Mumblypeg ~ A playground game where boys stand with their feet shoulder width apart whilst throwing a pocket knife point down between their own feet. The boy who gets closest wins. Getting the knife in your foot is an automatic win.
It’s over, but it’s not. It won’t take days or weeks or months for the final speck of dust from the insurrection attempt of January 6th, 2021 to settle. Years at the very least.
I posted a piece that day; a post overflowing with the anger that consumed me as I watched events unfold. There were moments of sadness. There were moments when tears welled up. There was concern for those who were inside and under siege. What I never felt was fear that the insurrection would succeed. I was certain that in the end the mob would fail.
That January 6th post was filled with so much rage that I considered just trashing it and writing a post at a later time when I could present something in more measured tones. In the end I published my fury, albeit somewhat toned down. This site is my own story, a journal of sorts and it only seemed appropriate to publish a post that honestly reflected my feelings on one of America’s darkest days.
Today, January 9th, the fear that I didn’t feel three days ago is starting to percolate. I’m finding myself in a dark cold shadow of foreboding as details of what happened on that day of infamy become clearer with reports of five dead and many others injured. Apparently the mayhem that characterized January 6th may not be over as threats of what might come on inauguration day are being revealed.
I was ready to publish a light post to start the New Year. An attempted coup in America has compelled a more serious post.
Today started out as a civics lesson; both houses of Congress convene and officially count the Electoral College ballots, a ceremonial final act in America’s drawn out electoral play. In normal times a simple governmental ritual. But we all know how that normalcy thing has played out lately.
Just as the civics lesson on ceremony was beginning, the votes of only Alabama and Alaska having been counted and those of Arizona challenged, the lesson on ceremony turned to one on insurrection.
The Capital of the United States of America was stormed by Trump supporters, protesting the outcome of an election that was held over two months ago, upheld by the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice and sixty times in various courts.
By the time this post is read, the events of the day will be well known so there’s no point in a review here.
“A year like no other.” That term became overdone sometime around April and now we find ourselves at the 2020 finish line. What a slog. They say that you hit the wall in a marathon at around mile 21 of the 26. If 2020 was a marathon, and it certainly seems that it was, we started hitting the wall somewhere around mile 5. We’re finally about finished.
My last piece was an overly long review of the COVID year. It wasn’t exactly a positive piece. This post is a look back on the year through my camera lens. Seemed like an easy thing when I first hatched the idea but I’ve been puzzling over how to approach it. I was going to start with month by month but a review of images revealed that some months were less than inspiring. Okay then – by subject? By season? Favorites? Monochrome v. color? I guess I’ll settle on haphazard.
Some of the photos have already been published, while others are making their debut.
San Francisco, just a short drive away, is one of my favorite places. As I started browsing month by month a simple image of a cable car touched my heart. There’s nothing really special about this image except that it reminds me of The City in good times.
A cable car blurs up Powell St.
“For the birds” idiom. Worthless, not to be taken seriously, no good.
To say that 2020 was “for the birds,” is an understatement. In honor of a “for the birds” 2020 we present three images.
Here in Hercules we have a small pond that’s home to ducks and egrets. Is this duck looking at something in the water, contemplating it’s feet or just nodding off?
Why is it that egrets always look angry? Maybe this one was just upset with 2020.
While visiting Morro Bay in October, Cora and I visited a wetland. As soon as we hit the trail we came upon a tree that was filled with vultures. This vulture looks both stodgy and foreboding. But isn’t that what vultures are supposed to look like?
Some holiday traditions are forever. Take for instance, the big blue recycle bin; it’s overflowing with cardboard and there’s a pile of cardboard that won’t be binned until the trashman comes and empties the bin. There’s one prime rib bone left in the fridge, the tree is molting and is no longer being watered and nobody has bothered to light the Christmas village for the past few nights. All traditional signals that Christmas is behind us.
The waning holidays are taking me back a year. It’s a pleasant journey. The families gathered for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day; hugs, kisses, handshakes, shared potluck, children huddled over new toys. It’s an unpleasant journey; the sad realization that one bad year feels like decades. It’s almost hard to recall what those pre-COVID days were like. We talk about those days with nostalgia, almost like the characters in those movies that take place in a post war dystopia, “Remember how pleasant the holidays were before the nuclear war?”
It’s happening again this year just like every year about this time; that scornful look back at the outgoing year. It’s time to blame the calendar or a Gregorian number for what we perceived as twelve months of woe, comforting ourselves with the idea that a new calendar, a new number will bring on better days to come. Are we never satisfied? Are we always looking for the great panacea that we believe resides in twelve new sheets of paper?
“Let’s not get that classic car calendar this year, it brought us bad luck. Let’s try puppies or national parks.”
If we’d known a year ago what we were in for we’d have settled for a replay of 2019. Most of us, about 99%, are justified in throwing 2020 on the scrap heap of shattered years. The other 1%? They seem to always get by don’t they? And maddeningly enough they’re getting by better than usual.
In our house we recycle and that includes Christmas bags and Christmas wrap and in that spirit (and laziness) some of the anecdotes in this piece are recycled from previous years.
It’s upon us once again. The season of gifts, of Santa, of menorahs, stockings, twinkling lights and a blogosphere decorated with memoirs of holidays past and present. The thought briefly crossed my mind to do a piece about all of the things that we can’t or aren’t supposed to do because of this year’s “C” word. But to what end? Accentuate the obvious? Never mind. For this piece I’ve said all I’m going to say about Christmas in 2020.
I was in the local Ace Hardware store yesterday looking for some holiday essentials; firewood, plenty of Scotch tape, gift tags and a pair of pliers. The pliers have nothing to do with holidays. I just wanted a small, cheap pair to remove pin bones from fish fillets.
I prefer the Ace store to Home Depot. You can get lost in both but not in the same way. At Home Depot you literally get lost just looking for a box of nails, wandering aimlessly, vanished within the canyons of towering racks. At Ace you get lost in the browsing, absorbed in the plethora of gadgets, gizmos and gimmicks.
I have a particular fondness for those old timey hardware stores because they’re fun to walk through and because I used to work in one. And I wore one of the familiar hardware store red vests; the standard uniform of the old school hardware employee (the currently popular term for employee is “associate,” a term that I resist using. “He was an ‘associate’ of the John Gotti crime family.” See?).
Retail work at Fox Hardware was one of my first jobs after graduating college. That’s what you do isn’t it? Go to college for four or more years and then set your skills aside to be a barista or to work retail. While that job paid a pittance, my years at that little hardware store in San Francisco were probably the most enjoyable of my working life and the Christmas memories some of the warmest. And so the gadgets, gizmos and gimmicks and the red vests at Ace, took me back to those Fox Hardware days and the days leading to Christmas.
Arthur was the store manager at Fox. He was a busy little man who flitted around the 2 ½ levels of the store (main floor, basement and mezzanine), making certain that everything was just so. Arthur also took charge of the window dressing, and whatever he might have lacked in management skills, and he was a decent, fair man, he more than made up for with his mastery at setting up a window display (Arthur could sometimes be very blunt. When Cora and I were dating he saw us walking to work together one morning. “Are you two sleeping together?” he asked. It’s always been my contention by the way that sleeping, per se, is never the issue as its something of a benign activity.). Arthur’s Christmas displays were warm and enchanting, complete with a small electric train. You knew Christmas was coming when Arthur climbed into the window with his boxes of lights, decorations and holiday magic. Like children excited over dad getting the Christmas lights out from storage, the thrill of the coming holidays spread throughout the store when Arthur did up the holiday window. Continue reading
“Water is an inorganic, transparent, tasteless, odorless, and nearly colorless chemical substance, which is the main constituent of Earth’s hydrosphere and the fluids of all known living organisms.”
Trust Wikipedia to take water and boil it down to a scientific dry gulch.
Water is so familiar to us that we’ve allowed it to become unfamiliar.
Water just is.
We so take it for granted that we forget what a remarkable work of nature that water is.
“Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean.” ~ Ryunosuke Satoro
As a photo subject water is one of the most, if not THE most versatile of photo subjects. It presents itself in so many different ways.
Water is a singular tiny raindrop decorating a flower…
Water droplets cradled in a petal
Morning rain drops adorn an aloe fire chief flower
The nice thing about photographing trees is that they’re more cooperative than most other living things. They don’t whine like teens. They don’t move from the perfect pose to sniff at the lens like dogs. They don’t photobomb like idiots. Even when trees do move, or their parts at least, the effect can still be pleasing. Below: The wind rustles autumn leaves while the photographer -me – uses a too slow shutter speed. It was a mistake but one I was okay with.
Autumn leaves, Drytown, CA
The trees of autumn, like the one above, are among the most popular subjects, for their riotous colors; the different flavors of reds, oranges, yellows and brown. While I’m not going to pass up a photo of autumn’s arboreal splendor I do find myself particularly taken with the old and gnarled and the dying and the dead trees. Continue reading
Most of California is back on lockdown and, with the exception of take out or delivery, restaurants are once again shut down. Months ago, when the pandemic was still a novelty I applauded the complete restaurant closure and criticized the torch and pitchfork rabble that was protesting the closures.
With the resumption of the restaurant restrictions I was ready to give them my full throated blessing, not that officialdom really cares about my own irrelevant stamp of approval. I was ready to unleash a barrage of derision and vulgarity, in this very space, against the anti-closure hordes.
Double standards and mixed messages
And then, just before firing the first salvo I found myself compelled to hold my fire when I learned the story of restaurant owner Angela Marsden of Sherman Oaks, California where the local officials closed down both indoor and outdoor dining. Earlier this month she showed up at her restaurant, The Pineapple Hill Saloon and Grill to find an outdoor dining area in a parking lot just feet away from her own outdoor patio. The dining areas look almost identical to each other yet Ms. Marsden’s is shut down while the other patio was given a permit to operate. The difference? The other dining area belongs to a catering company, set up to feed the cast and crew of the T.V show Good Girls.
By all accounts and from the appearance of her own patio area Ms. Marsden had done the right thing and followed the guidelines issued by the Los Angeles County Health Department. As she put it in an interview with a T.V news station, “I did the dance,” and to the tune of $80,000.00. To add injury to the insult Ms. Marsden found herself without funds to support take out service only.
Is there anything that touches the senses like water? A drench of water cools us on a sultry day and a warm soak takes away the chill or soothes an ache. What tastes better than a cold draft of water at the end of a run? Water in its many forms and shapes provides us with exhilarating, awesome, beautiful and even frightening pictures. Listen to a rippling stream, or a surging river, the ocean’s waves, the lapping sounds of a lakeshore or the sounds of raindrops on a leaf. Ever smell the ocean? There’s really nothing like it. Scientists will tell you that the smell comes from bacteria digesting dead phytoplankton but without the ocean water that unique smell wouldn’t exist. So I choose to credit the ocean.
“No one can see their reflection in running water…
Stanislaus River, Calaveras Big Trees S.P., California
…It is only in still water that we can see.” Tao Proverb
bolognanoun
bo·lo·gna | \ bə-ˈlō-nē also -nyə, -nə \
: a large smoked sausage of beef, veal, and pork
Point Pinole Regional Shoreline is 2400 acres of scenic liberation located on the San Pablo Bay shoreline just north of the City of Richmond. The park’s web of trails leads you through meadows, past wildflowers, through a cathedral of eucalyptus trees and emerges on the bay shore where you take in the refreshing breezes and vistas of Mt. Tamalpais, the Marin shoreline, and the expanse of San Pablo Bay. Along the shoreline you pass runners, walkers, mountain bike riders and the occasional equestrian. If you want solitude you can take one of the lightly travelled trails into the eucalyptus woods where it’s silent and meditative.
I have a sentimental attachment to Point Pinole. Nearly twenty years ago I coached the Salesian High School Cross Country team and Point Pinole was the location for our team’s home course. A visit to the park with a walk or a run along the route of the course brings back some pleasing memories.
I was walking Lexi along the shore when the text came in at 3:05 telling Contra Costa County that a new stay at home order would take effect at the close of the weekend. Not even the stay at home order could spoil a sunny afternoon by the bay. I was expecting it anyway and figured to take it all in stride. Earlier in the day I’d warned Jessica that our Christmas plans might be dictated by the county. Continue reading
The Life in My Years 