{"id":13729,"date":"2022-02-16T19:01:51","date_gmt":"2022-02-17T03:01:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=13729"},"modified":"2022-02-17T07:01:08","modified_gmt":"2022-02-17T15:01:08","slug":"be-high","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2022\/02\/16\/be-high\/","title":{"rendered":"Be High"},"content":{"rendered":"

About three weeks ago, I went for a hike in Castle Rock Park, alone, going far, and I talked to a plant for a long time. A madrone with a duckbeak snag and a moss beard.\u00a0 I haven’t used pot or alcohol for twenty-five years, but I still like to be high.\u00a0 When I find the way.\u00a0 After all, it never was about getting<\/em> high.\u00a0 It’s always been about being<\/em> high. And here’s the guy I was high with.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Amazing creature.\u00a0 The skin of these madrone’s so smooth and bumpy.\u00a0 I want to put him—them into a story.\u00a0 I’m going to call them Bumpy the Tree-ee.<\/p>\n

The way I met Bumpy—I was sitting on this overlook at Castle Rock where I can see across valleys and the Santa Cruz mountains, all the way to Monterey Bay…and I was pushing.\u00a0 Trying to get<\/em> high. And not making it.\u00a0 Kind of despondently thinking, I know<\/em> I used to get very excited by this spot, and…what was I used to do to get into this scene so heavily? Without having to burn a bone of the good old green.<\/p>\n

Don’t<\/em> take out your phone Rudy.\u00a0 The road to High sure as f*ck doesn’t run through checking for emails, text messages, Twitter , and new stories on the Washington Post<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The wonderful doughy flesh of the madrone trees. They look like trees sculpted by someone unconcerned with the normal standards of how trees should be shaped. Fat branches sprout out thin branches instead of stepping through the intermediate stages. The trunks have great wens and buboes, elephant wrinkles and stomach-paunch folds; they puddle out at the base.<\/p>\n

I decided to paint Bumpy. I’d been trying to get a new painting going, and all I had was this tasteful grid of colors that I kept changing.\u00a0 I was inspired by Sylvia\u2019s latest beautiful quilt, with wonderful colored squares, and circles inside the squares, and each square\/circle divided in four. But I settled for plain old bland squares.\u00a0 And then obviously I needed more.<\/p>\n

I was on the point of putting faces into the squares\u2014thinking the faces might represent characters or critters in my novel, but that felt boring, also the canvas isn\u2019t very big, so the faces wouldn\u2019t get much pop.\u00a0 And then I decided to put in maybe just three faces, maybe to be characters in a story, and to have the middle of the canvas filled by Bumpy the Tree-ee.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cBumpy the Tree-ee\u201d\u009d acrylic on canvas, February, 2022, 28\u201d\u009d x 22\u201d\u009d. Click for a larger version of the painting.<\/a><\/em> For more info see my Paintings<\/a> page.<\/p>\n

The painting took me a long time, like seven or eight sessions, when usually I can finish in four.\u00a0 I kept adding to it.\u00a0 Making the tree gnarlier.\u00a0 Working on the kids\u2019 faces.\u00a0 Doing the color backgrounds over and over.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I’d like to put Bumpy and the three kids into a story to be a prequel or sequel to\u00a0 my story “Everything Is Everything<\/a>,” which I’ve rewritten quite a few times.\u00a0 It’s a story about endlessly regressing scale.\u00a0 Lower and lower size levels.\u00a0 And it’s useful to remember that trees have extensive root systems. Bumpy\u2019s root system might go down through transfinitely many size levels. He might be, in some very real sense, omnipresent, with a tendril always closer than you think.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want to do the stale thing of saying atoms are solar systems. For that matter I don\u2019t want to hang out on the atomic level at all.\u00a0 Hell, I already did that in my very first novel Spacetime Donuts<\/em>\u2014which I wrote in 1976, some 55 years ago.<\/p>\n

I want to go down to the subdimensional level below<\/em> the atoms.\u00a0 I love that word \u201csubdimensions.\u201d\u009d But it\u2019s a little misleading.\u00a0 If we have Absolutley Infinite “Conway space” like in the Surreal Numbers<\/em> <\/a>post I did a while back, we\u2019re talking more about size scale more than about subdimensions.\u00a0 Maybe I better say infinitesimal, or no…transinfinitesimal<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The Mathematician Godfather makes you an offer you can’t understand.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The painting above is one of my favorite in the permanent collection at SF MOMA.\u00a0 James Roseqnuist, “Leaky Ride For Dr. Leakey.”\u00a0 I’ve never seen an explanation of the painting, but I have a theory.\u00a0 First of all, Dr. Leakey was a British anthropologist.\u00a0 But let’s just think of him as a man who’s perhaps interested in sex.<\/p>\n

Sex?\u00a0 Well “ride” suggests intercourse, right?\u00a0 And we see a Pop Art glamor girl looking out through the star-path zigzags on the right.\u00a0 And the central image shows an assemblage that’s screwed together.\u00a0 And it’s dripping.\u00a0 And pencils…well what other words start with PEN?\u00a0 A Leady Ride for Dr. Leakey…and, harrumph, a thoroughly enjoyable one.<\/p>\n

Am I high yet?\u00a0 Jive can get me there.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Mystery guests behind the moire curtains. And when I see their “faces,” I scream until my voice cracks and goes silent.<\/p>\n

Adventure.\u00a0 Something to think about besides the three bringdowns: past remorse, present fear, future tasks.\u00a0 Better: past happy memories, present is NOW, future is wide open.\u00a0 No need to worry about it.\u00a0 It ain’t here yet.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The third year of Covid coming on.\u00a0 Wow.\u00a0 Maybe nothing matters anymore.\u00a0 Should I write another novel?\u00a0 I’ll be 76 in March.<\/p>\n

Last night I was thinking maybe I really am done with being a novelist.\u00a0 Ageism is real. People tend not to care what I do, even if it\u2019s good. And Age is real as well, that is, my powers are fading. At this point I\u2019m sometimes repeating myself.<\/p>\n

Novels take so long, and they\u2019re so hard for me to sell anymore. If I’m bopping around the size scales, it could become a picaresque novel.\u00a0 All that world-building.\u00a0 Kind of frenetic, and tiresome to think about..<\/p>\n

In a way I\u2019m up for writing a transreal novel about getting old and dying, I did the afterlife in White Light<\/em>. I danced around it in Juicy Ghosts<\/em>, but didn\u2019t fully go in there\u2014although I guess teepsapce is a bit like the afterlife.<\/p>\n

Get a grip, Rudy.\u00a0 You don\u2019t want to write a novel that\u2019s about getting old and dying. That’s too much like real life.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Hi, Jack.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The broken clock all gone.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Time frozen.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Sylvia and I went down to Seabright Beach near the harbor in Santa Cruz. Very low tide, the riprap jacks deep in the sand, only a stub of the timeflown lighthouse.<\/p>\n

Planet of the Apes<\/em>. This was once a great city. And everyone was high.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The lean, faceless natives gathered, sounding shrill cries. They led us to a feast of roast carrion on a smoking pile of dried kelp.<\/p>\n

The world is fun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

About three weeks ago, I went for a hike in Castle Rock Park, alone, going far, and I talked to a plant for a long time. A madrone with a duckbeak snag and a moss beard.\u00a0 I haven’t used pot or alcohol for twenty-five years, but I still like to be high.\u00a0 When I find […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13729"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13729\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13739,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13729\/revisions\/13739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}