It’s getting on towards the end of the year.

Nice shadow of some stained glass. I like to think that our universe is like the stained glass, the cosmic One is the light, and bright shadows are what we see.

We saw the Los Gatos Christmas parade a few weeks back. I wasn’t shooting all that well that day, but I like this mysterious news-photo-like shot of a baseball player in an old Cadillac.

Always love the kids blatting their horns.

“Woman With Jellyfish,” oil on canvas, December, 2013, 24” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

I redid my painting, “Woman With Jellyfish” this week. It looked too plain, and now it’s bright. Christmassy.

My painting show reception and a readingfrom The Big Aha be at Borderlands Books on Friday, January 17, from 5 to 7. I’m planning to hang most the paintings that appear as chapter heads in The Big Aha.

I wish you a peaceful holiday season!

The Big Aha is out in ebook, paperback and hardback now. I’ve ordered a bunch of the paperbacks and hardbacks to mail out to my Kickstarter backers. Still waiting them to arrive. This whole process has more steps than I’d quite imagined. But I’m almost done.

Late-breaking news: A great review of The Big Aha by Giulio Prisco, published in Skefi’a and reposted in io9! The book’s first review and it rocks. Whew.

Early warning: There will be a release party and an art show for The Big Aha at Borderlands Books on Valencia Street in San Francisco on Friday, December 17, 2014. I’ll be mentioning this again…

What next? Over the last few months, I got back the rights to my three old “transreal” novels White Light, Secret of Life, and Saucer Wisdom . What is transrealism, you may ask? Read my 1983 manifesto on the topic.

I’ll probably be republishing those three novels via my Transreal Books early in 2014, as ebooks for sure, and probably as paperbacks as well.

While I’m at it, I might as well republish my old memoir/rant All the Visions . I originally typed All the Visions on a giant long scroll of paper, emulating the divine Jack K. working on On the Road. My usual activities.

Keeping the ball in the air.

Another project I’m looking towards in 2014 is to assemble my electronic journals into a fat book. I have about half a million words on disk for the period 1990 ”“ 2012. I’m editing that and pruning it down. Maybe I can squeeze it into a single 800 page volume. My role model here is the phonebook-sized Andy Warhol Diaries of 1989. I read that sucker for about a year, a couple of pages a day. Would be nice to make a book like that.

Some of today’s photos are from an recent outing to the fields and cliffs above Four Mile Beach and near Davenport, north of Santa Cruz. This is a Davenport photo. The shot-up-sign archetype. “Words suck,” as Beavis and Butthead used to say.

There’s a nice balance between agriculture and ecopreserve on the coast above Santa Cruz. Fields of, like Brussels sprouts, fine. The point is that there’s no McMansions, no hotels, no roadside attractions. Just the cliffs and the beaches. Although, of course, there is the Whale City Bakery in Davenport, always worth a stop.

We saw a huge number of pelicans out there. There’s been a vast school of anchovies in the Santa Cruz Bay lately, and the birds, seals, dolphins and whales have been gorging themselves.

There’s always some surfers around, sometimes quite a few of them, but as it cools down and gets windy, you don’t see many people actually walking on the beach. If you’re willing to take a little trouble by, like, walking a half mile from your car, it’s not that hard to find solitude in the unpopulated zones of California…and, really, most of the state is unpopulated. The cities are just small spots. Our beloved anthills.

Something heavy and cosmic about seeing pelicans against a sunny sky. People used to wonder where the dinosaurs went, but now it’s commonly said that the thunder lizards didn’t “go” anywhere. They just evolved into birds. Pelicans are pterodactyls…but with feathers. Pterodactyls 2.0.

My cinemetographer/photographer friend Eddie Marritz was in San Francisco, and we had a tapas dinner with him, his daughter Leda, and Leda’s husband Tim Conkling. Tim’s a game programmer who recently started writing games on his own. Among other things, Leda runs an interesting writing blog with her friend Steph: Small Answers. A new post every Monday. I love the Marritz family—I got to know them because I went to college with Eddie’s brother Don.

This is a photo of Eddie that I shot on film, developed, and handcolored—sometime around 1970. I was in grad school. Had a lot of free time back then. No computers.

What else? These are some of the roots that my wife mashed for a Thanksgiving side dish. Handsome fellows, no?

Beautiful little slough behind Four Mile Beach. Very hard to even see this hidden bight of water, the topography is kind of weird. I love that S curve. Nature gives us so much, everywhere, all the time. When I remember to notice.

But, like I always say, we humans are part of nature too. Building our intricate hives. And those can look cool, too. This chandelier in the new Los Gatos library is made out of a giant wood shaving that’s knotted around on itself. The highlight is that slanting plane of sunlight. I rushed this shot, not wanting to alarm the library patrons, but you can improve a slightly blurry shot in Lightroom. Not necessarily sharpen it to death, but play with the sliders till the picture’s effects look intentional or preordained.

This was an easier shot, bang, it jumped at my eye. The back of a building along Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz.

I’m having a sale on my paintings this month, and I’ve managed to sell three of them in the last week. Check out the insanely low prices if you’re interested in a special New Year’s present for yourself or for a loved one.

I took a walk up on St. Joseph’s Hill in Los Gatos yesterday, bringing my camera along. The camera is always good company on a walk. You show things to it, and it helps you see.

I’ve been going up in the Los Gatos hills maybe once a week for the whole twenty-seven years since we moved here in August, 1986. So I’ve taken this walk about a thousand times. It’s always new. That’s the thing about nature.

Nature is a fractal, that is she has endless layers of detail, which bloom out faster than a mere linear rate. That is, if you look twice as close, you see three times as much.

Also Nature is alive, and always changing. As is the sky. Always the same, always different. Chaos.

The perennial Dover Books company reissued my 1987 popular science book Mind Tools last week. I’m happy to have good old Dover keeping one of my titles alive. When I was a boy in Louisville, I used to send off for Dover books on science.

I wrote Mind Tools in Lynchburg, Virginia, right before I moved to San Jose and became a computer scientist. I was gearing up for the transition from math to CS. In Mind Tools, I looked at the four main areas of math from the viewpoint that “everything is information.” The areas? Number, Space, Logic, and Infinity.

I drew a lot of illos for the book. While I was working on it, my little rented office in decaying downtown L’burg was like a mad scientist’s lab, with all these little models I was building. I had this idea of finding dot-diagrams to illustrate the “shapes” of most of the numbers less than a hundred or so. I wanted to have a supply of these images at my hand for drawing on friends’ and relatives’ birthday cards. You can find these particular “Mind Tools birthday dot” drawings of mine online here.

Here’s a phone pole near my house. I like the natural collages that we humans put together. You can look at cities or human development as being natural artifacts like anthills or beaver colonies or wasp nests or seashells—we’re living organisms, and we assemble this stuff. We’re part of nature.

There’s this one ancient shed that I often walk past in the hills of Los Gatos. I love its peeling pale green paint, and I hope the owners never fix it up. Beautiful branching crack here, and to make it lovelier, the paint is arched up into mathematically rich concave surfaces.

I always love looking at treelines along mountain ridges. The nice thing about natural curves and surfaces is that they don’t accord with any really simple algebraic formulae. They emerge as processes, not as graphs of simple equations. But the processes themselves do have mathematical qualities, but the details of the end results are unpredictable.

It’s chaos, in a good way. In a chaotic process, you can have simple natural laws that are producing results that are even in principle unpredictable. Why unpredictable? Because there are multiple systems involved (rocks, geology, trees, wind, rain) and because the systems are interacting over extended periods of time. As a rule, the only way to “predict” a natural process it to watch it run, and when it’s done, that’s your “prediction.”

We travel into the future at a rate of one second per second. No shortcuts.

More human colony-organism type activity here. Apparently the humans cap their “rebar” metal rods so that they don’t poke out their own eyes. Faint strands of symbiotic spider silk augment the “warning” tape. (See this higher-resolution image of the photo for the spider silk.)

Back to that weathered old pale green shed I love. Dig the hinge, isn’t it perfect? A semiotic heft to it. Hello, god.

A eucalyptus branch lying on the ground. Blown down by the wind. The plants don’t mind. They’ll rot into the ground, be eaten by ants, whatever. The endlessly cycling fountain of life. We’re part of it too. Your body will cycle, but your life is an “eternal” pattern in spacetime.

Hazy light on this winter day. Already looks like sunset in the mid-afternoon. The laurel trees grow in clumps.

Selfie shot for the day. Weird thing about iPhone camera: If you’re taking a horizontal shot of something in front of you, you have to have the “volume” buttons down, but if you are taking a selfie shot you have to have the “volume” buttons up. Otherwise the image appears upside-down on many (but not all) viewer apps. No use raging at these kind of things—you just learn about them and deal with them. Like an insect gathering seeds.

My self-deprecating “self-portrait,” called Louisville Artist, used as a chapter illo in my new novel The Big Aha , which features a new psychedelic era…only this time the drug is quantum mechanics. Jam your internal One/Many oscillator all the way over into the mystic mode! Check out the book for free (or buy it rather cheaply) online.