All posts filed under: Random Thoughts

Why Should I Want to See this Sky Again

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On the way down from Tilden at sunset, I took photos of the glorious sky, but down on Spruce Avenue, a woman asked me why…  And I should explain that living in Berkeley you must get used to being asked, and expect a suggestion in any kind of direction the person wants you to adopt.  The woman asked me why I took photos when it was obvious that nobody took photos any more.  Her children had been camping and had taken videos with their cell phones, and she held hers to show me, perhaps how smaller and lighter they were than my heavy SLR from which a selfie must be a difficult thing to obtain.  As for me, I tried to explain in a few words why I took photos of the sky, in order to contemplate them later.  That’s why they are still photos, to serve as the starting point of a simple thought, perhaps delayed from this moment, when there were no words to describe what you saw and why you wanted to …

you are here

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He wrote that on the side page of his calendar.  “You are here.”  Actually, the period more like a middle dot. “what is that supposed to mean?” a voice in his head asked. “I don’t know,” he said to the voice.  “Those were the words that came today.” “Is that because I wondered why you hadn’t written anything yet?” “Yes.” “Is this like an existential statement?  A zen thing?” “More like the state of the world as I know it.” “Isn’t it also a refusal to participate, by that I mean I asked you to write something, you thought about something, but you don’t want to write it because, well, because you find it’s not of interest to you or to the world as you know it?” “Yes.” “Perhaps the world as you know it is a construct,” the voice in his head said.  “Perhaps I have led you to believe certain things that aren’t true.” “Perhaps, but the only certainty I have is that I am here, and you are not questioning that.”

Fractured Selfie

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Take your own picture at the end of your arm into megapixels down to more megabits and shown as megapixels that you, like the proverbial giant from your personal fable, can hold in your hand and retouch and aggrandize yourself and fix it up before you crunch it into bits, megatons of them blasted into cosmic waves captured at a desert location not far from Area 51, like time travel and teleportation, temporarily pulverized and spray painted onto fibrous optic fibers and spied upon not optically not visually but virtually by a vigilant machine, then vaporized up in a cloud from where it rains upon devices reconstituted on shiny LCD impressing eyes and minds to like or prefer not to.

The Dream that Awoke the Dead

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In a dream, he knew he was in a dream, and forced himself to wake up. “Wake up! Wake up!” he repeated out loud until, finally, his eyes opened. They hadn’t wanted to open, but now at the end of the optic nerve was a mind that didn’t want them to slumber, didn’t want to return to the nightmare. In the dream, he knew it was only a dream, he was in bed and his brother, his older brother, had come to drag him out and punish him. For what? He wondered, his eyes still half closed. What could have provoked this dream, the presence of his older brother who had appeared in a similar situation in another dream so many years ago. One’s own archetypes, he realized, thinking his brother had represented the ideal boyscout, and in the dream his brother wore the full uniform with a big belt which was presumed to be the preferred tool of punishment. The night before, he had had a passing thought about the stern man who had …

Nina Schuyler’s The Translator: a Novel

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San Francisco author Nina Schuyler wrote a gem of a novel called The Translator. Like many who grew up acquiring more than one language, perhaps easily, the translator’s stream of consciousness feels real. And for many who have attempted to translate more than just a few tag lines, second-guessing your translations become routine. When the original Japanese author rejects Hanne’s translation of his novel, it isn’t surprising that she falls into the abyss of failure that all who have pride in their work experience when critiqued. It helps to seize the hermetic feeling of the protagonist’s mind that following a brain injury she can only speak Japanese while the rest of her consciousness can perfectly hear English. And it helps that Japanese language and culture are hermetic too. We follow Hanne as she traces the fictional Jiro (to add to the feeling of mental confusion, she had a husband called Hiro) to the real Noh theatre actor Moto, and spends a few days with him. Together they unblock each other, he in returning to acting, she …

On the Highway 17 Express

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Some Sundays the bus to Santa Cruz, the Highway 17 Express, is crowded with students returning from a week-long break, or the Holidays, towing huge suitcases behind them. Other times it’s crowded with fun-seeking people heading for the beach. But today at the San Jose Diridon Station it is a regular kind of Sunday, and the young people informally sit on the retaining wall to make an informal kind of line. Yet they don’t hesitate to jump ahead when one didn’t react quickly enough – let’s blame cell phones on that one too. The driver greets everyone of us in the way they seem to actually enjoy their job. The bus fills up, so at the one but last stop the driver warns the guy boarding that there may not be any seats left. A fair warning, considering that some people would then ask to be refunded if they found out there’s standing room only. But if your alternative to standing in the aisle for an hour is standing at a bus stop in San …

A Penny for your Thoughts

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A penny there on the path, the made-up path by non-conforming pedestrians who won’t take the official planned sidewalk, and I don’t pick it up. I would pick it up from a marble floor – someone could slip on it. It would be worth a penny. It would be useful to avoid receiving four pennies in change. The penny, having been dropped for its lack of value or a hole in a pocket, might mean something to you if you picked it up. Just don’t assume it’s supernatural that the year corresponds to a life event of someone who’s watching you from the sky. What if it doesn’t? Will you toss the coin? You can’t write to Dear Abby any more, to tell her you found a penny with no significant date on it. On second thought, an imagined message sounds better than any real message from real life. Yes, there are useful messages, every first Wednesday there’s a voice in the sky telling us the siren is just a test, otherwise we’d be asking …