Gemini X 3 / 5 +9

Charting the passage of time, activities, and identity:

what I do.

There's a lot more humor and a lot less ego involved in the parade of profile pics; at least, that's the way I see it.  (Judge me, if you want, but I don't intend to lose sleep over the matter.)  I have written before of Rembrandt's many selfies and of the third-person would-be objective perspective of mirror-images offered in John Fowles' novel Daniel Martin, an old favorite.  

Tracking my age and how the lines on my face and how the gray or white hairs on my head accumulate can be a sport with different events.  Guessing where the next ache or sore muscle will appear is another such event.  I am not getting younger, right?  

But I am also still paddling and diving and reading around and pursuing other such richly-enlivening activities.  (Man alive, I miss the studio and clay.).   I like to keep track of all those activities I am fortunate enough to pursue -- and keep track of the different people I seem to be and have been: Diver Matt, Kayak Matt, Teacher Matt, Clay Matt, and so forth.  After a long day desk-bound, there's a uplifting joy in checking what I was doing, who I was, in times past.  Sometimes, checking the last trip to Mendocino, for example, can spur me to check the weather and start making plans for the next outing,, however long or far away.  And, if that planning proves merely mental, proves merely daydreaming, that's good too.  I return to the matter at hand at the desk a bit more energized, a bit more ready to dig in.  

What with the pandemic, remote teaching, and reaching 59, I have been feeling reflective.

As a Gemini, I am used to seeing the world and myself through a two-fold lens.  

Here are a few more recent examples.

THE PADDLER:

(A) stern and serious, working at it --

B) Having fun on the water -- salt salvation --

THE VINTAGE LOOK  /  BLACK & WHITE GAMES:

(A) Ducking down an alleyway  -- "Call me Ishmael."          (Thanks, Herman Melville.)

(B) A "Pirate" Looks Toward 60?          (Thanks, Jimmy Buffett)

 

FULL-FRONTAL (portrait-wise):

(A) Post-dive, unmasked: 

red from too much sun and the cold cold water; 

slightly saltdrunk --

(B)  Post-paddle, pandemic ready --

This last shot: that mask gets lots of smiles, lots of laughs, from children and adults alike.  

It's a sea lion mask, technically, but many kids think it's a dog--and why not? 

Sea lions bark too, don't they?

So, I oblige.

Any man who barks in public can't take himself too seriously.

Lines Upon Lines

Ring: "Waves"

A good-luck ring, I'm hoping.

Classic artistry from the Irish metal-workers on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley, CA.
You can find their fine work here.

For me, the wave-ring is also a wyrd-ring, the pattern of becoming, of winding and unwinding, that marks the Old English idea and practice of fate, of the world's workings, of past/present/future.

Check the rings and lines of age on my hand too.  I'm reminded of how trees show their life-lines.  Knotwork.  Or, there's a Bruce Sterling novel that I never liked much of a future dystopian universe in which wealthy people could live long, long lives in young and younger bodies, but their hands would give them away -- the signs of aging in the wrinkles and lines of their hands being resistant to the otherwise miraculous drugs to offset mere age -- would give them away, and as an older reader now, as an older man now, I see what he was getting at.

That's cool.  Slipping over the cusp of 2015 into 2016, I think about something the great surfer Fred van Dyke said --in an excellent documentary, David L. Brown's Surfing for Life -- "I'm getting older, and I gotta dig it."

Something like that.  And I am digging it.

(Talk to the hand, if you don't dig it too.)

Today's Profile Pics, Annotated

Today, but so 80s.

Practical #1.

Practical #2.

Earnest -- or goofy?

Focus on the water.

Cold water reveals your (that is, my) age.

Up top again.

June 7th, 2015.

A silly exercise in characterization?
A characteristic exercise in silliness?

Update: Wire and Kelp

I like watching the aging process with this fellow.
Merman --
Wire figure: 1996.
Kelped: 2015.

Recovery Cat

Motley, laid up with dehydration and injured legs.
She'll be 20 on April 1st.

My Girl Motley

Motley: She'll be twenty on April 1st.

Motley

She's a bit of a worrier these days, poor dear.  And we'd just spent about an hour together, she sleeping on my lap and me reading, but those eyes call for more and more, don't you think?

A Man and A Boat

Self-portrait #52.


An empty boat
will volunteer for anything.

--Harrison and Kooser

My Girl

Motley: 18 years and running.

John Buchan: "A Barndoor Fowl"?

Here are two paragraphs from the very end of the first chapter --"Lost Gods"-- of John Buchan's The Island of Sheep, published in 1936, that I'm finding resonant.  Richard Hannay, of The Thirty-Nine Steps, is our narrator, and he's reached his fifties . . . .


I continued my journey -- I was going down t the Solent to see about laying up my boat, for I had lately taken to a mild sort of yachting -- in an odd frame of mind.  I experienced what was rare with me -- a considerable dissatisfaction with life.  Lombard had been absorbed into the great, solid, complacent middle class which he had once despised, and was apparently happy with it.  The man whom I had thought of as a young eagle was content to be a barndoor fowl.  Well, if he was satisfied, it was no business of mine, but I had a dreary sense of the fragility of hopes and dreams.

It was about myself that I felt most dismally.  Lombard's youth had gone, but so had my own.  Lombard was settled like Moab on his lees, but so was I.  We all make pictures of ourselves that we try to live up to, and mine had always been of somebody hard and taut who could preserve to the last day of life a decent vigour of spirit.  Well, I had kept my body in fair training by exercise, but I realized that my soul was in danger of fatty degeneration.  I was too comfortable.  I had all the blessings a man can have, but I wasn't earning them.  I tried to tell myself that I deserved a little peace and quiet, but I got no good from that reflection, for it meant that I had accepted old age.  What were my hobbies and my easy days but the consolations of senility?  I looked at my face in the mirror in the carriage back, and it disgusted me, for it reminded me of my recent companions who had pattered about golf.  Then I became angry with myself.  'You are a fool,' I said.  'You are becoming soft and elderly, which is the law of life, and you haven't the grit to grow old cheerfully.'  That put a stopper on my complaints, but it left me dejected and only half convinced.

--John Buchan, The Island of Sheep