In January, 2025, my girlfriend Barb Ash and I took a two-week trip to Quintana Roo and the Yucatan in Mexico. I only got around to finishing this post on April 28, 2025. And note that a few of the photos are by Barb.

The hand of the woman sitting in front of me on the plane looked like an alien flesh-crab. Those nails! What if it hopped loose and scuttled around? The spacetime of air travel is otherness.

We landed in a Quintana Roo jungle, a new airstrip hacked out from the trees. About thirty miles from Tulum, a popular tourist site known for its ruins. We toured the ruins, quite awesome.

Barb’s Hollywood nephew was getting married in a casual resort nearby, it was fun. Met an interesting woman Taffy Brodesser-Akner, and ended up reading her recent novel Long Island Compromise. The title has three meanings. Very funny and jaded, maybe a bit like Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint.

Barb and I wanted to get away from it all, and we headed south along the coast for an ecological preserve that contains a tiny village called Punta Allen. Caution is the better part of wisdom, and I had not rented a car. We took a cab down to the edge of the preserve, where we found a boat among the mangroves.

It was small launch, sent by the resort where we’d be staying, Grand Slam Fishing Lodge. The boat ride took about an hour, winding past completely deserted salt keys with amazing birds.

The lodge was almost completely empty, the beach was unbelievable.

This seemed not to be the best fishing season for bonefish, permit, and tarpon — a trio which makes up a fisherman’s “grand slam.”

Insane clouds and water.

Rudy alone on the beach in front of our room..

Barb and I walked down the beach a couple of times, reaching little Punta Allen itself. Tiny worn adobe town. Casual setting in Punte Allen.

Hard to be sure if this particular venue was abandoned or not. Maya there, many of the families generations old. Most spoke no English at all, but a lady at a sort of travel agency spoke English. Not that it was a “travel agency” as you’d imagine.

We wanted to go on a boat ride and do some snorkeling. The lady phoned around and found a local man with a boat, and he took us out.

Took us straight out to sea, as a matter of fact, two miles to reach some shallows where I could snorkel, although at that point I was in a state of error. A spooky rain cloud hung over the sea like a stage curtain, ready to unveil the end of the world.

And then that first boatsman brought us close to shore, a zone of clear water and white sand, with no other humans in sight, and the view like a giant Rogthko painting.

We spotted an abandoned lightohouse on the shore nearby. So—bright idea—for our second outing, we got young Punta Allen local to drive us along a sand track through the jungle near water’s—so Barb and I could check out the crumbling lighthouse. The older men didn’t want to drive there. They were right.

The young man’s car sank into  axle-deep sand by lighthouse and got totally stuck. I was thinking about how an older Myaya man had warned Barb and me about a very large crocodile living in the mangroves by the lighthouse. A man-eater.

Barb and I paid off our struggling and perhaps terrified driver and walked back through the jungle to the village, a couple of miles. Utterly primitive houses along the way. Ate some local shrimp in Punta Allen,  then walked the final bit up the beach to our vast, empty Grand Slam Fishing Lodge.

Wonderful day, in a certain sense of the word. Not like staring at my screen. Glad the crocodile didn’t eat us.

We moved on, catching a local bus to Valladolid in the Yucatan. In the past, I’d ignorantly imagined that a Mexican bus might be sketchy, but far from it. They’re quite luxurious, with large, comfortable velour seats. No piled-up crates of live chickens, no waving bottles of tequila! You go to a local bus station to catch one, and you buy a reserved seat. Not especially expensive. If the bus is all booked, you sit around for an hour for the next one. Time means nothing anymore.

Valladolid is a charming, other-worldly town, completely off the grid, save for the fact that it’s near the famed square-topped pyramid Chichen Itza.

Prices very low; we got an extremely posh room on the top floor of a top hotel, in an old building with a large private patio overlooking the cathedral and the “zocalo” square. The Mesón del Marqués.

The Mexicans revel in making images of skulls and skeletons. This one is especially fabulous.

Most of the walls are painted in wonderful warm colors. And the low evening sun casts entrancing shadows.

We got a taxi from Valladolid to Chichen Itza. It wasn’t especially expensive, and a lot simpler that getting a bus or *ack* jointing a tour to herded around. The site made a profound impression on me. So alien, ancient, and strange.

The pyramid with tourists, for a sense of scale. But is wasn’t super crowded.

The old-time Maya had, of course, a snake god. Love this guy.

There’s a lot of talk about the Maya being into human sacrifices. Supposedly when they had a tournament in a game something like lacrosse, they’d sacrifice the best player on the winning team! Offering a really good soul up to the gods. Chichen Itza contains a huge (hundred meter long) ball court with glyphs carved into the walls. This one shows a star athlete who’d just had his head lopped off. And snakes of blood are leaping from his severed neck. Takes a little study to properly see this.

So here’s Barb pretending to be a sacrificial victim about to get her head cut off. Seeing her do this made me like her a lot. I myself did exactly the same thing for daughter Isabel’s benefit on a trip to Quintana Roo many years ago. I wrote a big Maya sacrifice scene into my second novel White Light — basing my research on an Uncle Scrooge comic book. Donald gets his heart cut out, to be held aloft in the rays of the setting sun, and Donald’s last thought is that he should have been nicer to Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

A monument at Chichen Itza with a hundred or two hundred skulls carved into the wall. I like how each one is different.

We spent most of the day at Chichen Itza—with its wealthy of strange and uncanny history. Some great hawkers too, Maya with authentic-seeming goods.

Hot from the sun and the walking, we stopped at an unexpectedly great cafe on the Chichen Itza grounds. Barb and I began idly squabbling over nothing, who knows what, and the Mexican waiters were enjoying the show, laughing in a friendly way, and, I’d like to think, admiring our chic looks. I tend to get this feeling when squiring the attractive Barb.

I felt cosmopolitan, as if living in a Federico Fellini movie, which is of course where I’d most like to be. Marcello Mastoriani and Claudia Cardinale in a Via Veneto nightclub in 8 ½ or La Dolce Vita. Nothing to quarrel about, nothing at all.

After Chichen Itza we caught a bus to Merida, a larger town in the Yucatan. Check out this flamingo-pink Merida hotel with a Vegas/Fifties/Art-deco design. And dig the elegant building to its left.

Given that the prices were so reasonable by California standards, we went and got a room in a hotel that’s a former palace, the Mansión Mérida. The ceilings in the rooms were about thirty feet high, and everything was made of amazing old stone.

As a mathematician I was delighted to see dodecahedral stone newel post on the entrance bannisters.

Our deluxe marble-halls Merida hotel did have one minor drawback. The only window looked out on a very busy street. But there was a complicated multi-panels-of-fine-wood shutter over the window, which was in fact floor length, and which opened onto a tiny balcony. Insane view of the street with brilliant cloud-dotted sky, and odd telephonics building across the street and its weird windows. Mexico has all kinds of architectural styles. I liked looking out there, and a crowd of kids gathered in the alley across the way, doing who knows what. Another country.

Great shop of Mayan crafts in Merida near the zocalo.

When I got home I made a painting based on the Mayan glyphs that Barb and I saw in Chichen Itza. I worked on the painting for about forty hours, doing the layers over and over, getting the colors right. I found a couple of websites with simplified images of the pictographs. I put in a couple of crocodiles, pals of Kukulkan and regretting that they hadn’t devoured Barb and me in the lighthouse mangroves. Also some skulls. I called the painting “Mayan Codex” because there exist some so-called codex documents illustrating Mayan and Aztec temple art. My beloved beatnik author William Burroughs revered these records. For more info see my Paintings page.

One last image, I think this photo might be by Barb. A little museum in Merida had some inspiring pieces from the Maya days. Especially this incredible stone Maya lad. So modern, like a Picasso. In a way, the word “modern” doesn’t mean all that much in art. Each creator and each era finds their own idiosyncratic way of representing things.

The people we encountered were friendly and relaxed. Nobody, but nobody, mentioned US politics—it seems they’re not interested in our national obsessions. The Mexicans have their own world, their own culture and history, their own lives. Viva Mexico!

Barb and I went to Mexico for a couple of weeks in January, 2025, on the Yucatan peninsula. I’ll blog some photos from there later, but today I want to write about this trip we just took to visit with my daughter Isabel in Fort Bragg, up in northern California, on the coast near Mendocino.

What were Isabel and I up to? Well, we did a performance on the theme of what Isabel is calling “The Time Ecosystem.” Here’s a YouTube video that Barb filmed and I posted…you can look at that and poke around in this post to get a general idea.

Isabel says that there are all different kinds of time–mechanical, celestial, tidal, migratory, now-moment, tree rings, heartbeat, generational, helical, dream, screen, emotional—and how they mix together into an psychic ecosystem of sorts.

I mixed in in some comments about the fourth dimension, which Isabel is also interested in.

About 40 in the audience, on rows of low benches, outdoors, at sunset, bundled up, philosophers all. Outside the Larry Spring museum in Fort Bragg on the northers California coast The event was backed by the Redwood Time Project of the Spring Museum.

Fort Bragg is kind of a shaggy town, a mixture of hippies and Latinos and country people and crafts people and devotees of the redwoods and the sea. Mellow and unpretentious.

Amazing bluffs.

We talked a little about how there’s a still time or a no-time or an all-time that you get into when you’re totally absorbed. Hiking or making something or focusing on something. For me, writing and painting are my favorite kinds of no-time. I’m the real me then.

Isabel’s sketches for the painting of a hypercube that she made for the art show that went with our presentation. The idea is to draw two cubes and connect the corners. Like how can draw a cube by drawing two squares and connecting the corners,

One style of time. Another style is the very famous Jackson Pollock work called “Lucifer.” It’s at the Anderson Museum on the Stanford campus. The Anderson family used to have all these plantings in their home, and for kicks, the curators assembled some of the family furniture and put it beside the plantings.

I posted this, and someone asked if I really had a signed Jackson Pollock in my home. I wish! I like looking at this one for a long time, at least fifteen minutes, and I get into it, into that tangled Pollock time, the tangled space, and his body gestures. Price tag on this baby? Estimated at half a billion dollars.

Isabel is a pro jeweler, and I love looking around her studio. So very many kinds of time in this image. The hammering, the snipping, the letter-stamping, the polishing.

And I’m crazy about her pliers. I take t heir picture every time I’m in down. Pinch!

“Science” sort of bullies us into saying that time is line with numbers on it, to be measure by some boring clock. Oh yeah? Look at this path. The graceful organic curve. The pace I take going uphill or down. And my overlaid body images of the times I’ve walked it, at least once a week for about forty years. Two thousand weeks, two thousand walks.

How did I get go old? Where did the time go? But is it really gone?

In the special theory of relativity, and in other branches of physics, we talk about a four-dimensional spacetime. A stack of 3D moments, if you will. With all the old moments forever there, and perhaps future one’s there already. Look at that nice cliff. A flat person’s spacetime.

And here’s a nice image of the 3D spacetime that goes with the 2D world known as Flatland. Squares and triangles live in Flatland, sliding around like coins on a table top. And their spacetime selves are prisms..

And now here’s a deep rap from my best-selling book ever, Geometry, Relativity, and the Fourth Dimension. I published it when I was 31, via Dover Books. The editor imagined I was a wise old man. She came to have a look at me. But I was just a hippie. I did not in fact get royalties for the book, due to the contract I signed for a one-time fee of one grand, but there are several hundred thousand copies of it out there, and that’s good enough for me. It was my start.

<Begin quote.
If we accept the spacetime view of the world wholeheartedly, the question becomes, “What causes the illusion of the passage of time?” David Park’s article, “The Myth of the Passage of Time,” insists that we are in fact at each instant of our lives. Every moment of past and future history exists permanently in the framework of 4-D spacetime. The illusion of the passage of time is a consequence of the structure of the universe; in particular, it is a consequence of the fact that the memory traces of an event are always located at spacetime points whose time coordinates have greater values than the time coordinate of the event.

This fact cannot be explained; it is simply an observable property of the universe. That is, you are going to have memories of thoughts or events only at times “later” than the times at which these thoughts or events occur. Each point on the individual’s life-worm finds its place in relation to the other points on the life-worm by comparison of memories. There is no paradox in the claim that my earlier self who drew that image till exists. I will always be drawing that picture, typing this sentence and meeting my death. Every instant of your life exists always. Time does not pass.

You might argue, “Look, I know I am existing right now. The past is gone and the future doesn’t exist yet. If the past existed it would be possible for me to jump my consciousness back five minutes.” But there is no consciousness to jump back or forth; you are always conscious at each instant of your life. The consciousness of five minutes ago is unalterable. Even if it were meaningful to speak of “jumping back five minutes” and even if it were somehow possible to do this; you wouldn’t notice that you had done it! For if you entered back into your body and mind of five minutes ago, you would have no memory of having been in the future. You would think the same thoughts and perform the same actions. You could jump back over and over, read this chapter up to this point 50 times, and not notice.

Not that I think the idea of “jumping back” is meaningful. For this idea implicitly includes the notion of a consciousness that “illuminates” one particular moving cross section of spacetime-and this is the illusion that I am arguing against.

End quote>

But, you know, maybe that’s wrong. When I was getting my Ph.D. in mathematical logic at Rutgers, near Princeton, I managed to befriend the king of logicians Kurt Gödel , a mathematician and philosopher at the level of Einstein. This fp;;pwomg passage is taken from my august tome Infinity and the Mind, also online.

I managed to ask Gödel that same question, “What causes the illusion of the passage of time?”

Gödel spoke not directly to this question, but to the question of what my question meant — that is, why anyone would even believe that there is a perceived passage of time at all.

He went on to relate the getting rid of belief in the passage of time to the struggle to experience the One Mind of mysticism. Finally he said this: “The illusion of the passage of time arises from the confusing of the given with the real. Passage of time arises because we think of occupying different realities. In fact, we occupy only different givens. There is only one reality.”

And then I wrote my novel Software, with robots eating people’s brains.

As Isabel says about time lines, we don’t want to get so far into math and logic and science and *ack* computer science that we forget the hydra-headed times that pullulate around us.

The world really is not digital at all. It’s not made of numbers. It’s made of …what? Smears? Jiggles in infinite dimensional Hilbert space?

Great redwood stumps in the woods where the road back from For Bragg leaves Route One and rises into Anderson Valley. Each branch is a time line of its own, each breeze is a kingdom of Oz.

I love the Fort Bragg stores with their utterly non-standard items on display.

Isabel enjoys the all-but-incomprehensible teachings of the late outsider scientist or artist or TV repairman Larry Spring, whose shop is a still-beating heart of Fort Bragg.

Why “Fort”? Why “Bragg”? Political history is a timeline I steer clear of.

While we were doing our show, I was looking at the phone poles and the wires and admiring how multidimensional they are. So cute here, like looking into the 1950s. Time machine!

Such fun to be presenting with dear Isabel! I think she’s onto something with her Time Ecosystem.

Excellent murals in Fort Bragg. Consider the timeline of a squid tentacle, yes!

Isabel has turned me onto two great works about the sea. One is the first-person film, My Octopus Teacher, and the other is the amazing book, How to Speak Whale by Tom Mustil.

Our cinematographer Barb Ash. Amazing how well a phone works by now. A video is a whisker of time.

Over in Mendocino they have this sculpture, “Time and the Maiden,” carved from a block of redwood about a hundred years ago. Supposedly it represents some stage of progress in becoming a high-ranking Mason. I always though the guy was about to cut the woman’s throat, but supposedly he’s just helping to braid her hair.

Hairs as time lines, of course. Time is everywhere, deeply intertwingled.

John Updike wrote a poem with the line:

“Time is our element, not a mistaken invader.”

In the end it’s all about nature. No numbers on a dial. The Calla lilies of spring.

The sunset clouds, never exactly the same, each sunset unique — like the time-line of your life.

And, ah, the gnarly roots beneath the Monterey pines by the Beachcomber motel above the Pudding River beach.

Our endlessly creative world. With time to spare.

And Isabel’s workbench is busy.

And now came bad news from Louisville. My big brother Embry was suddenly dying of cancer. It came on very quickly. I flew back to Louisville, with my son Rudy Jr. along, and we had a chance to say our goodbyes to Embry. He was very weak. It was good to be together. I held his hand for a long time, and he told me his whole life was flashing before his eyes, bouncing around, and he liked that.

Embry’s son Embry III took this photo of me sitting by Embry Jr on his deathbed. He’s near the end. And I look so…pensive.

As I keep saying, where does the time time go. How can this be happening. So strange and sad to reach this milestone. I always knew it’s coming, but the reality isn’t like I imagined at all. Not even after seeing Sylvia die.

Embry and I were little boys together, seventy-five years ago — and I was thinking of us as little boys in the woods, with something scary drawing near.

Photo above of Stephen Davenport, Embry Rucker III, Rudy Jr, and Peter Graves. Stephen and Peter were two of Embry’s best friends in high-school. Lots of stories. The three of them had motorcycles and used to ride around together, not as hoodlums, but more just goofing around in the countryside.

Embry and Stephen took a famous spring-break trip to Florida, years ago, and they were broke, and hungry, and they went into a restaurant to order perhaps a single egg each. The family at the laden table next to them left the room. Instantly Stephen was on his feet, hunched over their table, and gobbling food. Then they returned. They’d simply stepped out on the deck to look at the view.

Rich, remembered laughter.

The day after I got back to California, Embry actually died, and I flew back to Louisville, this time with daughters Georgia and Isabel along. It was a big funeral, with many familiar faces from the old, old times. I got it together to deliver a eulogy…went though a lot of rewrites, making it be about him and not about me. Read it online at
Embry’s Eulogy.

It’s also worth mentioning that I published two memoirs by Embry under my Transreal Books imprint. You can buy them, or read them online at Embry’s Books.

Faces from the primeval past at the funeral. Shown above is Churchill Davenport (Stephen’s younger brother (their father was the rector of our church (where our father Embry Rucker Sr. became a deacon when he was 40))).

So much to unpack in family stories. Like a fractal, going deeper and deeper, with everything intertwingled. That’s why I called my autobiography Nested Scrolls! To write an auotbio, you have to know how to skim along, riding the sharp memories and the high-points. Like ice-skating.

Popping back up the memory stack: Churchill Davenport. He has truly a hero of my youth. He was very smart, athletic, talkative, persuasive, and with an artistic temperament, going off into side-alleys that nobody else would have thought of. A wild partier and a ladies man. And he did very badly in school. My opposite in nearly every respect. As I say, I greatly admired him. And talking to the 2025 version of Churchill was in no way a disappointment. It was like a reward for having done the eulogy. Seeing how our lives had unfurled.

My favorite memory of Embry is the time in 2005 when he and I went on a serval-weeks-long scuba diving trip in Palau, Yap, and Pohnpei in Micronesia, in the South Pacific, inventing the itinerary as we went along. Plus Jellyfish Lake! This shot is on a Sam’s dive boat from Palau, heading for the Blue Corner dive site, which I in fact mentioned in the eulogy. One of the greatest days of my life. Good old Embry.

And again back to lovely Los Gatos. At certain times and angles it feels like a mountain town. In the old days San Franciscans viewed it as a country resort. Love that clapboard in the photo, and that red, and the mountain—called El Sombroso because it’s shady.

I started this painting before I heard Embry was sick. Two of my go-to motifs are tentacles and flying sacers. I started this one with a giant tentacled creature from the sea. And then I heard about Embry being sick. And after he died I didn’t know what to do with myself.

Eventually I picked up this half-done painting and finished it. I tend to work from my subconscious when I’m painting, and not know exactly what the details mean. When the monster with the big teeth emerged, it made sense for me to paint that. But you might well say that the gravestone-shaped thing is Death.

I was reaching a point in the writing of Sqinks where I wanted a whole bunch of these blobby little sqinks to merge together into a super sqink. And seeing this fine yam, or sweet potato in the supermarket, I realized that’s what my super sqink should be like. A giant yam.

Years ago in Lynchburg, Virginia, I spotted a cardboard box for shipping a brand called “Playboy Yams.” And I wrote a ditty.

I’m eyeless and I’m waxed,
I’m orange all the way through,
I’ll be your playboy yammy
Now, what are you gonna do?
I’ll be your yam
I’ll do what yam boys do
I’ll be your yam all night
And in the morning too.

This is a spot on St. Joseph’s Hill near where I live. Sometimes I’ll bring a printed manuscript here and sit on a step, reading and correcting it. I’m lucky to have this view, I’ve been walking up here since 1986. Nearly forty years. About half my life. Nearly every day I ask myself: Where did all that time go? How did I get here? How can I be so old?

And here came Christmas again. The second without Sylvia. Even with her gone, I’m still putting up Christmas trees, at least so far. I do it for myself, really. It would be too sad not to get my little holiday treat. So I schlep out and bring in a tree on top of my car, as always, and dig out the ornament box from the basement.

Hanging the ornaments together used to be a thing. Last year the grandkids were around to help me hang them, but this year I hung them alone, and I wasn’t sure how it would feel. But it was fine, it even felt good. An annual ritual, honoring what’s come before, what’s to come, and where we are right now, putting our beloved baubles on our tree.

Rudy and Georgia, eccentrics in San Francisco!

Isabel and Georgia on Christmas Day.

The photo shows a crazed round of this multi-deck Hungarian card game that the family plays at holidays. Each player has a deck of cards, and the goal is is successfully play all your cards—with everyone playing on the same heaps at once—and when your cards are gone you scream “Stock Out” as loud as you can. And that’s the name of the game. Love how the wide-angle setting on the phone camera makes Jasper’s arm so frighteningly long.

Around now I scraped together my money and upgraded from my Leica Q2 to a new Leica Q3 43. It hurt to spend so much. But I had to have it. First picture of me.

And this is the first photo of Barb!

A traditional photo I like to shoot. The stuff on my desk near the computer, or to the side of it, or behind it. My desk is quite large, it’s a so-called Geek Desk with basically a table on top, and engines and levers underneath, and you push a button to move it higher or lower, so you can switch between sitting and standing as you endlessly work that keyboard, like a tattered person in rags working the Reno slots. Pull me a winnah! I won’t annotate the full panoply displayed, but the painted-upon sphere is a kind of sketch or model, by my genius artist friend Dick Termes. His finished works are big painted spheres more like a meter across.

Playing with the new camera, looking for things to shoot. Here we have a would-be Klein bottle, a skug, and George. The skug is a model 3D-printed by a loyal fan, representing a type of critter in my novel Turing & Burroughs. George was knit by my grandmother Lily von Klenck; I think she got the plastic head in a yarn shop. Our kids always liked George. Nice move on Grandma’s part to knit George so his arms point two different ways.

Always fun to photograph reflections.

And here I am, the empty man, with steady hand, the man of shade.

I see this oak tree every day, and every day I love it. All hail the gnarl!