BIG SUR

This is Big Sur, California Big Sur - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. It's one of my favorite places on earth. You can see why. I spent a good deal of time here, camping and having fun back in the early 70s.

This is Richard Brautigan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia who happened to be my favorite author at the time I was playing in Big Sur. Richard was well known then as a "Beat" type poet and an author of novels. A Confederate General From Big Sur (1964, ISBN 0-224-61923-3) was my favorite of his books. Here you can find a list of his novels Richard Brautigan: Novels—Introduction and a blip about their content. Here you can find his poetry Poet: Richard Brautigan - All poems of Richard Brautigan

Today I have to go to the town to the left and do my Monday meeting thing again. But my head will be in Big Sur. It's featured in The Smithsonian Magazine this month, if you read it. The article talks about my Big Sur and it's unique ambience and the people, famous and not who are connected with it. A good read.

Here are a couple of Brautigan poems. I once laid on the very edge of one of those cliffs up there in the top photograph, drinking Strawberry Hill wine, as my friend and I dangeled our idiot's legs off the end of the cliff and took turns reading Brautigan's poems. There was a good deal of laughing involved too. :-) He was an interesting fellow, our Richard. Parody, satire, black humor and Zen.

As it turns out, Richard had a long battle with mental illness and took his own life the

age of 49 back in 1984. I think it was a tragic loss. Here, where this tiny lettering and heart are... is a poem that I find particularly relavant to my life currently. I should have known that Richard Brautigan would have had the right words. As it turns out, you can't enlarge it so here it is:

Love Poem

It's so nice

to wake up in the morning

all alone.

and not to have to tell somebody

you love them

when you don't love them

anymore.

Hope your evening has something warm and sentimental.

PHOTO TRAILS

I photographed these outside my library's back door in the science folk's domain. They are the first spring flowers that showed up in this nice protected corner. They were supposed to be for citizen when she was so low... flowers to cheer her up, but it took me too long to get it together. Oops.







This is my river... chock full of salmon, sturgeon, sculpin, which are a nasty little catfish wannabe thing with spikes that cut you and make a strangling quacking sound when you pull them out of the water... eeeech. Steelhead, trout, wide mouth bass, regular bass, squaw fish... that squawk when you catch them. I truly prefer my fish to remain mute as they suffocate! Actually, we catch and release, but several friends gift us with things they don't release. The only fish we don't release are the squaw fish because they are killing all the baby salmon and have a bounty on their slimy heads.


When you are not facing north at the river and Washington state beyond the other side of the river, and you turn around to face south... this is what you see. These are my gorge cliffs. Hard to tell with the clouds hanging there, but they are very steep. Click on it and it gets bigger. My town is no more than four blocks wide north to south and has only one main street. We are three and a half miles long.






Now this next one is for Citizen in particular and the rest of you too.
It reminds me of her aliens, though I am sure this was perpetrated by the science folk.
They are everywhere.

I've no clue what the experiment is, but there
is one for sure. What do you think they're doing?

I'll ask some questions and see what I can find out.



Favorite quotes overheard today...

"I'll tell..." #1

"Who you gonna tell?" #2

"God." #1

"Yeah... and he'll get all smitey and shit!" #3