{"id":5727,"date":"2014-12-30T15:33:43","date_gmt":"2014-12-30T23:33:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=5727"},"modified":"2015-01-11T12:21:31","modified_gmt":"2015-01-11T20:21:31","slug":"aliens-coming-down-a-pointed-ladder-magic-rabbits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2014\/12\/30\/aliens-coming-down-a-pointed-ladder-magic-rabbits\/","title":{"rendered":"Aliens Coming Down a Pointed Ladder. Magic Rabbits."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There\u2019s some woods near Los Gatos where I\u2019ve been walking for twenty-eight years.  Ever since we moved here in 1986.  I always see new things.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/images5\/magicrabbitcones.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Like these pinecones resembling (to my eye) rabbit ears. The broken wood is the rabbit\u2019s face. <\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/images5\/youthstairs.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>We had a nice Thanksgiving and Christmas with the family. It always does my heart good to see the grandchildren. The wheel of life\u2014I\u2019m on the way out, my children are middle-aged parents, and the new crop is  coming up.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/images5\/leafoncactus.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Dig this oak leaf resting on the gnarly leaves of a red hot poker cactus. Maybe my mind is like the oak leaf, resting on the cosmic, living biome-swirl.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/images5\/surfstairs.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>My wife and I are always going down to Santa Cruz, looking at the ocean over and over.  I like these stairs, on West Cliff Drive near the statue of the surfer.  The stairs go right down into the water.  Something richly symbolic about this photo, too.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/images5\/secretoflife_ebookcover.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I put out <em> <a  href=\"http:\/\/www.transrealbooks.com\/#secretoflife\">The Secret of Life <\/a><\/em>as a single-volume ebook the other day.  It\u2019s also a part of the three-books-in-one <em><a  href=\"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/transrealtrilogy\">Transreal Trilogy<\/a><\/em>.  But I wanted <em>Secret <\/em>out as a single, in case anyone is looking for specifically that book  As usual, I used one of my paintings for the cover; this one is called \u201cHe Enters Her Room.\u201d\u009d  It works as a cover for <em>Secret<\/em>, as the guy looks like he <em>could <\/em>be an alien in a human body. With that small head.  I myself have a head the size of a grapefruit, or a satsuma, or a Meyer lemon\u2014it gets smaller every year.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/images5\/haringaliens.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>We went to see the <a  href=\"https:\/\/deyoung.famsf.org\/haring\/about\">Keith Haring show <\/a>at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco. It\u2019s quite good.  Keith did some remarkable things\u2014like he drew five or ten thousand large chalked graffiti pictures on rectangles of black paper in the NYC subway system over a period of five years.  The rectangles of paper were in place to cover up ads whose space-rental time had expired.  A very nimble guy with a small head. I\u2019m planning to look at some videos of him.<\/p>\n<p>The picture shown above, drawn on a prefab urn, has some nice aliens, he didn\u2019t draw these particular figures over and over, and it\u2019s fun to see them.  <\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/images5\/haring_explains.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>He draws a certain kind of dog a <em>lot<\/em>, also UFOs.  I think of the series of drawings above as, \u201cKeith Haring Explains It All.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/rudyrucker.com\/paintings\/images\/75_nudenabsufo.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Keith\u2019s UFOs look different from the way I like to paint them. That\u2019s one of mine above.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/images5\/crackedmud.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m on the verge of starting to write a long story or a novella with the working title, \u201cMillion Mile Road Trip.\u201d\u009d  I was calling it \u201cEndless Road Trip\u201d\u009d before, and saying it would be a novel, but that felt like too long to walk on my bare feet.  I\u2019ll just do a million miles for now.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/images5\/115_endlessroadtrip.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>It\u2019ll have a couple of aliens in it, and I already <a  href=\"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2014\/09\/05\/endless-road-trip-4th-dimension-authors-pov\/\">painted them <\/a>back in September.  These days I think these two aliens are called Yampa and Pinchley.  My outline for the story was too complicated before, and I\u2019ve been making it simpler and simpler so it\u2019ll feel easy enough to actually write.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/images5\/laddertoroof.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I\u2019d been puzzling over how the two aliens manage to show up on Earth.  Probably at first one of them is chasing the other. The boy chasing the girl, right.  Or vice-versa. And today I had the idea of making their arrival really simple.  There\u2019s a ladder that tapers up to a point.  It\u2019s like \u201cforced perspective,\u201d\u009d the point is, like, a thousand light years away.  Or in another dimension.  And the aliens come climbing down that ladder.  Which I saw while walking near Lexington Reservoir.  Gift from the Muse.  Took the photo with my iPhone\u2019s feeble camera and really it\u2019s not bad.  Just don\u2019t zoom on it or you\u2019ll see the quantum space-foam speckle.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/images5\/treerabbit.jpg\" \/> <\/p>\n<p>And I saw a second magic rabbit in the woods.  Maybe put the magic rabbits in the novella too.  \u201cThe Million Mile Road Trip,\u201d\u009d yeah.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There\u2019s some woods near Los Gatos where I\u2019ve been walking for twenty-eight years. Ever since we moved here in 1986. I always see new things. Like these pinecones resembling (to my eye) rabbit ears. The broken wood is the rabbit\u2019s face. We had a nice Thanksgiving and Christmas with the family. It always does my [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-million-mile-road-trip","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5727","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=5727"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5727\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5730,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5727\/revisions\/5730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}