Return to the Fall 

It has been quite a while since I sat down here to write a post. I did a note on the Lost Era show at Tiger Strikes Asteroid gallery, but that was way back in March. I never did follow up writing about the orange stone even though I finished it over a year ago. Anyway, here it is:

Fire on Ice

It has not been a productive year for the stone work. Other stuff kept coming up. I put a rock on the carving table but it sat there for months like an unpaid bill while my creative energies were diverted into the Lost Canyon Project stuff.  I finally got to work on it, and finished it up a little over a week ago. Here it is:

It isn't one of my better pieces, to be sure. But nobody bats 1000 at anything. 

The other day I was checking the statistics for the WFB on Blogger, and noticed a spike in page views, but I can't imagine why.

What could possibly be the reason for a lot of traffic from Duke, Princeton or Oxford universities? And the jump in views is here at the World Famous Blog, and also on the Lost Era blog, and The Lost Canyon blog as well. Maybe I'm a better writer than I thought. Maybe some clever undergrad is plagiarising some of my musings for a quick "C" in English class. Many of the views here were for stuff that I had written in 2009 which didn't feel like a long time ago, but that was sixteen years in the past. 

 I guess sixteen years is a long time, but as I just said, it doesn't feel like it was all that long ago. It's a feature of being old. When you're in high school, sixteen years takes you back to infancy. When you're seventy three, it's just a short while back.

So very much has changed since 2009. Here's one of them:

Today we braved the rain for Time Out Burger. The place was a mediocre dump until a Korean couple took it over a few years back. Now, Time Out defines hamburger, and you can get a great grilled chicken dinner with a full plate of salad, and a big drink for under six bucks.

Time Out is long gone, and a chicken dinner like that, anywhere these days, will kill a twenty dollar bill, and seriously wound a fiver who goes along. So few of the features of daily life around here remain unspoiled. With every passing year, life here in So Cal is measurably worse than it was the year before. More crowding. More traffic. More high density housing.

More foreigners. Perhaps it isn't politically judicious to not be pleased with folks deciding to prefer Southern California to  wherever it was they came from. But I see headscarves on women and masjids springing up like the noxious weeds they are. There is nothing whatsoever to be gained by importing moslems. There is nothing worthy of admiration, or emulation in the muslim faith, or the repressive cultures that it spawns. They are not immigrants, but invaders, colonizing  bits of our nation to spread their vile religion.

Except for the moslem incusion, Pete Hampton predicted this future back in 1961, and launched his quixotic, and failed crusade against rampant development.  And, more and more it's looking like my own quixotic crusade to preserve Pete's legacy is coming to a similarly unsuccessful conclusion. But more on that in another post.

Summer is gone. The days are getting shorter. Time is getting out from under us, and change rolls on at an ever increasing pace. There is no brake on Time, and no breaks in change.

JWM