Hippy Roundup

Image courtesy of www.foodfirst.org

I've always assumed the lady next door was a hippy. She wears billowing Indian print skirts & tie-dye shirts, has pendulous breasts that flop about unimpeded, is overweight, under washed, and has excessive facial hair. Sort of like how I imagine Patricia Krenwinkle would have turned out if she hadn't joined the Manson family.

The hippy lady next door and her husband are in charge of yard work and handy-man stuff at my place.

This morning I noticed a couple of garish jugs of something sitting outside my landlady's laundry room. I thought it was some sort of Nascar brand anti-freeze, which seemed odd, so I took a closer look. Round-Up. Extra strength, long lasting.

Faced with these two garish jugs full of Monsanto chemistry I had to reconsider the whole hippy business.

The signs were always there. The husband has been repairing our fence, replacing the wood with this weird toxic putty that gets the entire neighborhood feeling a bit like we are huffing paint. He's always at his most redfaced, sweaty and happy when he's slapping around this toxic paste. Our fence now weighs several tons, is held together and mostly upright by a convoluted set of metal cables, springs, & braces, and I hope no one is standing near it when it inevitably collapses.

They probably think organic is that thing the dude in Emerson Lake and Palmer plays. I can imagine them singing their favorite tunes from Brain Salad Surgery to each other: "You see it really doesn't matter when you're buried in disguise, by the dark glass on your eyes, though your flesh has crystallized... Still...you turn me on."

Meanwhile, while they sit there all fat and sweaty and high on solvent fumes in their toxic wasteland cabin next door, I have these two jugs of Monsanto poison sitting outside my apartment. In my more paranoid moments I'm positive I can feel myself mutating.

Calico 50K

2 weeks before the race, my friend Kista suggested I run Calico with her. I said yes.

It was, for me, the best 50K I could’ve picked for my first. I loved it. Yes, the trail was brutal and gave me all the challenges I needed. I ran though, looked out over, and descended deep into, a desert that was awesome in its beauty. I am not going to have a single majestic view running a road marathon with 25,000 other people. There was hardly a moment without majesty out there in Calico. This was especially true in the very rough second half.



I run to run. A 50K race through the Mohave is about the experience, and the experience is about what I see, and what I smell, and what I hear, what I feel… In order to have this experience, I need to be present. I’m always a bit startled when I read race reports that involve itunes playlists. I can listen to music at home. When I’m running through the Mohave Desert, in places that can only be gotten to by foot, looking out over these magnificent views that haven’t been seen by that many humans, and that I will never see again, not in this same way, not for the very first time, I cannot imagine why I would want to be any less than completely present.

For a full report and more pictures, see the Calico 50K entry on other my blog www.slowtwitchjournal

Bloody Knees #3

Usually when I run at night, I run trails. I have to pay attention when I do this, feel the ground with my feet, piece that information together with fragments I see under the moonlight or might remember from having run the trail before in the daylight, and what I can see under a headlamp, which is usually just a spot immediately in front of me and in 2D.

It takes a lot of focus and being very much in the moment, and when I’m done on those runs I always discover I ran faster and easier than I do in the light, and had more fun.

Last night I ran the Silverlake Reservoir. It’s flat, I do laps, and I’ve never felt it required my attention. At this exact moment I was thinking about an attractive woman whose company I enjoy.

Just as I was mulling over whether I should ask her on a date, I did a face plant.

Lost & Found

Lately I've been running trails.

There's nothing I can think of that feels more freeing than being at the crest of some ridge in Griffith Park, storm clouds above, wind blowing through the grass, mile 8 of a 14 mile run, knowing I got there on my feet, all alone, and that I need nothing. The city is sprawled out below me, a noisy, busy, aggressive, neurotic mess of crackheads, screenwriters, actors and assorted other wannabes...

I've been taking photos on some of these runs.

As a runner, I love these areas. As a photographer, I'm not quite so sure what to do with them. There's a groove that perhaps I've not yet settled into or even found. The shots that seem the most successful are also those that are closest to my urban scenes.

This particular shot is from Elysian Park, the oldest park in Los Angeles, a beautiful but sometimes gritty park surrounding Dodger Stadium. Chunks of it are empty. Chunks of it are full of hip young neighborhood dog walkers. Chunks are full of low-rider families picnicking. And chunks of it are notoriously full of mostly hispanic identifying-as-straight men cruising for gay sex on the trails and in the bushes.

More shots can be found on my running blog www.slowtwitchjournal.com

Labyrinth

The labyrinth at Serra Retreat, a Franciscan Retreat in the hills above Malibu. I spent the afternoon there with an old friend.

I'm one of the many who confused a labyrinth with a maze, maybe because of the old story of the Minotaur (examination of that story, it is said, results in the conclusion that the Minotaur was indeed trapped in a maze).

Apparently labyrinths have been around forever, and appear in places that had no connection to each other (and thus couldn't have transferred the work) - at the same time as the classical Greek labyrinth there were nearly identical Native American labyrinths, and the same pattern appears in 2500 BC India...

According to wikipedia (the great source of lowest-common-denominator public knowledge) The medieval "labyrinth symbolized a hard path to God with a clearly defined center (God) and one entrance (birth)...Labyrinths can be thought of as symbolic forms of pilgrimage; people can walk the path, ascending toward salvation or enlightenment. Many people could not afford to travel to holy sites and lands, so labyrinths and prayer substituted for such travel."

Sculptor Robin Murez recently built a cute little labyrinth in the Venice 'hood. Churchgoers there do not see it as a hard path to God. They see it as some pagan thing that will cause people to walk around in circles instead of come inside and pray, says an article in the LA Times

Pasadena Half Marathon

The idea, originally, was that I was going to run a marathon before I turned 50. And that was it. Eventually, though, I remembered how much I loved to run, and it became about much more than a simple, single accomplishment.

Around the time I realized that, my friend Buck said she was going to run the Pasadena half marathon, exactly one month before the LA Marathon. I liked the way the dates lined up: Feb 21 Pasadena Half. March 21 LA Marathon. April 21 my 50th birthday. I get excited in a sort of OCD way when numbers form patterns. It also seemed like a good idea to get a race in before the marathon. I wanted to feel the nervousness, get used to the crowds, wake up at 4:30 am to run a race, and just kinda test the process, in case there were any mental or maybe even physical adjustments I needed to make before Marathon day.

It was awesome. There was that glorious weather moment as we came round the Rose Bowl parking lot where the sun was shining through a light drizzle/mist; that’s beautiful weather to be running through at 8:30 on a mild February morning in Southern California.

My time? Nothing too exciting, really. A little over 2 hours. Not Kenyan material. It was, however, the first finish line I’d run across since some small town central Texas hill country 10K back around 1980, 30 years ago, when I was 19 or 20. I’ll call it a personal first.

A Warm Rain's Gonna Fall

I was raised in the desert. I'm not so much of a rain guy. Yesterday evening, though, I was out walking down Sunset, and it was a really warm rain, so instead of dashing from under one awning to the next I decided to just stroll and get soaked. When I got to the coffee shop I was pretty much drenched, I guess - everyone kept commenting "Wow, it must be really pouring out there"...Not really, though. Just a beautiful warm rain. And this morning it feels like the same.

Here's what it looked like at my place up on top of the hills in Echo Park last year in the rain:

Venice Beach, Labor Day 2009

Two cholitas on Venice Beach, Labor Day 2009.

Surfer Girl. Venice Beach, August 30th, 6:30 pm

Venice Beach, August 30th, 6:30 pm. I’ve never before ridden the bike path through Venice - too much work dodging tourists and roller skaters - but there was no riding in town due to the toxic air from the fires.

Never having ridden the path I’d no idea how different Venice looked from the perspective of 10 feet further south than the boardwalk. It’s a completely different viewpoint, an insider’s viewpoint maybe, and I'm always thrilled when something as simple as a shift in position opens up what is to me a complete change in perspective, especially of something I've seen so very many times over so very many years from the earlier seemingly fixed viewpoint.

If you click on it you can see it bigger. It’s like magic.

Vancouver Island, 1994

Long Beach, on Vancouver Island. 1994.

Opposite side of the island from my parents' house, which was right on the beach. That was my mother's deal. She loved the ocean. My stepfather was a prairie boy and hated both the ocean and all the trees. He preferred a flat and endless stretch of wheat fields.

My mother said that when she died she didn't want any sort of a big fuss with a lot of people. She just wanted her immediate family to wade into the ocean she could see from her porch and quietly scatter her ashes there. So that's what we did.

A day or two later I took a solo trip across the island.

Long Beach was a place I remembered visiting when I was about 12. I remembered it was cold, desolate, and really beautiful. I also remembered that hippies had built all sorts of shelters out of the driftwood.

It hadn't changed much from my memories as a kid in the early 70s. It was still desolate, beautiful, and the only signs of humans were odd bits of hippie detritus.

Miles of beach, middle of August, and I was the only person there.

Vancouver Island, 1994

I've been to this place twice. The first time was during a family vacation in the 70s. I remembered it as cold, desolate, and stunningly beautiful. I remembered enormous driftwood - not just a piece of wood but the entire tree. I remembered abandoned lean-tos and other shelters made out of driftwood, by hippies, I reckoned.

And when I returned a little over 20 years later, it was exactly as I remember.

Night Surf

April 26th. We headed out to Zuma around 5pm. The wind was blowing hard from the north and it was too cold to even bother. South on PCH traffic was jammed, one accident after another. We stopped off at Topanga. There was no surf. A bunch of ambulances pulled up. A helicopter landed. Some time went by while they worked on the victim. Once he was stable enough they moved him quickly into the helicopter. Even from a distance you could see blood on the sheets covering him on the stretcher.

We headed down further to little Sunset. High tide, mellow surf. Watched the sun set on our boards, and surfed into the dark. I didn't realize how cold I was until I got out and discovered I couldn't feel the ground. It took an hour before I got feeling back in my feet.


Topanga


Helicopter takes off with accident victim


Portajohn on PCH


Tere


Two boards


MS-13 has claimed this beach. From Pico Union to PCH - who knew they surfed?


MS-13 and the Mini Simmons


My Town & Country board


Long and Short: my Town & Country & Tere's Mini Simmons


Paddling out at sunset


High tide churn at night