nanatehay's Open Salon Blog

Misty Shoreline

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 08:03:48 -0400

We took a break yesterday from gardening so Sirenita could show me some of her old haunts. She's part mermaid, so we wound up exploring the Pacific shoreline around the Golden Gate - though it was a foggy, drizzly day, it was beautiful and mysterious and unlike anything I've seen before.

The trees here look like Middle Earth.

Near a place called the Sutro Baths, jagged little islets rear up out of the surf.

The breakers were dramatic.

North of Sutro Baths is Baker Beach - the dunes here are held in place by native plants in shades of silver and green.

There was a stairway into the sky.

A view from the stairs. Wherever I go I'm interested in the local flora, and the plants here were especially fascinating. There are artemisias of some kind mixed with other salt-tolerant shrubs and weird little succulents and the over-all visual effect is rich and textural and, for me, almost surreal.

I fell in love with this landscape, it's like another planet.

A red flower and a dew-glistening artemisia.

Lupines!

The north end of Baker Beach is a clothing-optional area, but the few people we saw there were completely not nekkid. By way of compensation, the Golden Gate Bridge loomed impressively out of the mist.

Hi!

Splash! In the background here you can see Marin County and a giant container ship leaving the Bay for points unknown. Right after taking this shot I tried to climb lower down on the rocks for a close-up of the waves breaking, but Sirenita yelled at me that I could get drowned and it seemed best to defer to her knowledge of the area.

As dusk closed in, the fog lifted off the bridge.

China Beach. By this time it was fully dark, and before too long the police rolled up and shined a spotlight in our faces and said we had to hit the road. Ah well, it was a fantastic afternoon of sightseeing, and I was lucky to have Sirenita as a tour guide and a story-teller for the wonderful places we visited.

Battling Entropy For Fun And Profit

Tue, 6 Mar 2012 17:03:51 -0500

I woke up the other day not knowing where I was. Urban sounds; traffic, rain falling on pavement, people talking on the sidewalk below. What the hell?

After a few seconds of sleep-induced confusion I remembered - San Francisco. Sirenita Lake's place. Landscape.

A couple years back Sirenita had mentioned she wanted to re-do her yard and I answered "What a coincidence, I do landscaping!" but, as often happens with such conversations, we never followed through. We were chatting recently, though, and I asked if she still wanted to do the yard makeover and it turns out she did and since there's no work in KC right now and I figured it'd be awesome to meet Sirenita and Mark and I've always wanted to see what California north of LA looks like, one thing led to another and I woke up the other day wondering where the hell I was.

The yard in question, viewed from above in a photo Sirenita sent so I could get an idea of what we need to do. It's about 25' x 25' with two planting beds in the center surrounded by a paved pathway and then another bed less than 24" wide running along the outer wall. It's challenging for me because I'm used to working with big Midwestern yards where there's a lot of space - foundation beds, perennial borders, back yard, beds along the sides of the house, and etc. Houses in San Francisco, though, tend to be on tiny lots and this one is no exception, so the task here isn't to create sweeping vistas (which is what I'm used to) but rather to fully utilize the limited space available without making things look too busy or crowded.

Another shot Sirenita took before I came out. You can see the planting beds are green and lush, but they're also kind of cluttered and tangled and the plants are grown into each other to the point where it's difficult to weed or to tell where one ends and another begins. Calla lilies and irises and alstroemeria and amaryllis and violets and verbena and other useful things are mixed in with assorted weeds and snails and so forth and the whole area needs to be sorted out and set right.

The first step in beating back the entropy was to determine what existing plants we want to keep to incorporate into the new landscape. Here are some irises in our "salvage area."

One bed stripped down to the bare dirt; behind the cherry tree are some new plants we're going to put... somewhere. We have columbines and coral bells and cyclamen and cinneraria and maidenhair fern and wallflower and 0thers too, though none of the nurseries we've been to have hostas yet, which is throwing a major monkey wrench in the plan. I want a ring of hostas around the two cherry trees, but for now we have to proceed without them, and possibly also without the echinacea and rudbeckia and other sun-loving perennials we need for the less shady areas in the outer bed. Hostas or not, at this point we're starting to get an idea of what we want the beds to look like, but we're also kinda making it up as we go along.

The nurseries around here are different from what I'm used to, and though I wish they had more perennials they're nonetheless fascinating. Here is a "wall-o-succulents" at one of the local garden centers. It's about 4' by 6' and is one of the coolest succulent plantings I've ever witnessed.

A succulent close-up.

Nurseries in San Francisco serve macchiato with an artful little plant drawn in milk.

Back to the yard; a charming garden hippo lives here.

Another garden resident - what a cute newt!

Mark and Sirenita are kind folk and sometimes they let me out of the yard to recreate. Here are some California poppies I saw while walking in the park.

Yesterday while hiking a ridgetop trail in Oakland we saw a day-time moon framed by redwood trees. It's incredibly beautiful out here, and I'll hopefully post more about it at some point, but right now I need to get back in the yard and finish de-entropizing the wall-side planting areas. Once that's done we can move on to the fun part, laying out and planting the beds and refurbishing the container garden and maybe designing a compact water feature and so on and so forth...

Pepper's Soul

Thu, 2 Feb 2012 21:02:49 -0500

I've had Pepper since 1995. Angie's dog had just been stolen, so I asked my friend Randy if he would give us one of Chica's pups. He immediately brought Pepper over, a few weeks old and as fat as a little sausage, and told me "She's yours, but only if you take care of her even when it's not convenient to." I said "Well, duh," and I've taken care of her ever since, just as she's taken care of me.

Pepper at her favorite place. It's one of my favorite places too.

Pepper turns 17 this year. She is, by the standard "1 human year = 7 dog years" metric, 119 years old. I don't think that's an accurate system of measure, but regardless, she is quite old. Her hearing is almost completely gone and her eyesight is very poor and she has arthritis and hip dysplasia and she's just not doing that well physically. I expected all of that when I told Randy I'd take care of her forever no matter what, but what I didn't expect was a breakdown in her mental abilities.

These days, Pepper follows me around the house wherever I go, always interposing herself between me and my destination. Her over-riding concern, I think, is that she be with her pack mates; dogs are social animals in a similar way to how humans are, and long ago Pepper imprinted on me as her lead pack member. That's fine, it's no more than I've learned to expect from her, but lately she very often seems confused. She almost maniacally follows me wherever I go, and very often damn near causes me to fall over because she's underfoot as I'm walking from one place to another. Sometimes she walks into a wall and then just stands there as if waiting for the wall to move, and usually she stands there until I come along and gently move her away from the wall and back into pack activities.

She seems, in short, to be losing her mind.

My question is, what does that even mean?

What is a mind?

Is it a function of electrical and biochemical activities that take place in the vicinity of a brain? Are our behaviors (and dog behaviors) nothing more than expressions of physiological imperatives which are hardwired into our physical bodies?

Or do we have something above and beyond our physical being, something which for lack of a better word we call a "soul"? Is there within us a spark of existence which survives independently of our material body?

Does Pepper have a soul, or is she a purely mechanistic entity, an automaton doing no more and no less than what evoluti0n demands of her?

I wish I knew.

On good days I think we all have souls, and that Pepper does too.

On bad days I'm pretty sure that "the soul" is no more than a pattern of impulses generated by the cells that make up our brain.

Depending on my state of mind on a given day, I swerve back and forth between those two viewpoints.

One thing I do know; when I pet Pepper, when I make it a point to hold her head in my hands and put my face next to hers so I know she can see me close up...

She smiles.

Barack Obama, NDAA 2012, and the Illusion of Democracy

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 06:12:50 -0500

Why can't the Republicans figure out who they want to be president? Does Mitt Romney still have a chance against Newt Gingrich? Will Newt become the nominee for the GOP's presidential run in 2012? If he does, will he be able to defeat Barack Obama?

These are the questions that we're told are important, but as usual we're being asked to watch a dog and pony show, a distraction crafted expressly to divert our attention from what's happening right in front of us in real time.

The simple truth is that, aside from cosmetics, it doesn't really matter who the next president is.

The George W. Bush administration was arguably one of the most disastrous and anti-democratic in U.S. history - Barack Obama himself has said as much, and he was of course elected on the basis of his supposed differences from his predecessor. That being the case, it's a little disappointing (insert ironic emoticon here) that not only has he not repudiated the less savory policies of the Bush era, he has doubled down on them.

In the latest broken promise from the Obama administration, the White House has announced that, after threatening for months to veto a bill containing provisions that would strike at the civil liberties of every single U.S. citizen, Obama will instead sign the bill into law. The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 codifies the arrest and indefinite detention without trial of anyone, including American citizens, anywhere, including on American soil, if the president deems it necessary.

Think about that for a moment.

Finished?

Alright then.

Now go back to discussing the Republican frontrunners and why they don't measure up and the latest gaffe they made and how awful it would be if one of them won in 2012; that's certainly a lot more fun than contemplating the shredding of the Bill of Rights by our current president. Let's go on telling ourselves Obama means well and the only reason he does the stuff he does is because those sour ol' Republicans on Capitol Hill are such obstructionists. We all know he wants to do the right thing and if we give him a chance he'll prove it, maybe not this year but next year or the year after that. All we need to do is trust him and go to the polls next November and cast a vote for progressive values and things are gonna be alright, Barack's on our side, really he is, and besides we're Americans, we have rights, there's no way they'd ever use NDAA 2012 against one of us unless we were a terrorist or something, everything's fine...

Three Years of Tink (because the penicillin hasn't worked)

Fri, 9 Dec 2011 19:12:00 -0500

I'll never forget when I first met Tink. I was in Fargo for the annual Scrap Metal and Ketamine Fancier's Gala Ball, and after the midget wrestling but before the dancing llama show I wound up at this dive on the edge of town called LuLu's Titty Emporium. There was an assortment of riff-raff there, the usual marginal sorts one sees in such places, but even among the colorful pervs and junkies and future suicides, one character stood out. Off in the corner next to the restrooms was this odd-looking cat drinking appletinis and cackling to himself while running up a phenomenal score on Donkey Kong, and I remember thinking "Maybe this guy knows where to get some PCP." Turns out he did, and later that evening we wound up in an alley behind the Dollar General store, kicking the shit out of a crippled Armenian and laughing that weird angel dust laugh, the one that sounds like waaah-waah-wah-wh-~~~~*. The rest, as they say, is history.

As you may have guessed, I'm exaggerating slightly. There was no dancing llama show, and it was cocaine, not PCP.

I first met Tinkerertink69 - or Bob Smith as he's known to his inner circle - in Open Salon almost three years ago. I'd joined in October of '08, had published a post that got one comment (from Bill Beck, actually, and bless him for that) then went weeks and weeks without getting another on anything I wrote. As is usually the case with new people here, my blog was going unnoticed because I didn't know anybody, but I did manage to make one good friend, Natalie Not Pedantic (I wouldn't have stuck around if not for Natalie's friendship, so if you want to blame someone for my presence here, blame her). She and I sometimes chatted via IM and browsed OS together, pointing out interesting posts to each other and generally exploring this surrealistic zoo of writers and artists and ravers and lunatics we'd fallen into. We read Verbal Remedy and Freaky Troll and Catamitebastard and other famous OSers and we loved their blogs, but we also searched out offbeat posts by people no one had ever heard of, or in other words, people like us. One evening she said "There's this guy you have to check out, he writes some of the strangest and funniest stuff I've ever seen." I clicked on the link she sent and read Some advice that I should take myself --

"(The stuff you'll probably read and not follow cause you're a rebel that way, but don't come crying to me when the stalker lady from Chatalot.com throws a dead rabbit on your door step with a note reading 'Unlike this rabbit, my love will never die....')

To which I replied:

good advice tink.

but am i alone on this when i say i find the dead rabbits flattering? not fun you understand, just sort of an ego boost; "wow, this poor lady regarded me highly enough to off that bunny."

nanatehay

December 26, 2008 09:09 PM

After that I was hooked. Tink's first post had done pretty well compared to mine (twelve comments and eleven rates!), but not many people were reading his blog yet, so it was fun to go over there and laugh with him and Nat and one or two other people even though - or possibly because - he wasn't one of the OS stars. All that changed eventually, of course. The Great Flame Wars of Winter '09 came along, and as a result I was defenestrated by the OS community for a time while Tink went on to win First Prize in the semi-annual Open Salon Hottest Princess Leia Look-alike Contest.

No, that's not an extremely poor example of Photoshopping; Tink's head really looks like that.

Then came the open call soliciting haikus about Kerry as a fruitbat with STDs. Tink's entry was voted best by a jury of people with avatars showing one of their eyeballs close up:

durian's foul bloom
editor's groin untended
competing for stench

As you can see, Tinky was finding his writing chops, so it was beginning to become an Event when he got home from work around 3AM, whacked off to Internet porn for a while, then posted something really weird.

Kerry Lauerman

Sadly, there was a seamier side to Tink's rise to glitterati status. Late in 2009 news broke that he'd knocked up Drew-Silla, a naive yet bitchy OSer with a penchant for men who cluck like a chicken while holding their balls.

To avoid a scandal, Joan Walsh had Drew hustled off to a convent in Vermont, from where she continues to blog while learning free-style origami and raising her bastard child. In the wake of this sordid imbroglio, and after an intervention staged by Grif and Dr. Amy, Tink checked into the Betty Ford Clinic, where, following several lobotomies and a lot of macaroni-on-construction-paper art, he managed to kick his addiction to expired NyQuil.

Dr. Amy

Grif

Humbler now, but still unbowed and bursting with talent, Tink staged a triumphant come-back to the Open Salon stage with his poignant and critically acclaimed blog post titled WHY YOU SHOULDN'T FRIEND INVETERATE MASTURBATORS ON FACEBOOK! Since then he's gone on to even greater heights of glory, but, well, you know the rest of the story...

Thanks for all the fun, Tink, and thanks also to Nat and Zuma and JK and Voicegal and Dustbowldiva and Cartouche and Deven and B1 and O'Stephanie and Lonnie Lazar and Julie and Stellaa and Padraig and Bees Tone and High Lonesome and Catamite and AKA and Trudge and Sirenita and CCC and Ariana and Cappy and all the other people from the old days and the people who've left and the people who've joined since and are still joining, except for the spammers, I hate the fucking spammers. It's difficult to imagine nowadays, but there was once a time, in the long, long ago, in the Gone-Before Days, when OS didn't have spam. "But surely that is a myth, there can never have been a time without spammers!"

RIP raman11kumar, the only spambot I loved like a brother.

My old avatar from back in the day.

And Bleue - ten days and counting...