Three Days Before the Beginning

And three days after the start.

I've always said that woodworking reveals the personality of the woodworker.  Whatever holes you may have are shown, the solid areas are seen as well.  The negative and the positive.


The slabs come into the studio and I study them just like the I Ching says to do.  Walk around them, eye them, put them together in the various combos, make the plans, work out the steps.  And wait.  And do it all again.  Three days before the start.

You think you are ready to start so you tentatively take the first steps.  And stop again.  Is this the right way, is the plan still sound, should you change anything?  Three more metaphoric days after the start.

The wood didn't go down without showing me my weaknesses in my personality.....a couple of times actually.

Like the I Ching says though, what has been screwed up by man (not being sexist here by the way) can be made right again by the actions of man.  At one point I doubted this wisdom.  Didn't know if I had the giddy-up in me.  But I stopped again and did the three day contemplation thing and found the way back.

The glue-up, oh...the glue-up.  So so fraught with anxieties.

A preview of some of the grain.  Like angel wings.  Golden Brown ones.

 And for some synchronicity in the Carl G Jung's original definition of the word in the preface of the Richard Wilhelm's German translation of the I Ching....1949.

Should've been here in the 60's

Cary's got a gig but Cary doesn't have a guitar.
He's hocked all of them.  Well, he still has a ukelele and a dime store Fender rip-off.

But you can't play a gig with those he tells me.

Awhile ago I help my friend Bill put in some new windows in his house out in the East Bay.  He wants to pay me for my time.  I refuse of course, he's one of my oldest friends and hell, I love working him.  We catch up on things and drink beer and swear and fart. We work well together.
Anyway, his insistence wins over my "Hell, no, you're not paying me."
So the money wasn't really mine in the first place.  I shouldn't even have it.  It's not real money to me so I decide to get Cary's best guitar out of the pawnshop so he can play the show.

We meet at the Utah for quick one before heading out to the Mission.  He tells me he has 60 bucks for the cause.  I'm not quite sure why he decides to put on the Maple leaf bandito mask.

He takes the bus, I go on my bike of course.
When I get to the window to pay he hands me $40.  "What happened to the other twenty Cary?"
No answer. 

I start to talk to the guy behind the counter.  Ron.  He's a fourth generation pawnshop guy.  He makes it clear he doesn't give a shit about the business, it's only because it's been in the family forever. Cary tells his sob story of habitual guitar hocking and Ron's like shaking his head.
"You know how many times I've heard this?  You should've been here in the 60's, that's when I heard it two dozen times a day."

I feel Cary is trying to hustle me out of the store.  He's like that.  I get very little time with Ron.

Oh, and if you're in San Francisco this Thursday, Cary's playing the Utah.  I'm going to be doing some mountain clog dancing for a couple of his songs.  He likes that clip clop of shoes keeping the beat on the old wooden stage floor.

Muscle Up

We had to wait for the check to clear.
Headed down to Gilroy again.  Mike drove this time, he's got a proper rack on his truck.
The old guy was a completely different animal today.  He even cracked a few jokes.
Forklifted the three slabs onto to the truck, wrestled 'em down by hand when we got back to my place.

Giving some orders.

Ken's a gruntin' here.

Henry said he would drop by and help me when I needed it.  I can already feel my muscles buffing up from moving these a thousand times.

The Dancer

I thought one phone call to my go-to guy in Marin would take of this.  After all it's walnut and California is loaded with it.  But one call didn't do it, took a whole bunch of 'em.

We even had an appointment set up with an outfit in Oregon.

We, we being Ken and I, were looking for slabs of walnut for the lobby of a new building going up in downtown SF.  Ken, he's a metal guy.  He's also the guy that designed what we're building together. I'm doing the wood portion of the pieces.

First one is a bar of sorts for the lobby.

Finally found what we were looking in the self named Garlic Capital of the World....Gilroy, California.

First thing the old guy said to me as I stepped up to shake his hand was "Didja bring your fucking 6 shooter?"  I guess I deserved that as I was wearing my straw cowboy hat and snapped scalloped yoke flannel westerny cowboyish looking shirt.  In soft pastels.
He also almost kicked us out after less than five minutes because we didn't spend enough time on his fucking website beforehand.
He softened up after I realized that he needed some shit thrown back at him.  So throw I did.

Great day down there talking with him.  Third generation sawyer but also a Stanford grad, also lived in Japan, also Olympic level Judo teacher, etc.   Interesting as hell.
At 81, still loves to go out dancing.

His fork lift was a belching old thing that immediately filled the place with stuff you didn't want in your lungs.  This was his evac system.

Telling one of his stories.

We bought these three and buying more next week when we go down with the truck.

His wife.  She deals with the money exchanging hands.  No credit cards.  Cash or check only.

You're not from around here.

Yesterday morning I'm down in San Luis Obispo, the Cali, or SLO as they say.  With Josh and Brett.  Day One of an indie film they're doing.  I'm gripping and gaffing on it.  Being deliberately oblique here since a NDA is implicit.  The film is on one particular aspect of AI...artificial intelligence.
We're here for an interview with a couple who are major players in this one particular aspect of AI.

Really fascinating sitting there watching the interview take place and taking in what these two are saying.

Felt like being in the future.

Doing the gear.

The interview.

They had chickens.

We finish up around six.  Josh and Brett are staying, they're going to camp out on the beach.  I head out with the thought I want to hit the Elkhorn on the way back.  The Elkhorn, in San Miguel, pop. 2336, is the second oldest bar in CA.  Probably because the other older ones have burnt down or something. But still, #2 is #2.
I take the only seat left at that point at the bar.  The very end.  I can see everything.  The woman next to me gets up and puts a bunch of money in the jukebox.  Oldies Rock start to come out.  She sits back down and keeps turning and looking at me.  I'm a bit baffled why.  I look just like the other folk in there, got a beat up baseball cap on, a t-shirt with writing, jeans, a couple day growth on the face.

The group at the other end are toasted.  The cowboy with the cowboy hat has a high voice.  I'm thinking his voice doesn't quite live up to the hat.  But what do I know, maybe he's the orneriest baddest dude on a saddle.

A man sits down next to the woman sitting next to me.  They're close somehow.  She turns a couple more times to look.  I'm on my second beer at this point.  Her man companion finally says to me, "You're not from around here, are you sir?"
And because of the interview earlier and how if humans tweak the syntax of a sentence a bit it can stop a computer in his/her tracks I say, "Yes, I'm from not here" and I'm giggling at my own inside joke.
And so the conversation begins.  They are surprised I've found this place.  I tell them I come here often whenever I'm in the area, I love bars; why I'm down in their hot and dusty part of CA today.  They ask if I know so and so who works at such and such. The man is originally from the bay area, the woman is telling me all the big music acts that come through Paso Robles.
The high talking cowboy gets up and drags a woman away from the bar and they dance and twirl.  Alright, now it's becoming interesting.

The couple sitting next to the couple sitting next to me are talking.  I think he's a climate change denier.  He may even be in the energy field somehow, after all there is a large old oil pumping out of the ground production area just north of here you see.
But I had to leave at this point.  Still a three hour drive home.  Since San Miguel is one of the fabled Mission towns of California, I walk up to the Mission and poke around for awhile.  See if She has anything to say back to me.
Get back in the car and one final look at the Elkhorn.

Oh...And Josh's last film.  Watch this, it will change your life for awhile.

Thursday March 5th Dogpatch Light

From yesterday afternoon's one hour bike ride near the compound.  Got thirsty so I ended up for a beer at the Sea Star on 3rd.

The Sea Star is the last remaining of the new old dive bars in the neighborhood.  The new owners kept the feel at least.  And free popcorn.

Looking toward the SFHQ of the Hells Angels.  A final squirt of light.

I think this building has something to do with the SF bus system.  Who would ever think to put these elements together in a building?

Randomness.

I've been digging on blue channel conversions recently.

The Every Where Hum

I watched the beautiful event of my father dying some years ago.  His hair once dark, now white,  his frame once tall and proud, now a shell.  His skin had become so transparent that the eye seemingly couldn't discern the outer surface.  You looked into his skin.
At the end his head was cocked backward almost impossibly, eyes closed, mouth open.  He would take several deep deep contorted breaths and stop.  With a great start he would take several more.  At one point he ended.
It really was a beautiful thing to watch the big Arc reunite with itself to become the big Circle.

It's the way it should be.

Sometime after that I was throwing away some dead flowers from a shoot and one of them was so still full of life and movement that it reminded me of the death of my father.

Lately this concept of age has been swirling around me.  Yesterday morning the Universal Love Shack or that place where thoughts come from suggested to me to put on Baden Powell and Vinicius de Moraes's CD "Back to Brazil".
And I'm putting away the set from yesterday's shoot, sweeping the dojo so to speak, open to stuff and the end of the CD draws itself out in bass tones.
I had this thought that it was this low deep hum that seemed to come from everywhere. 
Then The Thought comes back.  Maybe that's what death of the body will be like.
The Hum....the OM.

Alright enough of this.  Back to your regularly scheduled program.