I take a bath in the windstorm as
huge yellow leaves and a few drops of rain
dive bomb me while my neighbor tussles with
more stuff he purchased and
goes inside.

It's Dance Sunday and I'm suiting up
amidst magnificent windstorm and
plumes of
fresh fallen leaves.

Normally at this spot of beach I organize children to dam and channel the creek as it crosses the sand into the sea. I love organizing children: managing factions, developing leadership, channeling dependable strengths, mediating conflicts. It's like a cush corporate job but with toddlers and sand.

( But today I wanted to sculpt. )

I live in a treehouse. There's one tree squirrels climb every day to jump onto the roof. I see them squirrelling around right outside my window, one foot from the glass. But this was no squirrel. I've lived here five years but never saw a raccoon before. This year, I've seen this bandit three times. But way up the squirrel tree? There's a big hole in the tree, and the curious beast's head was stuck way in it, poking around, and my flash didn't seem to matter. But after this shot, it was time to slide away from me. Now I hear thumping on the porch. Fearless beast!



I think he needs a name. I'm leaning toward Plimpton. Other ideas?

I told Akiko to dress for the Panda Club, where everyone looks like a panda. So she found some black and a little white and bamboo and I took her to the Vogue, where she had an Alaskan Ale and I had a shot and we danced mostly two hours straight. At one moment, with the spotlight on her face, she was the perfect panda.

Later she told me about oxytocin, a trust-building brain chemical produced when you touch nipples, used to treat autistics in their trust struggle, and i promised she could have all the oxytocin she wants.

In each eye is a $4,000 lense and her wide paws shovel deep into bee honey and swing as she marches in the teddy bear parade.

I was ten years old, the right age for a volcano to capture imagination. The mountaintop was blown away. We had family nearby who experienced a rain of thick fallout. Near their house, a river carried a wall of steaming, gritty mud into bridges and through homes, caking high up each tree with thick, gray ash. I saved a jar of ash and floating pumice rock among my treasures.

Do not destroy this marker. This marking system has been designed to last 10,000 years. If the marker is difficult to read, add new markers in longer-lasting materials in languages that you speak.

How do you mark a radioactive waste site?
To design a marker system that, left alone, will survive for 10,000 years is not a difficult engineering task.

It is quite another matter to design a marker system that will for the next 400 generations resist attempts by individuals, organized groups, and societies to destroy or remove the markers.

While this system of markings should represent an enormous effort and investment of resources on our part, the construction itself should be of materials of little value, and the workmanship should not bestow any value through the elegance of craft or artistry. Doing substantial work on materials of little value suggests that the place is not commemorative of phenomena highly valued by the culture that made it, but as marking something important yet quite unvalued... not a treasure, but its opposite... a location of highly devalued material ("dangerous garbage" or an "un-treasure").</ul>