did my 20 minutes today, got a few hundred words down.

2 files changed, 64 insertions, 3 deletions

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+## sketches
+
+In the evenings if you head down to the beaches of Los Angeles you can watch the setting sun sink in to the blue of the Pacific, which eventually swallows all its color, but before it disappears beyond the reach of California, the sun paints a momentary stripe of red across the water all way back from the horizon to the shore, like a red river running out of the ocean. If you follow it all the way to where you stand, and turn around and stark walking up the beaches of Santa Monica and climb into your car and head our onto the concrete emptiness of the Santa Monica freeway, you'll find the river of red keep flowing, taillights now a string of traffic leading from the beach, through the high rises of downtown out into the Raymond Carver suburbs of Los Angeles and eventually farther east, through San Bernardino and on over the coastal mountains into the high desert and, depending on your precise route, out to Phoenix or up into Death Valley, Las Vegas and onward.
+
+Los Angeles is at once familiar and abhorrent to me. I know its streets, its freeways, even sidewalks, and many of its beaches. I know it's plastic people and their silver screen dreams. I know it well and I hate it all. What does it mean to hate the familiar? How does that internalize? Cancer perhaps. At the very least you should leave, it is the only dignified thing to do. So I did leave and looked at it from a long way away. From a distance it just looks silly, the hate dissolved, the anxiety and terror of being trapped in Los Angeles's clutches faded. Now I rather like it. For about three days. Then I have to go.
+
+I dragged William down to watch the sunset over the beaches of Santa Monica. I once stayed with him down here, at an apartment overlooking a bilge water smelling marina of the sort where no one sails, they just store boats. A massive waste of capital and really, really wonderful boats that someone like me would be happy to sail across the horizon to anywhere. Alas writers rarely afford boats. Not the kind of boats you see from the window of an apartment near the Santa Monica harbor. Bill is a writer too, it wasn't his apartment, he just happened to have lucked into it for a while and I, on one of my three-day passthroughs, was also tolerated.
+
+But that was years ago, decades even. Now William lives on the other side of the city (can the Los Angeles basin and surround areas really properly be called a city? There are, technically speaking, probably about one hundred cities, though the lines between them exist only for elections) and I live where I park the bus. Right now that happens to by Los Angeles, for three days. And this is one of them, here, at the Santa Monica pier where the strange confluence of corporate  capitalism run amok and sand combine to produce something that I'm sure no one really likes. The banality of the Santa Monica pier is difficult to put into words. People always say Eskimos have over one hundred words for snow. You'd think Americans would have one hundred words for banality. 
+
+Probably we're all too busy watching television or posting something to internet to come up with sufficient words to capture the banality of our experience. 
+
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+the red rock country of valley of fire. The red in the roacks comes from iron, the same as the red in blood, i think. the desert sandstone, the desert bighorn, las vegas, the air conditioned nightmare.
+
+
+## Images of others
+
+--- Eating Stone
+Migrating bluebirds, dozens of them, rest in the storms' wake, scattering electric blue shards in blond strands of salt grass.
+
+The air had an edge of glass to it, the trees no burden of leaves. The light was thin and brittle.
+
+Breath condensed in milky wraiths.
+
+...only a cobalt sky with no edge but winter's cold and a river beside us that shook out its light in full dazzle, a river rimmed with ice...
+
+---
+
+
+## Traveling
+
+In 1941 Henry Miller returned from Europe and drove across the United Staates -- back when driving across the country was somewhat more adventurous than it is today -- and dubbed his experience, <cite>The Air Conditioned Nightmare</cite>. Miller was taken aback by what had happened to his homeland in the twenty or so years he had been absent. He was, to put it mildly, not a fan. Still, for every ten page screed railing against the banality of America and vast superiority of France there's a few paragraphs tucked in there about how great Charleston is, or how wonderfully alive New Orleans is and of course there's plenty of superlatives about Big Sur, the place Miller would eventually crash land after his trip.
+
+"A great change had come over America," writes Miller, "no doubt about that." He continues: "There were greater ones coming, I felt certain. We were only witnessing the prelude to something unimaginable. Everything was cock-eyed, and getting more and more so. Maybe we would end up on all fours, gibbering like baboons. Something disastrous was in store -- everybody felt it. Yes, America had changed. The lack of resilience, the feeling of hopelessness, the resignation, the skepticism, the defeatism -- I could scarcely believe my ears at first. And over it all that same veneer of fatuous optimism -- only now decidedly cracked."
+
+> A new world is not made simply by trying to forget the old. A new world is made with a new spirit, with new values. Our world may have begun that way, but to-day it is caricatural. Our world is a world of things. It is made up of comforts and luxuries, or else the desire for them. What we dread most, in facing the impending débâcle, is that we shall be obliged to give up our gew-gaws, our gadgets, all the little comforts which have made us so uncomfortable. There is nothing brave, chivalrous, heroic or magnanimous about our attitude. We are not peaceful souls; we are smug, timid, queasy and quaky.
+
+Nearly 70 years later I purchased a motorhome originally constructed not long after Miller's trip. It was all fiberglass, wonderfully rounded and sleek, the perfect shade of the 1960s aquamarine blue, like a California swimming pool had been pored into a fiberglass mold, given a nice white stripe down the side and set loose on the American highway. The motorhome was made by company called Travco and it was once *the* motorhome. Johnny Cash toured in the Travco, John Wayne owned several and Charles Kerault used to Dodge Travcos for nearly the entire run of his traveling news broadcast. Playboy called it the coolest vehicle on the road and now, just under sixty years later, it still is.
+
+Of course the years take their toll on even the finest of things. Before it became our home I spent eighteen months tearing it apart, insulating, re-wiring, re-plumbing and re-propaning it. Then I put it back together with new versions of the old. Where possible I left things as they had been. I refinished the wood of cabinets, and put in new paneling on the walls, but otherwise I tried to stay with the look, feel and personality of the old. 
+
+Where possible I also tried to stick with technology of the era. Technology that strikes me as one of the last sane moments our culture had. I tore off the ugly rooftop air conditioning that had been added at some point. Instead I put in vents with fans. I got rid of the refrigerator and put in an icebox. It struck me at the time that these things were not though necessary to some of the wealthiest, most famous people of the 1960s -- people who could have had anything they wanted, but did not consider things like air conditioning necessary. The idea of being hot was not yet considered a hardship, it was still just part of existence on this planet. 
+
+I also wanted to make it livable space for myself, my wife and our three children. In fact my wife refused to move in without air conditioning, so I did put in a small air conditioner, but we ended up using it only a few days over the course of the two years we lived in "the bus" as my children christened our Travco.
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+
 ## I Remember California
  
 > I remember redwood trees, bumper cars and wolverines
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 Red is the color of blood entering the world. Our blood is blue while it is ours, but once it leaves it returns to the world red, not blue. Leaving you, leaving me, always red. Ever since I was a small child and told for the first time that blood was only red when it made contact with the air, I have wanted to go in a pure oxygen environment to bleed blue. Alas pure oxygen environments are hard to come by. So far as I have been able to research none of the astronauts -- who spent perhaps more time than anyone else in pure oxygen environments -- ever thought to prick their skin and produce a little blue blood. 
 
-Nothing seems so alien to me, so unsettling as bleeding blue blood. Traveling to other worlds, alien ships on the white house lawn, even something so prosaic as finally receiving that message SETI is waiting for in vain, none of it seems to me so alien, so exotic as the very simple, but deeply unsettling idea of watching blue blood ooze out of a cut in my arm.
+Nothing seems so alien to me, so unsettling as bleeding blue blood. Traveling to other worlds, finally receiving that message SETI is waiting for in vain, even something as Hollywood-inspired as alien ships landing on the White House lawn seems to me considerably less remarkable and nowhere near so alien, so exotic, as the very simple, but deeply unsettling idea of watching blue blood ooze out of a cut in my arm.
+
+Our planet is a place where blood is red. Like sunsets, like red rock mesas, like red clay, like red taillights, like muddy red marshes, our blood is red. To bleed anything else is to be elsewhere.
 
-Our planet is a place where blood is red. Like sunsets, like red rock mesas, like red clay, like red taillights, like muddy red marshes, our blood is red. Our planet is red, in part at least, though the moniker of red planet has already been assigned to another in our culture. I propose that's a misnomer, a mistake of observation. Mars has red dirt and, so far aw we know, not a lot else. It's monochromatic true, but it does not celebrate and revel in red like our planet. And since it seems painfully obvious at this point that no one will ever journey to mars, it seem high time we reclaimed that mislaid label and put back where it belongs, here on earth, The Red Planet.
+Our planet entire planet steeped in red. The moniker of red planet has already been assigned to another by our culture but I propose that's a misnomer, a mistake of observation. Mars has red dirt and, so far as we know, not a lot else. From the images sent back by various rovers and probes it appears very uniform in it's red, a monochromatic world that, while red, does not celebrate and revel in the near infinite variety of red like our planet. And since it seems painfully obvious at this point that no one will ever journey to Mars, it seem high time we reclaimed that mislaid label and put back where it belongs, here on earth, The Red Planet.
 
+Nowhere I have been is quite so red as California. California is a red state. The color overwhelms nearly every part of it, from the red of the golden gate bridge, to the Pacific sunsets, to the alpenglow of the High Sierra, to the line serpentine red of taillights snaking up the 405 and through the Hollywood Hills. Every California red is different, inseparable by geography but also isolated from one another. The red of taillights on the 405 will not cast on the clouds above Mt Whitney with any of the grandeur that John Muir was so fond of overstating..
 
 
-California is a red state. The color overwhelms nearly every part of it, from the red of the golden gate bridge, to the pacific sunsets, to the alpenglow of the high sierra to the line serpentine red of taillights snaking up the 405 through the Hollywood Hills.
diff --git a/what-the-meadow-teaches-us.pdf b/what-the-meadow-teaches-us.pdf
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