Manta Ray Night Snorkel

Wednesday, October 9, 2024. Waikoloa Beach, HI

Six of Pentacles, reversed. I’m wondering if there’s something going on with all of these reversed cards. Reversed, this card indicates a breakdown of maintaining support. This could be a reference to Gollum last night. Or the odd rumination about The Day Jobbe. Or possibly this is a representation of the aspect of our vacation that Mark referred to as "Open Wallet, Shake Well."

We woke early. Mark went for a walk and reported the Orion was at an odd-looking angle in the west. We both went for a walk and I photographed birds and plants. Mark went for a hike on the volcanoes’ saddle and a visit to a coffee plantation; I stayed at the unit and wrote (and napped).

In the late afternoon we drove to a Kona marina for an evening snorkel with manta rays. We had originally planned to take an 8 P.M. snorkel, but we were the only ones to sign up for it, so we got bunched with an earlier tour. The boat took us a little north of Kona to a bay near the airport. The cliffs were more basalt than lava. The sun was just on the horizon when we anchored. Mark and I got into the water for some free swim time before things got started, and saw small mantas skimming along the bottom of the bay.

The captains gave us pool noodles which we were to tuck by our feet. Then we were supposed to hang onto a float board decked out with 1000 lumen lights on it. The lights attracted plankton, and the mantas and other fish would come for the plankton. The idea was that one would float flat, breathe through the snorkel, and wait for the large mantas to come and barrel roll underneath one.

At first all I saw was a cone of light with plankton in it. It was a bit like meditating, although I had to stay aware of the water collecting in my snorkel so I could remember to blow it out, and a line connecting the float board to the boat that kept brushing against my foot. I’d say that many of the folks there were not in a meditative mood, and sometimes it was difficult to ignore them. Then mantas glided out of the murky waters and into the light.

They move so gracefully, and at the same time they look more like some kind of airplane than a fish or bird—or they look like a flying cloak or mantle, which I suppose is related to their name. Their horns are actually fins. At one point five mantas came up and barrel rolled underneath us; we could see their white undersides and radiator-like mouths and gills.

Then they’d swim back into the darkness, only to re-appear who-knew-when.  During their absence, I would breathe and watch a whirling spiral of silver fish dancing in the cone of light underneath the float-board.

When we got out of the water about an hour later, there was a smudge of red on the horizon where the sun had been, the moon was out, and Scorpio was chasing after Venus. My teeth chattered as I got out of a wetsuit and rash shirt—I warmed up quickly enough once I toweled off and put on a hoodie.

This really was a meditation on the creature of the deep (despite the idiotic antics of some of our more distracting fellow snorkelers), and I came away from the experience with a sense of having made contact with representative of the waters.

Afterward, we asked the crew where they went to get soup or chowder and they reacted like we were extraterrestrials. Apparently soup isn’t a thing in Kona.

Sunset and Raving

Tuesday Evening, October 8, 2024. Waikoloa Beach, HI

The layout of the resort is passive-aggressive towards pedestrians. The different centers are about ten minutes apart from each other by foot. One can walk, but I think they want you to take shuttles or drive. Or golf.

Since Mark slept through Monday night’s sunset, he offered to walk to the beach to watch tonight’s.

We walked along a golf course and then down some steps to Waikōloa Anchialine Pond Preservation Area, a lava flow filled with brackish ponds. Feral cats live here and we saw ten (at least): tabby, Siamese, calico, white, tuxedo, and black cats. There were very likely more hiding in the underbrush. The Sun was about ten degrees off of the horizon and the Moon was a waxing almost quarter. We got to the shore, which was a collection of dark lava, white stones (coral), and coral chunks. The sky shifted to purple and rose hues. I spotted Venus about a third of the way fro the Sun to the crescent Moon.

The rocky short was spiky and offered few comfortable places to sit. Some sandpiper-like birds took a bath in the shallow water around the rocks. The sun sank some more and I watched for the green flash (didn’t see it). About this time we realized the Marriott Luau must be happening across the bay because lilting guitar and a tenor’s voice echoed over the waters and strings of cantina lights lit up on the far shore. What appeared to be a sunset “booze cruise” sailed into the bay. We looked but didn’t see any fire dancers. About halfway between Venus and the Moon, Antares appeared. The clouds around the sun continued to put on a ruddy show.

About this time we heard someone, apparently on the path behind us, channel his inner Gollum and start to rave in an wrathful and frenzied manner. I think it was one person, but it sounded like a sad person was having a screaming match with an angry person, possibly about tourists and the environment. By this time the sun had completely set and it was dark enough that Mark started using the flashlight on his mobile. I wasn’t quite sure if Gollum was coming any closer or not, but Mark and I agreed it was time to move along.

After some stumbling off of and back onto the path, we made it to Lava Lava Beach, which was lightly populated. As we watched, a skiff, presumably from the Booze Cruise, discharged a gaggle of bridesmaids onto the beach. By this time Scorpio was bright and undulating through the sky.

We navigated around a large zooey Hilton pool, around a pickle-ball court, through a parking lot, and back onto the main pedestrian loop. Mark wanted to see the milky way, so we sidetracked back through the feral cat sanctuary at Waikōloa Anchialine Pond Preservation Area. Mark found a patch of unbroken pavement between the lava flows that was on a dark part of the path and we traced the Milky Way fro Cassiopeia through the Summer Triangle and Delphinus. Scorpio was still up, so Orion wasn’t.

We made it back to our unit and contemplated spas and day-trips for the overmorrow. 

Underwater Videography

Tuesday, October 8, 2024. Waikoloa Beach, HI

Today’s card is the Wheel of Fortune, reversed. Generally, this is a good card, but it’s not a fabulous card, the meaning of which can be summed up as, “Pay attention to what you can learn from when things don’t go perfectly.”

I must not ask, even as a joke, “Did they film Magnum PI here?”


Today we got up early—mostly because we’re still on Oregon time—and tried to see the comet (again) and generally get oriented to the skies. Then it was off to Dolphin Discoveries in Kona to snorkel.

Originally we were to go on a dolphin tour where we would observe dolphins from a boat, but that package was cancelled and we were rebooked on a double-snorkel trip. All of the passengers on the boat were pleasant and the Dolphin Discoveries crew (Erica and Captain Raj) were laid back and knowledgeable.

Our first snorkel was in Kealakekua Bay State Historical Park, a bay against a cliff where there is a white obelisk to Captain James Cook (British explorer and jerk). The water by the boat was a deep blue, then green, then a washed out turquoise, then white as it became more shallow.

Clutching a rental GoPro Camera, I plunged into the water and promptly had my snorkel come out of my mouth. The water was warm (again!) which was a nice change from the cold water off of the Oregon Coast. Undaunted, I began to video fish. What I hadn’t taken into account was that when I wear my contact lenses, I’m very far-sighted, and the GoPro has a fairly small screen: so there was no way I’d be able to look through the camera’s finder to see what I was imaging. I more or less held the camera at arm’s length and pointed it in the same direction that I was looking. But I really didn’t have an idea of what kinds of video I was getting, other than that I probably had a good shot of Mark snorkeling.

There were tons and tons of fish, and they seemed to be used to people. We saw a purple and gold striped boxfish (probably) and a blue and gold spotted tang and lots of trigger fish. Slate-pencil Sea Urchin lurked among the (mostly) cauliflower coral and (some) finger coral. It was difficult to get close to them, though, because they were about eight to ten feet below the surface and swimming down—even with fins—clutching a GoPro in one hand and holding breath was hard; I kept bobbing up (I guess I should be thankful that I’m much more buoyant than I used to be forty years ago). Mark felt the water pressure in his ears when he tried to swim to deeper depths.



After an hour of floating and diving and pointing the GoPro camera hopefully, it was off to the waters around Pu'uhonua O Honaunau National Historical Park, the Place of Refuge. We snacked on delicious pineapple en route. The ocean continued to be calm and the sky slightly cloudy.

On the second dive, I think my and Mark’s gear got swapped—my mask was leakier and the bite on the snorkel felt off. Despite this difficulty, we sited a spotted ray. I was so intent on videoing it that Mark had to pull me back from swimming out of bounds and into a dolphin sanctuary! Afterward, we saw an eel and more of the other fish. Mark liked the majesty of the second dive site, but I had a better experience at the first. Mark says I should have switched masks with him—but I was trying to make thing work.

The GoPro seemed to be turning itself off, so I got fewer videos of this spot. After forty-five minutes in the water, it was time to leave. On the trip back to Kona, we stopped by a rock formation that looked like Pelé lying on her side (the old chiefs used to have their priest light fires in the formation’s “eyes”). At a second stop we visited a former hill that had collapsed into a caldera (sort of like The Devil’s Punchbowl in Oregon, only navigable by boat.)

Afterward, we changed into dryer clothes and went to downtown Kona. The captain (Captain Raj) had recommended a place to eat (Mark asked) which turned out to be right on the ocean in Ōneo Bay. Mark had really good fish tacos, and I had a “Luau Pizza.” Our waitress was a hoot, and had strong opinions of how disruptive the Ironman competition (or “Underwear Run,” as she called it) was. We did a little bit of shopping, looked at Hulihee Palace (closed for a private event), and then drove back to the resort.

We both noticed that time seemed to be stretching out. Mark’s fairly active anyway, so we weren’t just sitting around on a beach day drinking, but it felt like we’d been on The Big Island forever. Possibly not paying close attention to what day it was or listening to the news and limiting social media time helped. We also never really got off of the Oregon time zone; so we frequently found ourselves up around 5:30 A.M. and being actively engaged with the environment—and being tired and ready for sleep by 8:30 P.M.

Orienting to Hawaii

Monday, October 7, 2024. Waikoloa Beach, HI

7:00 A.M. which means it’s 10:00 A.M. at home. This morning’s tarot card is the Three of Pentacles reversed, which I’m thinking is me worrying about work and writing craft and vacation.

Today is a recovery and orientation day. Despite wanting a bit more sleep mentally, my body was ready to be up at 5 A.M. After a brief attempt at more sleep, I got up again for the day.

Mark was already awake, and I stumbled about our condo trying to see if I could see Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, but I think it’s too close to the sun. Also, it took me some doing to locate Polaris, and there’s a shield volcano in front of everything, and the ocean is to the southwest (not the westwest). I think what’s confusing me the most is that I’m not in a valley oriented north/south.

We’re staying in a Hilton resort village made up of three or four properties and shopping centers. Our unit is nice. It’s on the third floor of a blocky mansion-style building with a red tile roof. We’re on the northwest corner, with a spacious balcony that gets a lot of late afternoon sun (and late-night geckos). The resort is on the southern coast, just below the most western tip of the Big Island. The saddle between Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa is east of us. I really should have looked more closely at a map, because my directional sense, never my strong suit, is especially scrambled the entire trip.

The grounds are well maintained and manicured—sort of like Disney World, only without all of the branding. We’re in a part of the resort that isn’t zooey. I’d say most of the folks in this section are white, middle-class retirees and their families. There’s a smattering of folks from Asia and India.

I’d say it’s a toss-up which is the loudest: the birds, the local water features (I jokingly referred to the artificial creek running around our unit as our moat), or the air-conditioning unit across the street at pool. I suppose that staying at the resort must be similar to being on a cruise ship, only without the ocean travel.

If we wanted to drop a lot (more) money, I could have a day spa treatment and massage and we could swim with enslaved dolphins.


Mark has disparaged (rightly) my humming of “Mele Kalikimaka”, and so of course my brain has switched to the song, “Puka Shells.”

In the morning, we went to a local access beach about fifteen minutes east and tested out the snorkel-masks Dad loaned us. I would say the most surprising thing about the beach was the sign warning folks about unspent military ordinances and to not touch anything that might look like a grenade.

The water was surprisingly warm; throughout the trip I had to keep reminding myself that we were in the tropics and that the water would be much warmer that the 50F it is off of the Oregon coast. A turtle buzzed Mark while he was swimming underwater. There were lots of triggerfish. Mark found a semi-secret cave that one had to swim to above the rocky cliff on the east side of the bay; it was a little too public for making out in, and we had to settle for a quick kiss around snorkels.  I absorbed too much salt water my third time out and suddenly felt sick while still out in the surf—luckily, I wasn't too far out and it was easy enough to float back to the beach.

I also wasn’t expecting to be out in the sun so much and got a particularly awkward and ugly sunburn: the tops of my pecs were bright red and I had white streaks underneath, which made me look especially saggy; I’d unevenly applied sunscreen around my neck, so I had red “straps” running down the sides of my chest and a white bib-shape over my sternum. I looked like I was wearing a Holly Hobbie or Marie Osmond dress made out of sunburn.

I'm thinking that today's tarot card should have been The Sun, reversed.

Flying to Hawaii

Sunday, October 6, 2024.  Seattle, Washington.

We’re on our way to Hawaii and are currently laid-over in Seattle.  It seems a little unreal…partially because we’re going in October and I’ve been focused on work.  Mark has been reading at least three books about the islands and has already booked several snorkeling excursions.

Mark has never been to the islands. 

I was there last in December of 1977 over the Christmas Holiday.  My family spent about a week there.  What I remember was a dingy-looking pigeon in a dark, stone, Honolulu Episcopal Church on a rainy Christmas Day… I remember collecting rocks from a crashing surf with my sister, Julie, while my folks walked the beach…  I remember visiting the Pearl Harbor memorial and seeing tiny oil droplets rising from the rusting hulks beneath the water. I remember going to a cultural center where my mom and sister put on grass hula skirts and Julie’s mortified expression when I took their picture.  I remember the the public was invited to taste poi; the docent there was complaining that they had to use ineffective toothpicks now that the Health Department had ruled that tourists couldn’t scoop up poi the traditional way with their fingers.  I remember Hawaiian dancers on a floating platform….  I remember trying to photograph every “tiki” I came cross and also being in a competition with Julie to buy the most resin tikis “made with real lava.”  (The “Love Tiki” with glowing eyes was an especial hit.)…  I remember island-hoping from Oahu to Kauai and there was some problem with the plane’s front landing gear (it was stuck up or down? the tire had fallen off? it was turned sideways?) that had everyone anxious.  I remember stifling my laughter and not making eye contact with my sister as we were sitting in a restaurant while two elderly ladies several tables over pointed and asked their waiter “Did they film Hawaii Five-0 over there?” (My parents were also wearing their straight faces.) The biggest impressions made on me were from a (dry) book of Hawaiian Myths and Legends collected by King Kalakaua (“Hina, the Hellen of Hawaii”, and “The Sacred Spearpoint of Lono”), and the infamous “hula girl”—also “made with real lava”—I brought back on the request of my grandfather before our Christmas travel (“Make sure you bring me back a hula girl, heh-heh.”).  

About two hours in the air—four more to go.  We’ve been separated from our roll-on cary-on.  The other passengers appear to be drama-free.  The sunset is slowly pulling ahead of us as we fly southwest.  When we took off from Seattle, the sun was on the horizon, but it sprang back into the sky as we ascended.  Over the hours it turned the clouds into a keystone shaped stain glass window.  

The ruddy glow has dimmed, leaving behind a honey-agate glow which turns turquoise and then cobalt.  The ocean below was a gradient greyscale beneath silvered clouds, but it’s all inky now.  

There should be a sliver of a new moon, but I can’t see it out of the airplane window… maybe it’s—oh! We just banked and now Venus and the new moon are visible!

We’ve been flying over darkness, but in the distance we can just make out glowing city lights.  I thought at first that this was Hawaii, but most likely it was Maui.  Of course the song “Mele Kalikimaka,” or rather, the first line of it, which I’m butchering into something like “Mala Kamiki maka” is playing in my head.

The most surprising thing about the airport on Hawaii was that it is open-air.  Gates, agent counters, and luggage are under structures reminiscent of huts.  Incongruous flat-screen flight monitors cast blueish light on palm trees.  Everyone says “aloha,” which was expected.  What was surprising is the use of “mahalo,” the meaning of which I thought was somewhere between “thank you” and “respect,” but which appears to be used for something between “thanks in advance” and “your forbearance and compliance with this procedure, which should be common sense to you, and which may be bureaucratic or mildly annoying, is appreciated and expected.” We retrieve our cary-on luggage and go to the car rental. 

The night-time drive to the resort is uneventful, although we do wonder which live animals we should be watching out for on the highway.  

When we arrive at check-in, Bud, the guy who greets condo owners is out for the day.  The women staffing the front desk are a hoot, and when we say that we were expecting chocolate covered macadamia nuts, tell us that we need to march into Bud’s office and pound on his desk for them.  “Here,” says one, “you check him in and I’ll tell this one about how to do things.”  My instructions boil down to use common sense and don’t trust Siri to get you places because she’ll steer you wrong (“I told them we wanted to take the exit, but did they listen to me...?”)  

It turns out the wild animals that cross the highway at night are goats and wild pigs.

Dog and Comet

Obligatory Dog Photo. We had a lot of rain the previous week.  This has cooled things down from the high eighties to the mid seventies—that's still warm enough for the dog to want to play in a local reservoir.  

The last few mornings, I've been looking in the east for Comet A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS.  I haven't seen it:  I think it's been too faint, and it's low enough that the hills to the east hide it before it gets too light.  I expect that I'll have better luck seeing it in mid-October.  

Apparently, there's another one, comet C/2024 S1 (ATLAS) waiting in the aisles; that one might be as bright as Venus a few days before Halloween.

It would be exciting if there were two comets visible in the sky at once. Finger's crossed; comets are notoriously hard to predict. 

Virtual Eye vs. Virtual Ear

Lately, I’ve been self-indulgently going back through old blog posts to take a look at their structure… and (true confession time) to have an LLM generate a pod-cast on them. I’ve come to the conclusion that spoken analysis of some of my blog posts from an LLM feel less virtual than written analysis. Also, I’d say that there’s still some garbage-in/garbage-out going on in the analysis: since I’d fed it fifty different posts, the LLM doesn’t quite know how to deal with the wide-ranging topics, and defaults to statements about personal blogs being like a diary or a lexical exploration of how to live one’s life. My sense is that if I focused the source documents around just one topic, the output would be less general.

The virtual podcast is fairly amusing — the male voice sounds a little like A Martínez from NPR, the female voice sounds like the character Roz Doyle (from the sitcom Fraiser), and the script seems like it was lifted from a Radio Lab show. Occasionally, filler phrases like “totally,” “one-hundred percent,” “exactly,” “absolutely,” “of course,” “fer sure,” and “I’m here for it,” become obtrusive. Probably the more jarring moments are when one virtual host will talk about “clicking through the posts”: which you know couldn’t have happened because they don’t have a body.

I’d also say that two virtual hosts speaking about what I’ve written — at least when they aren’t looping through the same script for the third time — somehow feels more validating than reading a generated analysis. I’m pretty sure the hosts have been primed to offer emotional judgements (e.g. “he’s so vulnerable writing that,”) over the textual analysis. And the synthetic voices have fairly good (if sometimes glitchy) tone and inflection.

Jane Yollen was right, the ear and the eye are different audiences.

Equinox Ornithomancy

I spent the weekend of the Autumn Equinox recovering from my latest COVID vaccination (not so bad, I guess, but I could do without the fever and chills).

Between naps, I quickly read two saucy man-on-man murder mysteries set in a magical Victorian England (the “Charm of Magpies” series, by K.J. Charles) and finished up a re-read of “The Mists of Avalon” (which says less about imagined British Paganisms and The Goddess than I’d recalled, and could be paraphrased “Morgaine and her certainty are the common factors in all her failed, betrayal-filled relationships.”)

So this Equinox there was no dancing in a magic circle, nor harping under moonlight, nor meditating while incense floated around me.

However, on the Equinox, Mark and I did go for a long walk along the Willamette River and to Delta Ponds. As we were walking along the gravel path between the two bridges on the south end of the Ponds, I looked out on a strip of water running between two marshy beds of river grass. It was a little after the sun was in its meridian. A dark egret stood on the eastern bank, facing a white heron on the western bank. The two birds facing each other put me in mind of the Middle Kingdom hieroglyph for the horizon 𓈌 , although I believe two animals back-to-back more commonly hint at it in Egyptian art. Still, it was a striking image — almost like a tableau from tarot card — that seemed to signify the Equinox. I stopped to pay better attention to it; fixing the curving the shining water between the green grasses, a shadowy neck, white wings, narrow beaks, and the symmetry between the birds in my mind.

And like the tarot, it was telling me something I already knew: the day was the day when the balance of the season would shift into shadow.

Song and Magic

I’ll confess that I watched the first two episodes of “Agatha All Along,” and now I’ve got the “The Ballad of the Witches’ Road (Sacred Chant Version)” playing in my head (written by Kristen Anderson Lopez and Robert Lopez, the same folks who brought you “Let It Go” and other Frozen songs).

It starts out in A minor, which is obligatory for that old time Child Ballad feel. It steers away from simple arpeggios just enough to keep you guessing, and there are accidentals and parallel fourths thrown in to break it out of a rigid pentatonic structure. The lyrics scan, with (mostly?) iambic hexameter in a rhyme structure AA (BB)C (DD)C for the verse and EEE(FF) for the chorus (which lends itself to a round of “down down down down / down the witches’ road”), flirting in 6/8 between a waltz, a conga, and a polka while still staying a chant.

The words mostly work. Since it’s a soundtrack from a work of fiction grounded in a Marvel franchise/Disney show, it’s not exactly a hymn to the Goddess nor a aria to the seasons and Earth processes — even if it does reference “Maiden, Mother, Crone” — I’m trying to decide if the folk references in the song constitutes cultural appropriation or not… and I think the chant is geared toward moving a story with Marvel/Disney magic in it more than stereotyping real-world magical practitioners.

At least it’s better than "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo.” And so far, there haven’t been any references to “Hoary Hosts of Hoggoth.”

To be honest, I wish more of the traditional NeoPagan chants and poems I’ve encountered were half this good, and I can easily imagine using re-tooled variations like “down the autumn road.”

Dream: The Dance Student and the Ocean Horses

I was an art student of some kind; like a dancer. I might have been a young girl, but during the course of the dream I became myself (probably idealized to be in my forties). I was attending one school (possibly Reed College), had been accepted at another school. The schools were along a long curving bay. The school I wanted to go to was away along the coastline, to the left; there were lights of small towns along the bay, and the school’s lights shone like small blue lights over the water.

There was a side-scene where three or four female councillors were discussing my transfer. They were all wearing narrow dresses, in a business-academic style. One councillor was championing me; I forget the details of the discussion, but there were some rules that would have to be relaxed or bent to allow me to go. My champion concluded the argument with “Well, at least my ass has a cleft in it,” (implying that the others were tight-assed), and “Excuse me; I’m being a bitch.”

Back at the beach, I stood on a high dune or loose sandstone cliff about eight feet high overlooking a lower beach and the water. It was twilight; there was enough light to see the sand and the water, but the lights were still on in the distance. I climbed down the nearly vertical embankment and realized that I’d left my backpack in the beach grass at the top. I started to climb back up, which became extra tricky—I moved as if through treacle, the cliff was suddenly extra crumbly, hand and footholds became inextricably difficult. The tide surged in, and I got wet from my feet to my knees.

After some effort, I made it back to the top of the sand embankment and my pack. I looked back down at the beach below. Suddenly, three white horses with rippling manes were on the sand below; I have the impression that they came out of the waves. They wove back and forth in front of me; they whickered at me, pulling back their white lips and showing their not-quite-as-white teeth. They wanted me to come with them, but there wasn’t a way for me to climb down and I told them so.

Old Skydiving Memories

We’re cleaning out the garage, straightening out the old boxes of holiday decorations, tools, tents, furniture, books, and old paperwork. In the course of this, I found a manuscript of my 1995 skydiving memoirs. Oh. My. God. I was so earnest at twenty-nine, half a lifetime ago.

At the time, I wanted the memoir to be exploration of the questions, “is truth a static thing to be discovered or revealed, or is it an evolving thing that one grows into?”, “what are the boundaries of self, and when am I not-I?”, “how does one navigate and integrate different cultural groups?” and “what have I got to show for my thirty years on this planet?” Reading the account now feels like a collection of description-lite, barely-strung-together situations.

It mostly works on a mechanical level, but it doesn’t seem to work on a cathartic level—part of the problem is that I am not giving the reader enough background information. If I were going to write it again, I would introduce some of the folks more thoroughly. I would look for and emphasize repeating images and motifs in the descriptions of the jumps. I would address the elephants in the room: Arcosanti, my burgeoning queerness, and my failures at finding True Love and Romance. And I would add the last skydive I ever did, by myself, a few days before I returned to Oregon.

Vacation Lessons

When I fly, I like to pull tarot cards for myself. Usually this results in cards that are about travel. This time around the tarot suggested that I be more mindful in setting up habits around how I use my time.  The three-card-pull was a capstone of little observations I stumbled upon while away from home, work, and the Internet.

My friends, who are only a year or three older than I am, are not exactly elderly, but they are in the early stages of being old.  This is better than being old like my parents, but still, as the saying goes, “We’re not exactly spring chickens any more.”  I have also fallen out of good fitness habits, and was in better shape this time last year than I am now.  If I want to be spry in thirty years, I need to be actively spry and limber now (glares the the joints of his toes).

The systems of air travel in the US are brutal to the under-privileged, the foreign, and the elderly.  To navigate in the world one needs a good credit card, a modern cell phone, mental acuity, and good English language skills.  And guess what, air travel is simply a simple manifestation of a much larger system of privilege.  I imagine that I’ll need to stay on top of how the world works as I age.

I spend far too much time on social media, and far too little time playing the harp, reading tarot cards, exercising, learning Middle Kingdom hieroglyphs, or writing, and various “adulting” jobs like meal preparation, laundry, and general maintenance.  I suppose this means actively scheduling time.  Given my inclination to relax and recharge after work, I should probably limit my social media to a half-hour or so in the afternoon.

I can survive on just one sixteen ounce cup of tea per morning.  This feeds into the decision to aim for seven-and-half hours of sleep.  This means both going to bed a little bit earlier and getting up a little bit earlier.  It also means I should more aggressively reclaim lost bed geography from the dog.

If I had to select which Tarot card symbolizes reclaiming lost bed geography from the dog, I’m pretty sure it would be the Nine of Wands, with the Seven of Wands reversed for those nights when she sprawls her body athwart the bed and crushes my knees and feet into each other.

Lunistice and Summer Solistice

Last Thursday was the solstice, so I suggested that we hike up Spencer Butte and watch the not-quite-full moon rise before the sun set. In a different world, Mark and I would meet our gay pagan coven at the top for high ritual drumming and dancing; however in this world it was just us, lemon-honey-ginger tea, and macaroons. And my camera. And hippie-lite Eugene.

I may or may not have intoned intentionally trite couplets with poor meter while making vaguely mystical passes with my upraised hands and a spacey look on my face. Mark may or may not have said sarcastically, “that’s so hot.”

Spencer Butte is a Eugene City park. It’s not too much of a climb, but it is a good indicator of how in shape one is. We took the easy route up, mostly because I’ve sprained my wrist and I didn’t want to slip scrambling up the steeper side of the butte and re-injure myself.

The parking lot was full-ish, but we found a parking stall. The number of folks were evenly split between jogging attire, hiking attire, and hippie attire. As we hiked up the path, several scantily clad men wearing chunky jewelry descended; so I’m guessing we must have missed any Gay Pagan Men’s ritual at the butte’s peak.

We walked among the cedars on the east side of the butte in twilight, but the growing Earth-shadows had not yet become one night. In some corner of my mind, Suzanne Vega’s “Night Vision” played. There’s arched stone causeway which lends itself to one of us shouting “Smooching Bridge!” which is followed by smooching.

It was around 8:15 when we achieved the peak and daylight. The climb wasn’t too bad, but I will admit that the stairs at the end were challenging.

A group of loud folks coalesced at the end of the trail. Four vultures perched on a snag near by, and I took some photos of them. One by one they launched themselves into an updraft rising on the northwest side of the butte.

The old fire spotting station site freed up, and we managed to snag a seat on the flat triangle of concrete at the butte’s highest point. A stranger and his dog, Rico, joined us to get away from the jabbering crowd.

The haze to the east surprised us. Mark thought it was pollution stirred up by the 85F plus temperature. If you squinted, you could make out the Three Sisters. The sun was still about a handspan above Fern Ridge Reservoir on the western horizon.

The shadow of Spencer Butte stretched away from us, and I realized that it would be pointing in the general direction of moonrise. I had forgotten that the moon was at its lunistice, so it rose to the right of the butte’s shadow, about as far south as possible for it to rise. At first, you couldn’t see the moon as it rose just a little north of Mount June: its white dome blended in with the eastern haze. Slowly it inched upward until it broke away and hung over Mount June’s peak.

We turned around. The setting sun reflected off of Fern Ridge Reservoir, turning the western horizon into molten red gold.

We at the macaroons; they were a mélange of artificial flavors and aftertastes. We drank the tea, which was supposed to be summery and fiery; I liked it, Mark thought it was too sweet, but it did wash out the synthetic taste of the macaroons.

I took photos, pausing every now and then to appreciate what was going on directly. In a different time, I might have been drumming; in a different time, I might have chanted “Isis / Astarte / …” ; or walked a spiral lit with candles ignited with flame from the sun’s rays.

But just before the sun set, we started down the butte, descending into the twilight trees and not lingering at any potential smooching sites so as not to be caught in the parking lot in full night.

Our car joined the caravan of other cars heading back to Eugene. As Blanca Paloma sang AEAE (“…may they bury me on the moon / so that I might see you every day / every day but one…”) I spied a heart shape at the wooded side of the road: a three-point deer with its antlers arcing over its head.

Shiftless Youth

Lately, the alley near our house has become a popular hang-out for an octet of shiftless charter-school kids to take a noisy off-campus lunch. Aside from their litter, it would be more tolerable if they weren’t so loud and crude. Unfortunately, the fence they like to congregate at seems to reflect their conversations our way. 

Luckily, we’re not adjacent to the alley, so it’s not so intrusive (or late-night) than it was at our old rental near the fairgrounds—still, one can resort to pretending one is narrating an episode of Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom only so many times.

While I do have some fantasies about high altitude ballistic water balloons, perhaps purchasing a few more loud wind chimes is in order as an antidote to their scintillating congress. I believe I’m obligated to come out in slippers and a plaid bathrobe and shout, “Hey, you kids…!”

I much prefer the Lycanthropic Tea-Time Ritual Children. Even if they do interrupt my afternoon writing, they have a more elevated (if shrieked) vocabulary.

New Books from Powell's

About a month ago, I went to Portland for DrupalCon, a convention focused on Drupal, the open source platform for many of the web servers where I work. I picked up some technical information, had a few “aha” moments (and a couple of “grr” ones) over how things are done at work, and it was a good chance to network with coworkers in other departments.

During one of my free evenings, I managed to shop at Powell’s Books. I haven’t been to Powell’s in over five years, at least. When I was at Reed, we would have occasional pilgrimages to Powell’s Books; the place seemed larger and more labyrinthine then. We used to just wander through the stacks any which way, and it seemed like there was always hidden treasure on every shelf. This time around I felt a little rushed and presented with more dross. Maybe I’ve gotten more picky.

I purchased a large bag full of mostly science fiction and fantasy, two books on "Magickal Mixology", and two books about medieval cathedrals (research!). Alas, when I got back, I discovered that one of the cathedral books had been cut up a bit by a scapbooking monster previous to selling the book to Powell’s. The fiction books were fine; I managed to pick up “The Calculating Stars,” by Mary Robinette Kowal, which I’ve enjoyed; the cozy “Legends and Lattes” books, which were refreshingly light; a recent-ish anthology of Valdemar short stories, which were diverting; a collection of David Sederis essays, which I haven’t gotten though yet, and some other books in the to-be-read pile. So far the only book I have’t been enchanted with is an anthology of short stories loosely based on Oregon folklore, which was a staff pick, so I’m giving it more of a chance, although it seems to be less “folklore” and more “campfire gothic.”

It’s nice to be reading fiction again—or rather, it’s nice to be reading things that are a bit more current than “Magic’s Pawn,” “War for the Oaks,” “Foundation,” or “Talking to Dragons.” Which I love; but I suspect one reason my writing sounds like it’s from the 1980’s is that I default to older books and stories that are comfortable when I’m not reading more modern works.