Thanks for stopping by. The WFB is my 'whatever I happen to be in to at the moment' corner of the web. I have two other Blogger sites which are far more interesting.  

The Lost Canyon Project is the chronicle of my work photographing and cataloging the life's work of my late friend, artist Pete Hampton (1940-2018) 

 

The Lost Era Transcripts is the fruit of the Lost Canyon Project. It is a re-creation in book form of Pete's unfinished master work, The Lost Era. This is a good candidate for the finest work I have ever done.

 

Travels and Tribulations

9/6/21 Labor day-

doesn't mean a lot when you're retired. We're not doing a party, but we are having a couple of friends over for ribs, and beer. So, anyway... 

Mon, 8/30

Mary had errands and appointments all day, so I had the grounds to myself. I took a re-heated cup of coffee out to the gazebo sometime around 8:30, and took my usual seat at the table. Buddy the Cat came out to join me, and The Most Mysterious Skinamalink followed. The morning was clear and warm, the sunlight taking on the deeper tones of fall, just three weeks away. And the air had a hint of that back to school smell. Summer is over. There is always a sweet melancholy about it. I spent my working years in the school systems, so I have never grown away from the heart rhythm of a year that  begins in September, and breaks in June. The sunshine, the cloud scattered morning sky, the end-of-summer whisper in the quiet. It's easy to forget how beautiful So Cal is. The seasons abide, indifferent to our affairs.

My surfing career took up only a few sweet years in the 70's with a brief reprise in '82/'83. Nonetheless, I caught the nostalgia in the smell of the morning. Back on swing shift at last! Grab the wetsuit, and a bar of that grape-scented wax. Strap the 7' 4" diamond tail to the racks, and fire up the Volkswagen.

But that was... Don't even think about it. The daydream vanished, and the  chatter, and madness of the world rushed in.

This shit ain't gonna' stop.

 The endless roller coaster of my mental health is taking a nose dive again. 

 Every day I sit down at the desktop, and run through the long list of bookmarked sites. Some sites are just lists of links, each one leading to a new outrage. Other writers remind me that the world continues to go to hell. I haven't found anything that remotely resembles good news in a very long time. I don't have to add any details. You know.  

The best hope that I have right now is the hope that I'm wrong about our prospects for the time we have remaining to us. I'm not optimistic.

 It's one point on which the Catholics, and the free-range theologians seem to agree: the greatest, and deepest Hope also lies outside the boundaries of the time we have remaining to us. But that's how it always has been, and always will be.

The question remains, though: What to do? Right here. Right now. Sitting in the middle of the railroad tracks, worrying about the oncoming train is not a good plan.  I never thought I'd be the one to say this, but I'm leaning on prayer, morning, night, and much of the vagrant brain-time in between.

 Coffee was getting cold. Ol' Buddy jumped up on the table, and popped the bubble. I gave my  bestest old pal a pet and scratch, and got up to look at the stone.  My attention dropped in on the project, and reclaimed the morning from the troubles.

I  did some excavation in the places I plan on drilling.  The shorter the distance to drill, the better. 

 
Drilling a long hole in an odd shaped piece of rock is tricky. It's not too hard to get the drill started in the right spot. 

 

Hitting the target on the exit is the hard part. Of course, this isn't machine shop work. There's a generous margin for error on a piece like this one. I've done better, but these are both well within the excavation zone. They're close enough. Actually, they were just far enough off target to give ol' Carp a chance to have at it. "You're losing it. Too old, yep. Lost your touch for sure. This job gets a "D+"

 
 

Sometimes I take pleasure in telling Carp to piss off, and die. He never does, though.

(thu, 9/2): The drive from heck

 The town of Ojai is about fifteen miles inland from Ventura Beach, a little over a hundred miles north of here. Mary and I finished a great lunch at a Mexican restaurant there, and headed for home at about a quarter after two in the afternoon. Bad, bad timing. 

 It had been over twenty five years since I  last made the crawl in afternoon rush hour traffic through Los Angeles. There is nothing to recommend the experience. Traffic on the southbound 101 jammed up miles outside the city. We could have walked faster.

It took a couple of eternities, but we finally made it into, and out of downtown, and jumped off the freeway on Whittier Blvd. in East Los Angeles. I used to do this when I worked teaching school in Highland Park. The cruise through East LA was slow, but far less unpleasant than the crawl down the bleak eastbound 60.   

But that was back in the nineties. And instead of sliding down the off-ramp, and making a quick right on the boulevard, we joined a line of a dozen or so cars  dripping one by one into the equally jammed up boulevard traffic.

Back in the day, cruising Whittier Boulevard on Saturday night was a So Cal rite of passage. Even in the nineties, going through East LA was an entertaining drive.  The atmosphere was what my grandmother would have called, "gay", meaning bright, cheery, and colorful. Back then it seemed like every  group of store fronts housed a bridal and quinceanera shop, the windows crowded with mannequins in huge gaudy dresses. Other storefronts had windows full of stereo stuff, or cheap furniture. There were botanicas selling herbal cures, and party stores with pinatas hanging from hooks. Not to mention great little restaurants everywhere.

Now most of the store fronts are empty. The bridal shops are gone. The remaining stores are selling made-in-China shit. Instead of restaurants, the streets are lined with catering trucks. Eat a taco on a paper plate while seated at a folding chair on the sidewalk. The whole place looked third-world dingy, dirty, and dull. Everyone on the street was slouching along, masked up like a plague zombie. You couldn't see a human face anywhere. Instead of an easy cruise, traffic was  a creeping, bumper to bumper crawl.  This was no better than the freeway, and my truck is a five-speed. These are the very worst conditions for a stick shift, just a little too fast for first, but not quite fast enough for second. Third gear? Never got there.  We left Ojai, at about two-fifteen. It was after six thirty when we made it home.

So what were Mary and I doing in Ojai that left us crawling through East LA during the worst traffic of the day?

We drove up to Ojai for lunch, after a stop in Ventura beach. We went up to Ventura to visit a place called Art City Studios.

I spent the morning shopping in this pile:

 And came home with these:

It's just a little over four hundred pounds of alabaster. These five chunks range from  fifty, to about a hundred twenty pounds. They were quarried in the Anza Borrego Desert, right here in So Cal. I love the idea of working native stone. This stuff is just full of color: red, white, purple, gold, black. 

 

There's some pearly translucence in a couple of the pieces. This should keep me busy for over a year.