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Archive for the ‘Million Mile Road Trip’ Category

Delirium and “Stratocast.”

Wednesday, January 27th, 2016

So last week I was in the hospital for hip surgery for three nights.

I was really sad and anxious about going in there. Infection in my hip joint and they took out all the hardware, and I’ll be on intravenous antibiotics for six weeks, and then they put a new hip back in. A traumatic two operation under deep full anesthesia

Opiate painkillers. Each night my room seemed like a completely different space. The second day I noticed the effects of the opiates on my dreams.

Watching the dreams like movies, semi-awake. Rooting through mounds of rusty metal scrap. Faces. Never getting into proper dreams, but enjoyable, in the sense that being high is enjoyable, and unpleasant, in that I no longer like to be high. Most of all it was exhausting, and in the morning I didn’t want to go back there.

My wrist looked so pathetic. At times I’d almost be looking at all this crap on it and wondering if it was my wristwatch.

Our daughter Isabel made me a lucky amulet, she’d stamped one of my favorite slogans onto it, “Eadem Mutata Resurgo,” which is Latin for, “The same, yet changed, I arise again.” One of the mathematician Bernoulli brothers chose this as his epitaph, in connection with his work on the logarithmic spiral that nautilus shells trace.

The third night the pain ramped way up, we loaded on the opiates. I fell deeply asleep at 6:30 pm, and woke, soaked in sweat, in a state of delirium at half-past midnight.

My bed seemed like the edge of an alleyway, and I was like a wet rag of clothing lying there, a wadded nightgown or a bra or some scraps of paper. A nothing. Pathetic. Lost. Undone. I was awake, but unable to remember who I was, or where, or what my significance was, or what ordeal I was undergoing, or what I was supposed to do. A wet crooked rag in an alleyway.

Overhead was the “trapeze” lifter-bar of my hospital bed. It meant something, some task, but I didn’t know what. Sounds from beyond a curved wall which was the curtain across my door. I hoped someone would come in. They didn’t. Eventually I found the ringer-button to call a nurse. I told her I couldn’t remember who I was, and that the body trauma and the meds had gotten to me. She was sympathetic.

On the table by my bed, I found the paper scrap with my marked up draft of the “Stratocast” chapter for Million Mile Roadtrip, which is the novel I’ve been working on for over a year now. I told the nurse the scrap was from a science fiction novel I’m working on, and that I was a writer, and that I’d try to recover myself by thinking about it. She approved. I had all the time in the world here, anonymous in the middle of a hospital night. After a few minutes I got the courage to call for a nurse again—a different one came, both of them were Indian, this one got me my laptop from my knapsack cross the room, and I got to work, writing on till 3 am. Had to call the nurse yet one more time for my reading glasses. They didn’t question what I was doing.

I was happy to be writing in such an extreme situation, and I think the material came out pretty well. And I decided to run the last twenty or thirty basins as a single block. A surreal mural.

Out of the hospital now, I’ve revised the chapter a couple more times. It’s not really that my medical delirium led me to these visions. It’s more like other way around. These comfortable (to me) visions helped draw me out of med-trauma delirium. For me, these visions, are ordinary, base-line reality. Check ‘em out.

“Stratocast”
Copyright © Rudy Rucker, 2016, draft of a chapter to appear in Million Mile Roadtrip.

Villy quickly realizes that his half-sized Flying-V guitar is alive. Basically she’s an alien. A type of Harmon. She stretches her neck so she can nuzzle Zoe’s black guitar, who is male. The instruments chime softly to each other. Villy thinks of them as a pair of race horses that he and Zoe are about to ride.

“Or magic broomsticks,” says Zoe inside Jorge’s head. The crew has teep powers again.

Crazy Pinchley’s at the wheel, his head cocked at an odd, coquettish angle. He’s already rigged a flappy rudder to the back of the car—for steering them once they’re airborne. Pinchley is more than ready to set sail for Szep City. He’s got Yampa’s memorial gig to plan.

Scud’s in front, next to Pinchley, holding the saucer pearl. Unfortunately he’s still not quite able to levitate the car.

“Think of a fin all around the pearl,” Villy tells his brother. “And the fin is part of you. Don’t hold back, You have to merge into the whatever.”

“Not my usual thing.” mutters Scud. A full minute of silence. And then: “Hey, I’ve got it! And you do this all the time, Villy?”

“It’s how I surf.”

The purple whale rises into the air, revealing a vista of Harmon cubes amid streaks of smeel foam. Spidery green critters scamper about. They have T-shaped bodies, with big eyes on the sides of their hammer heads. They pluck and and thump the cubes, livening up the choruses.

“Gear we go-go!” says Pinchley, still talking like Yampa. He guns the engine—and nothing whatsoever happens. The gigundo tires spin in empty air.

“You do stratocast now?” says Scud. “Is that the word?”

“Gear we go-go,” says Villy, kind of mocking Scud and Pinchley.

Zoe stares into Villy’s eyes. She looks zonky and vamp. Like a goth rocker. The lovers have their fingers on their frets, and they’re holding triangles of seashell for picks. Zoe nods her head once and—

Zam deedle squee. She’s off, sailing the sonic sea, and Villy’s close behind. The two of them are dancing in music-space, orbiting each other like strands of DNA, growing a tree of sound. Sweet. But, uh, the car’s still not moving.

Zoe breaks off, embarrassed, and she begins tuning her guitar, or trying to, except that it doesn’t actually have tuning pegs. The car hangs in the air like a ripe fruit, gently swaying. Pinchley and Scud turn halfway around to stare at the would-be stratocasters.

“So we’ll do the damn drive dumb,” says Pinchley. “Lower us, Scuddy.”

“Wait,” says Scud. “I’ll give them caraway seeds.” He produces the jar. “Everyone here loves caraways. Maybe its a Goob-goob thing. Maybe they’ll help with your stratocasting.” He pauses, takes out a couple of seeds from the jar, and nibbles them with his front teeth like a rat. “Curved,” he says. “Rye bread aroma. I feel maybe even smarter now. Try them, Vill and Zee.”

So Villy and Zoe eat some caraway seeds, pretty much a whole teaspoon of them apiece, crunching the seeds with their back molars. Villy definitely feels a lift. He sees colored shapes from the corners of his eyes. And when he turns his head, the quick bright crescents are gone.

“I see the colored things too,” says Zoe. “Smeel boomerangs. Flying out of our ears like bats from their caves, huh? We’ll play with them. Stratocast a goblin march.”

“That’s a plan?” says Scud.

“Shut your crack,” says Villy.

Zoe strikes a fresh chord. She goes for a bluesy beat, a cycling rhythm beneath the jai-lai scribbles of the smeely grace notes. Villy gets into it as well, gazing out at the horizon. The smeel crescents creep forward, they’re like frail, lace-winged bugs in the cones of the lovers’ eyebeam headlights. Villy checks them off with pecks of his pick—without exactly staring at them. They’re hella shy.

So, yaaar, Villy and Zoe are playing at a new level, fully into the flow, elaborating riffs like syllogisms in symbolic logic, and where the hell is Villy getting words like that—oh, he’s siphoning them from Scud and Pinchley and Zoe. All four of them part of the pudding, with the ghost of Yampa present as well.

The purple whale is a stratocasting pod of sound, yeah, it’s rushing across the Jello-salad expanses of the Harmony basin, swifter than a strafing jet. Pinchley does a solemn steamboat-pilot routine, guiding them along a graceful curve that, much sooner than seems at all possible, has covered five thousand miles. Scud levitates a little extra, just enough so they scrape it across the ridge between Harmony and the next basin over. Oh wow, are they ever going fast.

“Hundred thousand miles per,” gloats Pinchley. “Rock the roll, Zoe-Villy. This here new basin is called Wristwatch by the way.”

Villy peers down, putting his guitar fingers into reptile-brain auto mode. The Wristwatch basin is cogs and gears, a vast array of them, slowly turning, with levers and springy coils and, weirdly, big patches of honey here and there, clogging up the works. Ants in the soft honey, timekeeper ants. But how can Villy be seeing such tiny details, with them careening past so fast?

“Frog tongue eyebeam,” goes Zoe, very cryp and glam, with glowons highlighting the outlines of her far-gone face. She’s playing Egyptian crescendos, accompanied by teep images of, like, jackal-headed gods marching into a pharaoh’s tomb, and semi-unwrapped mummy-girls shaking their booties beside the curly purling of the river Nile.

Villy backs her with the argle-bargle grunts of man-eating crocodiles. As for Zoe said just now—she means that, even though they’re topping a thousand miles a minute, it’s possible, what with their caraway-seed-enhanced mental powers, to shoot out an eyebeam quick as a frog’s bug-catching tongue, and to leave your eyebeam in place for a few secs, and thereby to vacuum up a mini-video of what is/was happening there/now.

Goofing on Wristwatch basin, Villy notices independent little batches of cogs and worm-gears bustling around on their own, rooting at the planetary timepiece and prying off toothed wheels to take unto themselves. For its part, the big watch is of course eating as many of the ticking freebooter assemblages as it can—sometimes trapping them in the ants’ honey-ponds.

Lots of time. Until time’s up. They squeak over another ridge.

“Cuttle Scuttle Swamp,” says Pinchley.

A flying cuttlefish thuds against the grill of the car, sending them into a wrenching 3D tumble. They’re in danger of blacking out. Zoe bears down on her guitar and gets into feedback mode. The internal amp is driving the strings which drive the amp which drives the strings—generating a chaotic jitter of skronks and wheenks. The dark energy of the way-sick bleat is enough to right their yawing vessel. Thank you, holy stratocast.

Scud in the front seat becomes watchful, looking far ahead, and he zaps the next incoming cuttlefish into sparkly dust. Not that the cuttlefish are attacking them, per se. They’re into some intramural scene of their own. A civil war?

Two populations inhabit Cuttle Scuttle Swamp: red cuttlefish and green ones. The red ones fly, beating their skirt-fins, and the green ones disport themselves in the shallow, smeely waters. The air-cuttles dive down at the water cuttles, and the water cuttles power themselves into the air like breaching manatees. When two cuttles collide, they tangle their tentacles and—are they biting each other?

“Making love,” says Zoe, and she segues her solo into a steamy, insinuating beat. “Sharing. Like you and me, Villy boy.”

Villy crafts a squalid bass line to match Zoe’s mood. He’s never played this well before. Basins flit past. For half an hour, he and Zoe are fully zoned into the stratocast. And then they happen to notice the landscape again.

“Gold Bug basin,” Pinchley is saying. He has this whole sector mapped in his head.

Shiny black beetles are excavating galleries and making lacy mounds. Beetles like the living cars of the Van Cott streets, but less citified. More tribal. Miners. Their antennae bear rows of sideways branches. They emit explosive clouds of gas to help with their excavations. One of them will crouch down, raise her tail, and another will strike a spark with his jaws. Ftoom. They’re digging for lumps of gold, A midnight-blue beetle displays a large nugget in her triumphant mandibles. Villy’s focus-point twitches from the prize nugget to a crater filled with dome-backed beetles waving fringed June-bug antennae. The beetles are worshipping an idol, a golden beetle-god the size of a blimp. Glowons add to the graven idol’s luster.

The appreciative Villy and Zoe segue into a shimmering musical fantasia of lush flourishes. And then Scud torques them over the beetle basin’s onrushing ridge. Pinchley trims their course, ever aiming towards distant Szep City. The four of them take a feral pleasure in their phantasmagoric speed. More basins and more.

“Funky Broadway,” announces Pinchley. Zoe chimes a downward arpeggio, with Villy in teepful synch.

Funky Broadway is a world of living cities, blocky hives trundling across a great plain. The cities are inhabited by parasitic or symbiotic races of monkeys. Here and there pairs of cities batten onto each other. Their primate passengers hop from one metropolis to the other. Some of the ape-men brandish exquisite works of art to trade, others take prisoners whom they feed into gigantic meat-grinder gear-trains embedded in the lowest foundations of the towns.

Zoe’s music is like stabbing cries. Villy circles them with mournful evocations of fallen worlds. Once again the lovers lose themselves in their stratocast harmonies, threading through basins by the score.

“Paramecium Pond,” intones Pinchley.

A simple world. It’s a five-thousand-mile pond, glowing a pleasant shade of yellow-green, vibrant with algae, shiny with microorgasmic tides. Paramecia, amoeba, volvoxes, and rotifers—teeming, breeding, and engulfing each other when they can.

“An octillion in all,” says science-boy Scud. He shares Villy’s and Zoe’s ability to lock onto a passing sight and do a mental zoom. There’s quite the teepy vibe inside the car by now, what with the living Harmon guitars, the saucer pearl, the kids’ mental acrobatics, and Pinchley’s crackbrained imitations of Yampa.

As they plane across Paramecium Pond, Zoe and Villy spin out a sludgy mat of sound—a multipart fugue. The microorganisms’ population count is dropping at a logarithmic rate. They’re eating each other and getting bigger—like rivals working their way up through the brackets of a tournament tree. A mere billion of them remain. A thousand. A hundred. One. A paramecium the size of a continent.

The titan lolls in the planetary pond. A fat man in a bathtub. Suddenly the glowing waters slosh. Something wrong? A dark spot has appeared upon the emperor’s ciliated pellicum. It’s a raging infection, a rogue colony of his lower companions. The lord of all paramecia springs a leak—*pop*—and they’re back to time zero. A planetary pond with an octillion rivals.

Inspired by the scene, Zoe and Villy craft a bombastic rock opera that spins into a mad whirl across all the remaining basins en route.

Red, white, and black starfish tessellate the surface of a basin, They peel up in twelves, forming dodecahedra. Trumpeting elephants bear smaller elephants to and fro, building mounds that stretch towards the heavens, calling out the thousand names of Goob-goob. Pinchley steers them past their writhing trunks and, where necessary, Scud zaps the trunks to stubs. A zone of spiderwebs and flies. The flies buzz with pleasure as they’re eaten. The spiders grow wings and take to the air. Milk-spurting udders flop in high green grass. Towering flowers chide our party, speaking in snobby British accents. Vines with floating cucumbers like zeppelins. Little uniformed airmen in the airships—they gather on a taut hull for a hornpipe dance. Recirculating flows of lava amid rubbery volcanoes. Gouts of magma flatten into fiery flying saucers who do their best to annihilate the purple whale. They escape to a basin of mermen and sirens who loll beside a glassy black sea. Krakens ply the inky waters, their heads like the prows of Viking ships. A sky full of barking dogs, with a grid of identical doghouses below. Evil saucer rabbits slink from house to house, enslaving puppies, and ignoring the fruitful carrot fields all around.

Tiny saucer gnomes juggle huge, bristly ogres in the air. Steaming cauldrons of porridge. The ogres dwindle to raisins in the mush. Flying jellyfish carrying tiny shrimp-people. The shrimps rise up in mutiny, and set the jellies to warring against each other. Lashing, stinging tentacles. Beneath the fray, striped sea snails cheer from wagging sponges, and offer floral bouquets to the mutinous shrimp. Hopeful pigs join snouts in pairs, disk to disk. They spin upwards like helicopters. Saucers zap them into showers of greasy bacon. The strips drift down into the traffic on greasy, overcrowded streets. Hippos in a basin of braided rivers. The waters cascade down the cliffs at the basin’s edge. The hippos roar in joy, showing stubby peg-like teeth. A population of sinister eyeballs rolls across a plain, swirling about a commanding central figure who revels in being seen. A planetary sea of whirlpools that split and fork, weaving elegant sheaves of knots. Above the sea, parasitic tornadoes fill the hazy air, draining energy from the maelstroms. Colored clouds float above them all, the clouds savoring each others’ rain. Lightning bolts dance from one cloud to another, as if to herd them into a grid. In another basin, crystals sprout like hoarfrost ferns, then snap loose and tumble, transforming themselves like images within a kaleidoscope. Arpeggios ring from the crystals, sounding a chorus that’s continually approaching a final realization—but not getting there.

Rubbery fungi grow upon the crystals, dampening their sounds. Zoe and Villy join forces with the crystals, pushing their swelling harmony over the edge—and the crystals shatter into swirling flakes that carve the mushrooms into bits. Another basin holds a planet-sized human corpse with homunculi feasting upon it—like fiddler crabs on a dead dolphin. Fish walk by on pairs of legs, and chickens stand on ladders wearing mortarboards—all of them discussing the planetary corpse. Crawling naked brains play cards and dance in festive patterns, like folk dancers seen from above. A book takes shape amid the ring of circling brains. Squealing bagpipe sacks covered with red mouths and beady eyes. They clack their chanter tubes in sword-fight duels. But their real enemies are pairs of scissors seeking to cut them open. And, at the end of the trip, a scary mystery basin, velvety black, with seen/unseen/unseeable forms within. Beings from unspace. To truly perceive them would be to go mad. Scud levitates, Pinchley steers, and the lovers push.

And the delirious outward stratocast is done.

Onward.

Trip to Guanajuato #2. Post-op. Diego and Hunhunahpu.

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2015

Added November 11, 2015.

I finished that painting I was talking about in this post! Love this picture.

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

As always, more info on my Paintings page.

And now back to the original November 3, 2015, post.

That new hip I got in March, 2015, didn’t take, that is, its cup never bonded with my pelvis bone. So day before yesterday, on Monday, October 26, I had my third artificial left hip implanted. There was the usual jump-cut in consciousness. I’m lying on the operating table with an IV in my arm, and then I’m waking up in bed in the recovery room. I couldn’t move my feet at first, as they’d given me a spinal block injection to paralyze the lower half of my body. I could hardly talk.

“Is the operation over?”
“Yes.”

And then I’m looking around the room, lying there for maybe 45 minutes, a large room with other patients, nothing very interesting to see, nothing alive except for the humans, just steel and white, cloth and plastic. Now and then a nurse. And then they wheeled me to my room, and Sylvia came in, and my life began again.

A hospital is the opposite of Guanajuato. Knowing this operation was coming up, I’ve been feeling kind of down for the last few months. The day on Route One with Isabel, and the four days in Mexico—those were breaks that gave me a much-needed lift. And Syvlia and I went to see The Magic Flute opera in SF the day before the operation, so uplifting.

But here I am in the post-op present tense, venturing out once again into the psychic surf, wanting to get back on my board and ride some painting and writing waves.

On my last day in Guanajuato, I toured Diego Rivera’s childhood home, right next to my hotel. They’ve made it into a museum with replica/reconstructed furniture, and a few of his smaller works.

I hadn’t really grasped how great an artist Diego Rivera was—in the US he’s mostly known for his murals, which are wonderful, but he could do really lovely fast stuff at smaller scale. Like this one here is a 1943 painting of an exploding volcano called Paricutin—Diego was sent there as part of a journalism gig. There’d be no good way to get a photo, so they sent a painter. Wonderful brush strokes.

Maybe the most interesting works on display are drawn from a set of 24 watercolors that Diego made, intended for use as illustrations in an book based on the legends in the hieroglyphic Mayan codices, a book to be called Popol Vuh, never published, to have been edited by one John Weatherwax—I wonder if William Burroughs knew this guy, Bill was always talking about the Mayans and the codex.

Re. the codices, in an amazingly evil act, the conquistadors and the Spanish priests burned most of them. Writing in July of 1562, Bishop Diego De Landa wrote:

“We found a large number of books in these [hieroglyphic] characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they [the Mexicans] regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.” Such codices were primary written records of Maya civilization…

Anyway, back to the good Diego, you can find the manuscripts for the book he was going to illustrate for this John Weatherwax guy, a 1930’s Communist pal, online in the Smithsonian collections. I get the impression the texts are more or less public domain at this point. It would be cool if some small press could finally publish the book with Diego’s illos.

Wonderful, wonderful images by Diego, like alien cartoons. Mayan gods, yes! So gnarly. I’m going to work them into Million Mile Road Trip. A number of gods cooperated (or competed) on creating our cosmos and on creating human beings (shown above). Think of a Hollywood movie, or big budget videogame. Hundreds of people are involved, contributing to it. Graphic art, CG, makeup, costumes, sound, cinematography, casting, actors, and numerous directors. Not just one director. No boss, no top director, no head producer. Like some Hollywood movies will have a “second unit” filming stuff. And a universe emerges.

Here’s Hunhunahpu , the tonsured corn god, making humanoid shapes on this calabash(?) plant, including perhaps a copy of his head.

Later a woman lies under the bush and the head drips spit on her crotch and she gets pregnant, and I think bears twins, one of whom is just plain Hunahpu, with Hunhunahpu the dad. At this point I know next to nothing about the Mayan cosmogony.

As part of my post-op physical and psychic rehab program, I’m working on a copy of that first Hunhunahpu painting. After three days in a daze, I kicked the oxy meds and went, more or less, back to being Rudy. And then I wanted to do something creative, and I wasn’t quite ready to write, so I started painting. I’m using acrylic paint instead of oil paint, as the clean-up is easier this way. And acrylic paint dries so fast that it’s easy to paint over things and revise. That’s a working mock-up shown above. The colored part is my painting thus far, and the Hunhuhahpu is just a collaged-in copy of Diego’s version that I still need to paint in. [You can see the finished version at the start of his post.]

There’s a harsh, saturated, Mexican-wall-paint quality to the acrylic colors that I like.


Cool composite painting of Don Quixote. Artist’s name is Trigos? (Correct me if wrong.) Click for a larger version of the painting.

The last touristic type site I saw in Guanajuato was a surprisingly interesting museum of paintings and statues of the character Don Quixote—from the Cervantes novel.

I’ve never managed to read much of the novel, so when I was home I sought out a couple of translations, and give it another shot, but to no avail. To me, the character Don Quixote is just an idiot.

But you could say there’s a sense in which Don Quixote stands for writers. His lance is like a pen. He’s surrounded by books at home—which is like having a manuscript you’re working on. He goes out on missions and gets everything wrong—because he’s overlaying his transreal novelistic notions upon the world. Tedious, long-winded, overbearing.

Out in the surf.

Trip to Guanajuato, Mexico #1. Mummies, Photography, Bef.

Friday, October 23rd, 2015

Some travel notes from my trip down to a month-long arts festival in the lovely town of Guanajuato in the middle of Mexico. I was there for four days. The days were very full.

I went there to be on an “SF and the Future” panel with the novelist and graphic artist Bef Mexico City, he’s a fan of mine—going back to his reading Software when he was fifteen—and I once published one of his stories in Flurb. I’ve been trying to get together with him, first last night and now this morning, All night I dreamed about setting up the meeting…I can’t just phone him because I don’t know his number here, or the international prefixes, and I’m paranoid about international phoning charges on my cell. Email kind of works, but it’s spotty.

I think I’ll see Bef and his friend Gabriela Fries in about half an hour, Gaby for short. She’s on the organizing committee of this giant month-long arts festival they’re having here, Cervantino, and the Bef connection is why I’m invited.

Guanajuato is an old town in a little valley, it grew up in the 1500s. I’m in the central historical part of the town, all stone buildings and cobblestone streets, some of the buildings very grand—baroque or neoclassical, as if in Italy or Spain. At one point Guanajuato was one of the richest towns in the world, due to its silver mines. The hills on either side are covered with blocky little houses, a little like in San Francisco, but the house colors are way more saturated and less pastel. Mexican colors. Vibrant.

I can’t speak Spanish at all, which feels awkward when people talk to me. It’s an interesting change from California—down here it’s the Mexicans who run the show. Crowded streets, most of the people reasonably well off.

Some incredible Mexican hipsters.

Dig the lovers in the lower right corner.

As soon as I got here last night, I ordered what were in effect two dinners at a large mariachi-infested Posada Santa Fe on a plaza. Seemed kind of expensive, but I’m confused about pesos, with all those zeroes. (After a day of mulling it over, I figured out it was only about $18 US.) It was unwise to overeat so immediately. This one table at the restaurant, with a man and a woman, they had eight or even ten musicians around the table, playing as loud as they possibly could, for over an hour. The man at the table was singing along some of the time, a lean guy with a mustache and a cowboy hat. His woman looked absolutely thrilled. I took a picture with my phone and she seemed glad. A big night.

Took a walk this morning, enjoying the cool fresh air—we’re at something like 7,000 feet. the sunlight, and all those wonderful colors on the walls. The streets wind around, all cobblestone, and there’s stone alleys between them. I followed one old woman for a block to make my way through a confusing zone. An archetypal behavioral pattern: following in a local’s steps. Mexico as another world. I can see a scene with my characters following an alien in Million Mile Road Trip—maybe a bubble or a bird or an ant.

I really aced my panel session—I “killed,” as the stand-up comedians say. About three hundred people there. I spoke slowly, acting relaxed, explaining cyber+punk, trans+real, science+fiction. The listeners could get simultaneous translation headsets. “The scientists say it’s not science, and the literary critics say it’s not fiction.” Wheenk, wheenk, wheenk.

For the rest of the day, many people who knew who I was, and they came up to me on the street. I was talking to a young man named Franco, from Mexico City, and I mentioned how it was nice to see Mexicans in their own habitat instead of in the US where many of them are in a bad position. I wasn’t sure if I should say this, but Franco totally knew what I meant. He was happy to talk about Mexicans. He said when he visited the US he felt sorry for the Mexicans there, he thought they looked lonely and hangdog. He thought it was strange, or maybe funny, that there’s so many millions of Mexicans in the US.


Click for larger image.

I ended up at a hotel called El Meson de los Poetas. Great view of the town, with all the houses on the slopes and, as I say, the vibrance and saturation dialed way up. I’m always processing my photos in Lightroom, and using two sliders with those names. More vibrance makes pale colors as intense as the bright colors, and more saturation makes all the colors more intense. In Mexico, it’s like there aren’t any pale colors at all, and all the colors are, like, whoah!

I’m starting to see in terms of sliders, because I post process my images a lot days. For me, the images I take out of my camera are my negatives, and I use Lightroom like a darkroom for making a final “print” image of those originals that I decide to keep. I crop a lot because I have a wide angle lens. And I tweak with the exposure, highlights, shadow, clarity, contrast, distortion, vibrance and saturation, horizontal and vertical transform, etc.

I was supposed to wait for Bef and Gaby to have lunch, but I got hungry and went to a cafe in a plaza. I ate two bowls of soup and a milkshake in only ten minutes at a sidewalk cafe. I could hardly believe how fast it went. “Has my watch stopped?”

Then I spent some time at a different cafe with Bef and Gaby. Gaby is a mathematician and a science promoter. She’s writing a thesis essay on my novel Software, and I talked about the book, with her typing some notes into her laptop. We’d meant to record it, but neither of us remembered to bring a recorder, so we were down to analog realtime life, off the grid in Mexico.

Bef and Gaby were being so nice and sympathetic that at one point I almost burst into tears. They were saying stuff like: Had I realized what a completely revolutionary novel Software was? Does it bother me that I’ve gotten relatively little recognition for my work? Would I say that now, after 35 years, the public is finally beginning to understand? It’s been a long road, and I’ve stuck to it, always doing it my own way, happy with the work. It’s balm when, now and then, someone understands what I’ve been up to all along.

High on the friendly acclaim, I bought some cigarettes and, back in my room, I stood on my Mexican balcony with my shirt off in the sun, feeling like a Beat ex-pat. Instead of getting stoned, I took a selfie.

Bef himself has published about ten novels, some of them crime novels, and a couple of SF. He says he did two narco crime novels, but now he’s moving on to new crimes, like art forgery. He also does graphic novels, one of them, Uncle Bill, is about Burroughs shooting his wife in Mexico City all those years ago. A theme also treated in my novel Turing & Burroughs. Bef has a Tumblr called Beforama—these days he’s mostly posting cartoons of Frankenstein.

Bef and Gaby said they have a friend who lives in Tijuana, somehow involved with the underworld, and this guy took them to “the most sordid bar in Tijuana.” They sold pot and coke and acid over the counter there, the place had never ever been cleaned, but, says Bef in his mild, calm voice: “It wasn’t at all threatening. It felt very safe. Everyone was friendly.”

We talked about Mexico City, where Beg and Gaby live. The population is 24 million. They call the city just “Mexico,” just as a New York City dweller speaks of “New York.” Regarding this Mexico, Bef says it has one of the largest ex-pat American populations in the world, yet…the Mexicans never see them. The ex-pats live in enclaves, go to American restaurants, send their children to American schools. Like hidden aliens. But maybe that’s not so different from other ex-pat communities worldwide.

I shouldn’t have had those cigarettes yesterday, my chest hurts today. I sent a lot of recklessly cheerful emails last night, almost as if I was drunk. Social networking gets so important when you’re alone.

My bad hip hurts a lot. Next Monday I’m getting it replaced for the third frikkin’ time—don’t even ask—and I’m uptight about this. It’s affecting my mental stability. I’ve been having nightmares almost every night. Last week I dreamed about a nurse who wasn’t really a nurse, she was the angel of Death. Vintage horror move. The moment of realizing that this “nurse” isn’t caring for you, she’s imprisoning you, and she’s terribly strong, and she seems to have more than two arms. The starchy plastic cloth clamped across my nose and mouth. And why oh why does the doctor have no face?

Two nights ago I dreamed about trying to calm a guy who was screaming that he couldn’t stand disorder. Last night I dreamed that I was unloved and alone, a wistful outsider, lost forever. My first thought this morning was, “I wish I was dead.” But then I looked out from my balcony and again everything was good.


Click to see larger image.

I’m very happy to be in Guanajuato, and I wish I could stay longer. Like…forever? Learn Spanish. Some of the people are very attractive, others grotesque, others archetypal in Bruegelian ways. I can only guess at their inner lives, these denizens of an unknown world.

Huge numbers of police in town, riding around six or seven in a car, looking a little like street gangs. All different kinds of cop uniforms, some of them carry automatic rifles or machine guns. Bef says it’s because the governor of the Guanajuato state doesn’t want any kind of bad thing to happen at their prized festival.

Yesterday I spent some time with another conference participant, a somewhat eccentric map-maker named Peter Eberhardt latched onto me two separate times, and a welcome diversion both times, Peter behaving like a tour guide. Very knowledgeable, he lived in Mexico for many years. He says he’s drawn the best map ever of the US, and it won a prize. He was looking to find a local educational poobah whom he could tell about his map. It was fun to be with him. He pushed our way into this huge folkloric dance show, with thousands of people watching. I was glad to be on the scene, although I tend not to like that kind of spectacle. “Awkward mating rituals,” as Eberhardt put it. He says the folkloric dances are particularly well-loved in Mexico, a cultural touchstone.

I wonder if Bef likes the dances. He’s a city guy. He says he doesn’t like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s books or magic realism. Why not? He finds found these books corny—perhaps in same way that I find some of Ray Bradbury’s work corny. Nostalgic evocations of rural life. Who cares about made-up caricature people who never could have existed in the heartfelt teary-eyed way being described.

Today Bef insists on going to see the Mexican mummy museum, and I think it’ll be freaky and depressing, also it’s a half hour’s walk from here, and in an unkown part of town. My son Rudy Jr. was urging me to see it too. He was on a tour around Mexico a few years ago with the Cyclecide Bike Rodeo group—putting on shows with a gang of SF hipsters—and he passed through Guanajuato. So I guess, yeah, I’ll see the Mexican mummies.

I didn’t eat all that much yesterday, and I’ve been avoiding fresh vegetables and unpeeled fruit, and drinking only bottled water, and I still don’t have the “squirts,” which I dread getting again in Mexico, like I did back in Puerto Vallarta when we went there nearly thirty years ago, or in Spain when I was there fifty years ago, or in Manhattan about twenty years ago. You don’t want to repeat those kinds of experiences that you remember with horror for decades.

On a more upbeat food note, I’ve had some really excellent tacos at this dive called Trompo. So good that I moan and grunt while I eat them—hey, I’m eating alone. The corn tortillas are fresh-made, and they fry them in fragrant meat grease, and the meat is chopped small and singed black. The taco is tiny, two little corn tortillas on top of each other, with the meat on that, and you have bowls of cilantro and pickled chopped onion and a great green salsa to add on. I can eat one of those Trompo tacos in about two bites. I had five of them in a row yesterday. The pork taco al pastor is far and away the best. I see lots of people eating tacos at stands on the street, as well, crowds of them, and Rudy had urged me to try those, but I’ve held back from that. Don’t want to go all muy squirtado.

I hiked up to the ridge above my hotel, a serious climb, like a thousand feet, up stone staircase alleys, the air thin, my heart clenching in my chest. At the top I could see into the next valley, with similar kinds of houses, but not so many. The houses on the hill are ancient, many have been here for five hundred years. Like an anthill or a stone hive. Like the Alfama district of Lisbon, Escherian with twists and turns. Barking dogs and crowing roosters. Some of the dogs barking in a blood-chilling kind of way—in an oh-I-think-I’ll-go-into-a-different-alley kind of way.

Beneath the surface of Guanajuato is a maze of tunnels, with tunnel intersections, and ramps popping up here and there. Retrofitted from drainage tunnels built by those excavation-happy miners. Means there’s less surface traffic in the lovely town. You can walk in the tunnels too, if you want to, but I didn’t want to.

After my hike, Bef showed up and we talked for awhile, sitting in armchairs by the balcony window in my room. I noted down a few of the things he told me. He mentioned the word chiflado, meaning “crazy.” It comes from the verb chiflar, meaning “whistle.” The chiflado has been touched by the whistling breath of the beyond. He also mentioned that his brother had been in a reggae/ska band called Mamá Pulpa, meaning Mother Octopus. Here’s a video of their tune, “Que Mal Gusto.”


Click for detailed image.

Bef also told me one of the biggest bands in Mexico at one time was called Café Tacvba. Here’s a video of their tune, “Quiero Ver.” And he was involved with a zine called Sub (as in subliterature, as in Sf or crime novels.) And he was in a story anthology called Mexico City Noir.

And then we did go to the Mummy museum—my legs were rubbery by now, so we took a Mexican bus part of the way, exciting for me, and not something I could have managed on my own. I told Bef I was happy to be seeing the sights with him, as being his partner made me cool, and less of a tourist. He said I didn’t look like a tourist anyway because my eyes are intelligent as opposed to dull and blank. Of course I do carry a camera. Bef pointed out a nice little cyberpunk tableau—a man repairing computers with a screwdriver and pliers in a store that was, literally, a hole in the wall.

I took really a lot of photos in Guanajuato, about 200, continually carrying my kick-ass street-photographer wide-angle 22 mm lens Fujifilm model X100T. You have to switch the battery at least once a day. Working the camera so intensely, I’m getting smoother at using its dauntingly large array of settings. Something I’m trying to learn is how to grab shots of things happening, that is, when I see something staring, I want to quickly aim at it and press the shutter button and get a fast click and have the photo be in focus. There can be this deal-killing lag of a half a second while the camera focuses.

Something I haven’t tried recently is to manually set the focus to a reasonable range, and not have it getting measured, and that speeds up the response. Or go even more manual and set some reasonable shutter speed as well, like 1/125. And let the camera decide on the aperture. Or even pre-set the aperture too, which speeds up the camera’s response even more. If you’re running the images through Lightroom or Photoshop, you can usually fix a frame that’s too dark (underexposed). The thing you can fix is if it’s out of focus or if there’s motion blur.

It sometimes annoys people if you grab a shot of them. I kind of like being sneaky, although now and then I’ll go brazen like patron saint street photographer Gary Winograd, and get right in people’s faces, and then smile and nod at them as if what you just did is okay. If you ask a subject’s permission before the shot—that’s more the “polite” thing to do, but then you may not get a good shot, as they’ll be tense, or posing in a blank way.

What will work is if you go further than just asking permission, that is, if you take the time to chat with them and get to know them a bit, and have them be as curious about you as you are about them—my sense is that Diane Arbus took this route. But I hardly ever do that. I’m not someone who’s great at talking to strangers. If someone ends up looking wearily pissed off in a photo then I do feel slightly bad. But it might also be a good photo.

Anyway, the mummies were even more disgusting and horrible than I’d expected, but at least the “museum” wasn’t all plastic and educational…it was scuzzy and funky and Mexican and like carnival side-show. By the way, these bodies weren’t deliberately mummified in the Egyptian sense—there’s something about the dry, hot air around Guanajuato that just preserves some bodies, makes them look like hideous sagging beef jerky. These mummies were, as I understand it, bodies that were excavated and evicted from this one particular graveyard next to the mummy museum. The families of these bodies were unable or unwilling to pay the graveyard an additional fee for “perpetual burial.” So the mofos running the graveyard dug up the “deadbeat” bodies and put them on display!

The impresarios seem to have a certain sense of macabre humor. The mummies are dressed or posed in odd ways. Like, dig how this zombie guy is undoing his pants, presumably so as to unleash his ectoplasmic penis… Eeeek! The very worst are the mummies of babies—I refused to even look at them. Bef didn’t mind the babies. He likes the museum in the way that a kid might like creepshow horror comics. The last time Bef went there was when he was eight, a big family roadtrip up from Mexico City to see the Mexican mummies!

Bef recounted a story (possibly an urban legend) that at one point, like in the 1950s, the Mexican mummies of Guanajuato were lent or rented to an American sideshow for a year, and when they came back, one mummy was missing. A great set-up for an SF/fantasy/horror tale. “The Missing Mummy.” He’s coming back, he’s about to step out of this taxicab down in the street outside my midnight balcony, and look at the nice red glow of the tail lights on the cobblestones. The mummy has come to town to seek me out. Needs some advice on certain interdimensional anomalies. Maybe Bef and I can co-author such a story or graphic novel of these days. Do it in a bilingual edition, Spanish and English. Sell it to Berlitz and Rosetta Stone for their language courses…

On the way to the mummy museum, Bef went into a Mexican wireless service store, I think it was Telcel, not that this photo of the Telcel office—which is every bit as cold and and monochrome as an Apple outlet. Bef wanted to renew his phone plan, and it took a long time (and he was unsuccessful), but I didn’t mind waiting.

I was glad to sit down, and I filled up a whole page of notes for ideas about this “Ultrastorm” chapter I want to write for my Million Mile Road Trip. And I’ll talk about these ideas in the next entry of these “Writing Notes,” incorporating some further revelations I was granted while visiting the Diego Rivera Museum in Guanajuato on the next day.

Stay tuned.

Oh, and many thanks to the Cervantino Festival, to Bef, and to Gabriela Frias. I like Bef’s Batman T-shirt here.

Raiders, Great Pumpkin, Tunitas, Pigeon Point, Perfection

Thursday, October 15th, 2015

Today’s post is photocentric, and the theme is Nature’s perfection.

Kicking it off is this nice shot of a sunset at Pigeon Point lighthouse on Route 1 south of Half Moon Bay. I like how the roughness of sea echoes the clouds. And the vertical shadows of the clouds along the band above the horizon.

Backing up a week, I went to see the Oakland Raiders with some of my SF writer friends. This dude shown above is not, so far as I know, an SF writer, he is, rather, the ultimate exponent of a certain type of pregame festivity. Note how his sunglasses are adjusted to hold the empty 12-pack in place.

Cecelia Holland organized our outing. She’s published about 40 novels, some with warriors and Vikings, and she feels at home in the endzone “black hole” seating in Oaktown. I really get a kick out of her. A full-on writer.

Lively, passionate fans all around us. Imposing, but friendly. We were all in it together.

I dug this hat, which was in effect a football.

Very loud in the crowd and I forgot my ear plugs. I tore off the margins of a draft book proposal for Million Mile Road Trip that I had in my pocket and chewed them up to make something to put in my ears, and when that didn’t de-decibel-ize me enough, I tore strips off my handkerchief. At one point the Blue Angels few by overhead as well, but you could hardly hear them. Peaceful in the BART car riding home.

A few days later, my daughter Isabel and I spent the afternoon along Route 1 driving from Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz. Isabel was visiting from Wyoming. Our initial goal in Half Moon Bay was to find the 1,969 pound biggest pumpkin of the year 2015. It’ll be the star of the annual Pumpkin Festival on Oct 18, 2015, but it’s already in place there, a captive alien, on a stage in front of a building called I.D.E.S. We had to ask around for awhile to find it, but it was wonderful to see it there, and nice to be there before the crowds arrive…all these years I’ve wanted to see the Great Pumpkin without the crowds.

Here’s me posed as city-slicker alien-hunter with his big-game trophy. A slain Freeth. Soon to appear in Million Mile Road Trip. “You…you made my sister into pie?”


Maverick’s wave mural in Half Moon Bay. Click here to see larger version.

Isabel spotted this life-size (?) Mavericks wave mural. Dig how the surfer has a 3D lightbulb in his path. Very Magritte, especially with the window on the wall. SFictional flash: mappyworld (or maybe even our own world) is a hypermural “painted” on the 3D hypersurface of…some 4D alien structure…and you notice—huh?—a 4D dvoornik’s 3D cross-section hanging in the air in middle of the room, the dvoornik being part of the underling hyperobject that our world is “painted” onto. And the window is a hole into unspace. Obv, right?

A few miles south of Half Moon Bay we came to a sheer roadside bluff with the Tunitas Creek Beach at its base. The path down was so steep that there’s a fixed rope that you have to hang onto. It was basically insane for an old man with a bad hip like me to follow Isabel down the path, but I did.


Click here for a larger image.

Wonderful to have all this space to ourselves. That’s Isabel in the middle, and that giant puddle is where Tunitas Creek pools out.

We walked around for quite awhile there. Nature on her own is so perfect. The artful disorder, not too regular, not too random, on the edge of chaos, ever-changing, the waves, the ripples, the birds scattered just so, and in motion as well, and don’t forget the clouds, it’s an endless dance of beauty. “Nature is god!” I exclaimed, trying to express what I felt. “Totally,” agreed Isabel, who’s known this all along.

It was getting dark and we still had a way to go. We scored some halibut chowder and “Mexican coleslaw” at Duarte’s tavern in Pescadero, and stopped by the Pigeon Point lighthouse hostel at sunset. One of these days I’d like to spend a couple of nights there. So fully off the grid.

A whale bone was hanging there by the ocean in a wood frame with the sunset in the background.

The lighthouse is kind of rundown…they’ve been raising money to refurbish it for about 10 or 15 years, but it’s fine as it is. Better than fine, perfect. Everything’s perfect, okay?

Perfect? Aren’t there still all the problems in the newspapers? And the issue that each of us is going to age and die? Well, you could, on a given day, and in a certain mood, suggest that we live in the best of all possible worlds—“possible” relative to the various ineluctable physical, statistical, and sociological constraints of it having to be a real world.

Perfect for that afternoon, anyway. An afternoon of peace.

Great to see you, Isabel!


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