Day 53 - Mendocino in the Morning

"I wanted to go to that karaoke party at that bar in Livermore tonight. But the boss just texted me that they really need this up there in Mendocino by the first. It's already a new year, can you believe that? Crazy. So I'm just over there at that Starbucks getting me a big coffee to get me through this night. Hey, Happy New's Years."

Day 53 Shake it up, Sugaree- See You at the Jubilee

One, or perhaps both, of these people fit the rules.


The rendezvous was a meeting of mountain men, fur traders, and skinners. It was held once a year. The place and time were passed along by word of mouth and intuition.

This photo was taken about five minutes after we decided to do it. The chest in the foreground is my Christmas gift.


Me? Not me? Who cares? See you around the mountains.

Day 52

"Yeah, I know I look like shoe-thrower. No, I do not want to let you take my picture. If you catch, you can keep."

Day 51- Hours Before the Winter Sun's Ignited

"The dove-blue holiness of Sunday....." - Dancer from the Dance


I woke up early to take a walk around the neighborhood as they woke up to private personal Christmas joys.


This guy came running out from his open garage to meet me.

"Let me turn on my lights, and you can take a picture!"

It was the first of many sweet and surprising gifts I got today.


This blog is both much more boring for the reader, and meaningful for me, than I could have predicted. I can't wait to see what 2009 brings.


Merry Christmas.

My Favorite Customer

"Hey Carl, I'm going to take your picture, okay?"

A fraction of a second later he stuck out his tongue, but I was quick.

Carl works in the rain and the ice and the heat and the dust, and nothing ever gets him down. They used to call him half-car, but I still don't know why.

He likes everyone, always has something nice to say, and never meets a stranger.

He is my psychic opposite.

He helps balance Blue Lake.

Seven Days of "No"

"All winter holidays are based on rituals to call back the sun in the winter dark. You fucking well better not show my face".




"Here. This is the pretty part".



"Full sunlight. Use a flash. That better be 35mm film in there. (note- it was). Lift tip of tongue to just behind teeth, slightly open mouth. If you do all that plus remove digital noise, you can post it."



"Wait'll I move this lawn, be right back"



"What do you mean, I'm cute, Miss Beauty? YES to taking it, YES to posting it, NO, I don't want to see it".






"What're you, a fuckin' cop? Yeah, I know it's Christmas Eve, get off my land".





"just my profile. I didn't wash my hair and I don't want to put on lipstick"

Day 46 - Stan Lee Lost a Bet

Day 46 - The Macro Universe of Forced Overtime

Camphone pic of ____ ____, my radioman homie

He was a generous resource for his stories about tattoo art in the Balkan ruins , and our hours of overtime conversations about biblical mythology and the nature of 'goodness' and why he didn't use torture when he was in Iraq. (one reason - it's a lousy interrogation tecnique.)
- Thanks. I didn't want to make you wait for the novel to get a publisher to be acknowledged.

Day 46 - Unfair Trade

My niece Jamila poses for the label of her family's Christmas vintage.

Day 44 Here is My Heart

Detail of a Designer Perfumes kiosk salesgirl with the colorful shirt.

A Maillot figure and a Renoir complexion, plus a Mona Lisa smile. Due to being about 20 pounds bigger than the mannequins in the GAP window behind her, she made me delete her face.

It was a pretty one.

I'm almost done with my holiday shopping. Will upload the last two days when I finally get to my own laptop.

I bought two stocking-stuffer-sized bottles of Ed Hardy Men's that I didn't need from this girl. The power of subliminal visuals.

Day 44 - Louie's Top Shoppe and Xmas Tree Lot

Louie's endless supply of brothers-in-law provide the labor and work for tips plus an occasional shot at a warm place to sleep off the morning Scotch-and-tamale heartburn.

I realize I am a day behind. I actually had a day when everyone I asked said no.

(I dreamed last night that a pale and matted little red fox jumped up on my bike handlebars to nuzzle my cheek. It was bliss. I wonder if it means anything.)

Day 43 Sucking Up to the Local Management

During the 20 minutes that this informal little chat took place, six of her flights came over to my (busier) circuit and Oldgirl here miraculously disappeared from the schedule until after the new year.

I am being held over on mandatory overtime from now until the 31th so that fuckin heffa
can go back east for her dad's third annual recurring seasonallly-induced visit to death's door.

Fuckface didn't even think of wearing a skirt herself until she saw me doing it. She really shouldn't try and get away with a full skirt with such a cowlike waistine and wide flat ass.

This is another time I am breaking one of my own rules. No permission asked or given. At least, it's only my own dumb rules and not a major multinational corporation's ethic policy I'm violating.

Fuck you to death, Noo Yawk Fauxhemian.

Day 43 -Madonna and Child

Mother in the parking lot of the homeless shelter with her son. Today was his 10-month birthday.


I ended up standing next to them in the hallway of the recieving room. I don't know whether they were dropping off donations like me or waiting for room at the inn.

This shelter treats everyone the same.

The smell inside that room was like breathing underwater in a swamp. It made the worst foot-and-ass-and-greasy-stove institutions of my backstory seem in retrospect like the Sephora counter at Neiman's.

Nothing left but the smell, like Erika Lopez says.

I got to hold the baby for a minute. He smelled like malt-o meal and talcum powder.

Day 43- Dear Santa. I have been a good girl this year.

How does it feel to be the child of the poor relations that no one wants to invite? Do you know your parents are losers and tweekers? What do you think about when you pass the house of that big Christian family with all the cool reindeer light sculptures on their lawn next to the big "Yes on Prop 8" signs still standing? Do you think they really mean it when they ask you over for a night of Bible stories and caroling?

Apparently you do. Apparently, they did.


I was standing there in the hallway when they invited you in, talking to the Older Brother about his new band. You smelled like sick wet dog and mildew, and I heard your stomach growl as we both smelled the gingerbread baking. I wish your dad didn't hate us so bad that you can't come over our house. I wish it wasn't so hard to be good to people right under our noses, literally.

The girls called you upstairs where they were writing birthday cards to Jesus and I overheard you composing your letter out loud to Santa (because, if you've got nothing, it must be because you're not good, right? Santa is Jesus when you're a poor kid) and I remembered the hymn "Jacob's Ladder" a second before I thought to take this picture.

Day 42 - Xmas Shopping in the Rain

Sign Guys are the canaries in the coal mine. Like the adolescent males who are placed as the first line of defense around the food stores of simian collectives.


Disposable and yet the first to accept what nobody else wants to see.

Day 41- Oh Little Town of East L.A.

Self-Help Graphix in East L.A. was putting on another one of their more-than-usually-awesome special events this weekend.

Ofelia ("Mary") and her brothers (2 of the three wise guys) let me take this.


This is so like what I want to be doing with my picture-taking - a big box of myths you can pick up and put on while slipping into another soul. It helps to make a huge ass of yourself and not take the end result too seriously, either.

Day 40- Jim and Chip

"Hey".

"Hey!"

"I saw you up on the trail earlier. Can I take your picture?"

"Sure! Oh, wait, Chip wants me to dry him off first. We had to have our run through the water, didn't we, boy? I'm Jim".

"Nice to meet you, Jim. That picture didn't turn out very well. I didn't bring my camera, just this cell phone".

"No, that's great! Looks just look us, don't it boy?"

"But you're not in it. There's only part of you in the frame".

"That's okay", getting into the car dry and happy together, "You got me on a run with Chip. You got the best part of me".

Day 39- Ms. M.

Ms. M keeps an office on the ground floor of the big professional arcade that I pass on the way to the freeway.

When I'm having a lull, like this one I'm in currently, I do something I'm scared of or something I hate before I begin my day. The elevator in Ms M.'s building is creaky, poky, and scary, and I hate it.


After weeks of sneaking for panicky elevator joy-rides, I peeked into the closest office. It smelled like soy candles and good tea. The colors were soothing and perky. Ms. M. herself was tolerantly amused. She let me come in and take her picture while waiting for her morning tutoring student.

I still don't like elevators, but I like this place.

Day 38- There's the reason. Then there's the REAL reason.

"When we bend a new corner,
I feel like a sweepstake winner.
When I meet you around the corner ),
You make me feel like a sweepstake winner

And you should know - you should know by now:
I like it (I like it like this), I like it like this"

Tags: alley, fisheye, lomo


Once, about three years ago, I mentioned in one of my TMI blog posts that I was a devotee of the knee-trembler.
It's not just sex in an alley, it's the whole package - life going on outside the lane, bright sunlight (or peek-a-boo fog and mists), standing eye-to-eye, bare bone to bare bone, in opposition to male-female games and/or the social posturing going on in the pretentious little hipster bar on the other side of the alley.

Anyway, this photo was taken by my husband.

We stopped for coffee in a little cafe upstairs and this guy in the foreground walked in to use the bathroom. I know, huh? He hardly glanced at me, I didn't look at him longer than a second. I don't crush or get sprung, and I'm not attractive.

But it seems to be my fate that, every five years or so, I meet up with some mutual-sexual-thunderbolt type thing, always by surprise. I don't deal in fun and harmless things like flirtation - when I am attracted, it's always instantaneous, mutual, and totally carnal.

There was undeniably something suddenly in that room between us as thick as a sticky cloud.

"You know he's totally your type", Husband said, to aggravate me. He knows me too well. I shook my head as if to clear it and felt like I had to get out of there to break this totally ridiculous arrow-shot of eros.

"I'm going outside for a minute, you can carry the fisheye for now", I said.

I went outside. Put my face deliberately into the wind to make it sting away my langour. Watched some birds. Felt someone behind me.

I looked up to see that the pull of our magnetism had attracted White Shirt to follow me into the alley. Husband took this picture, and I ran up towards him and took the camera. It was the last exposure. I wound the film, dropped it off at the 1-Hour place, and just posted this to my photoblog.

At the time I added the Marley lyric, I didn't think about the appropriateness to this photo, just how awesomely it summed up my marriage.

Funksteena saw the rest.

I think that, between them,Funksteena, my husband, and Ray see everything about me there is to see.

Day 37- Some people really know how to relax

The Honey Spa Salon is a natural nail salon that uses no acrylics or chemical fragrances.

No cellphones, pagers or loud talk is allowed. This isn't enforced, just understood. Loud people generally don't like natural nails and 90-minute pedicures.

This happy mail carrier just got a 15 minute honey foot massage.

"It's the only vacation I'll get this year".

I'm coming back for the 20 minute chair-massage.

Day 37- Everybody Will Die

Day 39 - The only non-white person in DiversityLand

Why would a guy, wearing a big ol' custom-printed "Obama is my man" tshirt, buying drinks for all the other philosophers solving the world's problems (at 10 a.m.?), conspicuously petting all the dogs of all the prettythinwhitefemale customers, fling a filthy name at an innocent woman asking permission to take your picture?

"Oh come on", the nervous bartender said, "don't be a dick. Here, hon, take one of Gary under my flag".

The fellow who refused to be photographed went on with his World Peace as Long as It's Inside a NorCal Bar act out on the heated patio, while I got this nicer guy in blurry profile.

This blog is getting to be a lot like my life - the places where I think I'm going to see a new and interesting face is just another sauce with the same old leftovers.
And the places where I go everyday with no inspiration always surprise me, like a cat that suddenly answers when you call.



This town was the whole damn list

Day 38- Come Fly with Me

Captain Hotel Lima is the best person in the world.

No exceptions.

End of story.

She has a story, and it would earn her a place in that new December sky right next to Orion, but she doesn't want me to repeat it.

I'm lucky she let me take her picture.

When I'm alone and sad, I cheer myself up by making collages of what I want to get her for her birthday.