Feeding the Baby

This is a picture from The Online Archive of California a very comprehensive collection of photos of California. You can see that it is the Tejon Pass area. That is a really lovely rocky mountain. The road that connects Los Angeles with Central and Northern California goes up the mountain through Tejon. Its extreme grade and potential for ice or snow has always made that road especially perilous. Truckers have to think carefully before taking their machines over the "Grapevine", if the engines or brakes aren't functioning properly they will probably fail on the road. There are emergency ramps at or near the bottom of the roads for trucks that have lost their brakes. The ramps are little dirt hills a little wider than a truck and the idea is to slow the truck to a stop on the slope of the hill, rather than plowing into something or someone at the bottom of the hill. I love the look the two women are sporting. I am reading the Worst Hard Time by T. Egan and I want to dre...

World is too much with us This is Henry Wessel , if you want to buy me a fiftieth birthday present you could buy me one of his prints. I would be ever so grateful. I was thinking that a print like this is like a poem. Robin Ekiss , who taught a poetry class for adults last spring, told us that her technique was to hold those big stormy ugly emotional stories at the very tip of our tongues and then describe something mundane. This way you allow your subconscious to pick the metaphors for the big stormy ugly emotional ( bsue ) stories, and allow the reader to pick the bsue stories that the image evokes in them. They are not necessarily the same stories, but they are most likely from the same category. This photo, and all of the photos of Henry Wessel that I have seen, evoke my personal  story. That place is my childhood and teens, that color is my own despair, that sign my cry, that degraded wilderness, my soul. But of course the picture is so much better at explaining it. I th...

In my dream last night I was living in a tatty little track house with my husband. It was very much the end of the line for us, nothing great, just a space to lay our heads. He and I were in our bed but I couldn't sleep so I got up and went to the living room, probably the ceiling was that cottage cheese shit that all houses had in the 70's. I was reading and the lights were dim, there was an open window and through it I heard a crash. I jumped up alarmed and screamed for my husband. I called his name over and over and he didn't come, so I went to look. Out the window in the back yard I could see a trail of "things", you know bits of clothing, books, stuff and then out of the side room came a large Samoan. He just looked really bored with me and told me to to shut up with all the noise. He was robbing my house. He and this thin little woman, in her twenties, and this was all just a job for them, they had no fear of being caught, but they did have weapons and woul...