say the room is dim. This is where my little phone camera was a great aid. I used it like a viewer, moving it back and forth near the canvas, while watching the screen  to see the details: not only magnified, but clarified by the camera’s AI.

And look at that big eye up there! So craftsman-like, such detail. And for some reason known only to Peter Bruegel, we have a row of three little birds (or demons) perched above the eye.

Barb and I spent at least an hour in “Dlolle Griet” room in Antwerp,  going every square inch of the masterpiece. Paradise! No way of knowing if I’ll ever get there again, so I took my time. This little detail above: my god! It’s practially a novel! A fractal! No stinting here, no short weight, no rough draft. Seems like Bruegel might well have spent a year on Dulle Griet.

We stayed in a retrofitted mansion in downtown Antwerp, with a rooftop patio and a view of the tile roofs and the cathedral. No problem, baby! The lighting on the cathedral is so striking because the sun was rising from behind me. Unless it was setting…

As always in search for the cool part of town, we found an Antwerp street with artistic shops. This was an avant garde furniture store or gallery with nobody in it except for this friendly guy, Wout Bemelmans. His goal in life is to design this type of furniture, and he had a few pieces to show us.

And then it was back home, flying out of Amsterdam. The airports so modern and slick there. Souls getting sorted to leave this world.

And back to my deck in good old Los Gatos. As I always say, if clouds were for some reason rare—like if there was only one spot on Earth where you could see them—how we’d flock to view them!

I introduced Barb Ash to Teri Hope, curator of the Los Gatos Coffee Roasting cafe—and Barb hung a show of seventeen photos that she took in Cuba last year. A beautiful show and a big success.

Barb has this skill that somehow I still haven’t mastered—even after sexy-five years of shooting. It’s called focus. Barb’s photos are totally sharp. Great compositions and subjects too.

One day I was showing Barb the Haight, where I don’t go very often. Always fun to see the new stores and the old ones. Borderlands Books is there these days, moved from Valencia Street, a great place. This shot shows the sign of … a music store. Cute.

We hit the insanely gnarly Fluevog shoe store. One of a kind creations, year after year. Me wondering which shoe will go best with my outfits.

This is more or less a Halloween painting, although at the time I was also trying to visualize some of the aliens in Sqinks. They’re called Mu9ers from the world Mu 9. Like the San Francisco 49ers, in a way, although these critters are known for huffing human brains. Not that, as it turns out, it actually kills you have a Mu9er huff your brain. More like it clears you up. But too many repeats, and your brain’s a little too clear, or maybe it’s wet, gooshy, and collapsed like an old pumpkin, and there you are on the Santa Cruz sidewalk. Spare change?

But while it lasts, we can have fun. Here I am in food-coma at Rudy’s Can’t Fail Cafe in Emeryville, down near the lower end of Berzerkistan. I worship the Clash song, “Rudy Can’t Fail.” Along with Dandy Livingtone and his “Message to You Rudy,” these rude boys redeemed by first name, which lived so long in the shadow of that cutesy-poo, didactic, ad-jingle-type reindeer.

Rudy can’t fail! Yes! Rudy Jr. had told me of this Valhalla, and, while spending a night in Berkeley, Barb and I sought it out for the most bodacious breakfast imaginable. Spinach, salmon, grease…we got! Unpretentious as a used car lot, but hip and mellow within.