Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker loved coloured glass. She collected it: not glass objects so much as bits of broken glass. She lined the window sills with it, turning the windows into room-filling kaleidoscopes. At certain times of the day, rainbows ran through the whole width of the house, west to east, all refracted through broken glass.

She loved it more than gemstones (which she seldom wore, preferring a nice piece of jade, agate or vintage Bakelite), more than precious metals (she wore the same pair of plain gold hoops in her ears for 40 years). She preferred it to sea shells; in the years we lived  in Pismo Beach, she filled jar after jar not with exotic shells – which you can pick up there at every  low tide – but beach glass.

The metaphor here is so very obvious that I am not going to even pursue it. Instead, I want to talk about where she got the glass. I mean, you can go to garden stores and recycling centers and buy broken coloured glass by the pound – really, you can just scoop it up by the spadeful and carry it home! But  for Kage, that would have been like hunting on a dude ranch; you know, where you can go out and shoot tame doves or antelope or lawyers. No, she preferred to stalk feral glass.

If you’re not familiar with beach glass, I will tell you of its wonders. It is a special category of scavenged treasure. There is always broken glass on a beach, but actual beach glass has matured and metamorphosed. The actions of sand and water have softened the contours and frosted the surface; if you can still see through it or cut yourself, it’s not ready – it must be pitched back into the polishing tide to ripen further. That’s part of the Code.

You can find it anywhere on a beach, though it’s most common along the tide line, where the sand crabs and kelp all come to rest. You must pace along slowly, eyes down, watching for the glint of jewels in the wet sand; with practice, an emerald spark the size of a pinhead will leap out to your eye like a spotlight. At Pismo, though, there is also one tiny cove where the glass piles up like Aladdin’s Cave – you can only reach it at especially low tides, the multiple-minus ones a few times a year; but when you do, there are dunes of beach glass and polished rocks. You take off your tennis shoes and fill them with wet cabochons of beer bottle, and climb out barefooted and triumphant.

Kage mostly used empty condiment jars to store it in: British jams and pickles come in especially nice ones. She filled the jars with carefully sorted colours –   green, blue, brown, red, purple, frosted opaline transparent – and she lined them up on the window sills where the sun would shine through them. The green and brown jars were the fastest to fill, and the most varied. People take a lot of wine bottles down to the beach.

The blue was rare, and sometimes still bore an identifying Milk of Magnesia imprint, blurred by the sand and water. But it was much more common than either red or purple; in fact, she was never quite sure what the red could have been, aside from ill-fated wine glasses shattered on some romantic picnic. All too often it turned out to be safety glass, which  is not proper beach glass and won’t frost correctly: Kage despised it. The purple was often ordinary glass stained by the sun, tinted a fabulous pale amethyst like desert glass; but sometimes you could find a shard of some specialty hue, a deep grapey shade.

The advent of plastic containers may have been good for safety concerns, but it has put a serious crimp in the beach glass trade. If not for specialty brewers and vintners, this class of beach treasure might be extinct now. Luckily for Kage, living in a holiday town like Pismo saw a lot of booze-filled bottles on the beach. The glass tides renewed themselves; they got scarcer, but the harvest never failed.

We last took a walk on the beach in September of last year. After that, between the surgeries and the cancer, she was too weak, though I pushed her down in her wheelchair to the edge of the sand a few times. But it was this time last year that she last actually walked on the beach. We were both still convinced she was going to survive, full of plans on how to make convalescence pass faster, what music to take to the hospital, whether or not she wanted a new nightgown. All through that walk we hunted for beach glass, as we always did. We found little bits of it in the wet sand, and Kage put it in her jacket pockets. Just like always.

That last pocketful was all over her desk when I cleaned it up in February. After she was gone. She’d just emptied her pocket at some point -probably when I was racing around yelling for the laundry to please for Gods’ sake be put in the hamper – and left that last trove in a little drift among the juju and toys and notes. Just like always.

I put it – oh, everywhere, when I cleaned up. A shard in a box of paperclips, another in a case with mystery amber earrings (never saw ’em before; don’t know where they came from); here, there and everywhere. Consequently, I’m still finding them, as I open a box or an envelope. Just found a sliver of sapphire in a box of old checks, as a matter of fact.

Broken glass. I guess I’ll never be free of it. But, oh, the light through its colours is lovely.

Tomorrow: a hymn to hot water

Kage Baker usually declined to deal with delivery people, repairmen, mechanics, ringing telephones … they all unnerved her to excess, and those of us who knew her also knew it was to everyone’s benefit if Kage was not point woman on domestic disasters. She’d try her best, and she was always ready to show willing when the car broke down or the washing machine had a convulsion, but she just wasn’t a tool-user. Or an organizer. Or especially competent with the Yellow Pages. (“Hey, did you know there’s a physicist listed?” “We don’t need a physicist.” “Well, no, but it’s neat …”)

Growing up, there were so many people in the house that such things could be habitually left to The Practical Ones (me and Sister Anne, usually). It’s possible that if Kage had had to face the same spectrum of leaks, explosions, smoking appliances and bleeding siblings that Anne and I did, she too would have become a DIY Disaster Tech. But I doubt it. Kage was the woman to go to if you wanted to ward a room against spirits or even get aphids off the roses: but she was likely to use something outre like Borax for both tasks, and somehow melt the mixing spoon while she was at it.

Today I am faced with one of those common household problems that Kage couldn’t handle, and I wish I didn’t have to, either. The water heater has died, and it has inexplicably escalated to a DefCon 4 status. So far, 4 plumbers have either expressed severe doubts it could be replaced (seriously? It’s a freaking water heater, not an FTL drive) or quoted  the annual GNP of Lichtenstein as a price. Much solemn shaking of heads, and that particular pressed-lips look that means “You won’t understand. It’s a guy/plumber/baseball cap thing. I’m a d**k and you don’t have one.”

If Kage were here, she would be hunched over her desk, the 1812 Overture or Ruddigore on loud, typing furiously and ignoring everything else, and confident that I would somehow produce hot water by bedtime. It means I can’t stay hunched similarly – the corgi is whoofing and the parrot is making velociraptor noises, which means someone is coming up the walk. Hopefully plumber #5, who will give me a new water heater.

Otherwise, I may have to loose the hound. And the dinosaur. And start crying.

Tomorrow: a hot shower, please God

Kage Baker placed great emotional importance on omens, anniversaries, hallmarks and the like. The sight of a blue heron flying overhead always meant money was on the way. Looking up at just the moment the streets lights come on was fortuitous; hats on a bed or spilled salt were a calamity. Even hitting a string of green lights on an everyday street could give her a thrill, the anticipation of some greater good in the offing.

Everything meant something; everything was telling a story.

Was she superstitious? I would say yes. Kage would say, “Hell, yes.” Then she’d give you a sly, Long John Silver look (she practiced it) and add, “Do you know what’s out there?” And if you did not, or had simply never given it any thought – well, she’d tell you.

I remember one December morning as we were getting ready for a Dickens Fair opening: most of us were already in costume, the sets were dressed, the audience was lining up outside in gratifyingly large numbers, considering it was raining – and the electric lines were suddenly struck by lightning. (Yes. Really. Lightning.) The Cow Palace, which is where we perform that Fair, was plunged into darkness. It stayed that way for a couple of hours. The audience mostly remained, entertained by heroic actors who went out and busked in the torrential rains. Food booths sent out boys with trays; free popcorn was passed out.

Inside, we lit candles and lamps that had only ever been set dressing; wandered around in the dark playing parlour games (Hide and Seek, Sardine and several varieties of silly buggers) and actually had a very good time. A mated pair of dulcimer players came into my Parlour to practice by one of the few lights around, and never left – hey, John and DJ, well met in that storm! Kage, though, instructed to keep the kids in our group entertained, sat by the (faux) fireplace and told them ghost stories until the lights came back on. I was alerted to this when one of the kids, clutching an electric candle, began shrieking about the long white arm creeping down the fireplace flue – never mind that the “fireplace” was a plywood box nailed to the wall, or that Auntie Kage was sitting there smirking: no, under that story-teller’s spell, those kids believed.

So did Kage, at least while she was telling the story. She had that ultimate tale-teller’s skill.

We used to hit clouds of yellow butterflies on I-5, driving North – hundreds of the things, that would sweep across the highway around Buttonwillow and stick to every surface of our truck (we were driving on our own by then). We’d stop for gas and find drifts of gold and purple wings under the windshield wipers, or appliqued across the radiator grill; there were piles of them in the gutters beside the roads. It looked like Mardi Gras beside the gas pumps of Lost Hills.

Kage gradually developed an entire mythos around the butterflies: how they were the attendants of a Lord of the Middle Air, and they followed in his wake, helpless and mesmerized. He Himself sped down the road on a variety of steeds, that evolved over one panting summer into a silver motorcycle … every time one passed us, she would claim it was that Lord, and we had just missed seeing the face of a god. We would wail hymns and disappointment as the red lights vanished in front of us, with the gold butterflies in His train blown in through the windows and caught in Kage’s long red hair.

Chasing a Lord of the Air down I-5 all summer long … that was bliss, madness and bliss. And oh, did we believe.

Tomorrow: broken glass

Kage Baker was fascinated by ghost stories. She only wrote one, though, and was not very pleased with it – neither were any of her editors, and I think it’s only available these days on Fictionwise.com. I like it, but I must admit that it was not up to her usual standards of … well, reality. Surreality? Meta-reality? Whatever it was that gave her stories that internal skeleton of veracity is not quite as obvious in Incident On the Land Belonging to Senor Rojo.

Because what Kage liked were ghost stories that purported to be real; parapsychic phenomena and history.  Little voices asking for their bones from the cupboard, teenagers wandering back roads in their prom dresses – all the obvious folk lore stories, they bored her. She’d roll her black eyes, and mutter “Oh, crap, another Resurrection Mary story … that girl gets around more than Paris Hilton!” But anything that might be real – something someone actually saw, whether it turned out to be another White Lady or a raccoon in the garbage – was cool. And she found ghost story books in every town we went to; there is always a Local History section in the indie bookstores, and one or two volumes are always about the restless dead.

Though I must warn against overindulging in such tales after an evening spent bar-hopping and drinking Irish Coffee. The combination of ghost stories with caffeine, sugar and whiskey induces very unnerving palpitations.

Weird creature stories were also acceptable to Kage. Nowadays those have a respectable name – cryptozoology. And the re-discovery of animals previously assumed extinct is one of the original sources of Kage’s Company stories: it was wondering about all those living legends wandering into backyards that led her to postulate someone doing it on purpose.

It was the ghost stories, though, that held first place in her heart.(“Does the world need another species of iguana?” she would wonder. “And if we do, can we trade in salt-water crocodiles for ’em?”) The last years of her life were much enlivened by the ghost shows on television, especially as they multiplied with a bacterial ferocity. Most of them were just held up to ridicule – the sort of shows where the audience (us) howls advice and bad jokes at the feckless “researchers” and is rooting enthusiastically for the ghosts. I name no names … but no other team measures up to the solemn standards of the noble plumbers Jason and Grant, and they were her favourites.

Maybe because it’s because there is nothing so heroic as a good plumber, and no woman reaches her 40’s without discovering this. Usually in traumatic circumstances. Also, those guys sometimes found nothing, and they always admitted it when that happened. Undeniably cool.

Now, nearly every pretty little town on the California coast has a ghost tour, and Kage loved to take them. Her absolute fave was the Tour in Monterey, a town we loved and visited anyway, for sheer delight’s sake. The Tour there is run by a madly enthusiastic and knowledgeable local historian, in a most charming vehicle: a converted trolley that runs on bio-diesel. The bio-diesel is processed from cooking oil, and so the tour winds through the dark streets of Monterey in a gentle breeze that smells like french fries and doughnuts.

At several places there are stops, where one can get off and run about amid the historical buildings (Monterey has more standing, functional adobes than any other city in the country, I think), peering in the windows and generally carrying on like Halloween. Kage loved that; she was fascinated with peeking into other people’s houses … the final stop is in the old Catholic Cemetery, where on may wander amid the graves in the moonlight. It’s damned scary, too; among other potential terrors, the graveyard is over-run with geese. Big vicious ones.

There were no geese in downtown Monterey, though, on our last trip: just gorgeous houses we could peek into. One such was reputed to be somewhat indistinctly haunted – lots of shadows and white shapes and strange noises; possibly from the bandit Joaquin Murrieta, who grew up around the corner … we crowded up gleefully to the front door, staring through the beautiful cut-glass peephole at the elegant front hall. Nothing weird to be seen, but after drooling over the truly lovely woodwork, Kage snapped a picture on her new digital camera.

And here it is: Kage took the picture through clear glass, looking at a well-lit entrance hall. What she got was this mass of orbs. What is it? No idea. But it’s real, whatever it is, and it delighted her.

I’m going on a Rural Cemetery Tour this Saturday, up near Santa Rosa. Who knows what I will see? I’ll bring back word …

Monterey Ghost Tour: http://www.toursmonterey.com/gpages/ghomey.html

Tomorrow: maybe cryptozoology

Kage Baker practiced the stratalogical method of filing. She employed piles, heaps and towers of reference material. Continental drift moved information around; sometimes where she could find it, sometimes where it could ambush her with a new idea. Ritual objects, bibelots and souvenirs topped most of the stacks, acting as paperweights and marker buoys.

Sometimes a whirlpool or information sink would form. It didn’t seem to happen on purpose. Kage didn’t decide to keep all her information on carbon fiber production (which, by the way, is stranger in origin than you might think) on the window sill under the raven static gel sticker, next to the lamp shaped like a pile of pirate skulls … but that’s where it would end up. Searching for one reference paper would lead to finding another just under the first; then a string of newspaper clippings right next to them, and a copy of someone’s highly pertinent graduate thesis on the British textile industry in Farnborough, Hampshire in a manila envelope nearby. Apparently  the pile would heat up like peat forming, and convection currents would carry all the related material together.

How did the relevant material self-identify? I have no idea. Neither did Kage. She was aware of the process, though, and favoured the theory of quantum entanglement to explain it. Quantum phenomona and string theory were an absolute mystery to her, but she had no problem dealing intellectually with things only perceived via faith. I am not sure most physicists are doing that much different – just with better math.

But then, Kage has left me notes for a short story where quantum entanglement and the vibrations along cosmic strings account for all those middle-of-the-night shoes that appear to lucky cobblers in the faerie tales … also one where the the mythical infinite monkeys with typewriters are actually Higgs bosons preserved in racial memory. They do something amazing. Actually, they do everything amazing.

So for all I know, there are half a dozen infinitesimal dimensions coiled up in this desk. They must spread out through all the boxes and Tuppers and envelopes and re-purposed styrofoam coolers I packed Kage’s notes into, as well, surrounding me with a macro-universe of references. They resonate to the vibrations of Google searches, and call up connections and cross-references beyond the ken of mortal man. The vibrational nano-energies then stir all the notes and photocopies and lists on cocktail napkins (there are a lot of those) and form eddies like the stellar nurseries in distant nebulae.

Where I find them. Not in distant nebulae, but in the inexplicably re-arranged stack under the purple lava lamp; the one that last week had nothing more significant than a Spongebob Squarepants notepad but today has a conjecture on Permian-style extinction on Mars that I have never seen before.

The only other likely explanation is that Kage is haunting her own desk, and is carefully re-filing things when I am not looking. I’d like that. Mind you, she never bothered to re-file anything when she was here, but you never know – people can change. Maybe she’s gotten tidier, now that she partakes of eternity herself.

If the energy of the universe is pouring through me, I think I would rather it was Kage.

Tomorrow: ships and seals and sealing wax. Some crunchy casserole, anyway.

Kage Baker, like any sensible person, liked to sleep in on Saturdays. She didn’t get to do that much as an adult – despite a vow at the end of high school that she was never going to see a Saturday dawn again.

The first thing that Scotched that idea was a tendency in our late teens to come home as the sun was rising, especially after a Friday night out. Momma’s house faced east, and as one climbed the 54 steps from the street to the front door (the yard was almost vertical) one was bathed in the earliest light, breaking over the Hollywood sign to the East. It’s a wonderful memory now, of course; at the time, we were like a pair of slugs in a rain of salt water.

I remember one amazing summer, shortly after the Beatles broke up (sob). A tiny little theatre down on 6th street near MacArthur Park played Beatles movies all summer – all the legal ones, all the bootlegs, all the home movies and cartoons and even Magical Mystery Tour : which is proof that not even the Beatles should  always be given artistic control.  Anyway, we’d stay in the theatre until it closed at 1 AM, then get beer and Chinese food and drive up to a pull-out on Mulholland Drive. There we would sit and eat and drink (and discuss stories) until the lights of the LA Basin began to fade. Then we’d coast around the curves of Mulholland, saving gas by not turning on the engine until we reached the base of Woodrow Wilson Drive and had to drive uphill again, and eventually go to bed.

Good times, good times.

After that, many Saturdays and Sundays too were taken up with art shows. No galleries – Kage sold her water colours and ink studies in parking lot shows. On a good day we made enough for a bucket of KFC, which is pretty triumphant when you are barely 20. But it necessitated getting up early, and loading the car with stands and boxes and stacks of paintings, and getting there in time to snag a good space and set up before the middle class finished breakfast at IHOP and came out to exploit us. The Bohemian life is tougher than most people think.

But around then, we discovered the Renaissance Pleasure Faire. Along with the multichronistic extravaganza that took over our life like neon kudzu, alterations in sleep patterns became needed. If we indulged the urge to stay home Friday night (Clean sheets! Showers! Flush toilets!) then we had to get up at dawn to drive out to Faire. And if we had gone out Friday to Southern Faire, or been on The Bus overnight to get to the Northern Faire, there was no sleeping once the sun hit the tent and turned it into a Reynoldswrap Baking Bag.

So when Faire was in season, there was no sleeping in on  weekends, either. It was one of the biggest reasons we started coming in on Friday nights and sleeping on site – that extra fraction of an hour Kage found she could stay in the sleeping bag. And then we left the tent in Actor’s Camp and moved into the intra-inter-dimensional hooch of the Green Man Inn, and she got nearly an hour a morning more of sleep.

But I got up, if I’d been to bed at all. It was my best thinking time. Even now, when I could sleep in all I wanted … I literally cannot sleep. And it’s not the minor intrusions like the cat that wants to sleep on my pillow (I can sleep on the cat at need) or the corgi that is sitting up like an otter to beg for treats (why? Why at my bedside at 6 AM? What is the weird corgi reasoning in this? There are no dog treats in my pillow!) or the little parrot voice under the cage blanket calling seductively, “Hi? Hello? Meow?” and then singing Rule Britannia.

I can sleep through all that. I can even sleep through wondering why most of what wakes me up isn’t human, and why I seem to be sleeping in a zoo. What I can’t sleep through is my mind starting up on the story while I am still asleep … A cook is about to bring news of a dead butler on the local beach. There is a fox terrier to name. I must count the guns on a 175-foot long hermaphrodite brig. I realize I need someone to have shot Herbertina and no one has.

Good times. Good times.

Tomorrow: the end is nigher.

Kage Baker liked the idea of county fairs. There is something so marvelously wholesome about the idea, even if one of the best activities is eating your way from one weird fried food to another. But the air of Harvest Home, the bright colours and lights and happy screams from the Midway, the fact that everything smells so impossibly good – she loved that atmosphere of carnival. And fairs, all fairs, are magical microcosms. So much happens there!

And at most county fairs, they have the best rides ever: those candy-coloured chairs with foot vibrators built in. For 25 cents you can sit down, get a barely-legal foot massage, and watch the crowds drift by. Man, that’s bliss.

Kage loved people-watching, as do I. And county fairs are prime for that. Even people who arrive in sensible shoes and ordinary clothes mutate during their time on the fairgrounds. By mid-afternoon, everyone is wearing hats with horns and ears and pinwheels and dayglo sippers full of margaritas; they have traded their cardigans for hoodies painted with googly-eyed vampires. The T-shirts alone constitute a graphic novel, and tattoos bloom spontaneously on every bare arm.

At the LA County Fair (where I spent yestreday) there was actually a guy air-brushing tattoos on folks. With stencils. Amazingly cool. Some guy was having the entire wavy hill scene from Nightmare Before Christmas painted on his back.

There was a model train set you could walk through in one place. In another was what was advertised as the biggest steam engine in the world. There were Clydesdales and miniature horses. There was a monkey-free monkey exhibit, whose entrances were flanked by two-story-tall fire hydrants: absolute layers of mystery, folks. There was a pirate village (with live pirates) and a gypsy encampment (full of dummies).

There were the usual wonderful exhibition halls full of flower displays and quilts and jams and sheep and prize steers: America the Beautiful, live and breathing softly on your hands. There was a Jurassic Hall full of really pretty good animated dinosaurs – although the audio-animatronic emu in the All-Healing Emu Oil booth one hall over was drawing a bigger crowd. Of course, it danced …. there was an ice sculpture display, that one went through wrapped in woolly blankets supplied at the entrance. There were sauna models where one could strip down to underwear and a paper examining gown and walk through, presumably to experience being papier-mached first hand.

Fried food. It’s the mainstay of country fairs, that and barbecue. They had fried barbecue at the LA County Fair. Fried Twinkies and Snickers bars are almost passe, now, but they are only the tip of the fried iceberg (which you can also approximate with a fried ice cream bar). There are: deep fried … avocados, beans, clams, doughnut sandwiches, eggs, frog legs, Good N’ Plentys, hemp, ice cream, jelly, Klondike bars, lemons, mushrooms, nougat, onions, peanut butter, Quaker Oats, ravioli, soda, turkey legs, udon, veal, watermelon, xocolatle, yams and zucchini. And more.

There are beer booths everywhere, but they only serve Budweiser and Stella Artois; however, the wine tasting pavilion is a paradise. And there are marguerita booths, whose influence cannot be underestimated.

There are entire halls dedicated to those special products As Seen On TV. Those are as good as a zoo, except the weird things displayed click and light up rather than growl and pace. There are items to do dubious things to absolutely any aspect of your life, at a discount and in decorator colours and usually accompanied by a set of carving knives. Ladies press magic cooling towels to your face as you walk by; although I missed it, I bet someone somewhere was selling relics. There are fudge booths and shaved ice machines at the ends of every hall, too.

And it’s a drug dream of cheap sparklies. Some of it must be fake, some of it might be real: I don’t know or especially care, because it all cost next to nothing! There are nearly as many weird things encased in amber as there are encased in frying batter. There is genuine fake Bakelite, and faux vinyl made from recycled trash bags. There are miracle fibers, natural fibers, recycled fibers, organic fibers, green fibers, vegan fibers; all of them are wearable and will guarantee dietary regularity!

Heck, does anyone really need to be advised to go to a County fair? Of course not. It’s an incredible giggle, as much for its tackiness as its moments of true beauty – and there are many . I can recommend a koi pond behind the Flower Hall where apparently dragonflies evolve from thin air; the Midway at the one perfect moment when the neon comes on; the first bite of a funnel cake fried (amazingly) in walnut oil. Spending 6 whole hours laughing out loud with your family, and coming home with a marshmallow shooter.

We stayed up until 10 PM shooting marshmallows at the corgi, but we had to stop eventually – he ate all our ammunition. Kage would have loved it.

Tomorrow: planning for the end

Kage Baker had a number of work-related personal rituals. These were the things she did to facilitate the start of a writing session, or close down her computer at the end of the day. They were things that calmed her, or started her brain kicking over, or helped her remember to save her files and run a security sweep.

If she’d been a poker player, she would have had to wear green socks or turn her hat around to spark her luck. And if Freecell did not exist, she’d have written twice as many books.

I’ve adopted a few of her rituals, just to evoke her when I write. They don’t seem to actually do whatever sprititual thing they did for Kage (who was more rote religious than I): except for one. That’s the daily webcam rounds.

The first thing Kage did when she went online every day was check all her favourite live webcams. She called them her palantiri (which she thought were one of the few practical inventions in LOTR.) They were her magic windows.

Among them were the beachfronts at Torquey, England; Ocean Beach in San Francisco; the view of Avalon Harbor from Crescent Avenue. Her very favourite was the deck at Nepenthe Restaurant in Big Sur – it’s like looking out over the woods from a terrace in Rivendell. Sometimes there are odd shadows on the edge, indistinct but people-shaped, even when there is no fog and the view is as clear as glass: Kage loved that, and was never able to figure out what they were. I don’t know either, but they still show up from time to time.

It’s been foggy at Ocean Beach for days on end – but that’s just summer in San Francisco, about which even Francis Drake complained. Nowawdays it is suddenly clearing out, as the autumn comes on – that’s the best time, when the air is like blue wine along the coast.

Avalon, on Catalina Island, is always clear: a beautiful, serene morning – in 1964. You can see the coast of the mainland, sunk in smog, fog and the 21st Century; but in Avalon, King Arthur is probably strolling down to the Busy Bee Cafe for pancakes, in his jams and flip flops. For sure, some of the sleepy tourists on the Serpentine Walk are operatives Dr. Dr. Zeus on R & R. At night, the view is nothing but an amber glare (someone has mounted a yellow spotlight on the palm tree facing the camera) but daylight is tropical paradise.

Point Reyes … is pretty consistently a fog-bound curve, and a fog bound slope, and some low fog in the sky. It might be a bear, or a shrub, or a Park Ranger: can’t tell. Later in the year it will clear out as all California beaches do in the latter half of the year. Right now I can’t tell if I’m looking North or South. Somebody’s dropped this palantir.

Torquey is in Devon, England, on the Coast – a  holiday town, they call it the English Riviera. It’s not especially Riviera-ish, but even in modern times it does look like the sort of place where one could ride donkeys (if the Nanny State still permitted it), eat enormous ices (if the Nanny State still permitted that) and pass some vacationing Oxford don trailing smoke from his pipe as he strolled in deep thought along the strand (if the Nanny State still – oh, never mind.) It’s 8 hours ahead of us, but this time of year the evening in the British Isles last forever – I can check it in the California morning, and still see sunset on the Atlantic swell. Except it’s been raining there this week. (It is England.) It’s delightfully exotic, though, to know I am looking at the English Channel while I sit beside the open side porch door on a Los Angeles summer morning.

I’ve added Pismo Beach since I moved back to LA in March. It used to be the view out my window – now it’s a window directly into my personal past. It’s the one I look at most briefly, just long enough to see if it’s foggy or fair, and check out the weekend crowds. To see if a seagull has pooped on the camera lens this morning, which is always childishly funny. I fear I’ll see a red-haired woman walking on the beach; I fear even more the sure knowledge that I won’t. But everyone needs a splash of ice water to wake up in the morning, right?

When I’ve checked all the magic windows, I go to the Hunger Site (http://www.thehungersite.com/clickToGive/home.faces?siteId=1) and click on all their causes. It was Kage’s daily charity; it’s mine as well.

Then I check my mail. And refill my coffee cup. And post this blog.

And then I get to work.

Tomorrow: a report on the LA County Fair

Kage Baker was a very firm believer in the idea that sometimes – sometimes, mind you – you just have to shut down and  recharge. Nearly everyone agrees with this on, as it were, paper … Kage meant it. When she hit the bottom of some vein of activity or inspiration, she quit until it renewed itself.

It takes a kind of determination and courage to admit you have reached this point. It can actually be easier to just schlup along and produce really crappy writing (or whatever). and excuse yourself when eventually called on it with a shrug and an eye-roll.  But it usually means you just have to write something over again.

Which is why I am still sitting here watching Supernatural and knitting and drinking coffee and eating sweeties. An unseasonal marine layer has swept into Los Angeles, and the day is grey, grey, grey; I have all the energy and impetus of a pile of leaves. Much better to sit here and watch Sam and Dean, whose problems are much worse than my own.

The real test of character, though, comes when you realize that you have, mirabile dictu, refreshed the springs of inspiration, your Muse is back from the Men’s Room and it is time to get back to work. I can already tell that will probably be tomorrow. Restlessness is beginning to set in. For now, though, I can lean back and cuddle in the arms of the Winchester Brothers.

Even if I don’t get deathless lines like “Do not mock my World Turtle!”

Tomorrow: will come