Me and the most beautiful husband in the world.

I need to make with some not-blogging, my friends. When I started again I was worried it would be one thing too many and it seems I should have known better. I love blogging but I don't love not working on my novel (he said, effectively employing a double negative). Compared to working on a novel, blogging is a cake-walk, though it does require effort and concentration. I suppose there are others who can do both, but I'm not them.

Politics, activism, cultural criticism, these were actually things I did not want to blog about. All I wanted to blog about was, more or less, my internal realm, though in truth I haven't been up to doing that because my internal realm (though lovely and complex) is a space best used for exploring the larger narrative of my book. There's a certain psychic space that needs to be dedicated to that larger narrative in order to make it happen in fiction. I love you, my blog-people, but I went to school at great expense for three years so I could have a decent shot at being an author.

Sometime later in the week, I'll move this blog page to another spot on the menu. I'll make a front-page that's more about my being a published writer. I'll set up a Flikr account to post photos for those of you that still want a little Rick & John in your life. I'm keeping the site and the e-mail and someday, if I'm lucky, this'll be my Mr. Author With His Published Book site. Until then, I need to spend more ass-sitting time with my imaginary friends and their imaginary lives.

I hope you're all well. You can always send me e-mail or reach me by messenger if you like. And I wouldn't complain if you contacted me now and then to ask how the book was going. Be good to each other.

XX + OO = XOXO,

Rick

And one of these hard-to-photograph friends is named Carla. Below are six attempts and one success.Above, the simple Turn-Away.

The Ardent Turn-Away. Note my hilarity.

This is a classic Dodging-the-Frame.

We dubbed this one The Portuguese Shroud, in honor of Carla's heritage.

Your basic 'No Paparazzi.'

Exit, Stage Left.

Ultimate rejection: The Horsetail.

Success!

Remember, folks, it's not how good you look in a picture with your friends that counts, it's how happy you look that counts. The picture's supposed to record your happiness together. I was very happy in this photo, and so was Carla. I laughed so hard last night I cried. Happy is beautiful, even if it ain't the sort of beauty that will land us on the cover of Vogue. And really, who the hell cares? We're having way more fun than those girls.

Arcata, California receives an average of 38 inches of precipitation each year from October to June. Wikipedia says 'October to April,' but that is a big fat lie. It rains into June here, trust me. We get high winds and high surf in January and February, big cracking storms out of the Northwest that uproot trees and knock down power lines regularly. We lose power through the holidays most years. We've hosted several Christmas and New Year's celebrations by lantern light, which sounds lovely until you realize all that expensive food is going bad in the slowly-warming refrigerator.

As of the first week in December, 2007, we'd already had several intense storms with unusually high winds. The power went out for a few days, then it was restored. We went to work as usual on the 7th, a Friday. John parked the car about half a block away. If I stepped out onto the sidewalk and looked down the street, I could see the car, a 1990 Honda Accord we had purchased from an acquaintance before leaving San Francisco.

It was a calm, balmy day. It was not raining. It was not windy, actually. We had a full day of patients scheduled. At work I sit in the front office, which, when I choose to open the blinds, affords me a view of the sidewalk on 9th Street. Around 5:00 PM I heard a loud noise, a rather loud noise. The lights flickered (a common occurrence here in winter). I didn't think too much of it, though. The first Friday of each month in Arcata is an arts festival; businesses host local artists and musicians and stay open later than usual. It is generally a somewhat rowdy evening, so I wasn't concerned, you see. It is a university town, after all. Students get rowdy.

Then our friend Carla, who owns the shop next door, came in and asked me, guardedly, "Where do you usually park your car? It's a gray Honda, right? Don't you usually park down the street there?"

She pulled me out onto the sidewalk. "Is that where you parked?"

Redwood trees have shallow, yet extensive, roots. Heavy rains followed by high winds can loosen their root structures. They don't always come down during those storms. Sometimes, days or weeks after the storms have passed, with no warning whatsoever, they'll topple. There were two dozen people standing around, chatting excitedly. It had brought down a power line, cable and phone lines, too, before it had uprooted completely and crushed our car.

Here's your moral, my friends: Never, ever park your car any closer to a redwood tree than the estimated diameter of disaster it will cause if it comes down. That is all. Photos below helped us reap a generous monetary down-payment from the insurance company, with which we subsequently purchased a spanking-new Honda Fit. In gumball blue.

It took a local crew about six hours to cut the tree off our car.

Crunch.

Ka-runch!

The upside? It actually smelled quite lovely.

Merry Christmas!

The owner of said tree was sorry. Cheap, but sorry.

Absolutely everybody hates the way I drive. Everybody.

I live in a particularly beautiful place. This is the view on California State Route 255, which includes three bridges that cross over portions of Humboldt Bay. It is a soggy, moist place I live in. One cannot leave chips or crackers unopened at any time of year and expect them to remain crispy. Not that I eat such things. Processed starches punish me, people.

I'm singing along with Aimee Mann in this photo – aren't you glad there's no audio with it? John took this picture of me while I was driving us to the world's most depressing mall. He theorizes it is situated directly over a Hell-Mouth. We did not purchase anything there, though I did try to find a pair of shoes and some pants. Shopping is not enjoyable in Humboldt County. There are no men's clothing stores here, unless one counts such venues as Sears, Ross or Gottshalk's. They are all situated over the afore-mentioned entrance to Hell. Wandering about in them induces an indescribable state of anxiety mixed with barely-contained fury.

We returned to Arcata and shopped at the local outdoor store instead. It was a haphazard but successful venture. I needed new pants because I lost fifteen pounds last month. I'm now just under a size 32" waist. So lean am I. Here's a tip no-one asked me for. Want to lose weight? Stop eating processed starches. Whole grains only. Ta-da. Avoid sugar and caffeine, they make you crave more sugar and caffeine.

I did get new pants that fit, pricey items from Patagonia that will probably last five years. It's been my experience that their clothing's expensive, but durable. The shoes fit, too. It wasn't an easy shopping trip. The husband had to help or I would have given up and continued to wear my old pants with the 34" waist and a tightly-cinched belt to keep them up.

Aren't you glad you read this post? Oh, the mundanity.

They had adopted thirteen children in a small dirt-town in central Oklahoma, and then came the Depression; so many little feet passed back and forth across the wooden door-frame that the stain had worn away, replaced with a patina from the calloused pads and balls that pressed, repeatedly, into the base of the jamb. Elizabeth was half-Choctaw, and barren. Her husband had been distant, absent without explanation; in the unforgiving, midnight heat of August he came home, pulled a suitcase from the closet and began folding pants and shirts, laying them into the brown leather. Elizabeth slept lightly. To let him know she was awake, she said his name, quietly: Chuck. Coiling a belt around his fist, he answered, “I’m going.” She sat up in bed; the shotgun was already loaded, the stock was warm from resting on her thigh, under the thin cotton sheet. Before she pulled the trigger – sending shot into his chest – before the speeding lead could bore a broad and messy hole through the middle of him, puncture lungs and arteries and heart, she wondered if they’d hang her for it, would her mother make the trip from Texas just to see her twitch and sway above the platform, would she miss him very much, what would she tell them when the sound – an explosion in their little house – made them leap up from their sleep, out from under sweat-soaked sheets and off their beds?

Ardea herodias fannini aka Great Blue Heron (Pacific Northwest variety)

Yet another Blue Heron at the Arcata Marsh. Yawn. This one's there every weekend, posing for photographs like this. Attention whore! If you spent less time preening and more time catching fish you might put some more meat on your bones. Nobody likes a skinny Ciconiiform, you know. Honestly, the way she carries on you'd think she was the only bird around. The Marsh also houses and feeds eagles, several kinds of hawks, owls, kites, pelicans, godwits and over four hundred other species of birds. If you like birds, you ought to come out and visit. We're stupid with them here.

I only began to get excited about the place, I confess, when we started seeing otters at the Marsh. The weekend of our first marriage (September 16th, 2002) we spotted a lone otter in the outermost pond, Klopp 'Lake'. Since then, otters have come back in the spring and fall every year. Usually, we'll see an adult pair with three young ones. We haven't yet successfully captured them on digital media. They'll let you watch them frolic and fish in the pond (they make very loud crunching noises when eating, a gruesome delight), but when you take out the camera they tend to scurry. They know better than to let humans point things at them. If we manage to get pictures of them over the next few months, you can be sure I'll share them with you. I hope for a wee video of the critters in action.

If you think a stroll through the Marsh sounds like a dreadful way to fill the afternoon, to you I can only say, Get with it, my friend. Beauty abounds there and it does not require a remote.

Citizen of In-Between.
My father once told me that the difference between a boy and a man is, 'A boy will confess, out loud, those things he wants but knows he may never have.' A man, apparently, does not make such a confession. I am willing to admit I possess a list of such wants, though I will neither enumerate nor elucidate them. According to my father, this puts me somewhere between boy and man.

Join me, won't you, on the Isle of In-Betweens?

In a land made suddenly just, in every city, town and suburb, two men are walking to the grocery store, holding hands; at the corner, when the light turns red, they stand and wait on the sidewalk. At the intersection, three burly men sit in the cab of an idling pickup truck. The driver rolls down his window and gives a lazy, left-handed wave; he touches the bill of his cap and nods and says, “Good for you.”