I’ve been rereading David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus, Infinite Jest, I have an ebook of the 20th Anniversary Edition. I read the first edition when it came out, in 1995. I was still drinking and smoking pot then. But the Infinite Jest makes sobriety seem both feasible and cool and interesting—and it was one of the things that influenced me to stop drinking and getting high in 1996, a few months after I first read it.

While reading the novel, I tend to skip about half of the sections and focus on what I consider to be the “good stuff,” that is, the parts about the recovering addict Don Gately. He’s one of various threads in the novel, with three other threads being a pot-smoking tennis player Hal Incandanza, a disfigured Southern beauty and underground radio personality and crack addict Joelle van Dyne, and this terrorist French-Canadian Marathe who’s in a wheelchair and is trying to get hold of a movie by Incandenza Senior that you can’t stop watching. The movie might be kind of a metaphor for drug addiction.

It’s very hard to navigate Infinite Jest, as the given table of contents is, well, willfully screw-you stupid. It’s mostly just made-up names of years, and gives you almost no guidance. I found a really useful description of the sections online by Steve Russillo…scroll down the page that pops up (and there’s other useful links on this page).

This time around, Fall/Winter 2018, I read Infinite Jest on a Kindle, which in some ways is good, as I can make the font big, and I can highlight memorable passages to save. The Search function on the Kindle Paperwhile kind of eats it, as it just dumps out whatever, a thousand hits, for, like, the name Gately. Supposedly there’s an “X-Ray” function, but I only saw it working once on Infinite Jest in my life, and that was for about ten seconds. To focus on my man Gately, I just kept going back to a print out of Steve Rusillo’s descriptive table of contents, and deducing what page he was next on, and using the Kindle Go To | Page dialog.

Anyway, here’s some passages I happened to flag because I thought they were interesting or fun.  And keep in mind that my highlights are skewed by my personal interests and obsessions, and that someone else might select out a complete different set—Infinite Jest is an exceedingly rich and in-my-father’s-house-are-many-mansions-type book. The print book’s page number appears at the start of each passage. And, Wallace style, I’ve squeezed in a few italicized comments here and there.

And as usual, I’ve spaced out the text with a bunch of my photos.

Excerpts

19. A guy waiting to score pot. The insect on the shelf was back. It didn’t seem to do anything. It just came out of the hole in the girder onto the edge of the steel shelf and sat there. After a while it would disappear back into the hole in the girder, and he was pretty sure it didn’t do anything in there either. He felt similar to the insect inside the girder his shelf was connected to, but was not sure just how he was similar.

82. A theory of tennis. Seemed intuitively to sense that it was a matter not of reduction at all, but—perversely—of expansion, the aleatory flutter of uncontrolled, metastatic growth—each well-shot ball admitting of n possible responses, n-squared possible responses to those responses, and on into what Incandenza would articulate to anyone who shared both his [math and tennis] backgrounds as a Cantorian continuum of infinities of possible move and response, Cantorian and beautiful because infoliating, contained, this diagnate infinity of infinities of choice and execution, mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained, bounded by the talent and imagination of self and opponent, bent in on itself by the containing boundaries of skill and imagination that brought one player finally down, that kept both from winning, that made it, finally, a game, these boundaries of self.

85. Checking into a detox clinic. They gave him slippers of green foam-rubber with smiley-faces embossed on the tops. The detox’s in-patients are encouraged to call these Happy Slippers. The staff refer to the footwear in private as “pisscatchers.”

91. A French-Canadian terrorist’s remark. We have, as one will say, larger seafood to cook.’

93. Hamsters on a rampage. The expression on the hamsters’ whiskered faces is businesslike and implacable—it’s that implacable-herd expression.

158. Beat Zen & tennis. He knew what the Beats know and what the great tennis player knows, son: learn to do nothing, with your whole head and body, and everything will be done by what’s around you.

170. A nerdy M.I.T. radio station. [The psychedelic drug] DMZ is sometimes also referred to in some metro Boston chemical circles as Madame Psychosis, after a popular very-early-morning cult radio personality on M.I.T.’s student-run radio station WYYY-109, ‘Largest Whole Prime on the FM Band,’

996. A footnote on DMZ. An Italian lithographer, who’d ingested DMZ once, made a lithograph comparing himself on DMZ to a piece of like Futurist sculpture, plowing at high knottage through time itself, kinetic even in stasis, plowing temporally ahead, with time coming off him like water in sprays and wakes.

178. Fop angry at a fellow resident of a recovery home. I respectfully ask that she be kicked out of here on her enormous rear-end. Let her go back to whatever fork-wielding district she came from, with her Hefty bag full of gauche clothes.

179. The previously undocumented da-da-da speech tic. “Alls I know is I put a Hunt’s Pudding Cup in the resident fridge like I’m supposed to at 1300 and da-da-da and at 1430 I come down all primed for pudding that I paid for myself and it’s not there and McDade comes on all concerned and offers to help me look for it and da-da, except if you look I look and here’s the son of a whore got this big thing of pudding on his chin.”

180. Man questioning the validity of a 12-step program. You’re ordering me to pray? Because I allegedly have a disease? I dismantle my life and career and enter nine months of low-income treatment for a disease, and I’m prescribed prayer? Does the word retrograde signify? Am I in a sociohistorical era I don’t know about? What exactly is the story here?’

182. Nerd pain. M.I.T. students tend to carry their own special psychic scars: nerd, geek, dweeb, wonk, fag, wienie, four-eyes, spazola, limp-dick, needle-dick, dickless, dick-nose, pencil-neck; [and] getting your violin or laptop TP or entomologist’s kill-jar broken over your large head by thick-necked kids on the playground…

193. More on that M.I.T. radio station. Mario’s still listening to the WYYY nightly sign-off, which takes a while because they not only list the station’s kilowattage specs but go through proofs for the formulae by which the specs are derived.

215. A guy scores DMZ from some Canadians. God alone knew where these clowns had acquired thirteen incredibly potent 50-mg. artifacts of the B.S. 1970s. But the good news is they were Canadians, and like fucking Nucksters about almost anything they had no idea what what they were in possession of was worth [Wallace is insanely harsh on Canadians,often calling them Nucks, as in Canuck.], as it slowly emerged. Pemulis, w/ aid of 150 mg. of time-release Tenuate Dospan, almost danced a little post-transaction jig on his way up the steps of the otiose Cambridge bus, feeling the way W. Penn in his Quaker Oats hat in like the 16th century must have felt trading a few trinkets to babe-in-the-woods Natives for New Jersey, he imagines, doffing the nautical cap to two nuns in the aisle.

219. Party’s End. One of the saddest times Joelle van Dyne ever feels anywhere is that invisible pivot where a party ends—even a bad party—that moment of unspoken accord when everyone starts collecting his lighter and date, jacket or greatcoat, his one last beer hanging from the plastic rind’s five rings, says certain perfunctory things to the hostess in a way that acknowledges their perfunctoriness without seeming insincere, and leaves, usually shutting the door. When everybody’s voices recede down the hall. When the hostess turns back in from the closed door and sees the litter and the expanding white V of utter silence in the party’s wake.

221. Joelle prepares to OD on crack, in lovely rain. She likes the wet walk for this, everything milky and halated through her veil’s damp linen, the brick sidewalks of Charles St. unchipped and impersonally crowded, her legs on autopilot, she a perceptual engine, holding the collar of her overcoat closed at her poncho’s neckline in a way that lets her hold the veil secure against her face with a finger on her chin, thinking always about what she has in her purse, stopping in at a discount tobacconist and buying a quality cigar in a glass tube and then a block later placing the cigar inside carefully in among the overflowing waste atop a corner receptacle of pine-green mesh, but keeps the tube, puts the glass tube in her purse, can hear the rain’s thup on tight umbrellas and hear it hiss in the street, and can see droplets broken and regathering on her polyresin coat, cars sheening by with the special lonely sound of cars in rain, wipers making black rainbows on taxis’ shining windshields.

241. Pynchonian description of a power station. [The school] overlooks the steely gray tangle of Sunstrand’s transformers and high-voltage grids and coaxial chokers strung with beads of ceramic insulators, with not one Sunstrand smokestack anywhere in sight but a monstrous mega-ohm insulator-cluster at the terminus of a string of signs trailing in from the northeast, each sign talking with many Ø’s about how many annular-generated amps are waiting underground for anyone who digs or in any way dicks around, with hair-raising nonverbal stick-figure symbols of somebody with a shovel going up like a Kleenex in the fireplace.

272. Our hero Don Gately is in recovery. Gately often feels a terrible sense of loss, narcotics-wise, in the A.M., still, even after this long clean. His sponsor over at the White Flag Group says some people never get over the loss of what they’d thought was their one true best friend and lover; they just have to pray daily for acceptance and the brass danglers to move forward through the grief and loss, to wait for time to harden the scab.

290. A beatiful Southern girl. The big hair was red-gold and the skin peachy-tinged pale and arms freckled and zygomatics indescribable and her eyes an extra-natural HD green.

345. An addict’s career in a nutshell. Fun with the Substance, then very gradually less fun, then significantly less fun because of like blackouts you suddenly come out of on the highway going 145 kph with companions you do not know,

348. Worries that twelve-step groups might be cultish scams. [Was it] a cover for some glazed and canny cult-type thing where they’ll keep you sober by making you spend twenty hours a day selling cellophane cones of artificial flowers on the median strips of heavy-flow roads.

351. A recovering Irishman rejoices at having a normal bowel movement. “T’were a tard in t’loo. A rail tard. T’were farm an’ teppered an’ aiver so jaintly aitched. T’luked… conestroocted instaid’ve sprayed. T’luked as ay fel’t’in me ’eart Good ’imsailf maint a tard t’luke. Me friends, this tard’o’mine practically had a poolse.”

354. The long-term-sober AA crew. The old ruined grim calm longtimers in [the] White Flag [group], ‘The Crocodiles’ the less senior White Flaggers call them, because the old twisted guys all tend to sit clustered together with hideous turd-like cigars in one corner of the Provident cafeteria under a 16 x 20 framed glossy of crocodiles or alligators sunning themselves on some verdant riverbank somewhere, with the maybe-joke legend OLD-TIMERS CORNER somebody had magisculed across the bottom of the photo, and these old guys cluster together under it, rotating their green cigars in their misshapen fingers and discussing completely mysterious long-sober matters out of the sides of their mouths. Gately sort of fears these old AA guys with their varicose noses and flannel shirts and white crew cuts and brown teeth and coolly amused looks of appraisal, feels like a kind of low-rank tribal knucklehead in the presence of stone-faced chieftains who rule by some unspoken shamanistic fiat, and so of course he hates them, the Crocodiles, for making him feel like he fears them, but oddly he also ends up looking forward a little to sitting in the same big nursing-home cafeteria with them and facing the same direction they face, every Sunday, and a little later finds he even enjoys riding at 30 kph tops in their perfectly maintained 25-year-old sedans when he starts going along on White Flag [visits] to other Boston AA Groups.

355. The fates of the guys who don’t stay sober. The Crocodiles talk about how they can’t count the number of guys that’ve Come In for a while and drifted away and gone back Out There and died, or not gotten to die. They even point some of these guys out—gaunt gray spectral men reeling on sidewalks with all that they own in a trashbag—as the White Flaggers drive slowly by in their well-maintained cars. Old emphysemic Francis G. in particular likes to slow his LeSabre down at a corner in front of some jack-legged loose-faced homeless fuck who’d once been in AA and drifted cockily out and roll down his window and yell ‘Live it up!’

445. Metaphor for the ubiquitous presence of the One. This wise old whiskery fish swims up to three young fish and goes, ‘Morning, boys, how’s the water?’ and swims away; and the three young fish watch him swim away and look at each other and go, ‘What the fuck is water?’ and swim away.

449. Gately’s cool nightmare. And his dreams late that night … seem to set him under a sort of sea, at terrific depths, the water all around him silent and dim and the same temperature he is.

464. Gately applying to live in the recovery house. Gately scratched at her dog’s stomach and said he wasn’t sure if he was desperate about anything except wanting to somehow stop getting in trouble for things he usually afterward couldn’t even remember he did them.

824. Colorful character in the recovery house. The limbo man. He drank half a liter of Cuerva at some … Interdependence Day office party and everything like that and got in some insane drunken limbo-dance challenge with a rival executive and tried to like limbo under a desk or a chair or something insanely low, and got his spine all fucked up in a limbo-lock, maybe permanently: so the newest new guy scuttles around the Ennet House living room like a crab, his scalp brushing the floor and his knees trembling with effort.

855. Noobs respecting Crocodiles. Newly sober people are awfully vulnerable to the delusion that people with more sober time than them are romantic and heroic, instead of clueless and terrified and just muddling through day-by-day like everybody else in AA is (except maybe the fucking Crocodiles [The very long-term sobriety people sitting in the rear corner of the meeting]).

860. Homily. It’s a gift, the Now: it’s AA’s real gift: it’s no accident they call it The Present.

980. Book ends with flashback to Gately’s last binge. Someone shoots him up with an opiate called Sunshine.The air in the room got overclear, a glycerine shine, colors brightening terribly. If colors themselves could catch fire. … The very air of the room bulged. It ballooned. … Gately felt less high than disembodied. It was obscenely pleasant. … As the floor wafted up and C’s grip finally gave, the last thing Gately saw was a [guy] bearing down with [a] held square and he looked into the square and saw clearly a reflection of his own big square pale head with its eyes closing as the floor finally pounced. [Final sentence:] And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out. [SUCH a great ending!]

My Reviews of Wallace

I wrote a favorable review of Wallace’s first novel The Broom of the System for The Washington Post Book World in 1987. I was really excited by his work, he seemed like the next generation of cool. A new Pynchon. He was sixteen years younger than me. I hoped he and I might eventually be friends, like I am with a number of SF writers and other underground types.

I liked a lot of Wallace’s essays and stories, too. He developed a great and unique colloquial literary voice, this engaging, conversational modern style, which has in fact influenced me to some extent. And of course Infinite Jest is a masterpiece, a work of genius.

I disliked his 2003 nonfiction book Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity, which was about transfinite numbers—which is the field in which I got my Ph. D., and which I wrote my best-selling nonfiction Infinity and the Mind about, not to mention my novel White Light.

I felt Wallace didn’t do justice to the material, and that he spoke too slightingly of my hero Georg Cantor and my mentor Kurt Gödel. And I was annoyed at Wallace’s editor for not doing a better job in fact-checking the book, which does have a few glaring mathematical errors. I actually had a chance to tell this to the editor in advance and I wanted to help with the problem, but the guy said, nah, it’s fine like this.

When Science magazine asked me to write about the book, I wrote a harsh review. The review was kind over-the-top, but in a way it was funny, perhaps a bit Wallace-like, and everything I wrote was factual, but I regret it. I now think that Wallace might not have been all that mentally together when he wrote that book, and probably he wrote it on a brutally tight deadline, so I should have cut him more slack.

I wish he was still around, still rocking the boat. A suicide like Wallace’s is so hard to understand. Like Vincent van Gogh, or Diane Arbus. A creative genius, at the peak of their career—and they can’t take it. Clinical depression is a bitch. But his work lives on. Infinite Jest is [as Wallace himself might say] like a vast, gnarly, Mandelbrot-set-like fractal, and people can crawl into it and spelunk and space-out and chuckle and root around for many decades to come.

It’s been about six weeks since my last post. With Return to the Hollow Earth published, I’m kind of drifting. I did two new paintings last month, we had Thanksgiving here, and before that I did a trip to Miami and Key West. I’ll start with the paintings, then do Santa Cruz, then Miami, and then Key West. Going backwards in time, more or less.

“Dot the Eye” oil on canvas, October, 2018, 30” x 24”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

Here I just wanted to paint, with no content. I went for a puzzle grid of rectangles with scumbled messy colors in each one. I put a squiggle in most of the boxes, kind of like Sanskrit or, more fancifully, like High Martian. If I didn’t like a squiggle, I rubbed it off, leaving colorful debris, and then I’d do a new squiggle. I called the painting Dot the Eye because I put a pupil in that small white patch. What does the painting mean? Well, can’t you read High Martian? It says “I like squiggles and colors.”

“My Flag” oil on canvas, November, 2018, 30” x 24”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

This was a follow-up to “Dot The Eye.” I took the grid pattern from “Dot the Eye” and flipped it over. So “My Flag” is kind of a mirror image. I painted it on Election Day, thus the title. Regarding the imagery, this time I was using really thick and heavy amounts of paint, extreme impasto, and I held myself back from smoothing the paint over. I deliberately left it rough, and with the colors not mixed within each rectangle, leaving a spontaneous ab-ex paint pattern in place.

Okay, now let’s move on to Santa Cruz, Miami, and Key West!

Rudy Jr. Georgia, and their families were here for Thanksgiving. A big time. We went down to Cruz on the rainy day after Thanksgiving, it was soft and mellow in the damp air. Some nice big logs on the beach.

Rudy Jr. and I rolled a log stub down to the edge of the surf, and the five grandkids stood on it. What a sight. I’m lucky.

Here’s Grandpa.

We stopped by the tiny Surfing Museum in the little lighthouse on the point by Steamers Lane. There’s a particular handboard there that intrigues me, I’ve looked at it many time. The one writing project I’ve been into of late is a story called “Surfers at the End of Time,” which I’m writing with my old partner in gnarl, Marc Laidlaw, who currently resides by the beach in Kauai. We wanted to our characters Zep and Del to be able to surf through time (whatever the eff that means, but never mind, it’s science fiction). And I fixated on this particular teardrop-like handboard. It’s a time machine!

We’re so happy for rainy days in California just now. The first rain since last year.

Here’s the Vizcaya mansion in Miami. Love the light. Why were we in Miami?

Well, Sylvia and I flew to Florida for the Miami Book Fair. A random invite, via my 4D scholar friend Christopher White, author of Other Worlds, about 4D space and the spiritual impulse.

I presented about Return to the Hollow Earth. Underwhleming. I’d prepared slides, but didn’t have a really smooth talk, and I only had ten or fifteen minutes to talk in. I did manage to get a few laughs. Sadly, the fair organizers had failed to get any of my Return to the Hollow Earth books to sell on the spot. But I handed out bookmarks with the the URL for the book’s page. I’ll podcast the talk later this week.

As I was saying, one of the sights S & I checked out was this Italianate mansion Vizcaya by Coconut Grove, south of Miami. Great garden. This particular spot here, with the boxy shrubs, I’d like to be buried there. With alligators and technicolor lizards nosing up my remains. But not yet. Who knows, I may yet sell some books.

The guy who built this mansion was a lifelong bachelor called Deere—of harvesting machine fame. Kind of a Citizen Kane routine, get a bunch of European stuff and load on the class! He had a stone gondola installed at his waterfront, I guess you could lounge on it while bathing, really cool. Dig the striped poles, just like in Venice.

The Miami Book Fair organized a party for the authors at this super deluxe spot called the Standard Spa Hotel, across the bay from Miami on the island that is Miami Beach. It felt a scene in Antonioni’s movies “La Notte” or “L’Eclisse”. S & I haven’t been to nearly enough parties like this in our lives.

We never could seem to find an SF Union Square type or an NYC Fifth Avenue type “downtown” in Miami. Did catch a good meal and some music in Little Havana. And Miami is a great graffiti town. This pumpkin appeared in lots of places. Hard to see the detail here, but it’s kind of about to eat a cop who’s giving a ticket beneath the Miami Sun Hotel.

We wandered into a Cuban diner and I had a very good “Cuban sandwich,” which includes pork and ham. Culinary genius. I like the dead, small city look of the street outside. Reminds me of Louisville in the 50s & 60s.

They blast up or quarry out “coral stone,” maybe from blocks by the beach. With these designs that we biomimetic computer graphics types called Turing patterns. Activator inhibitor algorithms. Nice to see some out there in the world “on the hoof.”

This is a cool illusion-type photo. It’s rotated 90 degrees, and what it “really” is a graffiti design over some stairs, reflected in a puddle. But when it’s rotated the stairs still look like stairs, which kind of hides the fact that its rotated, but then the reflection part looks like…whoah!

We checked out the Design District area of Miami, kind of a Rodeo Drive thing, with boring ultra deluxe standard brand stores. But the architecture was very cool. The best thing was parking garage for the Institute for Contemporary Art museum, four stories high, covered with something like a Jim Woodring mural, made of embossed 3D parts, heavy pasted-on glyphs, and with huge rococo pillars at the bottom—not exactly pillars, more like the figures on ships. Insane. Very 22nd Century. I didn’t get a picture of it. The Institute for Contemporary Art itself didn’t have much in it. But in their garden I got a nice shot of the glass wall and the cloud-live sky.

Professor Rucker, wobbly on his pins, happy with a giant mural of math, in a super-graffitistic neighborhood called Wynwood.

Crazy, crazy shit in Wynwood. These eyes, so wild with, like Arabic writing on them and the collapsed fence.

An dig this graffitized Senior Center. The old lady still kickin’ it, and the checks on her coat are…Cuban dancers. And her blouse is just spray can squiggles. I’ve never seen a graffiti this strong.

A special selection of the Wynwood graffiti are set off in an area called Wynwood Walls, kind of like a gallery, although deep down there’s a really violent self-contradiction in gallerizing graffiti. But, anyway, they had some good stuff. I like the *duh*-type whale wearing pants.

And this piece, a cross between Cthulhu and and elefump, I mean heffalump, I mean ole Jumbo. Reminded me of Charlie Stross’s new novel The Labyrinth Index which I was reading with huge enjoyment as an ebook in FLA. Stross actually has Cthulhu taking over the Republican party, and he’s not far wrong…

And here’s a whole effin building covered with the urban blight of graffiti. Mother far effin out.

Dawn over Miami Beach. SUCH lovely clouds in Florida, so big and meaty, towering up, big old anvils, the rain comes and goes, my heart skips a beat.

I flew out a little early and drove down to Key West on my own. I kept not finding a place to snorkel, so on my way back to Miami from Key West, I did a snorkel outing off Islamorada Key, the second big key down from the top. I paid a guy a couple of hundred bucks to boat me three miles out and essentially throw me overboard near a rusty, steel frame structure on a six foot deep shoal, the tower is called Alligator Lighthouse. Like a gangland hit, it was, being put in the water there. All that was missing was the cement overshoes.

I’d only wanted to go one mile out, to the Cheeca Rocks, but the water was turbid, so the boatman points out to this thing like a little oil derrick, or Eiffel Tower, on the horizon, and we plow out there. Saw stacks and stacks of fish, yaar. I was having trouble keeping it together in the water, as the sea was rough—three foot waves. I was ready to puke from the ride out, and my heart was pounding really hard…I kind of thought I might die. But it was worth it, in a somewhat sad and lonely way. By then I’d been in the Keys four days, and I was missing having Sylvia with me.

On the way out of Key West I stopped at this Episcopal church, kind of a cathedral, called Santa Maria maybe. The whole time in Key West, I’d been thinking about my father, who, when he was about sixty, left my mother and took off on a road trip with a woman and spent some time in Key West. He really liked it there. He was drinking a lot, and Key West is a drinkers’ town. I lit a candle for him here.

I myself don’t drink anymore, but I stopped in at the Green Parrot, one of the older bars in Key West, if not all of Florida. Such a companionable hubbub in there. Went wild and had a no-alcohol beer.

The Green Parrot is right by the end of Route 1, kind of an amazing thing. The road runs from Key West all the way up into Maine. And here’s the zero, with a red fire hydrant, and the lovely yellow light of night. Mellow.

The better known Key West bar is Sloppy Joe’s a place my Pop liked a lot. And so did Ernest Hemingway. When Pop was there he’d grown a white beard like Hem’s, although sometimes people would compare Pop to Kenny Rogers, but he liked that too. Had an 8-track stereo in his on-the-road Cadillac, and, like two tapes, and one of them was Kenny’s hits.

There’s a wall of Hem memorabilia in Sloppy Joe’s, with a giant marlin and a photo of Hem with Castro and eeeeek a boxed shotgun, presaging our man’s sad demise.

I really admired Hemingway’s writing in high-school and even in college, although later, you know, his attitudes no longer rang true. Even so, he was a great stylist. I like that economy of phrasing thing. Classic example is the first page of his first novel, Farewell to Arms. A lot of later writers come out of that style, I often use it myself. Paring down, making the prose like haiku poetry.

There’s this big open spot Mallory Square in Key West, and poeple go there to see the sunset, with buskers and jugglers and a few cruise ships tied up. And out on the horizon, a pleasure-trip schooner plies its way back and forth, posing with the sun, quite lovely.

When you don’t see anything to photograph, you can take a picture of the faces on the ground. I think when I took this I was looking for my rental bike, which had disappeared, or been stolen, or I’d forgotten where I put it, somewhere near Sloppy Joe’s, and I have a sore leg these days and hated to have to walk all the way back to my hotel via “shanks mare” as some call walking. I never did find it, but the rental guys are used to that, befuddled tourists a plenty, and found it within an hour while I lounged by the tiny pool of my nice hotel, staring up at the fading sky.

Egrets all over Key West. At first I didn’t get what this guy was doing, but then I realized he was waiting for a lizard to crawl along. That beak! Dart! You meet your doom!

Just wanted to photograph clouds all the time down there…

The peak relaxation moment of my Key West visit was when I still had my rental bike, and I stopped in at a random cafe by the beach at the south end. The beaches themselves not super inviting…no coral and no fish, the sand very fine, the weather not quite warm enough to swim, and the sun just insanely strong, like sunlight on the Moon, drilling down into me with those ultraviolet rays, and I’d lost my sunglasses right before the trip, but at least I had a brimmy hat.

Anyway stopped in this cafe and had an ice tea, sitting at a table inside, with a guy my age doing maitre’d to let people go through the inside and onto a relatively chic patio. He said I could sit where I was as long as I wanted, we were twins, basically, 70ish men killing time in Hawaiian shirts. Looking out the door I saw a very animated little dog. This isn’t the real photo I took of him—I took the real photo in my head before I got my camera up to my face—but this one will do.

Liked this shot of the busboy out through the window too. Nobody rushing too hard in Key West.

And nearby was the tip-ass southmost point of the continental US. Like this condo and that amazing wavy-trunk palm, and always the CLOUDS.

Self portrait as a rotated pig on a grill.

Always so glad to see my friend the banyan tree. Grow up grow down grow all around. This was right by the Key West Lighthouse which was right by…

Hemingway’s house! Hem’s office very inviting, the nice chair and lounge chair. He’d knock off for the day once he’d written about 700 words. Then off to Sloppy Joe’s! Or maybe go out deep sea fishing. He lived in Key West about seven years. It was fun looking at his stuff.

The main drag of Key West is kind of blah, although varied, with tourist shops, eateries, drag bars, rave bars, and this eye-catching post-Halloween display in the CVS drugstore window.

Driving down to Key West from Miami took longer than I expected. This one tiny place I stopped at, Conch Key, really appealed to me. Five pilings in the water, and a pelican sitting on each, with various poses. Liked this guy the best.

Most of the houses on Conch Key were trailers. End of the line. Complete silence. Reminded me of the Turks and Caicos Islands where brother Embry used to live.

When I few into Miami, it was too late to drive all the way down the keys, so I spent the first night on Key Largo. I had fairly terrible but nonetheless exciting and memorable breakfast at the Café Cubano there.

And now, eeek! It’s back to the prison camp of the Silicon Valley yuppies!

And the home of sage among sages, Nick Herbert. I had a funny conversation with Nick before Thanksgiving. I was feeling a little bummed when I got to his house, and I had this classic koan-type exchange with him.

Rudy: “I wish I could stop being an effing asshole.”
Nick: “What would happen then? What would be different?”
Rudy: (pause) “Nothing.”
Nick: (laughs for a long time)

And in that moment, the monk received enlightenment.

I’ve been at loose ends for a month or two. In the moonlight.

As I mentioned earlier, I published The Hollow Earth & Return to the Hollow Earth , and sent the reward copies to my Kickstarter backers, also some copies to reviewers. My old Tor Books publicist Patty Garcia is helping with this. So far, no responses. Discouraged. I mean—Return is a great book!

That old writer’s comfort: “I’ll be famous when I’m dead” isn’t working for me anymore. But I write on anyway. I like doing it or, put more starkly, I don’t know what else to do. It feels good to exercise my practiced skills. And I forget myself when I’m writing. And I do get some rewards. Never enough, but some.

But these days I’m not quite ready to get back into a canoe and paddle across an ocean again.

Sylvia and I went hiking near Carson Pass in the Sierras last week. Check out this gnarly tree. I mean, this is the gold standard meter of gnarl, no? It kind of looks like an eye on the left, and that branch on the right is kind of like an elefump trunk. Sculpted by the Sierran winds, roots twined sturdily to the schist of granite.

It feels so good to plug fully into nature. Always the same. Heedless of our human wheenks. Someone inevitably pipes up: “But won’t we ruin nature with our pollution etc?” Not in the long term. If we screw things up badly enough, all of us will die, and nature will still be there. Healing adapting advancing across the millennia.

We have trouble grasping the scale of deep time. A few years ago, Sylvia and I visited the Fossil Butte National Monument in southwestern Wyoming. The place isn’t much to look at, just desert with some low hills and a visitor center, although the center has some great fossils. Lots of fish, of all things to find here in this arid spot.

But the thing I want to get at is that along the winding mile-long road into the visitor center, the canny park poeple have erected signs with names of geologic eras like Mesozoic Era and Age of Wheenk and Stegographene Period. And the road is leading you forward in time across some millions of years, and at the very end, the timeline dwindles down to markings along a wood railing around the visitor’s center, and the last effin’ inch of the line that has our recorded history in it, and we humans strut onto stage in, like the final sixteenth inch of all. Strut and preen. “We’re the masters, and its up to us whether Nature continues.” “Sure, dude. Go ahead and think that.”

“The Tyrant’s Wife” oil on canvas, October, 2018, 40” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

Speaking of the occasional hideousity of humanity, many of us were stunned by our day of watching the Kavanaugh hearings. Wanting to transmute this dross into art, I did a painting of it. I used oils for a change, which are messier, and give a dirtier, grungier look, with lots of impasto, and allow for an ab-ex (that’s abstract-expressionist, friend) look in the details. And overall it’s plain old 1930s expressionist in terms of embodying the suffering artist’s bleating wheenk. A cri de coeur.

It was a hard painting to do. As the news cycles rolled by, I went for making it a bit more general, a bit less shituation-specific. And I began to realize that, in a sense, the wife was the center. I had a lot of trouble with the faces—I did some of them 4 or 5 or 7 times.

Every now and then I feel a bit hampered by the fact that, strictly speaking, I can’t really draw. But as guys like me say, “Well, you’ve got cameras if you want a photo. It’s more important to have something say.” Actually sometimes I don’t even have anything to say. I just want to play with paint. So wonderfully non digital.

Look at the way this tree has a toe. Isn’t that great?

And how about this log that’s a squid, I mean, see the eye and the tentacles? I read that if you take an overdose of the benzo drug Ativan, things begin looking like they’re alive. Hylozoism in a pill, eh. But you don’t need the pill, do you. You just have to pay attention.

But writing about a guy who takes drugs might be fun for me. Escape literature. A virtual high. Gives the story some color. A glaze. I’m thinking about a character who’s an assassin, a “good assassin,” tasked with taking down an evil tyrant. Seen any of those lately?

Coming back from the Sierras into the traffic on 580 was brutal. Dig the sun on this rolling death box. Great shot.

The otherworldly quality of the jam, with the hells-gate windmill guardians. Like a Bosch scene of Hell.

And the luminous fantasy of the missed exit to Peace. Thing is, if a you’re in a bum scene, and you’re getting good photos of it, then you’re, um, happy, right? Art redeems all.

Here’s me with Bruce Sterling at the “secret” Google X lab a week ago. Always energizing to hear Bruce, and to bathe in the flow of his words. That slightly sarcastic tone he always has, and the wealth of historical and modern data points, and the fastidious self-aggrandizing. More than a match for my patented and copyrighted line of bullshit. Our joint story collection Transreal Cyberpunk is a supreme masterpiece, although this slim, astute volume remains, oddly and vexingly, all but unknown. It’ll be famous when we’re dead, okay?

So, inching towards another foray into writing, I’m thinking of an old man who risks all to assassinate an evil dictator, a tyrant like our worst dreams of a certain type of guy reaching a full, Hitlerian. Not yet sure about the characters’ names. It’s set in a mix between near future and 22nd C.

The hard thing about assassinating the tyrant is that you need to kill him, not only in our physical world, but in the cloud. Heavy backup for the zottarich pigopolists, you understand. Kind of like how it wasn’t enough to kill the Terminator just once.

But I want it to be, in some dry sense, funny. That’s where I get the angle of having the old assassin taking some odd drugs. Reality Clipping. High Vibrance. I thought of Milgrim who was on Ativan in Gibson’s Spook Country. Or of the “old writer” in Burroughs’s The Western Lands. And, especially, of Elmore Leonard’s characters. It doesn’t absolutely have to be chemical drugs my guy is taking. Software highs are cool too. Like make the world seem to run twice as fast or a hundred times slower. I’m working up some bogus tech in my “secret” Rucker X lab.

As I’ve already mentioned in this blog, I did a painting called The Red Saucer last month. Things I never stop thinking about: infinity, the fourth dimension, flying saucers, hylozoism, uploading your mind into some other form.

Might my next novel include flying saucers? Well, maybe, but maybe they’re really small. Rizing up from the subdimensions. Or maybe they’re peripherals, that is, gnostic “gnoses” being “driven” by minds in the biotech-based cloud. The people in that cloud can sense what’s on Earth, and they can use their meaty little saucers for effectors. They’re embodied.

To make it sweeter, I’ll take another arrow from Gibson’s quiver—the minds and the sensor/effectors might be in different temporal locations. Thanks to the cross-time communication channel of subdimensional subquantum wheenk.

All this is “breaking news” to me. I’m making it up as I type. And here’s a premonitional painting I did of some of the people involved.

“People of the Red Saucer” oil on canvas, September, 2018, 24” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

Early in 2018, Sylvia and I stayed at a hotel on 26th Street in Manhattan, near an imposing armory. I’d meant to paint that building, and then I did, using the leftover oil paint on my palette from The Red Saucer .

Drawing in perspective isn’t that hard, but it does take mental focus. I mean, I don’t always want to be a cartoony expressionist. And I liked putting scenes in those windows…I’ve always admired Wayne Thiebaud’s window-scenes, which are calligraphic and abstract.

So these people are connected with that red saucer I painted. So I put images of a red saucer on the posters, and the letters from the phrase “SAUCER PEOPLE,” writing some of the letters backwards or upside-down to make it seem higher-dimensional. And while I was at it, I signed my name backwards. Is that guy in the middle flying, or is he sitting on a girder? Time will tell.