One of my rituals is to get up before dawn once a week or so, and drive into San Francisco. I go south along the coast and then across the Golden Gate Bridge to the city where I was born. This morning, the rising sun’s rays and wind and mist painted the orange bridge over blue waters in sharp surreal light. It’s about an hour drive, one cd’s worth. This morning I listened to Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies, “Western Swing Chronicles Vol. I.” A pretty much unknown and incredibly swinging band from the early ’30s, with a 20 year old self-taught fiddler named Cliff Bruner, playing blues, country, blue grass, Texas swing. The Brownies recorded this music before Bob Wills started cutting records. Great vocal harmonies. Honky tonk piano. You can see the progression from these guys to Elvis. If you like old time music, take a listen to some of the tracks online.

Come here and tell me baby

Whose muddy shoes are these…

LSD in the ’60s

I was talking to a friend the other night. He told me he’d taken LSD back then, and it hadn’t been good. “What were the circumstances,” I asked. It turned out he’d done it with a bunch of other people, they’d sat around in a room… Well, duh! In the ’60s me + friends approached LSD with great care. The idea was to — ulp — increase consciousness. Yep. My first trip was with (pure) Sandoz acid liquid and I got up before dawn and went up in the hills to watch the sun rise. The first thing my enhanced awareness picked up on was the noise of the highway, audible from our house, but never as noticeably horrible as this. Later that day I saw flowers breathing. It wasn’t a hallucination. Flowers do breathe, we just don’t see it in our rushing around doing-this-doing-that minds. LSD ended up with a bad rep, it’s powerful stuff and lends itself to messing up people’s minds, but in looking back, the idea of expanding consciousness was (is) noble. More aware, more sensitive, more tuned into planetary forces and life in its many forms. OK?

Three-Dot Jots

I heard a guy talking on public radio in April, saying that by 2015 in Germany there will be more workers in the solar industry than the auto industry . . .The North House Folk School is wonderful institution in Minnesota with a huge variety of classes and seminars on crafts, building, music, doing stuff for oneself. Wooden boat building, making a kayak paddle, knitting, brewing, making a birch box and on and on. Wonderful for kids during summer months. North House Folk website . . . Huge billboard on 2nd or 3rd Street in SF with just these words: “Think ya used enough dynamite there, Butch?” . . . Memory is the 2nd thing to go. I can’t remember the first . . . It’s taking me a long time to get running again; a year off took its toll. I’m back to about a “C” level, I’m still slow up hills, but back with the A team on downhills . . . I’m going to NYC for the Book Expo in early June . . . Am giving a talk to the Big Sur Historical Society mid-June on the building of my house down there (Burns Creek, 2 miles north of Esalen) in the ’60s. Jeez I’ve become historical. The house was framed with used timbers, roofed and floored with local Monterey Pine, and covered with hand-split shakes. Gravity-fed water from a spring, owner-built septic tank, big garden . . .

Stretching At Your Computer (Dept. of Shameless Commerce)

StretchWare: Eleven years ago we developed software that reminds you to stretch at your computer. Every couple of hours, or certain number of keystrokes, a Tibetan bell sounds and a window pops up saying “Do you have time to stretch?” If you click “no,” the program goes away. If you click “yes,” the stretches appear on screen. Take a 5 minute stretching break.

It works on Mac and Windows and you can try it free for 30 days by going to:StretchWare website

This is our first major book since HOME WORK and it’s taking me longer to put it together than expected. Here are a couple of images from layouts done last week:

Potter Wayne Ngan’s hobbit-like playhouse for his kids

Meditation temple in the California hills by Sun Ray Kelley

I’ll try to remember to post pictures as I proceed with the layouts.

The Hippies Were Right All Along

Mark Morford wrote a brilliant, timely column in the SF Chronicle on May Day, 2007. It was a retrospective look at some of what we were all talking about (and practicing) in the ’60s. The world has finally caught up.

“…It was always and forever, about connectedness. It was about how we are all in this together. It was about resisting the status quo and fighting tyrannical/corporate power and it was about opening your consciousness and seeing new possibilities of how we can all live with something resembling actual respect for the planet, for alternative cultures, for each other…”

The Hippies Were Right All Along

Sambada at Ashkenaz

My son Will plays in Sambadá, a Brazilian samba band from Santa Cruz. I took my friend Sherm in his wheelchair to see them play in Berkeley last week at the good-vibes nightclub Ashkenaz. The band was hot. So were the dancers and Sherm spent the whole night watching them.

Sambadá

Diamond Ortiz at the Fourth Street Tavern, San Rafael, Calif.

This is a great little unknown trio playing blues, rock, and funk at what has become my favorite music venue. They have a different band every night, most of them local. The young gunslinger guitar player took it out onto the dance floor:

Guitarist Gabriel of Diamond Ortiz

Running and Skating

I’m back to base-level running for the first time in over a year. I had a thrill of a skateboarding run a few days ago. I took off an a downhill run on the road out to the Pt. Arena lighthouse on my (39″) longboard and started accelerating faster than I’d expected. No cars, so that part’s OK. But pretty soon I was up to a speed where I wouldn’t be able stay on my feet if I bailed, so I made long, slow carves and tried to stay alert. It was controlled out-of-control, and then I came around a corner and the hill flattened out. Whew! A rush.

Louie’s Japanese Saw

This was hanging on a post in my friend Louie’s shop. Louie, like builder Bruno Atkey, uses this saw exclusively. It seems better in all respects than American saws.

Japanese carpenter’s saw

Which Came First?

The egg of course! We just got 34 baby bantam chicks from the Murray McMurray Hatchery in Iowa. Baby chicks can survive 3 days after hatching and they come via US Mail in a flat box with holes, chirping. The first thing we do is teach them to drink water. We keep them under an infrared light as they grow. We’ve been raising chickens for 30 years. The fresh eggs are worth all the work.

Foxy

Found this beautiful creature, hit by a car, last week.

I skinned it, stretched and salted it down, and after a week, rolled it up in a poster tube and shipped it to Bucks Country Furs in Pennsylvania via UPS. In about 2 months I’ll get it back via UPS, beautifully tanned, a process I find to be a minor miracle.

Oak Firewood: I Fought the Law and I Won

I’d seen a downed oak tree by the side of the road for a few weeks. On a Friday I took Marco and a chainsaw along. We cut it into liftable pieces and had just got the truck (fully) loaded when along comes a ranger. “You can’t pick up wood by the side of the road,” she says. I walked over to her SUV and said, “You know, this is a win-win situation. You guys don’t have to pay money to have it removed and I get good clean firewood, which will heat my house all year and I don’t have to use electric heat, which comes from coal-fired electric plants, or burn up non-renewable propane.” She gets it, sort of. But then says, “You’ll have to unload your truck.” She’s gotta be kidding, but she isnt. Marco tosses the first piece down the bank, and I say no, no, dump it next to the shoulder. He looks at me, puzzled, then grins. We go home with an empty truck. Dumb, huh? Now I assure you it didn’t occur to me to get up at 3:30 the next morning, go down the deserted road and by the light of the full moon pick up the whole load. I would never do that. No, that would be resisting authority.

I’ve just realized, after struggling to make infrequent (and long) blog postings monthly or so, I should do shorter postings more often. I went for a run in the hills this afternoon. Got down to a creek and there was a spot of sunlight and I stripped and lay in the sparkling water for a minute. My time of year, being of the Taurus persuasion. Then I ran another few miles to a cat-tailed-lined pond of my acquaintance and swam in the cool water. Getting out in the woods and beach is an antidote to sitting at a computer.