Beauty

It's just a flower, an iris, one of many in my neighbor's garden. If it looks erotic I cant help it. Everything around here is looking splendid. The roses are going almost insane with blooms and the catalpa trees with their twelve inch leaves and bunches of incredibly fragrant blossoms are dropping them everywhere. The first crop of figs are swelling on the branch and my quince tree is loaded with baby quinces. A flock of ibis are patrolling the village, following the ditches which flood each property through a system of gates which are organised in a kind of hit or miss way. In short the place is so unutterably beautiful why am I leaving for more heat and humidity? I dont know. I should stay until the heat really kicks in and then make a run for the hills. It is impossible I think for me to acknowledge that I have found a place where I feel as at home as a stranger can. And hey! there is a coffee house gallery performance space in town! That'll make a change from the truck stop for casual dining out.
And a dog has adopted me. She is completely wild and has no concept of civilised canine behaviour. I cant take her on a road trip. She'd chew up the van and run away, besides I couldn't get her in the van. I think she is much happier wandering free, scrounging food and taking long swims in the ditches, but she lives under the van most of the time and tries to get into the yard. She is a really sweet and pretty dog. My dog thinks she's OK.
Jack needs a home again. I dont wish to discuss this situation right now. Later.

My Tumor

I dont think the surgeon is thinking aesthetic appeal when he snaps these pictures. Sometimes they look quite pretty but this one doesn't. I'm not sure why there are dimple shapes. They look a little like flowers. They always look like this. I should know. I think this was my twenty first surgery. I have attained my majority.

My old friend from way back in the Berkeley hippy days has been visiting. Those were the days when we thought the world was going to get so much better once our generation took over. Our days were filled with brilliant color and music and at the University few people had been touched by VietNam. The children of the rich and educated tended not to go. It was only at Community College that I witnessed young men disappearing for ever from the classroom. Now I sometimes meet their comrades in war on the highways. Forever misfits gradually fading from the scene with their dogs and packs and sunburned faces.

My friend hung out with the Berkeley Hiking Club. An unofficial entrance requirement was to have climbed the cables of the Golden Gate Bridge to one of the towers. My friend did it. It is hard to believe it as I see her now. Perhaps it was childbirth that made her so cautious in her later years. She says its much harder to get access to the cables now. Of course.

Buddha's birthday

I took this photo with a terrible disposable camera, but I still like the weirdness of it.

We celebrated Buddha's birthday today. We burned incense and poured sweet tea on a Buddha statue head and we floated flowers in the sweet tea. I really dislike religious ritual. I don't look on Buddha as a god, but just an astonishingly sensible man, so why am I pouring sweet tea over his 2500+ year old head? Being astonishingly sensible is a rare attribute.
It was good to have a crowd at the zendo and meet new people including some people who came up from Mexico. Then we all went and had lunch at some rowdy local cafe. They put us in the banquet room. After a while a covey of post church Methodists were also herded in. The Methodists were very restrained and polite while the Buddhists tended to exhuberance, except the Mexican people who had good, formal manners. When I say the Methodists were restrained, I am not referring to their dress. I thought dressing up for church died out in 1959, but these Methodists were quite eye catching. One man in particular caught my eye. He looked like a retired junior high principal or a real estate salesman, but he was garbed almost entirely in knock down drag out pure and simple yellow. I seem to remember that his entire suit was yellow, though it may only have been his jacket. His pants might have been beige. His tie was matching yellow. His shirt I think was white. Methodists, of course, do not sit for hours at a time in the full lotus position, so they can wear tight skirts and high heels. Our group at least, seems to find it less distracting from meditation to wear dull colors. We could not compete. Yesterday a Walmart employee mistook me for a man. Said employee had a sort of crest of fat growing, hump-like, from the back of her neck to her butt, but you couldn't mistake her for a man. I went home and looked at myself in the mirror and decided that I needed to make some forlorn attempt at prettying myself up. Look more Methodist perhaps.

Really tiny treasures

I never really looked at a cottonwood twig until someone showed me the star and target hiding in its heart. You have to break the twig at a node to see the star. The target is right in the open at this time of year, I think where last year's leaf broke away.
This morning one of the pack of young dogs that I run into every morning had evidently been hit by a car and had crawled into a big pipe by the side of the road. She does not seem to be able to move her rear end. The owner feeds and waters his dogs but doesn't get then fixed or get shots etc. As a result a mass disappearance occurs a couple of times a year. Perhaps I am wrong in thinking the dogs are turned loose in the desert. Perhaps he sells them to vivisectionists. The dogs are nearly always running loose. No one was home as usual. Turns out the owner was on the Biker Memorial April Fool's Ride honoring some recently departed biker of note. I left a message on his phone saying if its OK with him I'll take the dog and see if it is salvagable. She seemed pretty lively this evening, though still in her pipe. She ate a lot. The dogs are Catahula Hounds, according to the owner, and some of them are quite beautiful. The wounded one has a black head and mottled b & w body. She was always the one who greeted me and my dog so affectionately. I wasn't really thinking of another canine adoptee at this point, but sometimes these things are thrust upon us. We'll see.
I baked a cake this morning. I guess the increased elevation here does make a difference. The cake looked like a model of Mt St Helens after the event. I just tried again, with modifications, and a perfect looking cake is cooling smugly beside me.
I baked the cake because a friend and her husband were coming over. They didn't show. She thought we had agreed on Sunday. I thought Saturday. I told her that since we were both too intelligent to have made an error, the event did not take place therefore did not exist therefore neither one of us had made an error therefore our self images can remain perfect as always. So tomorrow evening I will attend a wake she is giving for someone I did not know, and I will bring my perfect cake.
I met a man bicycling for Jesus yesterday. I was looking for something to photograph to be the cover of my brilliant self published novel. I was on a desert road snooping around an old house and he came riding up on his laden bicycle towing a collector's item trailer. We had a philosophical discussion which was somewhat limited by his constant cries of 'And God sent his only son to die on the cross for our sins and that's it. There is no more.' He did say other beliefs were not necessarily evil - just misled. He was an alcoholic and I think probably a Viet Vet. I guess you have to have a revelation of some sort to have such a deeply held belief.