This spring, with my 73rd birthday coming up, Sylvia proposed that I take her down there to celebrate, and to let her see the place for herself. So we got on a plane.

I was in Guanajuato once before, back in October, 2015. I was there for an arts conference, and I really loved the town. The colors and the unspoiled quality.  Back in 2015 I blogged two posts about Guanajuato, and I still often talk about the town. Now in 2019, I’m doing two more posts, one of them today, and the second of  my 2019 posts will be on May 13, 2019.

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It was a long trip down—there was this thing about a certain kind of plane no longer being reliable, and naturally that was the kind of plane we’d booked on, so instead we had to fly this roundabout route from San Jose to Chicago to Dallas to Leon (which is the Mexican airport near Guanajuato.) As the sun set, we were finally drawing near. A peaceful moment above the clouds.

Right away, the adobe blocks of the buildings looked wonderful. And notice how there’s a pink building in there—the Mexicans are never satisfied with a block of all-beige buildings.

Guanajuato is in a ravine carved by an ancient river which has, as I understand it, moved underground. So the town has two halves, each half mounting up one of the two facing slopes. In the background of this photo, on the left, you can see this hill on the other side of the town. It’s chock full of bright little buildings like blocks. You see some hills like this in San Francisco, but not nearly so colorful

I like to walk around the streets and alleys just looking at the buildings, the people, and the walls. I think of this one as a picture of math, as the grid is kind of made of numeral 2’s, and someone scribbled a calculation, and that wire is like kind of weird arbitrary connections you find in math. Also note the irregular gray patch. And the metal flowers like prime numbers.

Alleys and fluffy clouds. The clouds looked firmer down here, more like they’re solid. That shade of pink…you never see that on a building in the States.

Everyone paints their house in some different wild color. Magenta, baby pink and baby blue, chartreuse, sour lime, deep cinnabar red, traffic orange, rich buttery yellow, pale citron. Often they paint “frame” rectangles around their windows.

I dig the interplay between the flat color areas and the wiggly tubes. The electrical conduits and meters are often on the outsides of the walls, which looks cool. Guanajuato goes back to the 1600s, when it was the richest silver mining town in the world. In other words, a lot of these stone and adobe houses went up before electricity was in vogue. So it was easier to put the wires on the outside. Kind of like in England, where a lot of old houses have their plumbing pipes on the outside.

Here’s Jesus, rising out of his tomb, and rarin’ to go. Xianity is like a widespread pop mythology. I figure in Greco-Roman times, the people had a spectrum of feelings about their “gods” as broad as our feelings about Jesus. For some it’s a colorful cultural things, for others it’s a light that burns within their soul. When the art gets this literal it’s cool.

We stayed at a hotel called Meson de los Poetas, that is, House of the Poets, and two doors down was the Diego Rivera house, where our man lived until he was about six years old. His descendants had the idea of making the house into a small museum. The most fascinating art in there is a series of watercolors that Diego made for a proposed edition of a history of the Mayas called Popul Vuh. These monkeys are some earlier stage of humanity. I love the ease and wit of Diego’s lines.

“Diego’s Hunhunahpu” acrylic on canvas, November, 2015, 36” x 36”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

After my 2015 trip to Guanajuato, I did a big painting modeled on one of Diego’s Popul Vuh watercolors that I saw. As always, more info on my Paintings page. This painting is, unaccountably (to me), still unsold.

Back to 2019. Perfection on the hoof. Those dusky deep red buttresses, and the rich buttery yellow of the wall. The war, low morning sun.

Guanajuato has a tiny cog-railway that runs up one of the ravine-city’s two sides. The car arrives in a tidy marble mall, fairly empty on a week day, with silver shops. I liked this big painting they had on display up there.

Speaking of art, here’s a cool original painting that was in our bedroom. Something about the culture or economics of Mexico makes it reasonable for a small hotel to have real paintings in the room instead of reproductions. This one is called, Maria Loreto de la Sangre de Christo, by G. G. Quevedo. I like that name Quevedo, it appears in a story by Jorge Luis Borges.

Deep idleness and relaxation in our room in the afternoons. That magical word: Siesta! Supper only starts at 8 pm, you’ve walked all morning, had a lunch at 2 pm, and then…kickback time. Sitting cross-legged resting the muscles of my legs. Or lounging in one of our comfortable chairs.

Not reading, not computing, looking out the window, enjoying the sight of that hill of houses, and, eventually, playing with my camera.

I spent over half an hour perfecting a duck hand, or maybe it’s a dinosaur, one of those guys with a knob on top of his head. The double edges due to mirroring, as I’m photographing the image in the door’s glass. How odd and alien and protean our human bodies are.

The Conquistador coffee roaster lay just under our hotel, cached in a space the size of a narrow living-room, with the machine roasting beans, off and on, all day, and clouds of bean-steam lufting out in foggy veils, causing, early in the day, the tidily uniformed school girls to feign great coughing fits. I’d sit there on a stool having a mocha mix of their coffee and chocolate. Peace.

Peeling spots of the alley walls only add to their appeal. Rich visual chaos, with its own implicit order. God is everywhere.

Click for a larger version of this image.

A night panorama of our view, sewn together from three full-size frames.

I remembered this view really well from my visit in 2015—I managed to get the same room as before, a salmon returning to his hatchery, savoring the aethereal memory scent.

With the ultra-low-light “Night Sight” setting on my Pixel phone the view looked like this. Those aren’t colored lights on the houses—the lights are white or yellow, the colors are from the walls.

In a lane near us we found a little art shop, selling etchings and postcards by a man and woman who ran a workshop together. The sales woman was pleasant, an local artist herself. speaking a good English (not a given at all). “Mexicans really like skulls,” I remarked, just to be saying something. “We love our death culture,” she said.

Here’s Veronica with her veil with Our Lord’s face on it. All sorts of art in the churches, not limited to any one style. Did Betty get a veil too? Whose face would be on it?

At one point we took a bus from Guanajuato over to the town of San Miguel de Allende for the day. San Miguel is better known, and we wanted to have a look. In many ways it’s as beautiful a town as Guanajuato, but it doesn’t have Guanajuato’s pristine, unspoiled quality.

San Miguel is known for the spire of its cathedral. The man who designed and built the church had only seen photos of Gothic cathedrals, so he made it up as he went along, and the result is wonderful.

Dig the line of yuccas. Very cool. Like a travel poster almost.

A downside of San Miguel is that something like ten percent of the people who live there are white US retirees, who have the look of Mill Valley people, although some are in fact from the East Coast. Of course Mexico City is fully cosmopolitan, but I think that’s a different thing.

At times I’ve wondered if it would be fun to go retire in San Miguel, but it’s maybe not a vibe that would work for me. I fear an entitled, self-satisfied, high-school-clannishness thing. Me thinking as a perennial outsider in saying that. But possibly if I ever did move there I’d soon fit in.

But there’s also the matter of the wealth-gap between the retirees and the locals. Seems like that could make you uncomfortable.

I really liked this guy selling hats. So classic. Loads of day-tripping white tourists thronged the San Miguel streets.

From a total outsider perspective, the locals in Guanajuato seemed at little more at ease than in San Miguel. Doing their thing in their own town. Fully in control.

I never once heard anyone mention Trump on this trip. For a lot of the local’s, he’s not even on their radar. Like, do I know the name of the President of Mexico? Parallel worlds.

San Miguel has scads of hip eateries and native art shops, also some higher end galleries. I liked seeing Mr. and Mrs. Death here above a restaurant.

I walked around San Miguel alone for an hour in the late afternoon, in that “golden hour” of sun, going nuts with the colors and the shadows, enjoying my trusty Fujifilm X100T digital camera with its fixed 23 mm lens. Well, not totally trusty, as it has a lot of manual settings, and it’s easy for me to mess them up, even now, after using it for over four years.

I always rework my photos in Adobe LightRoom…it’s almost like the shots I take are negatives and then I “develop” them on my computer. With a wider angle lens like I have, it’s often a matter of cropping down to the part you want.

Nice visual rhyme of the triangles here.

I was just feasting on those warm yellows and reds and ochers. Showdown at dusk. The San Miguel streets are a little wider and straighter than in Guanajuato. Although, as I say, more replete with rubber-necking goobs like me…though not really that many of us, not everywhere.

We wandered into an art show in a large building…had to pass in between a pair of guards…I thought maybe they’d want money or a search or something, but not at all. It felt like the locals weren’t much into hassling strangers over tiny things.

Anyway, this cool US artist Daniela Edburg, she was into was twisting up skeins of wool into shapes like tornadoes…and then taking photos of them. In one photo she held the faux-twister as if it were on a Kansas-type horizon. And here she lets it merge with her hair (I assume that’s her in the photo). “I am a tornado.” Yes. One Halloween our daughter Georgia “dressed as a tornado.” I don’t remember the details of the outfit, but I love the concept. It’s very Georgia.

I just love this photo. So Old Mexico. Like from Sam Peckinpah or from Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks. The late afternoon light, yes. Not a soul in sight. The warm stucco. Perfection. It’s a cafe on the main square next to the cathedral. And for spots like this, you gotta hand it to San Miguel.

Notice that little stand with three or four knobs? That’s a portable hat rack. If you like, you have one next to your table, and put your hats on it! I wore a hat most of the time we were down there, an old white felt model.

At the end of our day in San Miguel we got a taxi down to the bus terminal. I like these dudes in silhouette. Dark with light.

The bus we road on was a “first class” line of buses, with really a lot of leg room, amazingly nice, I’ve never seen a bus that comfortable in the US. Not that it was expensive. Maybe $7 for the hour-and-a-half ride between the two towns, basically busing through scrubby high desert. We were at 6,000 feet the whole time.

When we got back to our Meson de Los Poetas room after the San Miguel outing, I took a selfie of myself, looking hale and lucid, and the next morning, March 22, 2019, I posted it on FB and Twitter with the announcement that it was  my 73rd birthday, thereby indirectly petitioning for b-day cheer. Big score. I got hundreds of likes and replies, and on my birthday it was a soothing, pleasant activity to scroll through the replies, “liking” them, enjoying what they said.

As I mentioned at the start, I’ll put up the second of  my 2019 posts on Guanajuato on May 13, 2019.

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I have lots of little tasks I should do and I think of them in the morning and feel filled with ennui and despair. Paperwork, plans, maintenance.

It’s always better, as I so well know, to have a writing project. I’m high and dry with Return to the Hollow Earth all done. Also my story “Surfers at the End of Time” with Marc Laidlaw is done. Good news on that front: we sold it to Asimov’s SF Magazine. But vhat next?

When all else fails, I play with this hypercube puzzle I paid $100 for, in a way it’s like a Rubik’s cube, it’s called Melinda’s 2 x 2 x 2 x 2. It’s 3D-printed, with insanely strong magnets inside the individual cubelets to stick them together, so can, in effect, rotate the planes. I never did learn to solve a regular Rubik’s cube, but Melinda’s has the advantage that I can shatter it into cubelets and rebuild. Lots of interesting symmetries.

On Valentine’s Day, Sylvia made a big batch of cookie hearts. Wonderful. Here I’m eating one at my laptop in the Los Gatos Coffee Roaster café, a fave spot to hang.

I wrote story called “Juicy Ghosts”—couldn’t hack making it a novel like I was talking about, but I finished a story. I think I mentioned this one was about a guy assassinating an evil president via wasp larvae that our guy has grown inside his flesh? I waded into the story slowly, shallowly, careful of biting, stinging things. Not a great idea, but don’t know what else to do.

As I mentioned before, we’ve had torrents of rain the last six weeks or two months. Love it. I always get so excited about the rings that raindrops make in the puddle. Natural computation at its finest. Wind gusting 30 mph, rain sideways, 4 inches yesterday.

I went up to Lexington Reservoir, and yah, mon, it’s overflowing. The water rose, like, twenty-five feet in about three days. Smooth so-called laminar flow here.

I know a special lookout spot where you can see the true chaos of the flume. Paradise.

When I finished that assassin story, showed it to couple of friends, did some fixes, and sent it off to an SF zine. Not sure they’ll want to publish it. We’ll see where it ends up. Really the New Yorker should publish it. As if.

Dig the overflow scenes at the dam of Vasona Lake in Los Gatos. I like to think of natural processes as being computations. Those big churning flows…denser than any computers we can build.

Sylvia and I drove up to Terry Bisson’s to watch the Oscars with him and his family. Terry says he’s the world’s greatest unrecognized film critic. A lot of us feeling this way…

Now need something else to write. Like a junkie who keeps running out of his stash. Rooting for stories like a hog searching for truffles. I have an idea I might start on today.

Feeling unsettled and adrift these days. One of those periods when I start wondering if maybe I really am crazy. Going out in nature always helps.

Wonderful oak next door. The tracery of the branches.

I’ve been watching this fairly horrible Netflix series of six shows about Rajneesh in Oregon, “Wild Wild Country,” I hate just about every person in the doc by now, especially Sheela and that lawyer guy, so deeply full of BS, but kept wanting to see “how it comes out.” One of those shows that makes you feel diminished. I’m not sure I can face the sixth and last episode.

This is a photo I really like.  I’m making it into a painting right now.  Finally got back into my studio (the back yard) becasue it stopped raining today.

I’d like to write a story that’s a happy UFO 1950s transreal early autobio story. Or, really, any kind of story about my early childhood. In the evenings, before going to sleep, or in the mornings still in bed, I sometimes go into my memory bank and “walk around” our 620 Rudy Lane house that I grew up in, in Louisville, I walk around the house and around the back and front yards, with memories going off like landmines, or rather, memories opening up like the window flaps on an Advent calendar. Kind of an old-man thing to be thinking about, right? The guy in my story has a mean older brother who is a talking carrot. I suppose a bit of biotech went into growing the brother-thing.

I mean, really?  Is that all the  newspaper has to tell me?

The childhood UFO story isn’t gelling. Foraging for more story ideas. They pop out of the dirt like mushrooms in the rain.

I got really wet riding my bike to the Lexington dam to revisit the flume.

Nice night at the ballet with Sylvia.

I’ve turned to rereading William Gibson’s “Bridge” series, that is, Virtual Light, Idoru, and All Tomorrow’s Parties. Bill’s so good he makes me wonder why I even bother trying to write. This said, we don’t do exactly the same things, nor are we after exactly the same results, nor do we use the same types of characters, so there is room for me. If I ever write again, that is.

My friend and fan Chuck Shotton 3D-printed some UFOs shaped like the ones I write about, and each of them as a little flat battery and two diode-type lights, factory made in Shenzhen to flicker in interesting ways. Love these.  As you can see, they’re about twenty feet across.

Here’s a granddaughter with some balloons. A surprise party for our 85-year-old friend Gunnar. Rudy Jr. and his family happened to be there too. The three little kids loved doing a surprise party. And Gunnar really was surprised. Like witnessing a Platonic ideal, for the kids, the archetype know as “surprise birthday party.”

Despite my customary kvetching, I’ve got ten books coming out from Night Shade this year, with White Light and Saucer Wisdom this month! Details on the series.

“Wow” acrylic on canvas, February, 2019, 40” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

I finished a new painting called “Wow.” It’s a silhouette of one of my Wisconsin granddaughter standing in front of some blown art glass in a museum in Madison. I redid the profile a bunch of times. Drew a grid on a photo to help transfer the image by hand. I like how excited she looks—she was making a face for the picture.

With my Borderlands show over, I have a big stash of paintings in the basement.  Bargains galore. This one pinhead (Hi, Bart!) said he just wanted to buy the edges of the canvases, if I could cut them off and collage them together for him.  I might someday construct a painting like that, if all else fails.  But I’d be copying the edges, you understand, not mutilating the treasure trove.

One of my favorite neighborhood trees. The mossy crooked Y oak. With a girl and a dog nearby.

Different topic: Here’s a really crazy puzzle from my Hacker King pal Bill Gosper. What’s the next number? (Answer at the end of this blog post).
2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 31, 37, 71, 73, 79, 97, 113, 131, 199, 311, 337, 373, 733, 919, 991, ???

I was in the Cantor Museum Sylvia at Stanford yesterday or the day before, looking at their primo Jackson Pollock painting in the Anderson collection, Lucifer. Here’s a detail. His work has this fractal quality, in that the smaller bits work as well as the larger ones do. This particular painting he did in 1947, right at the start of his drip phase.

We walked around in the giant Serra sculpture they have at the Cantor, shaped like an eight, it’s called Sequence. Soothing to be in there. It was in the lobby of SFMOMA for the last couple of years, but it looks much better outdoors.

Something else I’ve been worrying about—a lot—is this currently hot computer data structure called blockchain.  It’s used by Bitcoin, and might have more applications.  See this article by Emily Su for possible use cases, but see Jimmy Song for grave implementation problems and see Kai Stinchcombe for full-on debunking disdain. I’m frantically researching blockchain, because I’m slated to give two talks at a blockchain conference in Miami Beach in April.

So I’m sweating about my talk, and I’ve been sweating—in parallel—about whether the people organizing the con were going to pay me in advance, like I asked them to. And for a couple of weeks that wasn’t happening, and I grew increasingly paranoid, seeing as how they’re a cryptocurrency-related company out of Hong Kong! (Visions of  Kowloon Walled City in Gibson’s All Tomorrow’s Parties.) But this morning my first payment came through, so I’m gonna do it.

I can’t really say much of anything fresh about blockchain, but I can spin out, I hope, a couple of amusing SFnal cyberpunk-type bizzaro use case scenarios. Indeed one of them relates to the story I’m summarizing just below, “Mary Falls.”

My foot is bigger than Sylvia’s foot. (Keen observation stored in blockchain link #00000000000002379818909797023978.)

Oh, what was I talking about?  Oh, yeah, “Mary Falls.”  I managed to start writing it yesterday.  An old woman dies and migrates into the digital afterworld under the auspices of a company called Juicy Ghosts. They fix her up with a material world peripheral of some kind, but the lady loses her control of this “body,” which is, lets say not a machine but a juicy-ghost organic peripheral—and then she has to accept an incarnation as a light-bulb switch. Or she has to work as an NPC (non-player character) in a videogame. And then, (John Shirley’s suggestion) she runs a drone herding sheep in New Zealand, or, no, she runs a ranger-drone in the Big Basin woods, electrically zapping dogs who get in there, but then she loses even that body, and has to transmogrify into a cascade in the Big Basin falls. But then, in the summer, the falls dry up, so she finds a life as a part of the slow shifting of the crystals in the sedimentary stone.

Yep, that’s a senior’s life in a nutshell.

Here’s my knee under the quilt on our bed day before yesterday. I was getting up the energy to go outside and paint…if the rain had  finally stopped, but it hadn’t stopped, so I wrote on my laptop for ahwile,  but yesterday the sun did come out, calloo callay! And I worked on my painting of the long cloud in that photo up the page somewhere.  Earlier in the blockchain.

Shot from inside a closing elevator.  Like, “Help!  Let me outta here!”

Oh! You’re waiting for the solution to Gosper’s great puzzle?  Well, the next number in the list is 1,111,111,111,111,111,111 that is, it’s the decimal number written as nineteen 1’s,  a bit larger than one quintillion, also known as “rep 19”. Why that number? Well each number in Gosper’s sequence is a prime number such that, if you list every possible ordering of that prime number’s digits, each of those digit=shuffled numbers is prime too. Some people call these “permutable primes” or “absolute primes.” And weirdly enough, no number between 991 and on past a quintilion to rep 19 is a permutable prime.  Fascinating, huh?  Who says mathematicians don’t know how to have a good time!

I’m thinking about writing an SF tale involving what we sometimes call digital immortality. It’s a theme I’ve often returned to, starting with the writing of my Software novel in 1979-1980. We’re almost at the point where a low-end cloud-based model of you is possible. At present these are thin, pixelated constructs with cardboard search-engine Eliza-type personalities. Call them toy ghosts. Later in this post I’ll get onto the topic of something richer, which I’ll call juicy ghosts.

Speaking of toy ghosts, I’ve often referred to this kind of emulation as a lifebox. You read my whole analysis of building lifeboxes online in the “Lifebox” section of my tome, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul.

I’ve actually constructed a rudimentary lifebox that weakly emulates me. See my interactive Search Rudy’s Lifebox page. Type, say, the words “software novel” into the Search box and press enter.

The Google-supported algorithm will throw up some ads as the first two or three results, but after that there’s good solid links into pages of my vast website www.rudyrucker.com. And not that there are pages and pages of search results, you can flip through them using the page numbers at the bottom of the list of results.

So, like I’m saying, if you put “software novel” in the search box, you’ll get links pages that involve my Software novel, which is, again, where my notion of the lifebox began.

Or if you especialy want to know about the lifebox concept, you might just put”lifebox” in the search box. In telling you this, I’m going meta on your ass.That is, I’m telling you to ask my lifebox page to find out what I think about the lifebox.

More fun: If you want know about the photo above, run the search on “Terence McKenna”. Or just plain “Terence” will do. Even though he’s dead, he’s still my friend.

This weekend I was talking to my son Rudy Jr. (CEO of Monkeybrains.net, who host this blog) about where lo-res current-tech cloud-based toy ghosts would be hosted. By hosting a ghost, I mean two things.

[This is not Rudy Jr., this is a big wave surfer called John Bowling whom we know. I like the Viking hat so much that I put it into a Surfin’ SF story I recently wrote with Marc Laidlaw.]

(Ram) Store and maintain a large data base (what I’ve sometimes called a lifebox) of the person, along with the code for a program that can use the data to emulate the personality.

(Crunch) Provide processing power to run a simple-ass data-intensive personality emulation code on the data base.

[Yes that’s a toy ghost version of me, age 17, in the Chevalier Literary Magazine 1963, Louisville, Kentucky.]

For awhile I had a retrograde notion that some companies like Google or Facebook or Amazon might host toy ghosts on enormous supercomputers. What I was calling silos. But that’s an outdated way to think. Rudy Jr. pointed out that most storage and processing is distributed, with chunks of it scattered across a zillion nodes.

Rudy also made the point that there’s always going to be limited space on the nodes—not enough to immortalize everyone— so a kind of fitness function determines who gets to have, and to keep, a toy ghost. That is, if a toy ghost is to continue to living in the internet cloud, people have to be looking at it and interacting with it. The system’s automatic garbage removal will prune away all traces of a ghost that’s rarely visited.

This a bit like the author’s perennial quandary: Which books remain in print? Which books continue being stocked in libraries? Which books remain readily accessible online? And pirated editions are better than none!

[I happened to see this on a wall in Los Gatos by random coincidence. To me it feels relevant, because my friend Greg Gibson in Massachusetts son Galen was killed in a school shooting some years ago. Greg is currently running a GoFundMe to support the publicizing of an unusual gun control video ad that Greg is working on. Check out the campaign and see Greg’s moving pitch video.]

It may be that an internet toy ghost is designed with an “instinct for self-preservation,” so it’ll promote itself. Similar to the original philosophy-of-language Richard-Dawkins-type meaning of “meme,” a sticky, catchy, useful thought that impels people to pass it on to others, thus reproducing itself. The older notion of meme kind of assumes that the meme has some heavy intellectual content or survival value.

These days an “internet meme” just means something like a phrase or image that people repost. Cat pictures, for Christ’s sake. But I admit I’m intrigued by the subcategory of “dank memes,” which seem to be flashes that make stoners laugh.

[Frames from the immortal Will Elder’s early Mad magazine strip, “Ping Pong” (parody of “King Kong”).]

A toy ghost might say, “I seem to be a meme. Kan I has cheezeburger?”

How do you kill a toy ghost that lives on the internet? Say it’s an emulation of a martyred rebel, or of a dead oppressor. Some faction wants that toy ghost gone. How to quash it?

(a) We might invoke the notion of a smart malware bot that finds and erases all scraps of info relating to that toy ghost. I remember a scene in a Bill Gibson novel where an obnox virus-thing slides under the door of a virtual room, and a shape like a cockroach eats it, and one of the guys says the cockroach had “offered criticism.”

But in practice I’m not sure if/how that would work. The scraps of the toy ghost could disguise themselves. It’s hard or impossible to search the whole web and remove all traces of something. And the ghost cold be continually redistributing and coding and re-encrypting itself. And it sounds kind of boring to read about.

[My old pal Eddie Marritz the famous cinematographer.]

(b) Or the oppressor might make sure the targeted toy ghost doesn’t show up in common search engines. (Eyeball kick: an online program that searches for specific toy ghosts might be called “The Book of the Living Dead.”) If you can hack the search engines you can make a given ghost be effectively invisible, And by reducing its registered hits you make it likelier to be pruned.

Like if the magazines refuse to review your books, you’re more likely to go out of print.

(c) Another way to lower the effectiveness of a ghost, it to make sure that whenever the ghost is accessed, a shitty stupid parasite shows up with it. Like an unshakable troll commenter or spammy-ad link. Degrading the ghosts’ reputation, making it be treated as malware or as spam.

Toy ghosts have wireless contact with Earth peripherals. This is a move in both Wm. Gibson’s The Peripheral, and in Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway.. Your toy ghost might talk to you on the phone. Like a type of smart cloud storage. Or a highly personalized assistant.

A ghost can be more autonomous and robust if it’s a biocomputation than if it’s an internet chip-based and system-moderated computation. So escaping from the digital to the analog would greatly empower a ghost. And being juicy or biological makes a ghost safe.

[Great painting by Stanley Whitney in the Harlem Studio Museum exhibit at the MoAD (Museum of the African Diaspora) in SF, right around the corner from SFMOMA]

If you’re juicy, you’re “in the wild” and not living on a human-built net by the sufferance of the internet operating systems and protocols. You aren’t subject to the ravages of the mindless internet pruning bots.

And the trick of converting a toy ghost to a juicy ghost is something that a rebel programmer called Gee Willikers has mastered. He found the trick of ghost migration while he was designing the weaponized wasps. In the process of his biohacking to create the Turing wasps, Gee Willikers learned to program living organisms. The organism runs a program on its neurons, in its hormone flows, in its DNA, it’s quantum computations, whatever. It’s tricky to port a block of info as large as a toy ghost onto an organism. The organism has to be temporarily paralyzed, like with cone shell toxin. Not even breathing.

My character Curtis Winch is going to make a really aggro move against a certain evil politician called Ross Treadle on the occasion of that guy’s third Presidential Inauguration. Curtis is going to use a tweaked, weaponized “Turing wasp” to temporarily paralyze Ross Treadle

[This is my artist friend Vernon Head with me at the SFMOMA Magritte Show. I almost feel like this image is a dank meme. :)]

And then one of the Turing wasps installs a copy of Curtis’s online toy ghost within Treadle’s bio processes. And then a rich new Curtis Winch will awake, hosted by Treadle’s body. And this won’t be just a chintzy toy ghost. No, man, this virtual Curtish Winch be a juicy ghost. And a bio-hosted juicy ghost, is much richer than a toy ghost. The “vital force” is real. It involves the richness of structure and function in living cells.

And now, having parasitized our illegitimate “President,” our juicy ghost is in a position to kick some serious butt!

I’m really into the gnarl of the rainy weather these days.

Oak trees are in some sense smarter than other trees. They don’t just send a long branch *doink* straight out. They think it over. A little this way, a little that way, paying attention to the amount of light and air in each direction. Wiggly, man.

Whenever the rain gets heavy, I skeeve on down into this gully across the street from my house. It “belongs” to some guy in a big house up on a hill, but he doesn’t notice me. I’m down there with what’s sometimes called the “anima,” that is, the “spirit of place.” She’s singing here.

I’m having a big art show at the beloved Borderlands Cafe this month. 25 new paintings, all made since 2015. I made a poster for it. I gave a reading from my recent novel Return to the Hollow Earth at the start of the show…you can hear the reading on Rudy’s Podcasts.

Also I made a video of a little tour I gave the audience. I had the video camera dangling from my neck, so all the setting shots are of legs and chairs, but oh well….it’s hella Rudoid. It’s got a good pro-quality tape of my voice and spliced in hi-res shots of the paintings.

It felt really good to see all my paintings on the walls, and everyone was nice to me.

Rudy Jr. and his friend Devin helped me hang the paintings which, at this point, is more than I can handle. Standing on a stepladder and reaching is contraindicated for an old coot like me.

Cory Doctorow, V. Vale, Paul Mavrides and Michael Blumlein were among the celebs in attendance. Blumlein shown above. So many times I’ve seen these guys at my Borderlands shows. Paul M. always gives me good art advice.

The last show was in 2015. Time flies. Actually, if you really have some time to kill, you can see videos of all my painting shows on my paintings page. Department of “You Watch It, I Can’t.”

Special shout-out to Jude Feldman, who’s worked with me on all my Borderlands events, going back to, hell, the late 1980s, back when she and Alan Beatts had the store in a basement of a brick building off Hayes St., as I recall. Jude might be the only person I’ve ever known who never shows signs of impatience or irritation. And she does this while dealing with SF fans and—much harder—writers. Incredible. And Alan’s a big help too.

Back to the rain. Dig the umbrella. What a great shape.

And these geese looming on the horizon (the dam at Vasona Lake). Saw a trailer for Godzilla: King of the Monsters yesterday. Looked a bit like this?

A couple of weeks ago, Sylvia and I went to the Women’s March in SF. I love these marches. I feel safe there, surrounded by like-minded people. Sylvia knit a bunch of pink “pussy hats” for the first march a couple of years ago, and now we’re down to one. I like the way one ear goes up and one ear goes down.

I borrowed the hat and wore it atop my Stetson for awhile. Once I was wearing it, Sylvia started calling it a “pig hat.” I do like to draw pig ears that particular way, one up and one down.

I like this shot at the parade, the woman and the reflection.

And this one is perfect. The women not taking any more guff.

Cool visionary-eyes graffiti on Market Street with the women going by.

Says it all. But *sob* why does “dick” have to be a bad word? Well, somehow it does have a really specific meaning in terms of male personality traits… Tyrant, mansplainer, tetchy, bullying, lacking in empathy. A dick. Sigh.

After the parade, Sylvia and hit an immense Art Fair on a giant pier, maybe #35. Someone had drawn an immense wave made of hair, like 20 feet long.

On a rare sunny day we made it down to Cruz, as is our wont. Third Ave beach was covered with driftwood…really big driftwood including logs. I don’t quite know how it all gets there…comes down the San Lorenzo River, I suppose, but usually that river looks so shallow and unassuming. Ants that we are, we humans tend to make little houses (nests) out of the wood.

This photo is called “Cruz Crowd rift”, but I don’t remember what it is or why I took it. Oops, It’s called “Cruz Crow Drift,” and of course it’s a crow on a Cruz-ant-erected driftwood log. Love the hierophantic look it all. “This strange riparian civilization, now lost in the mists of time. In erecting this monument, it may have been that the mysterious Cruzans were…”

Up the hill the other day in another sunny moment. Spring just around the corner. Love how green it gets. The plants are so frikkin grateful for water.

Went to Santana Row in San Ho to see Cold War yesterday, what a great movie. These two guys welding something to the window outside.

Dig the august Kenneth Turan’s review of Cold War. Kenny was my roommate at Swarthmore College about fifty-five years ago. Quote from the review:

“Given Cold War’s emotional and narrative complexity, it’s a measure of how meticulously made it is that the film clocks in at just under 90 minutes. Working closely with cinematographer Zal, Pawlikowski has pared away extraneous story moments and seen to it that the dazzling cinematography and ardent acting are in perfect balance.”

Yes! I get so sick of bloated two-and-a-half hour movies with scene after scene of people saying the same things to each other. And long conversations to explain every transition. In Cold War, one second the man and woman are looking at each other from afar, and in the next cut they’re embracing and going all the way. Get on with it! Lots and lots of story to tell.

The ending of Cold War made me so sad. The two now-doomed lovers are sitting on a bench by a rural road crossing. And she says. “Let’s go to the other side. The view is better.” And they walk out of the frame, and you realize this is a visual metaphor, and “the other side” is the Land of the Dead and they’re gone for good. Oh, Zula! (Short for Zuzanna.)

[A mossy thumb as the tree grasps the ground.]

It’s been raining again for two or three days. I went up into the woods behind St Joseph’s Hill, at the top of our street, and made my way partway up a creek bed that I like to explore. No real path along the edge, lots of rocks, branches, soft soil. I use two walking sticks, and wear boots.

Walking there with the stream full, I revelled in the physical chaos. The multiple-pendulum action of the waving branches. The intractably complex analog computations of the water’s flow. The 3D fractal clouds above, the lichen on the trunks and stones below. The moss with its endlessly various detail. The banks of bubbles around the splash-pools at the bases of cataracts.

I looked for a while at one floating pile of cataract bubbles, the pile continually replenished by new bubbles entering it from beneath. As some of the smaller bubbles below pop, they add volume to larger bubbles above. The biggest bubble grows and grows—then pops. Some of the big guys manage to last a little longer by somehow managing to shrink just a bit…not sure how they do this move. Maybe the seeming shrinkage is an illusion, it’s just that they ink a bit deeper into the pile of lesser bubbles below.

Groping for a metaphor about poeple in society here. The big bubbles are like the richer or more influential folks. The bubble pile is also a bit like the cells in my body. Nothing is as simple as it seems—and you’re frikkin dreaming if you imagine an animated 3D computer graphic can emulate our wonderful, chaotic, dripping wet Gaia.

And the cataract is so…joyous. Rapidly, but without haste, it pours down, multi-stranded, grooved, stirring up the basin, making bubbles, utterly chaotic and unpredictable.

[My old friend the mossy alligator log. He looks different but the same.]

Someone might ask me: “What is this ”˜chaos’ you’re always talking about?”

A chaotic process is something that’s non-random in the sense that it’s governed by natural law, but it’s of sufficient complexity that it’s detailed behavior is wholly unpredictable by any devices we can conceive of building. The only practical way to emulate a chaotic process is to build a physical copy of it. Or just watch the original copy that you already have. It’ll compute its state at time T by…running until time T.

The only way to find out precisely where your head will be at tomorrow is to wait until tomorrow. Because you’re chaotic. And remember, chaos is normal, chaos is the way the world naturally is, chaos is health.

What makes chaos different from brute randomness, is that, in a chaotic system, the overall behaviors and the general patterns are drawn from a limited repertoire, patterns familiar and known and expected—-although, as always, the precise details of each instant cannot be anticipated. By “general patterns” I mean things like the wagging of branches, the nodding of clusters of leaves, the bubbles at the base of the waterfall, the bumpy flow lines on the surface of a rushing stream, the back and forth oscillation of a flow, the drifting of a cloud, and so on.

[Crotch of tree. Bikini bottom.]

Human behavior has this same chaotic quality. The fine details are unpredictable. The moment-to-moment evolution of someone’s moods—–quite unfathomable. But a given individual’s overall emotional climate become knowable, and the full gamut of personalities to be found across the race is also a fact of nature that everyone learns.

A bucolic rainbow over a stray blooming plum tree above Silicon Valley’s San Jose, yes.