Searching for Trevor Yeats

While searching for some information on a former student of mine, Trevor Yeats, I stumbled upon a blog called the Arts of May which featured the very poem I was looking for. A friend, Michael McAllister Lyon had posted a drawing of a young William Butler Yeats and I was struck by how similar Trevor and William looked and wanted to share it. I was not expecting to find an accolade in a random blog dated 2014. It seems Trevor’s old poem written in 1992, continues to move people across the time continuum.What a gift that was to find the reference. I’m still no closer to finding Trevor than I was before. I wish him well, wherever he is. And a big thank you to Lily S. May of Toronto, Canada for the shout-out. I’m truly humbled. I wonder if this is my Trevor? What do you think? Oh, and I got dinged for spam by FaceFook when I posted this link. 

William Butler Yeats by John Singer Sargent, 1908. pencil, 9 x 6 in.

In a different dream (art, redux)

This was the desk portion of an old oak school chair desk, it was on my cousins’ porch in Nicasio, but someone drove a pickup right through the porch 4th of July, 2019, destroying it and the front of the house, and this is what I salvaged of the chair. 

This was the entire piece. The back of the chair too. I also had the rungs too, but they got separated from the rest. I repurposed it with chalkboard paint and pastel. I gave it a dream of a lake and a mountain. When my cousin moved everything out of the house for repairs, this piece got damaged along the way, the chalk image brushed off, so I reapplied it, but now it’s a different dream. Since the peace no longer exists with its other parts, is it a new piece or an old piece?

I offered back of the chair with the horses on it to Geoffrey Davis but he never replied. What is significant about the Paleolithic horses is that they were pacers, most horses trot diagonally but amblers, or pacers move both legs on the same side.  The only other horses that do that naturally are Neolithic horses, such as the Icelandic ponies (which have some Irish lineage) and the archaic horses of the British Isles including the Kerry bog pony, Dartmoor, and the Exmoor pony. The extinct tarpan would be related. Can’t use the word breed, here as it predates the concept. I wrote more on Kiger mustang pacers here.

I made this Angel assemblage from the rest of the old oak chair, and other detritus from the yard. it lived outside the Nicasio house like a guardian angel until the contractors finally came to repair the house last year. Now it solely exists as a photograph. It rests on a piece of sheetrock from the 1940s. It was one of the walls that was smashed in. When the contractors discovered that it was made with asbestos, the entire house got tagged and bagged for hazardous substances. The beginning of the end of the Nicasio house.

I write in order to learn—what I am currently interested in—and I never know what will catch fire. Suspect my dyslexia has a lot to do with my eclectic interests. But I must admit anything to do with horses has my unabiding attention—weird ideas come to me and then I follow them. See where they will lead. Most of these convoluted essays stem from Facebook comments. I write one thing, and then discover something related, and so on. And then it won’t let go of me. I am possessed once I am in the throes of writing  Most people just roll their eyes at this stuff.

Few folks know that Petaluma was once the hotbed of racing trotters. I think the famous stallion Kenilworth was a trotter. Not sure if he was a pacer. That information is hard to track down unless there’s an action photo. There were also famous trotting/pacing thoroughbreds, not just Standardbreds, and I remember reading that one famous racehorse who was a pacer, can’t remember who I have to go look that up. Like Healdsburg’s Black Ruby, the world’s fastest mule at the trot. So the larger question begs, was she a trotter or a pacer? Inquiring minds want to know.

The Gallo Girl redux: My Aunt Jane

A Facebook memory about my aunt Jane resurfaced today, and I shared it with the group, California History. I expanded the Facebook post from the original version to a much longer piece, in order to give it some background to a larger audience. So, even though I posted a blog about her in 2015, (and another blogpost as the Gallo Girl) this version is significantly changed enough to warrant its own new blogpost page. Also, in the process of explaining the California wine industry to one reader, I wound up with a rather long thumbnail sketch (at the bottom of the page), which, by right, should be a separate blogpost unto itself, as it kept expanding itself exponentially, but I will keep it here, for context. —MH

The Gallo ad of my Aunt Jane appeared during the mid-1950s and 1960s in newspapers, on the back covers of magazines, and on billboards (including Times Square—my uncle, upon returning home from being deployed in Korea, saw the ad in Times Square and said, Hey, that looks like my sister. His army buddies said Nah. It’s just a coincidence. When he got home to San Francisco, he said men were lining up around the block trying to score a date with her. I don’t know if the ad generated that much buzz.)

Jane Reilly, an Irish-American, was the first model for Gallo's Paisano wines (the artist had to make her look Italian. The San Francisco Irish shared strong ties with the Italian-Swiss colony.) Various permutations of this ad appeared throughout the mid-1950s to the mid-60s in newspapers, magazines and on billboards across the nation—including in Times Square. An image I saw throughout my childhood. My Aunt Jane. I thought everybody's aunt appeared on the back page of the Sunday Comics. 

When Jane was young, she performed in amateur musical theater in San Francisco, including The Mikado, and a Barbary Coast musical review, The Golden Nugget, where she was the lead can-can girl. At nearly 6 feet tall, the auburn-haired beauty was statuesque, and resembled Maureen O'Hara, so photographers including Peter van Nghiem, sought her out as a model for their portfolios. That exposure landed her the job as a model for the Gallo ad.

Check out the half-page front section ad in the Food Section of the San Francisco Chronicle, dated July 1, 1954. Check the price of the wine. I found it rolled up inside an old Christmas wrapping paper tube that I had nearly thrown out.  I don’t know what made me go back and check it out. By the time we got around to cleaning out the basement, I found several artifacts that became the basis of this story. A true salvage job.

I found a very poor half-eaten version of the color ad in a shipping crate in my grandmother's basement. And a photo to back it up. Can we say provenance? I also found the hoop earrings she wore, and this photograph, crumpled up in a trashcan. Time was not kind to the photo. I had to clone much of it in order to digitally restore it. It seems the woodrats had become the sole curators of the family photos and tacky Christmas ornaments.

I don’t know when Gallo changed the brand name from Paisano to Carlo Rossi—it was probably ca. 1970. The Paisano trademark of E. & J. GALLO WINERY patent was filed June 8, 1953, they opened for business in 1954, so this is really the first ever ad; there were also television ads with Carlo Rossi as well.

Jane led an interesting life, including attending Cordon Bleu in Paris long before it was popular. She learned French in order to attend. But women were actively discouraged from becoming chefs. She fought back and got her Grand Diplôme. Landing a job as a female chef in Marin County in 1975 proved  be impossible, but she also had a petit diplôme for desserts up her sleeve, and catered her desserts to local restaurants. To make ends meet, she also cooked for the Marin County Civic Center cafeteria. All the lawyers would line up whenever she placed her prized lemon meringue pies in the glass showcase.

My aunt Jane bio, as the Gallo Girl, RIP. Jane B. Reilly obituary 6/26/1929 - 7/26/2015.

Tweaked my back again...

After a fantastic marathon photo-editing session for my spanking new art blog, I leaped off the bed to do something, and promptly pulled my lower back. Yeep. I was sitting weird all day and thought nothing of it, and then I jumped up out of bed like a startled cat! Spasms. Oww. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Will I never learn? 

It seems like every back injury I've ever had was a result of sitting too long in one place and then leaping up to do something physical with no transition time in between. Like that time circa 1978, I was painting a watercolor for an art class and leapt off the couch to help my granny bring in some wood. I tore my entire lower back, including my psoas muscle (it keeps you upright) and I was flattened for three months. It was so bad I couldn't even sneeze. It took ages to recover. 

Redux. This injury is nowhere near as bad. TG. I took a Flexeril last night, and some aspirin. So now I’m fuzzy brained. Weirdly, I was editing a photo of an old painting I did for an art class in the way back days (was it the same painting?), and I stayed in one position all day, so I was stiff. The things I do for art. The painting, a copy of a Mucha, came out great. I learned how to dry layer watercolor like using pencil strokes.

It’s not clear exactly whereby back injury is, other than it's on my right side. Not an area I usually have issues with. My back is keeping mum. When I lie with my knees up, and then move suddenly, I have to quickly straighten my right leg out like a piston to stop the spasm. 

When I get out of bed, I grab my left knee and pull it up to my chest and then use that as a fulcrum to tilt  self upright. My right leg is not a happy camper about being pulled to my chest like that. So I move like a mime, isolating muscle groups to keep the spasms at bay.

FWIW, It does not feel anything like sciatica. Not that I've ever had sciatica. I don’t feel any vertebrae out of line, but it is more tender on my right side right below my waist, not quite to the sacrum. I think it's a muscle strain, nothing more. But I am sure it will take its own time healing.

Oddly, standing upright does not hurt. I can’t tell exactly where the pain is, which is maddening, but it is right below my waist on my right side. I think I must’ve tweaked something. It doesn’t feel like my back is out of alignment. The only thing I can say is that it's a good thing I am limber, and good at isolating muscle groups. So I can control the spasms. But it is excruciating when I’m lying down and I have to roll over, or if I have to get up out of bed. 

It sounds like it is the Quadratus lumborum, but more toward the bottom, where it joins the pelvis. Now that I can visualize it, it will make it much easier to heal. A stabilizer muscle. Like the psoas. Groan.

Positions to stretch that muscle are all comfortable, I like being on my hands and knees. Fetal position. All those muscle stretch poses is how I’m navigating movement through time and space right now. I make ridiculously dramatic tableau poses to do the simplest of things, but I am grateful for my strong thighs right now.

“The QL comes into play in the function and stability of your spine. It assists in forward-backward and side-to-side flexion and extension as well as assisting the diaphragm during inhalation. Sitting for prolonged periods of time affects the stabilizer muscles of the vertebrae, effectively shutting them off.”

Small mercies, at least it does not hurt to breathe. Could be worse.

See, I’ve been helping my cousin move a lot of heavy stuff lately. Real grunt work. I don’t recall pulling anything, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t. It also may mean that my body thought my back was in danger and went into spasm mode to protect my spine. Also I was probably dehydrated. It's a constant struggle to drink enough water.

I think I know what I did to set this avalanche off, I was getting out of my cousin's big monster truck and I slid down to ground without using the steps, and twisted my left ankle, stepping down wrong, thus jarring my spine. Meanwhile I was moving lots of boxes, then I was driving lots, so I must’ve put a strain on something. Then, I was sitting supine on the bed for a very long time without moving.

My left hip and femur did hurt somewhat yesterday, inexplicably, as if it couldn’t seat itself, but then, it stopped. I have an over-limber left hip and my femur can rotate out. I'm a bit double jointed. All those years on horseback.

At least it isn’t my psoas muscle. Then I would be right and truly phucked. Walking around upright feels OK, if I stand tall, should I attempt a walk? or rest?

Well, there’s some progress. I was able to haul my sorry carcass out of bed unassisted, so I must be healing. I’ve been using bungee cord style exercise bands to haul myself upright in order to crawl off of the bed. Once upright, I resort to sumo wrestler poses in order to get across the room.

I have added odd arabesque and lunges as well to my sumo wrestler pose to get around. Anything to avoid the pain when I have to bend over. It’s very dramatic in the kitchen when I have to get something out of the lower cabinets. Like making coffee. I look like I'm practicing kinky ballet in the kitchen.

I could use some tennis balls to massage the area. Dang, no tennis balls. OK, now I got balls. Tennis balls, that is. Green ones. I stole them from the neighbor's dog. I used them today to poke into the pressure spot. Relief. Snooze, ya loose.

I found some Voltaran gel from my old knee injury, and my TENS unit, but only one channel works. Anything is better than nothing. I'll use it until the battery dies. The heating pad feels lovely.

Voltran is a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory topical NSAID (mainly for arthritis), it's no longer used, much but beggars can’t be…. This Voltaren is similar to BenGay. Didn’t think it was working, but I do feel a lot better now. 

August 16. Well, the end is in sight. Perhaps my rear end. Not. This is the first day that I’ve been able to get out of bed without doing odd sideways serpent crunchies. I’m not 100% healed but what a radical difference from yesterday, and the day before, and so on stretching back to when I first posted this note August 9. So basically, 10 days in, there is light at the end of the tunnel. 

 I’m still using my elastic exercise bands as bungee cord handles to spring outta bed since that seems to be my most vulnerable position. I am trying to gird my loins, ironically that’s part of the muscle group name, loins. there must be some sort of cosmic joke embedded in that definition. Roar!

Meanwhile life goes on. In order to go to Lucky's I really had to gird my loins. It wasn’t too bad driving sitting upright and if I keep my most excellent posture, that is, walking tall, it doesn’t spasm. 

As soon as I got back from the store, I took another generic Flexeril. Didn’t dare do it beforehand and try to drive. I can’t bear to take it three times a day. Once every 24 hours is about all I can handle. I am so much better now than I was earlier today. I think a lack of magnesium and potassium is playing a role here because I was dehydrated, and suddenly bananas smell good.

No, I did not stay flat for the entire duration, I had three necessary outings (2 were jobs) which I’m sure set me back to the protozoan age. I was in agony again—especially while driving long distance to Forest Knolls to see Sam. However, I did get some quality writing time in. See The Gallo Girl redux: My Aunt Jane. But Searching for Trevor Yeats got me thrown in Facebook jail again for spam.

Laundry yesterday was a gymnastic feat, avoiding using my psoas, etc. I could not lift the laundry basket off the floor. Going up the stairs, I humped the basket up each step, but when I got to the top of the landing, I still couldn’t pick up the fucking basket, so I took off my shirt, slipped it through the handle and dragged it along like a good dog. 

I must admit, when things hurt deep inside, you get incredibly inventive on how to work around those physical limitations, I call them roadblocks. Now, to begin core stretches and strengthening. Suggestions?

Thank you all my friends for all your advice and input, Robin for sending me and that super CBD salve—which gives me the munchies. See Stoned off my ass for the duration and Serendipity 2.0, and Sneezing, such exquisite pain... (It took me a good month to heal from this fiasco.)

Saskatoon berries

In Glacier Park, I once saw a ground squirrel perched in a Saskatoon bush, greedily shoveling berries into his mouth for all he was worth, purple juice dribbling down his bib. He saw us but didn’t want to leave his booty. He couldn’t even squawk at us, his mouth was so stuffed, I thought he might gag, so he beat his little chest and slapped the branch with his forepaws, as if to say, My bush. My bush.

Words from the Arabic

A Facebook friend posted a great word list from the Arabic. Apparently an Arizonan was offended by the word haboob. He snidely said, We don't use Arabic words in Arizona. I had to laugh. There was a habūb in Death Valley once, took the enamel right off my teeth. He said, What we need now is a good monsoon. She should tell him it's monsoon season in Arizona. Words from the Arabic: haboob and mawsim.

But many of the words my Facebook friend posted were actually loanwords into the Arabic, not words FROM the Arabic. So I looked up each word from her lengthy list and came up with these solid Arabic contenders. Candy, cotton, lemon, magazine, mattress, alcohol, sugar, soda, sofa, zero, safari, sirocco, haboob, monsoon, zenith, azimuth, nadir, alchemy, alcove, assassin, adobe, tariff, tabby, sash, ream, mascara, cork, artichoke—all words from the Arabic. 

There was mixed etymological origins on of many so-called Arabic words listed, though. Most words were originally from the Persian, which is an Indo-European language. Moon and wine are Indo-European (IE) words, not Arabic. Chess is from the Sanskrit (also an IE language). Basil is from the Greek basilius (king). Guitar, Gr. kithara, music, Gr. mousa. 

Queen is also an IE word cwēn. There’s a lot of variation on that word, from incanabula to c*nt to quim. I was trying hard not to be a wordc*nt, and I tried to make it interesting but I couldn't let those errors stay—stet. I was on a roll. I wish I had kept the original word lists too. But se la vie. What I noticed on the many wordlists I looked up, was that people play fast and loose with word origins. 

Borax is interesting, Medieval French, from the Arabic, BUT from the Persian burah, (in other words, also an IE word by way of Arabic, call it a double borrowing.) Orange, from the Persian nārang, to Arabic, to Spanish naranja. Ditto that with scarlet: Persian to Arabic to French… Race and rest have Germanic/ Norse origins. And solar is from the Latin, solus. 

Many of our Latin plant names are roundabout travelers by way of the Arabic. And roundabout cloth names are also loaned or derived from Arabic: tabby, satin, possibly gauze, from Gaza. But taffeta is Persian, for woven (tāftah) with Arabic intermediation. Mouth-watering Arabic food names: Baba ghanoush, kibbeh, tahini, falafel—but fattoush is a compound word, Arab + Turkish, halva, is both Persian and Arabic. Neck-and-neck root word origins. 

Any Spanish words that begin with al- are, of course Arabic in origin. Alfombra, alcorque, arsenal, alhambra, algodon, albondigas, algebra, alcohol, amber, admiral, azucar, aciete, achofa, etc., of course are from the Arabic. But sugar is from the Sanskrit, she said sweetly. 

Maybe I'll get back to this list, but for now, it stays stet. A placeholder.

See Spanish words from the Arabic

• Nothing rhymes with… On the origin of oranges. Old Persian, purteghal, or narang, which is derived from the Sanskrit for the orange tree: nāraṅga. In Greek, the word for both the color and the fruit is portokali. In Romanian the fruit is portocala and the color, porticaliu.

SMALL RELIEF

I awaken to the alien sound of rain on the roof,
a passing fancy, a fleeting thought,
a last-minute hurrah clapping in an empty hall. 

At least this time there’s no lightning.

Small relief. No wildfires on the horizon.

AFTER HEARING BILLY COLLINS READ BAGS OF TIME

AFTER HEARING BILLY COLLINS READ BAGS OF TIME

    —after Billy Collins

I'm enamored by a seanfhocal from South Uist:

bags of time. When did we put time in a bag? 

I envisioned bags of wool, three bags full, to be exact. 

One black, two white. Double tax on the black bag.

And none for the little boy who lived down the lane.

Once upon a time, the great wool tax 

was levied by Longshanks and the peasants revolted. 

I had to sing the nursery rhyme, 

as my Irish baby name is invoked. 

Black sheep run in the family. 

And no, it's not a racist nursery rhyme.

That's a bad case of presentism at work.

My Corkonian grandmother cursed Longshanks 

and Cromwell daily. I thought the antiChrist 

would come and get me like the big bad wolf. 

In America, we say oodles of time. 

What are oodles, exactly? Rhymes with noodles.

A Tennessee slant rhyme, perhaps to accompany caboodle, 

as in kit & caboodle, perhaps lost cargo from the Dutch, 

as in boedel, or property. Open-ended portmanteaus of time. 

But those medieval bags, morphed from a hunting term 

to a race or an appointment. As in fixed time.

Boris Johnson said there was 'bags of time' for the Brexit exit. 

But it was Halloween and you know how mischief runs amok 

when the gates to the Otherworld swing open on rusted hinges.

When did we swap bagging game for bagging time? 

It all comes down to timing and knowing 

when your race is run. It's in the bag.

7/22/21

Getting it into gear

I’m having trouble shifting into gear this morning. Have you ever downshifted, only to have a stickshift come off in your hand? Old story. Apropos metaphor for the day. My first car, a 1958 Volvo panel van was always a mechanical surprise, but holding the stickshift up my hand like a crowbar as I was downshifting off the freeway was a bit much. I had to limp it along in second gear from San Rafael all the way to Larkspur to my mechanic Johnny Google’s autoshop on Main Street. 

I was really irritated when I found out later I could’ve just stuck a screwdriver in the gearbox to downshift. Or just re-screwed the gearshift back in, but I didn’t know that. I was just so freaked out, afraid to kill the engine, I cow-hopped and lugged it along to the garage in second gear without stopping, running stop signs and red lights, etc. 

That old Volvo was such a great teaching tool. This was circa 1970, no idiot's manuals. That old car taught me more about mechanics than I care to admit. I did have to use a humongous screwdriver to start the car as well, I crossed the connections on the starter which eventually melted it. We were MacGyvering everything long before MacGyver was invented. 

Don’t even get me started on alternator stories. We were coming back from San Francisco from an Irish music concert one moonlit night, and the alternator died on the Golden Gate Bridge. We figured out that if we turned off all the lights we could still keep driving. And so we did—all the way out to Forest Knolls—without lights. Without getting busted by the cops. By the time we got to Arroyo Road—there were no street lights—it was impossible to see. So I got out of the car and held my grandmother’s white piano shawl up like a beacon and Bob followed the shawl home like a moth to flame. 

Driving that car was always an adventure, so when one of the pistons blew, I never resurrected it. Because it was a rare car, it was far too difficult to find parts for it. Luckily the turtleback Volvo had the same parts. I always thought I would fix that car. David Best wanted my car to make it into a junk art car. I should’ve given it to him. It would've been immortalized.

The event was real, but, yes, I do speak metaphorically, I just couldn’t get into gear all day. I practically had to kick myself down the road. So I fixed myself a strong doublewide mug of coffee. I discovered there is a God after all who lives in a large coffee mug.

Remembering Barbara Scott

Barbara Davenport SCOTT, age 85, of Forest Knolls, California passed away on Thursday, July 8, 2021. Barbara was born July 19, 1935. Neptune Society I could not find an obituary for Barbara anywhere.

 

Barbara Davenport Scott, someone I’ve known since childhood, has transitioned. I found out via Facebook, how harsh. Not the usual transmission lines, or a note from the family. The first clue that she was no longer with us, was her old French blue velvet davenport couch by the side of the road across from my old alma mater, Lagunitas School, now the SGV Art Center. When the round poker table with its peeling oak veneer showed up by the side of the road too, I had a sinking feeling. All the funky furniture she wanted me to have—by the side of the road—did not bode well. Barb didn’t like being alone at night—I was ordered to stay overnight up to ten nights a month, and she thoroughly chastised and upbraided me if I neglected my duties and didn’t use up my monthly allocation. The times when I couldn’t visit, my cousin dropped in on Barb, took up the flagship. It was never a chore, it was like spending time with an aunt—it was a deep, abiding familial bond. She was also a part of our childhood, part of our past. We got to hang out with Barb, and to cook dinners for her. We had marathon scanning sessions, movie nights, paint nights, giggle nights. We took her on outings, went on hikes. She had never been to the Nicasio Reservoir. I was gobsmacked, and vowed to take her on more outings. We entered her art into the Vitrual Spring Art Show. She had never been in an art show. We remedied that.

Our 50+1 Drake high school reunion cancelled again

Our 50+1 Drake high school reunion is coming up (we caught the Covid bus for our 50th, and here I thought it was a prime number, but I suck at math. Should we join forces with class of 1971?) As I gaze at the photos of my fellow classmates from so long ago, odd feelings arise. I guess that’s probably true for many of us. Seeing all these stilted senior yearbook pages, I realized how I didn’t relate to most of my classmates. Perhaps it was a fear of being bullied. It seems nobody ever talks about that stuff. The overt and covert cruelty of peer pressure. The jockeying for position on the crumbling social ladder. 

I was so glad that the Summer of Love steamrollered in and the resulting societal breakdown had begun.  I really hated high school. I was also painfully shy, which didn’t help. It was time, and it freed us from the fierce conformity of the 1950s, and early 1960s, which was so constraining. I came from an immigrant family, we didn’t fit into the American suburban culture. And of course, we were poor, so we didn’t, or couldn’t buy into it. A blessing in disguise. I would not trade my untamed childhood years growing up in Forest Knolls for the suburban experience that defines American culture.

Wild swan at the Chileno Valley laguna, victim of the drought

I fear this wild swan is a victim of the drought. The Laguna de San Antonio aka Laguna Lake!) in Chileno Valley, in both West Marin, and Sonoma County, has completely evaporated. A first. Technically the laguna is a very large vernal pool, the largest in California, but this is the first time I’ve seen it bone dry. See that swan’s big black foot? It was always suspended above the water line. S/he was constantly grooming under that protruding foot, it stuck out like a small black sail. I’ve observed this particular bird for hours. It could not put that leg down, and the wing too was permanently canted up. That said, it could chug along pretty well on one leg. With only one functional leg, s/he managed fine in this part of the laguna, but never migrated to the other side of the lake with the other swans, or to the Arctic either. No idea if it’s a he or a she—we like to assign gender to things perhaps to personalize our experience—but it never had a mate or any babies. It usually swam alone, apart from the flock. I’m not even sure if it’s a mute swan or a tundra swan. There are both found in the laguna. After hauling out the old photos to post here, I can see it’s a mute swan—an invasive species. Am I supposed to suddenly hate it because it’s not native? But I have unconsciously named it. Its beak is somewhere in between the two species. Tundra swans have yellow embedded on their beaks, this one has scarlet on its beak. Maybe that’s why it doesn’t commute. It doesn’t know where to go. Besides, it probably has been anchored to this spot of the lakebed for so long, it has lost the urge. Mute attestation. I thought maybe that fishing line filament caught up on its leg, but I never could get close enough to see. I thought about calling a wildlife rescue for it, but it seemed to be managing OK. Besides, can you imagine trying to wrestle a swan? I’m no Leda. Now, the laguna is only a mudflat, the lake is gone—and on the opposite shore, I saw what looked like a dead swan. A one-legged swan, stuck in the mud, sans lake, wouldn’t stand a chance of survival. I’d have to seriously trespass across the mudflats in order to cross the lakebed in order to verify it. I wasn’t quite brave enough yesterday. I did walk a third of the way across the lakebed. Yesterday, I found the tip of an old yellow fishing rod in the mud right about where this photo was taken. I imagined a scenario that the swan was anchored to that same spot via that fishing pole. It grew used to its confinement. Maybe that’s why it didn’t join the others when it eventually broke free. It couldn’t. Someone said the leg looks dislocated. Perhaps the bird eventually broke free of its mooring—perhaps dislocating its leg in the process. A one-legged swan, stuck in the mud, sans lake, wouldn’t stand a chance of survival. There used to be a lot of fish in the laguna. Bass, catfish, sunfish. Michael from Petaluma stopped to talk, and told me fishing stories of his youth. The one that got away. How he threw them all back. No fish now. Only the memory of fish. There are several new Turtle Crossing signs. At least the western pond turtles can burrow in the mud and hibernate. Can catfish hibernate too? I didn’t see any fish carcasses in the desiccated and cracked mud. But then I wasn’t looking for them. I could see on the far shore, a dead bird and it looks like a swan just by its girth—whether it’s that swan in question, I have no idea. As I stood in the middle of the lakebed, a white feather came tumbling toward my feet on the breeze. Perhaps a parting gift. And yet I mourn its loss.

Dear Google (again)

DEAR GOOGLE,

Today I received even more emails from you telling me what was wrong with my blog.
URL is not on Google

This page is not in the index, but not because of an error. See the details below to learn why it wasn't indexed.

Server error (5xx) I GET THIS ONE ALMOST WEEKLY
Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt

First detected: 11/1/18
Status: Warning

The following issues were found on your site:

Viewport not set

Text too small to read

Clickable elements too close together

Redirect error

I am using normal text size, Georgia font, the default font for Blogger so I seriously doubt that my text is too small to read on a mobile device as it is bigger than 12 point. What are clickable elements? Are you referring to URLS? Most of the flagged pages are merely poems. Poems, I tell you. And short prose pieces. No URLS involved. What do you mean, viewpoint not set? The redirect error issue is entirely on you, Google, not me. You don’t even like my use of tags and it’s your freaking system.

Recently you deleted 13 of my posts saying that they went against community standards. They were poems, they didn’t even have swearwords, let alone, any hate speech—so I’m baffled. To your credit, you did re-install those 13 posts. But not the ones you deleted from the previous purge. I won’t mention the fact that you also put a red flag window over my blog so I couldn’t see it, saying that it was a fraudulent site. What do you think am, a Russian hacker? Back off.

At this point, I get more emails from Google telling me whats’s wrong with my blogspot than I do from my friends. I am at my wits end. I can’t take this anymore. I am considering taking down my blog and all 4000+ posts. This is utterly draconian. 

Your redirects and your explanations are useless. Telling me to see my webmaster. You ARE my webmaster. And the irony is that I have been using your software since day one. I am not using any add-on software. Just standard text. June’s myriad posts from you were relentless. Ditto that with May’s posts from you. Do you want to drive me away? Is that your endgame? 

Today, you also sent me yet another email, this time for site overview in order to improve my site, and to get more insights about my content. I don’t care how to improve my site so that more people can discover it. That’s not my goal, nor is it why I write. There is nothing wrong with my content, it doesn’t need improving, but clearly, there is plenty wrong with your software and sniffer bots.

Dear Google, please see my posts…

• Dear Google, why do you keep flagging my posts? I ...
• Dear Google, why do you keep flagging my posts?
• DEAR GOOGLE, Coverage issues have been detected an...
• DEAR GOOGLE, My woodside play is missing, looks li...
• DEAR GOOGLE, Google’s Blogger took down my memoria...
• DEAR GOOGLE, Blogger removed 13 of my blogposts fo...

Synchronicity at work

After an uncomfortable night in my car, as my Berkeley housesitting gig ended a day early, and there were no available post-pandemic couches to surf on in West Marin where I needed to be in the morning (gas @ $4.30 gal), and home bed was more than an hour’s drive north, I made a pot of morning tea with the last of Robin Rule’s looseleaf Yorkshire Gold. My grandmother was always an advocate for a pot of strong tea to make you right as rain, nothing like a strong cuppa to help you to carry on, she’d always say. As I sipped that cup of fierce courage, and massaged my old bones and aches into facing the prospect of the day, and dwelled on the unsettling aspects of the future, I thought of Robin, nestled up north, on a ridge in a handmade caboose house overlooking Willits. I marveled at all the good work she has been doing during the pandemic, with the food bank, and feeding people. Who says that good thoughts and best intentions don’t affect change? I don’t believe in prayer, I believe in doing—my mantra is action and verb. I believe in poetry, perhaps that’s a more tangible form of prayer. I haven’t seen her in decades, yet, we are still in step with each other—our friendship persists—despite a half lifetime of time and distance. Constant poet, the thought of her generous spirit, and very existence on that steep ridge, nourishes me. When I arrived home, there was a care package waiting for me—Robin had sent me three boxes of Yorkshire Gold tea for HER birthday. Such generous bounty. ❤ Thank you Alabama James❤ Synchronicity at work. Happy birthday Robin. Carry on.

• Serendipity 2.0

Salvaging retro-media

Today is a double-retro media day, liberating James Lee Burke from the ferrous oxide confines of audio cassette books to the cyberworld of digital media format. One MacBook is running Audacity to convert old audio cassette tapes. The other, transcribing CDs. Nothing went swimmingly. It’s complicated.

Imagine my surprise when I ordered four audiobooks on eBay, only to discover they were all on audio cassette tapes. TAPES! Ouch. I did not see that coming. But I was determined to listen to his books, so I had to reinvent the wheel, which meant hauling out an old 2010 MacBook, and borrowing a cassette recorder that had USB connectivity. Of course it wouldn’t work. Of course not. No instructions either. Made in China. You get the picture. Quality Google time, I found I needed Audacity too. OK, retro software. I haven’t used Audacity in 20 years. TG for open source software, it was still around. Many hat tricks under the bridge later, I got it to work, sort of—by using an auxiliary speaker. 

I discovered that Bluetooth speakers won’t work with retro MacBooks or software. Workaround: a speaker wire. My kingdom for a freaking speaker wire. Housesitting’s a btch when you need doohickies. 

Speakerwire scored, two days later. But the recording was too distorted when played through speakers. So I swapped the speaker for headphones and fiddled some more and got Audacity to recognize the USB connections from the audio cassette player. Voilá. The right stuff. The process made me reevaluate the aphorism, third time’s a charm. In my case, third time was pure luck. But the process sure wasn’t intuitive. Not exactly ProTools.

I’ve also learned how to transcribe and clean up audiotapes. I now know what the sound waves of an electronic fart looks like, or an electronic pop, and the difference between them and a terminal K or S, and plosive Ps, or the reader gasping for breath. I learned you can remove much of a word’s sound wave to eliminate distortion (a lot). And it still sounds like a word. Luckily only one tape needed doctoring. But time was not kind to the slide guitar intros, transitions, and exits. So I learned how to clean them up too. Thank you Carlos, sound guy for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, for letting me look over your shoulder in the recording studio so many years ago. Osmosis happens.

Also, I wanted to move New Iberia Blues to my music files so I could listen to it again later on my iPad vs my car CD player, as much of it is poetry. This man writes pure poetry on the slant. I about died when he described the sky or the bayou. I have to rewind and listen again. And again. And again. This man has a bad case of metaphor and he knows how to use it. A writer’s writer. And yes, I do get the obscure literary references embedded like Easter eggs throughout his stories. 

So I popped a CD into my MacBook, fired up iTunes. Nada. I hadn’t counted on my disk reader being wonky. I popped in another CD, nada. Since, I knew Toast worked on this old MacBook, I fired it up, and it triggered the DVD player to read the CD. Talk about going around the horn. By disk 10, I learned the trick, slam that mothersucker into the CD slot like a curve ball over home plate, top of the 9th, bases are loaded. And iTunes arrives all out of breath, wanting to know the score.

Why all the bother, you ask? Why not just buy a digital copy and use an iPad/Pod/Phone? Good question. Most of James Lee Burke’s work has not made it to digital format. And I have an old car with a CD player, no USB or auxiliary functions. The fake radio bluetooth workaround doesn’t work. So if I want to listen to James Lee Burke’s work, I need to go to extreme workarounds.

But I think I’ve met my match with Sunset Limited. I fixed one busted tape, rewinding and splicing it onto a new cassette holder, recorded it with only two bust-ups. TG for ScotchTape. But the final cassette rewound wrong and got tangled. Even I can’t fix this one. So close to the end too.

After a year+ in isolation, my new habit is…

It began simply enough, a friend loaned me some audiobooks. Since I drive long distances to and from work, I roared through his small audiobook collection in no time flat. Luckily he likes murder mysteries too. I loved reading Dick Francis and James Patterson—my aunt Toddy used to send me crates of books. But time has not been kind to my eyes. Besides, you can’t read a book while driving.  

John Grisham I already knew, but Jonathan Kellerman and Lee Child were new to me. I found them a bit gritty but doable. But soon I ran out of audiobooks, but not the road, which led me to trolling thrift stores and eBay for new reads. At the Rohnert Park Goodwill, I found an audiobook by James Lee Burke, an author I had never heard of, called New Iberia Blues. I took a chance on it. The price was right.

Someone asked me what new habit will you take with you from your 14 months of pandemic isolation? My new habit, besides food hoarding, is listening to audiobooks. My new driving habit is listening to audiobooks in my car. There’s an Irish saying, a good story shortens the road. 

Now I usually don’t like being read to, because I am a fast reader. In the past, I’ve shied away from audiobooks because I didn’t like a reader’s voice, or pacing. An audiobook is a three-way pact between the writer, the reader-interpreter, and the listener. There is nothing worse than being held hostage by a bad reader. They can sour a good storyline. I can’t finish that Kathy Reichs Bones novel because I can’t stand the reader’s voice.

Actors are often the worst readers of prose. Go figure. The woman who read Joan Didion’s memoir did it a disservice. Did you really just mispronounce that word? This is not a football fumble. There’s a comma there, use it—it’s not a run-on sentence. Oh FFS, don’t you even see the period? What is this, a California stop sign? Take a breath, fergawdsake. Don’t read like you’re stuck in the mortuary loo without TP. Do you even know what you’re reading? 

If I’m arguing with a reader’s reading style, it’s more than a distraction, it’s an intrusion. And male readers interpreting female characters. Painful. Why the breathless soft girlie voice? Women don’t sound like that. It’s demeaning. Besides, I can’t hear the dialogue when you go all fem, I have to crank the volume up to full blast.

My current long and winding road obsession is James Lee Burke who writes pure poetry on the slant. I want to rewind, and listen again. And again. And again. Not something you can easily do with a car CD player. I about died when he described the sunset as the color of torn plums, or his run-on sentences when he waxes on about the secret depths of the bayou. This man has a bad case of metaphor and he knows how to use it. 

Midsummer fires

My great-grandfather built bonfires on his hill farm near Dumnaway, near Bantry, and ran his cattle between the twin flames. The actual midsummer bonfire date in Ireland is June 23. Of course, all those midsummer bonfires in California would be an absolute disaster.

After listening to Billy Collins speak

After listening to Billy Collins speak, I thought of his poem, When I was Ten, and I thought of how 10-year-olds grieve at the idea of time passing. Something Collins hadn’t quite accounted for, when writing the poem, and then when he asked them what they thought, he was surprised to find angst runs deep within—no matter what the age. And yes, even age two is not too soon to worry about the direction of one’s life. Merely the world parameters are smaller, but that same fortitude we all carry within, is like the grief of a thin sliver of the moon waiting to shine as if from within. The stars in their courses never stumble, even the gazelle leaps across the skyscape each night searching for the Pleiades, and we look up into the sky, we look into that face of the moon and wonder about the beginnings and the endings of things. How to do it right. No matter what our chronological age, but we are always in medias res. It is always in the middle of things, there is no age, no circumference of thought. And as for those throwaway images—yes, that eggshell thin porcelain cup. The fragility of memory. I remember that poet’s proverbial jar placed in Tennessee and the slovenly wilderness surrounding it. Sure, there’s a little cultural elitism involved. One offhandedly drops literate phrases in the cultural desert, and utters scholarly things like in medias res, sage tags for the reader. Or to lend credence. All the left brain images we have learned so carefully, are tucked away to save for another day. But in the end, what matters most is not how many angels are dancing on the head of a pin, but how many pins are embedded in in the soles of those dancing angels’ feet.

While most people celebrate Father’s Day

While most people celebrate Father’s Day replete with breakfast rutuals, all I can say is that, for me, it’s complicated—as I had an absentee father (and mother). I knew almost nothing about my father’s side of the family, other than their family was from County Cork, by way of Boston. Lace curtain Irish. I also knew that my father’s mother, my grandmother, committed suicide at an early age, and that her husband, my grandfather, a San Francisco policeman, died soon after, of TB, leaving the teenage boy an orphan, to be raised by an unfit uncle. 

My father’s untold story began to emerge via those scanned photos making the intangible absentee father—somewhat tangible. I first began my scanning odyssey way back in 2015, when we cleaned out my matriarchal grandmother’s house and we found boxes of old photos. Some were from my mother, many from my Aunt Jane—who apparently had a thing for my father—which goes a long way in explaining the sisters lifelong enmity toward each other. And a shoebox collection of my father’s photos mostly from the 1940s to the 1960s.

In my father’s collection, a photo of an unknown woman with a baby raised a red flag. But no real answers. So many surprises, all the random photos that fleshed out distant fragments of memory, which led to new unanswerable questions. These scans of my father were all from prints. Hard copy. So many photos were badly damaged, cloning became my new art form. I also scanned my cousin Sinead Dinsmore’s huge photo collection, adding to the complex multi-generational extended family story. 

Then my friend, Donna Champion bought me a spiffy spit-kit, where I eventually discovered distant relatives on my father’s side, a huge unknown. Still piecing together that family tree, but now I know my great-grandparents’ names on my father’s side. My grandmother Viola Heaney married Joe Hurley, Sr. 

That DNA kit also gave me closure on the photo of that unknown woman and child. Four years later, the scanned photographs abutting new DNA results, yielded new information. My father had a son, I had a half-brother, who in turn, had two sons—both adopted out. Their DNA found me. 

I found an Alaskan connection by way of adoption, which led to the discovery of another generation. When I was first contacted, I denied all connection, but when I delved deeper, I began to find that they were correct, we were related after all. It seems that we all grew up fatherless. Substance abuse, my half-brother’s genetic inheritance, facilitated the two boys adoption. Ironic that my grandmother Viola’s father had a brewery in San Francisco. 

Hopefully, those adopted boys, my nephews, are celebrating Father’s Day with real joy, their adoptive fathers filling the void by stepping into the shoes my father and his son could not fill. And no, none of us have met each other. Hopefully the abusive gene has played out its hand, and these young men whom I cannot yet call brother, or nephew, do not carry that destructive gene.

And I found an old lineage lhread leading back to Nova Scotia, Antigonish, by way of Cork, Ireland, I found a far-distant French and Native connection I could not ameleorate. And then, in a flash, I understood, the Algonquin connection that spanned the eastern seaboard, the Acadians, the trail of tears. My great grandfather, Henry Hurley’s wife. Still don’t have the link from County Cork to Nova Scotia but I suspect it was a forced immigration from the great famine.

As I scanned photos, I began to put the story together, the generic rage I held against my father for abandoning me as a child, began to ameliorate, and morph into something else. Perhaps a vague understanding. My orphaned father, raised by a vitriolic alcoholic uncle—the model was at hand. The uncle left the shipyards of Boston to raise a nephew in San Francisco, instilled a lifetime of rage in my father who sought solace in the bottle. Talk about complex feelings. Sometimes there are glimmerings of forgiveness, like faint stars on the horizon.

My pissy prose riff off on the Billy Collins workshop

Pick any color. The ink always returns from the harsh light of the page to the comforting darkness of the inkwell. The next line is always waiting in the wings, unforeseeable, but inevitable. Gnashing its teeth. It is an attempt to see the poem as a living thing. Tight received forms, pro temp forms for the moment. OCD poets rearranging words from the chaos. We are always at work, it’s never done. We’re making the poem for the reader. Tidy poems, said, Mary Oliver, is the work of poetry. Self-expression is way overrated. Mohler said life is parabolic, no, he said life is paperwork, and manipulates the reader into empathy. Do the paperwork. Do the poets. We must find the time for sound, I thought. Poem is artifact of time and culture. You need a timeline. Matthew Arnold builds the reader a tidy scaffold of comfort, then removes it, brutally, like in Dover Beach. Like a hangman. Poet as master manipulator, or dominatrix. Dylan was in the imperative present tense of what is. Facing the death bed, not to rage, is the norm. He rages. He rages. Do not go gentle. Is the audience even willing to meet the writer halfway? I think not.  Poet as observer counting a murder of crows. Reader imbues meaning. Kay Ryan’s turtle was an inside job. Who won the race? The vowels said they’ve abandoned their end stations and have given up their guns for the well-meadowed line. The rabbit died. Puzzle poems and acoustic echo chambers to sound off outside the cathedral of poetry. A prose poem is an excuse to write bad poetry. Wordsworth was recollecting at the epicenter, I, eye the ego centric at the center of it all. Or was that Keats? No tranquility for the wokid. Poetry‘s job is to make the reader emotional. The pleasure of a poem is discovering the endings. Get in, get out early. A poem is a work order. Poetry is all courtship and no payoff. There is no sex, only a lot of panting. The sonnet is a proscribed birthday genre, but only if it ends in a zero. Null and void. Avoid the wet spot. Sadly, the self adulation urge is not to put away childish things. Begin with a generalization. Then get pacific. The argument of Aquinas’ angels and scholasticism, the theological skulduggery of education gets in the way of poetry. But all those questions about angels and asking them silly questions. Then what? Take care of the reader. An angel dancing alone in an empty room, to a jazz quartet, what about all those secularized angels? What did they have to say? And what about She? Did she want to hang up her wings in order to eternally count pinheads onto infinity? Sounds like a hellish form purgatory to me. Oh, Beatrice! Wherefore art thou?


Most of this prose is from a Billy Collins workshop, some of which became a prose poem, After listening to Billy Collins speak, and a tiny bit of it drifted into my Angels playing for sax freewrite. I suppose I should shape this into something or other, it has potential,mbut I am both intrigued and tired of it. Not a good combo. It took me forever to finish adding my Billy Notes, and this run on. 

Added 1/22.

Billy Collins workshop, Book Passage, June 19, 2021

Billy Collins, In The Driver’s Seat of Poetry: A Live Poetry Session

In The Driver’s Seat of Poetry: A Live Poetry Session

Some 700 of us from around the world joined Billy Collins for a three-hour Zoom workshop at $75 a pop, hosted by Book Passage in Corte Madera. When I did the math, I thought, who says that poetry doesn’t pay? Crime still pays better. Still, I was looking forward to taking the workshop with Billy as I had long admired his poems and have used them when I have taught Poetry Out Loud workshops because they are so approachable. I like his narrative personae.

Billy Collins, two-times US poet laureate, also offers free poetry chats on Facebook, most weeks, usually Tu., Th. at 5:30 PM, EST. The workshops, more like fireside chats, sans fireplace, evolved as a response to Covid isolation. Check it out.

For our workshop, Billy gave us a reading list, and asked us to write out all the model poems in longhand before the workshop. Since I had only just discovered the workshop literally minutes before it actually began, I was scrambling to catch up. She who hesitates, is…  That was the fastest three minutes ever spent, I managed to contact Book Passage, pay the tuition, get my link, and and then get my Zoom link to work. I was in. A grand slam. There are times when the universe conspires to work with you. I was all damseled about and out of breath. Even still, I managed to scribble out Sonnet 73. But it was a rush to get to the finish line, and that also meant that the entire tone of my experience of the residency was wide-eyed and out of breath.

Billy Collins opens with a discussion on the forms of poetry and then offers us a caveat, saying, this is not how I normally teach, this is not a writing workshop, nor is it is it a lecture. (For lack of a better definition, it’s craft lecture. OK, so, call it a poetry session.) He says, I’m not trying to look at a poem as a finished product but to return imaginatively to the scene of the crime, to draw the ink off the page, and put it back into the inkwell, and to see the work as a work in progress, to deduce the intentions of the poet. (In other words, a poem is never finished, only abandoned….)

Masks Off Day, watching Dancing to Jerusalema

https://www.facebook.com/111138863712827/videos/3637795652958491/

I love this tiny dancer, I love watching her extraordinary moves. I love how the Jerusalema viral dance challenge swept the globe in 2020. It certainly was a highlight during the beginning days of the Covid lockdown. It also seems like it was so long ago. Watching all these people dance to Jerusalema during those darkest of times, still makes me weep. Nomcebo Zikode’s voice is mesmerizing. During those darkest of days, during the pandemic, we defied the odds, and we danced. Oh, how we danced the darkness and the fear away. Someone said that dancing to Jerusalema was like the song of God expressing itself inside your DNA. From the cradle of civilization, the origins of humankind, Mother Africa brought the world together into one global village—for a moment. When the ego melts, the dance begins. The Dali Lama said, Tragedy should be utilized as a source of strength. The resilience of the psyche douring those macabre times was an extraordinary feat. We hardly had the time to mourn our dead. So many fallen. Then the brutality of what followed, as society fell apart at the seams. We were brutally reminded that there is only one race—the human race. For a moment, the song, Jerusalema, brought the world together. For a moment, the world was choreographed. For a moment, we danced and breathed as one. For a moment. Literally the definition of conspiracy, is to breathe together. And yet the breath was also the harbinger of death. We masked up and hoped death would look the other way. I have had exactly five hugs since the pandemic. Three of them this month. Lest we forget, as California officially opens up from the lockdown with “Mask Off” day, the unveiling of the year, and business returns to “normal” think of that journey, how far we’ve come. The depths we’ve plumeted. The heights we’ve risen to. The idea of society returning back to normal. I don’t know If I want that ever again. Let the lessons of 2020 not be solely remembered in hindsight, but also be a vision for our future. What changes of habit will you carry with you from the lockdown? I will watch the children dance. I will remember to live in the moment. I will remember to breathe. I will remember to love. Circular breathing. This breath, this day.

Masks off day

It’s kind of weird being out in public to do things other than the absolute necessities. I think I have to re-socialize. I was Miss Crankypants while shopping for used clothing. Though we don’t have to wear masks anymore, most people did, but the dressing rooms are still locked. What’s with that? So I tried on clothes in the aisles. Yeah, my agro levels rose. Turfy, I was. And then it dawned on me that I hadn’t done anything other than grocery shopping in so long that the only socialization skills I had were akin to hunting and gathering. I didn’t know how to behave in public. I think I’ve gone feral again. I’m sure the heat didn’t help. I may not be ready for the concept of leisurely eating out in a restaurant for quite some time. Last week, Glenn Ingersoll and met up at a mostly empty cafe on College and I could barely contain myself, the fight-flight syndrome was big with this one.

Dear Google, why do you keep flagging my posts? I have no idea what you want me to do.

URL is not available to Google

It cannot be indexed. Learn more 

Somehow I don’t think it’s the URL that’s the redirect problem. You are the problem. You changed the software. Not me. I only provided the content. Not HTML code. I used your software. So this is an internal problem. Why shoot the artist in the foot? Dodging bullets is not my thing. This doesn’t even make sense. But then, I’m arguing with a bot. A lot of good that will do. 

Dear Google, why do you keep flagging my posts?

Does anyone work for Google? I am still having problems with my blog. I seem to be singled out for non-existent errors. The Blogspot post harassment continues at my blogsite, mohurley.blogspot.com. I have combed Google Help, poste queries, and have not gotten anywhere. I am at my wit’s end.

I have most definitely forever lost several posts, the 13 recent ones were reinstated (for allegedly going against community standards! Yeah, no), but not the previous ones. 

Google Help said to send in the URL to restore it, but how can I do that when a post is completely missing…and not in draft form either. I can pinpoint the dates of two deleted posts. One deleted post of a play I wrote, I at least had a hard copy of, but the other was of a historic event written directly in Blogger. Juanita Musson’s memorial gathering and photos at Olompali. I’m sure other posts are missing as well. Since I use Facebook to generate writing material, I have been double-checking posts via Facebook Memories. And, no, the missing posts were not catalogued on the Wayback Machine.

Now many of my other posts are being flagged for console search errors. I have never used outside software, only Blogger. It’s mostly straightforward text, that is, poetry. And I haven’t a clue as to why so many my posts are suddenly being flagged. 

The closest I can come to, is that Google installed a new mobile web crawler in 2019, that is causing all these flags. If I knew that ignoring it would mean that it wasn’t indexed, I could live with that, but my last experience with being flagged is that Google can, and does remove blog post without warning. 

I am devastated by the loss of my work, writing is my art form. I have 4000+ posts. At present I am madly hand-copying and repasting everything into text documents, to back it up, but I am only 1/3 done. What Google chooses to flag seems to be rather random. There is no pattern that I can see.I have also backed up my blog with Google Takeout. But that does not resolve the problem. And no, the missing posts were not in the Google Takeout download. I won’t even mention the post that Blogger turned into gibberish during the last upgrade.

MacBookPro journals

A couple of months ago, I managed to find a mid-2012 MacBookPro I planned to soup up. I was just about to buy one last year when COVID-19 struck. That put a big wrench in things. No one wanted to meet up. Not for love, nor money—and certainly not for old MacBooks. 

After a few Marketplace deals fell through at the last minute, I despaired. One seller gave her MBP to her brother at the last moment—as I was leaving to pick it up. But the real asscake was the guy who sold the MBP I had planned to purchase—during the time it took me to drive down from Sonoma to SF. 

He then tried to fob off another dead MBP in its place, saying, Yeah, it works fine but the battery is dead. Yeah, no. I felt like I was in the Monty Python dead parrot sketch. I tried all the restart tricks in the book, including attempting to jumpstart it with a portable hard drive with an OS. Dead motherboard, and the battery indicator was green. After trying to sell it to me for parts, he handed me the dead MBP as a doorprize—but, hey, at least the battery was good, I swapped it out.

I am amazed by all those oily Marketplace guys offhandedly trying to fob off their lemony laptop’s age, or obfuscate its speed, or hide its lack of memory. As if I wouldn’t notice. After months of scanning ads for overpriced MBPs on Marketplace (Craigslist was useless), I finally found a likely candidate. It had to be a faster mid-2012 MacBookPro, not early-2012, not late-2012 (non-upgradable Retina). And not too expensive. 

I met this guy in the Richmond Costco parking lot, he was solid, not trying to hide anything. After a cursory check, I didn’t even barter—I paid more than I wanted for his MacBook Pro—$300. But it had good bones and a fast GhZ speed. My fastest used Mac purchase ever. I didn’t even need to run the usual checks. 

Besides, he had also upgraded it to Catalina at my request. That was the deal clincher. He had no idea that it would even run Catalina. As I put it through its paces, he looked at it anew. I was afraid he’d change his mind right there in the parking lot. I paid him off so fast, I forgot to get a bill of sale. Alas, I needed Catalina to run TurboTax. It seem the only reason I ever upgrade my MacBooks is to run tax software. A sad state of affairs.

DEAR GOOGLE, Coverage issues have been detected and flagged on my blogspot site. They are mostly poems, or jpgs of poems.

I keep getting warnings from Google that coverage issues have been detected and URLs have bee flagged on my blogspot site. They are mostly poems, or jpgs of poems. I have no idea what I am supposed to do. Or what could possibly be wrong with them. As it is, Google has deleted a few of my posts, most of which I was able to resurrect, but not all. I mourn the loss of my Juanita Musson memorial gathering at Olompali. 

On my corona poem, I made a brand new blog entry for it. That didn’t work. On the others. I made minute corrections to see if that would help. I even renamed some of them. Nope. Some allowed me to index URL, some didn’t. Looking at referring URLs did not shed any light. I don’t know what to do. But it seems that the Google mobile indexing URL is the culprit. It doesn’t seem to like many of my pages. Because they’re not mobile friendly? Bah!

Some of the warnings include:

Page is not mobile friendly How so? And do I even care?

Text too small to read. Really? And what is wrong with Georgia 12-point type? Actually it’s listed as normal size. It’s closer to 18-point text. You've done away with the font size numbers.

Clickable elements too close together. OK, Google, this is YOUR software. I have no idea what you mean. You don’t like my embedded links? I have not altered HTML. nor am I using other software to compose my pieces. So, what gives? Besides, there are no hot hyperlinks in most these posts. They’re poems fergawdsakes.

Is now a good time to bring up how Blogger chewed up my Shoe de Gras Mouse Wars  post on 11/30/2011, and turned it into an equation field of html madness? 

Notice there's no Hava <3 3="" all="" and="" any="" as="" asian="" at="" attract="" besides="" bird-mad="" cakes="" can.="" chocolate.="" clean="" d="" dark="" does="" drawer="" dry="" field="" go="" godiva="" goods="" hand.="" house="" i="" is="" letting="" list="" mice.=""

DEAR GOOGLE, My Woodside play is missing, looks like Google deleted it

OK, FOUND V. 3 on an old hard drive. Will restore it later. Right now I’m too disenheartened to think.

Final copy is missing. I found a first draft in my scanned notes. The short play would’ve been posted on my blog Sept 26, 2016. It was a smash success. I did a lot of historical research and incorporated folklore. Neil was so good as a vagrant ghost that some of the guests tried to run him off.Literally.

Woodside Spook Party Sat Sept 24TH 2016

Preparing for the drought

In California, we are hunkering down in serious drought mode. Perhaps the worst drought cycle in living history. The past 18 months have been the driest recorded in 143 years of Northern California rainfall records. This is a reminder—if we haven’t already done so—that it’s time to radically change our relationship to water. Less is more. Conserve, conserve, conserve. 

Every drop of water is precious. I know that most of you know this already. But we need to put what we know into radical practice, and share our water stories—in solidarity—if only to remind ourselves to be more diligent to keep our total usage under 50 gallons a day, which is still far too much.

Be proactive. Fix all those leaks, and use a bucket to catch any drips from faucets. Use a bucket to catch the cold water from the shower. Use a plug in the bathtub, or shower drain (or use a child’s wading pool as a catchment system) to catch the water to bail that water for the plants, or to flush the toilet. 

This is the land of two-minute showers. Get wet, turn off the shower water. Lather up. Turn on the shower to rinse. Ditto that with the toothbrush drill. Turn off the water while you brush. Don’t shower daily. Your skin will thank you. Sponge baths were a thing until very recent times. And don’t be frivilous, wear clothing until it’s actually dirty, then launder it. Or be more like Jack Reacher.

Be innovative. If you aim it right, with velocity, you can use a quart to a half-gallon of water to dump the toilet, depending on the bowl model, and your aim. Perfect that velocity, and aim and trajectory. Please practice first with clean water. Ya don’t wanna know... If you have an old toilet, put bricks or half gallons of filled milk containers for displacement. I used three half-gallon containers, plus a brick and the old toilet still flushed. Do not, I repeat, do not use displacement rocks in the toilet tank. Sure. Go ahead. Ask me why. Not my finest moment.

It goes without saying, don’t flush for pee. Toss those twatwipes in the trash, don’t clog the sewer pipes. Listen for unauthorized running water in the pipes. Maybe it’s your toilet having a secret inner life. It happens. Maybe it’s time to kick it to the curb, make it into a planter, and get a low flush toilet.

Think different. Use a wash basin for your dishes, and carry the water out to the garden. Don’t forget to collect those stray forks and spoons from the flowerbeds. Especially if they’re silver. Yes. Your plants may like the gesture that you’re offering them genuine silver cutlery but they really can’t use them as they have no hands. And if they’re fruits and vegetables, you might hurt their feelings. Use biodegradable soap or original Dawn, not detergent. 

Back in the 1970s, when I worked for a family in Belvedere, I rigged the washing machine so that all the water went into a big plastic garbage can on a dolly, and I wheeled it into the garden. That was back in the days of phosphate soap. None of the plants died. However they did develop a lint problem. Kill the fn lawn already. Plant native species. Every drop counts. You know the drill. We got this.

What are your water saving tricks and strategies?