SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

BLACK DOG, EARLY MORNING

Here is a writing exercise wherein you write down an assumption that bothers you, and then reflexively retaliate with what would constitute the opposite of that assumption:

✞ I will be unable to keep up with the standard of living in San Francisco, accrue debt and interest, lose my house, and become the Unabomber.
☽ I will thrive using my skills, talent, and proximity to community. Subsequently I will share the winnings with the community by revealing the methodology of creation, and in the inspiration emanating from what I create.

✞ I don’t have enough time, nor energy. Thus I will run out of both and be imprisioned.
☽ I will slow down and be free. An action performed gracefully emanates from one who has taken all the time necessary to rid oneself of distractions and false emergency. Someone who appears fast, has taken an exceedingly disciplined approach to slowing everything around them down.

✞ My past mistakes have doomed me.
☽ My past mistakes are lessons that if properly observed, help to solve the riddles that would be unsolvable if we hadn’t made the mistakes in the first places.

✞ I will be unable to take care of Ramona while operating in a society that deems it finaancially impossible to do so from a time is money perspective.
☽ Ramona, a descendant of wolves, exists to illuminate the false assumptions of human society, and in so doing, shows how to properly parcel time and energy to live a healty, wise, and realized life under the true principles of nature.

✞ I don’t have time, nor energy for love and companionship in human form.
☽ Smart work creates the circumstances wherein these stars align. Smart work is fulfilling work, and conducted at a rate, and time scale wherein the basic needs of life are taken care of with no sense of desparation.

✞ My past art and music are embarrassments I can never outrun.
☽ The purpose for making art and music is in the playing, learning and presentation. It is a process oriented field, like the baseball field you left too soon, and switched to music to redeem that regret. Failure is part of the game and part of why you like playing. Being in the batter’s box is fun because you are using God given kinethestic intelligence and ingenuity to defeat failure. It isn’t fun without the possibility of failure or the experience of it.

✞ I’ve wasted time and money making three websites for my art, music and garden businesses respectively, when there is only enough time in life to do one thing well, and probably not even that.
☽ Intelligence, and all ideas are radio signals. They serve as tools and instruments these websites do. They cost relatively little, and they’ve gotten better with each bit of work you’ve done on them. They will pay for themselves and help you to organize and prevent that which is beautiful and well rendered, and simultaneously show what to discard in order to make room for more innovative work.

✞ I’m too backed into a corner psychologically and financially, from a stress and anxiety perspective, to quit smoking.
☽ Breaking this habit happens relatively quickly. You won’t miss it once it’s gone. On the contrary, you will feel better and notice it, and enjoy it. It will open up new areas, and return your focus to where it naturally belongs when you are operating as the expression of the wilderness you enjoy being most.

✞ My back fence, and house actually, will deteriorate and fall down faster and more expensively than I am able to afford to fix.
☽ You have developed the skills to fix it yourself. That is a powerful investment that you haven’t yet seen fully realized. Imagine: You can build a fence with only the cost of materials, whereas most people have to pay thousands of dollars in labor costs, and even then, lack the perspective to properly select and verify the quality of the labor. You can do this! This is the ground of independence, on which freedom is bound to take root and flower. This garden will grow for you.

OSLO, NORWAY
I got to Oslo yesterday after staying up all night in Bodo the night before.  I hadn't realized how little I'd eaten in two days. Left my apartment with a weird hankering for Vietnamese food. Wandered around my new neighborhood and saw a "Lille Miss Saigon 1" w/ black and white artistic photos on the wall and a floor that looked like they never did anything to change it from its former self of being an empty retail space. 

Two Vietnamese ladies, one old, one young, were whispering to each other behind the counter.  I ordered a bahn mi sandwich from the young one and ate it like a heathen. Then I ordered another and ate slightly more slowly. I felt great afterwards and went for a long wander. I saw a huge waterfall going through the middle of the city where civilized rich descendants of Viking rapers were drinking a high quantities of two foot tall beers on a deck that was an impressive feat of carpentry right over the edge of the falls and out the back of a stereotypical Norwegian cottage built into the side of the little canyon. (Think red, steep and tall w/ ladders for stairs, black gabled roof, high amount of windows)

I did not dare partake in the deck life, as I could tell the atmosphere was very expensive. So I walked down the side of the little mountain trying to escape a former ballet dancer who crossed my path and stuck to it for some time.  She'd lost the confidence of her little dog due to drug addiction. I felt so sad for her which is my fault, and not hers. 

At the bottom of the descent I found a bar playing 70s rock and roll music by the side of a park that charged 4.50 for a pint, which is an anomaly is Oslo. There I sat on the sidewalk outside and listened to two Moroccan men angrily talk shit to each other and then bursting into hysterical laughter time after time.  Also, over the course of the two hours I sat on the side walk thinking,  I saw eight or nine attractive girls wearing narrow variations on an imaginatively tailored, floral printed dress and combat boots combination.
They passed by at intervals of every seven minutes or so.  When I waved at them, they would each wave back the same way and make the same face presumably that I was making, and then we would each start laughing. Near the end of this repeating phenomena, I saw some soccer toughs, and decided to test if I was dreaming.

The toughs were looking at me out of the window of a shiny, bright red bus and I waved at them. They waved back. I gave them a hang loose symbol. They gave it back. We all started laughing. As the bus pulled away the last in the procession of flower printed dress with combat boots girls arrived. She looked at me then through the window at the soccer toughs on the bus pulling away. She stood next to me and waved at the soccer toughs, all of us laughing very hard. She then pointed at me and walked a way while her friend dressed in leather looked on disapproving. 

Then a six foot eight inches tall, fierce faced, old man who was drunk and presumably worked at the bar limped over and picked up all the empty glasses from the Morrocan men's table where one of the jokesters had fallen asleep with a lit cigarette.  The giant piled the pint glasses eight glasses high, cradling them in his right arm, holding a crumpled, burning cigarette in his left. As he limped away I said "thank you" for some reason and the mask of all the winters fell from his face and he said "thank you, thank you." He then carried the glasses back into the bar where Graham Parsons was playing and the bartender was eating a pizza and talking on the phone. 

I didn't want to go, but thought it wise if I did and walked home.  Once back at my apartment I listened to baseball and ate grilled cheese before falling asleep for 12 hours straight. The room was hot and the air was still.

UNSTAD, LOFOTEN ISLANDS; NORWAY

The following entry contains some photographs taken on this day, followed by a transcription of my handwritten journal taken many years later. I was going to say “many moons later” originally but if you talk too much like a hippy lady you start taking too long in the grocery store. I scarcely ever go to the grocery store these days and that’s the problem with trying to make an art project like this is that these days just never are anymore. Who can keep up!?

VIEW FROM THE UNSTAD SURF CAMP LOOKING OUT OVER THE TOWN TOWARD THE SEA // IPHONE

SELF PORTRAIT ON THE TOP OF THE MOUTAIN ABOVE THE TOWN // IPHONE. TRIPOD. FISHEYE LENS.

THE SHEEP GATE NEAR THE SEA. // IPHONE.

BIKE RIDE ALONG THE ROAD THAT LEADS FROM BEACH BACK TO UNSTAD SURF CAMP.

UNSTAD SURF CAMP AND ADJACENT FARM // IPHONE

Ok…Here are some notes I transcribed from my handwritten journal on the day these photographs and video were taken. I should put some pictures of what the journals themselves look like because I like the way the sharpie handwriting looks on the drugstore Mexican school children notebooks and it should most likely be preserved for eternity but that will have to wait for another day.

10AM
I awoke and scrolled the phone. Then I walked to the camp kitchen and made a breakfast of coffee, crackers, salami, cheese, cucumber and two boiled eggs. A large, lesbian couple who were French seemed to disdain me. I didn’t like them either. They reminded me of teachers that didn’t like me in Elementary such as Ms. Keough. I then descend into a regrettable self flagellating psychological state.

!!AM
A nice Australian offered to ask Marion (who is one of the Camp’s owners) if I can trade a guitar performance for a surf board rental. (I think his name was Matty?). I was playing guitar on the front porch of my cabin. After this I made another coffee that was a bit gross with the Nescafe machine. Smoked a cigarette. Tidied room. And sat down to write but it didn’t really work. Smoked another cigarette. Then went upstairs to the deck. I watched the clear blue skies, the yellow flowers blooming in the field, the green mountain sides, and the red barn with its piled timber.

There was quite chatter in Norwegian. A couple on bicycles came up the road. The girl joked, and her voice echoed. The white Unstad Surf Camp Flag was flapping as I finally caught up on my writing. It’s not perfect but I see how engaging in artistic practice begets artistic improvement.

I think I need a nourishing meal. I’ve been eating mainly cucumbers, cheese and crackers for days now. I will see about a dinner reservation at the camp restaurant. Then maybe hike to the viking observatory peak and take some self portraits. Also I need to practice music today!

LOUD FOOTFALLS BOTHER ME
I walk quietly. This bothers the loud footfall walkers. My Aunt Elin once called me sneaky when I entered her house without her hearing. She is right. I am. I am a criminal by nature, trained since childhood to move from place to place constantly avoiding detection. I loath the sound of the footfall as it vibrates on the floor because I don’t like to be touched. I can feel the vibration through the floor and it feels like an act of aggression. I want to strike out against it. And if it is not intended as aggression, it is at the very least demonstrative of a dangerous lack of self-awareness. This should be attacked if you are a member of the wolf species.

If you go to therapy they teach you names for all your disorders. I don’t know the name for the one where you don’t like loud noises and want to attack the loud noise makers because you believe yourself to be part wolf. Then the another part, presumably the non wolf part tells you to feel badly as a criminal would. I don’t think the name for this disorder is werewolf because it does not depend upon the full moon to present itself. Psychology, like astrology always seem foolish at every hour of every day because all that’s real is blood.

4:20
A tattooed, shaved head Chef at Maude’s request gets his field guide because she sees that I am interested in the flowers. The white flowers are called Anthricus Sylvestris or Hundkäx in Swedish. The field guide was called BJÖRN URSING, FĀLTFLORA, 867 VAXTER I FARG. That means 867 plants in color.

After this I hiked to the top of the mountain. Got scared part of the way up and took photos at the top. On the way down I swam in the icey lake. Nearly had a cry at the beauty of the surroundings….the sun on the brilliant, green mountain side, standing knee deep in the cold clear water, birds flitting about in the under brush.

I picked up my bike where I’d left it at the sheep’s gate near the ocean and rode the remainder of the way back to camp. Once home I changed clothes and walked over to the dining room for dinner. Marion insisted I have the whale stew. First she brought out fresh baked bread and churned butter. Then the whale stew came out garnished with incredibly fresh sprouts of some type of garden green. It was an incredibly delicious and nourishing meal and it was nice to see Marion’s stern innkeeper face be gone, as she was proud of her work and taking care of a lost soul or whatever she saw.

After dinner I thanked her and went back to my cabin and drank two tall beers and smoked on the porch watching the sun go around the horizon. At 11:30pm, before brushing my teeth and going to bed, I practiced the following songs.

La Escondida
There is No Need to Name the Mooon
The Awakening Spirits Dream a New Day
The Wilderness is Not for Purchase
Look Up the Number
Danny Says (Ramones)
All My Loving (Beatles)
Spanish is the Loving Tongue (Bob Dylan)
Can I Sleep in Your Arms (Willie Nelson)
Muhammad Ali
Chuck Berry
Animals (needs review)
Floortje (needs review)

1AM
Bedtime.