Whoah, it was officially 106 degrees in Los Gatos yesterday, and today the thermometer in the shade on our deck reads 114. I’ve lived here 20 years and don’t recall it ever being that hot before. I really think our globe is warming. Here’s a picture of the ocean eating away the land (with a dog in the foreground). I love the light through the wave.

Sylvia and I escaped the heat on the bluffs in Daventport yesterday, and I tried another acrylic “en plein air” painting.

On the theme of global warming, in the past year I’ve enountered two friends who are Global Warning Deniers. In both cases, they’d taken their ammunition from the recent novel “State of Fear” by sci-thriller author Michael Crichton. In both cases my friends were bright people with little formal education; they read a lot, and as they enjoy Chrichton’s work, they assume it’s true.

Some have suggested that, by doing the leg-work for oil companies Crichton is at committing a crime against humanity. It’s hard to understand why he’d do this. Is that, given entrée to the super rich by his past successes, he wishes to fully ingratiate himself? Does he think he’s being daringly contrarian? Or maybe he resents scientists — although you’d think that with all the money he’s made he could let go of his resentments. Or maybe he just needed an idea for a novel…

I guess I’ll actually go see that new Al Gore movie “An Invconvenient Truth.” Least I can do. Well, really what I prefer to do is go to the beach and paint while we can still move around.

This time the picture came out pretty well.

So back in the Bay Area, we went to the “Monet in Normandy” show at the oddly named (after a building in Paris) Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco. (Though this obelisk picture is still left over from Gettysburg.)

It was a Tuesday morning, but crowded anyway, mostly with people even older than us. Vacationers and retirees! My people. In the long line for the cafeteria you can look at some cool thousands-of-years old bottles with great iridescence built up on them.

When I don’t see Impressionist paintings face-to-fact for awhile, I start to think of them as kind of boring crowd-pleasers. But Monet really is a genius. The compositions are so nice. And the way he peck-peck-pecks all those colors.

A big gain from visiting an art museum is that it temporarily jiggers the way I see things. After studying the Monets for awhile, the outer world began looking Impressionist, too. I saw this near the Golden Gate bridge, on Baker Beach after the show.

Although I can’t own a Monet, I live inside a bunch of them. This is a hill above Los Gatos yesterday.

I actually carried a small canvas up there and tried to emulate Monet by painting en plein air. It was 98 degrees in the shade. I was sitting on some ants; they crawled into my shorts and pinched me on the balls. I respect Monet more than ever!

Although my painting is still weak (I hope to make it slightly better), the effort amped up my Monet-vision even more. I could see lots more colors, as in these PhotoShopped bushes at Baker Beach.

It also struck me that in fact we can't ever capture what it is that we see. No two photos are the same, and espeically when you get an image into PhotoShop you see how many choices there are to make — the camera defaults are just one of an infinity of options. And paintings vary even more (like this wonderful Monet). Human experience is evanescent and there really isn't any precise way to capture it. All the more reason to pay attention.

How would you like to be the proud owner of Rudy Rucker’s old car? Maybe it’ll help you write science fiction! I’m trying to sell my good old 1989 Acura Legend on Craig’s List. You can find all the details there. This is the first time I’ve tried using Craig’s List, so am unsure how it will play out.

I bought this car back when I worked for Autodesk in the early 1990s; I still love it, but now I have a new one. Last year I painted the roof and trunk white because they were peeling from the sun.

Still mopping up the photos from my Journey to the East. Today’s are from the battlefield in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where my friend Don lives.

In Gettysburg, the Confederates got about as far North as they ever made it. It was kind of sad thinking about all the bloodshed there.

A really hot day, the fields so live and buzzing. My US ancestors were on the Confederate side; they lived in Virginia and Georgia.

We’re so lucky to live in peace at home right now; how terrible it must be to live in a country where a shooting war is going on.

After the wedding, we went to DC and stayed in a nice boutique hotel near DuPont circle, the Madera. Seeing the fountain in DuPont circle brought back a big memory rush of the times I hung out in this neighborhood when I was in college and grad school, forty years ago, we used to come in here to see the art movies at the Dupont Cinema and get cool books at the bookstore down the block.

[Bosch’s Death and the Miser, seen at the National Gallery.]

After college my first college roommate “Ron Platek” lived around Dupont Circle; I remember in 1970 my second college roommate “Ace Weston” and I were visiting Ron, a reunion. Ron had a postcard he’d gotten from Charlie Manson; he’d gotten Charlie’s prisoner number from a newspaper photo and had written him the question, “What IS the secret of your success with women?” and Charlie wrote back, “Ronald: Just be real, real, REAL.”

We three wanted to get high, and we met a chatty gay guy our age in Dupont Circle, he said he’d just gotten out of jail for dealing, but since we were so nice he’d take a chance and sell us some mescaline caps that he had buried under a rock in the circle; we paid him, he dug them up, gel caps of pink powder, we ate them and went to see the movie of Woodstock, which kind of made us forget we were high, though when we exited the theater, the trip came up and slobbered on us like a faithful dog that had been waiting outside.

Today, seeing the fountain, and the streams forever cascading off its high marble bowl, I think of the water as being like time itself, flowing on and on whether or not I’m here to watch.

What if the mescaline never really wore off? What if the past thirty-six years of my life have been a single, highly detailed hallucination. And I’m about to come down off my trip.

Yes, the last thirty-six years has been a mescaline hallucination. I find this thought oddly cheering. I’m still watching Woodstock with Ace and Ron. Ace will nudge me and we’ll walk out into the hot July night, it’ll be 1970 and I’ll be 24 again. I won’t quite be able to remember all the things I imagined — my life with my wife, the children, the books, the career, the ups and the downs. I’ll have a fleeting sense of it, a bustling of details within a snow-globe.

And then I suppose I’ll start over and do it all again. And snap out of it again. Infinitely many times on down the regress into the white light. Which brings us to the Now Moment.

That faithful slobbering dog of a trip waiting outside the Woodstock theater was my life.

Maybe when I die, it’ll be like a hallucination ending. The world takes over again. When I die, it’s not so much a matter of me coming down, it’s in fact the world that’s coming down. Coming down off the Rudy hallucination.

Really I’m writing this entry by way of getting the Rudy hallucination going again. I’ve been distracted by this long trip. I’ve been merged into my family and friends. Now, as I look inward, the illusion of being a writer snaps back into focus. “A Promethean figure snatching fire from the heedless gods.”

Back to Postsingular, what if something like that last rap happens to my character Jayjay while he’s jacked into the mind-amplifying Big Pig. He imagines he’s living out a whole life; I might run through this whole hallucinated life in like two pages at the start of the next chapter.

Regarding a Big Pig hallucination, the idea is that you’re extending your consciousness out into the Internet. And the computation can be cranked up to run a billion times as fast, so you do, like 36 years in a couple of seconds. How does that work?

Well, I don’t run my meatware that fast. I am running a sim of myself that fast, I’ve outsourced the computation into the Web. My outsourced consciousness consists of me watching a mental model of yourself reacting to things. And when Jayjay snaps out of it, he happens to have some of the outsourced memories mapped into his personal wetware.

Hi, Ace!