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.

Story-Hoard

Story-Board

Album: 70's Style

Cover art:
concept-driven,
playful, somewhat mysterious,
often literary.

Interior art:
the artist's portrait,
informal and yet pensive,
often black-and-white.


Looking back, the sheer sameness, the simple paradigm, the artifice meant to signal sincerity, well, it's all so much easier to see with a bit of perspective.  Time the Leveler.  The struggle to represent a vision, to play it cool without seeming to try too hard, and to have a bit of fun as well . . . .  

Yearning

Expedition

"I don't want to alarm you, but . . . ."

What you say to your kayaking-buddy when you're in 80 feet of salt water and your paddle contacts something moving beneath your boat.

(I think those were my words, but I kind of can't remember.)

______

P.S.  A friend wanted more . . . wanted the "end" of the story:

My kayak-buddy then had caught a lingcod, a predator fish, so I prefer to think that that lingcod had followed the last fish caught, had bumped my paddle, and then was caught himself.

Any other stories--and I have many in my head-- would cause anxiety.

So, happy ending for the kayakers.

(I really felt a moving body under my paddle: fish, seal, shark, other?  Mostly likely, a seal.  You tell me.)

_______

P.P.S.    So, the lingcod was 24 inches long, and at the time I figured he'd followed the hooked rockfish my pal Jeff was reeling in, but now I'm thinking I felt a seal or sea lion, most likely, following the rockfish instead.  (I've watched seals chase hooked salmon and bite off all but the head just before I could reel in the fish completely, for example.)  We hadn't seen any seals for hours, so we didn't think first about seals.  A shark is also possible, but I'd rather go with the seal.  I felt something solid but flexible, muscles shifting beneath skin, but that's describing the feeling I had while holding a paddle.

Comfort Before Revising

Gemini at the Beach

“You KNOW you have a twin,” the woman said, walking an elderly dog in the Van Damme State Beach parking lot yesterday in response to my hello.  (I was just waiting for her to pass by, for I wanted to strip off my cold wet neoprene.). “You have a twin, “ she continued, “in SC.”

I am not sure which SC she meant, for I didn’t think to ask.  I thought, South Carolina?  (Did I hear a touch of the South in her voice?  I think so.)

Maybe SoCal or Santa Cruz?

I do not know.

She walked on, the dog pulling her.

Catch-and-Release

Odd sensory memories surfacing from 2016
while I was working through a stack or two of paperwork:

a rat so very gingerly swimming past my kayak in the canals of Venice;

a bat so very gently rebounding from my chest in a castle in Scotland.

Captain, Helper

My good cat Captain loves to help me with the laundry.

What that means:  Our washer is not balanced properly, so until I adjust the machine, the washer flips out and becomes unbalanced and galumphs galumphs galumphs.  I tend to grab a book to read and just sit atop the washer (instead of dealing with the balance issues).  Captain, bless his soul, likes to help me and comes running when he hears the imbalanced washer struggling--and so we both sit atop the washer.

Yesterday while I was at work, the washer was in operation and Captain heard the imbalance and came running to the rescue, standing atop the heaving machine and gentling it with his weight, just a bit.

Comfort Reading Since 1982

Martha Grimes'
The Old Fox Deceiv'd.

Classic English mystery penned by American writer:
still counts, still delivers the goods.

Richard Jury, Melrose Plant, Wiggins--
A cast I find so much fun.

The Superior View

Street shots: Last evening in Edinburgh.

Just looking about.

Catching ZZZZZs with the Captain

Feeling ill's upside.

"The Other Worlds": Life's Largest Riddle

The Other Worlds is an excellent mythopoeic novel by a dear friend, Christoph Greger.  Christoph's own humble way of introducing the book to the world is worth quoting: "Hey all you cystic fibrosis lit fans, Ren fair geeks, and/or mythopoeic/modernist bildungsroman junkies -- here's something that might be of interest."

This fine novel deserves deep interest, presenting classic character-in-crisis; entertaining and evoking in the tradition of Yeats, Morris, Dunsany, de Lint, and Windling; and offering entry into multiple worlds, this one we share and those others 'beyond the fields we know'.  The setting and the style are distinctly contemporary; the themes and dilemmas, definitely timeless.  Life's largest riddle--mortality--met by mystery, measured by memory, and beset--or aided?--by magic waits at the heart of The Other Worlds.

Read this book.

Understory

What do you see?
What's happening?
How does the shot feel to you?

___

Or, is this is a crime scene photograph?
If so, what's the crime?
What happened?
Or, is it about to happen?

-------

Story-thoughts always make me happy.

-------

"Why do you think in terms of crime, Matt, especially crime stories?" a friend asks.

Family tradition?

Literary tradition?

Even Homer's epics are crime stories, if you want to take that angle . . . .

Musing

Fog and tide shift the profile here from the familiar to the mysterious.

Louise Gluck's "Dawn"

DAWN

1

Child waking up in a dark room
screaming I want my duck back, I want my duck back

in a language nobody understands in the least —

There is no duck.

But the dog, all upholstered in white plush —
the dog is right there in the crib next to him.

Years and years — that’s how much time passes.
All in a dream. But the duck —
no one knows what happened to that.

2

They’ve  just met, now
they’re sleeping near an open window.

Partly to wake them, to assure them
that what they remember of  the night is correct,
now light needs to enter the room,

also to show them the context in which this occurred:
socks half  hidden under a dirty mat,
quilt decorated with green leaves —

the sunlight specifying
these but not other objects,
setting boundaries, sure of  itself, not arbitrary,

then lingering, describing
each thing in detail,
fastidious, like a composition in English,
even a little blood on the sheets —

3

Afterward, they separate for the day.
Even later, at a desk, in the market,
the manager not satisfied with the figures he’s given,
the berries moldy under the topmost layer —

so that one withdraws from the world
even as one continues to take action in it —

You get home, that’s when you notice the mold.
Too late, in other words.

As though the sun blinded you for a moment.

--LOUISE GLUCK


(Thank you, AB, for the gift of the collected works!)

Throckmorton's "The Lost Ships"

Boyhood reading revisited.

Recommended: An Inspector Richard Jury Mystery

The second in the series from Martha Grimes.

The Old Fox Deceiv'd's Arnold is probably my favorite character -- next to Richard Jury himself, of course -- in the entire series.