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12
Mar 24

Cayucos, Spooner’s Cove, Morro Bay

I have a lot of videos piling up. Seems I’ll be stretching this trip out for blog purposes as well. That’s a deliberate content decision. Besides, who has time to edit videos when you’re out doing all of the fun stuff? And why am I still dealing with jet lag three days into your trip? I’ve never been good at this. I can move one time zone and feel the effects. I think I can fly, stay in the same time zone and drag for a day or so. But to move three time zones, have a clock change, in a leap year, and now be breathing in the briny Pacific air? I’m, right now, awake every morning at 5:30 and ready for bed when the sun gets low.

Definitely it is the leap year thing.

Today, The Yankee officially became a gas station taco convert. We pulled up, ordered our lunch and enjoyed lunch as it should be, outside, in the shade, at a picnic table. She’d also found Brown Butter Cookies The site says they are sibling-owned. Take that mom and dad! No family-owned stuff about this business. Traci and Christa had a deli, but the cookies were the hit, and so the pair followed their customers, and here we are.

No, really, here we are.

The review sites say they’re a bit pricey, and, for cookies, yeah. But the folks working there are charming. The cookies are good. They did not have peanut butter cookies, because that’s a seasonal thing, apparently. I wondered aloud if they had a difficult time getting peanuts or Jif or some other ingredient, but the woman who was patiently waiting on me to make my decision said they only do the peanut butter cookies in the summer because, during the school year, they make thousands of biscuits for 15 local schools. They are whole grain, applesauce, no dairy and no nuts. The elementary kids, she said, really love them. So they don’t make peanut butter cookies at the same time of year for allergen purposes. She sold me there, even if she wouldn’t sell me a biscuit. Schools only.

She also laughingly told us about watching people come in with their friends or loved ones and devolve into fights will trying to figure out their complete order. Cookies are a serious business out here.

Yes, a version of this photo will become a banner on the blog some day soon. (Related, I’m ready to put the outdoor tires back on my bicycle. The warm weather we’re enjoying this week has me sold that spring is here. It’ll be cold and windy next week, no doubt.)

Predictably, we hit the beach. This is at a place called Spooners Cove, and it was our second beach of the day. It is a sand and stone beach. You can walk from one end of the cove to another in five or six minutes. Lots of wave action, no swimming. I did find some sea glass, and there are plenty of tide pools. She was, then, a kid again.

There’s a great big rock jutting up out of the water. Of course, we climbed it. Here’s a view from the top.

Click to embiggen.

We’re slipping into this delightful habit on our trips of going to a place and doing not much more than the impossible task of taking it all in. Sure, we could have snapped a photo and kept moving. We could have stayed on the beach. But we lingered on the top of that treacherous rock and watched the waves surge and the water explode. We felt the mist and the raindrops and peered out to the horizon, to the bluffs on either side, and into the little puddles gathered on top of the thing. And, also, looked down, to ponder the power of the tides and the color of hydrodynamic creation.

(The rocks on this coastline are always changing. We are in a sea of change by the sea.)

We listened to the elephant seals and had dinner at a nice family-owned seafood restaurant in Morro Bay. These, it should be noted, were two separate activities. The back of the restaurant’s menu had the classic black and white family photo. The parents had immigrated to the U.S. from Europe. The kid on the end, the youngest, the shortest one in the long row, ran the restaurant.

It was a swift moving place. I started timing the removal of dishes. When you’d finished with a plate, it was taken from the table within 12 seconds. I am left to conclude there is a tableware shortage on the west coast.

We also took in the grandeur of Morro Rock.

Made primarily of dacite, the 581-foot height of the thing dominates the shoreline. It is one of 13 volcanic plugs, what’s left of an extinct volcano, in the region.

Two indigenous groups, the Salinan and the Chumash, each consider it to be a sacred site. Nearby, a settlement dating back at least 4,000 years has been discovered. The Spanish, Wikipedia tells me, probably were the first Europeans to see it, in 1542. Their first land expedition came much later.

Stone was removed for about 80 years in the 19th and 20th centuries. They were making a breakwater for the bay and building out the harbor. Morro Rock bacame a historical landmark in 1968. That gull is just one of the many birds that may call it home. Cormorant and peregrine falcons also nest there, but you can’t climb it. Too fragile for repeated use. We can blame decades of quarry work for that, perhaps.

We caught a lovely sunset on our way back to our room.

Sometimes you need to pull off for the sunset. I think it’s required when there is a coastline available for your composition.

These last three photos, according to the timestamps, were all taken within four minutes of one another. This panorama looks to the west, of course.

Click to embiggen.

I went across the two lane Pacific Coast Highway and faced the east for this one.

And then, walking back across the road to the car, and facing the west again.

There’s some magic in a sky like that. It’s a hopeful thing. Today is closing, but tomorrow has a great deal in store for you. The temperature you don’t notice, the sound may disappear, but on the breeze you might feel opportunity. You might feel the promise of tomorrow on those winds. There’s some magic in a sky like that. Plenty of it.

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5
Mar 24

Charging …

A damp and gray and glum day. It was a great day to sit inside and do not much of anything. A day to think of all of the things I have to do tomorrow, and Thursday, and Friday. It was a never do today what you can put off until tomorrow sort of day. An “I’ve had three phone calls and washed clothes and was doing housework well after midnight last night anyway,” sort of day.

Some Tuesdays are just going to be like that, right? And better it happen on a Tuesday than a Saturday or Sunday, or a Monday.

Yesterday was Monday, and that was a bit draggy early in the day. There was class prep and writing other classes and so on and so forth. I laid out the timing just precisely right for the day. Had anything come up, I would have put us behind schedule for the evening, which was still ahead of my regular schedule.

My lovely bride went to campus with me this evening. She had to address a class and also watched part of a lecture series that’s offered to students. The guest tonight was Dan Baker, the man who does PA for the Phillies, and formerly the in-stadium voice for the Eagles. He’s a Rowan grad. And they had him use his stadium voice to announce some prestigious internship appointments this evening. That was probably a thrill for the students who heard him call their name.

In my much less exciting class — how do you compete with that, really? — we talked about identity, specifically through Eugenia Siepera’s “New Media and Identity.” The class liked this one, which discusses identity and the self, Michel Foucault’s tecnologies of the self, gender and gendered technologies, ethnic and religious identities in the modern landscape.

I think this one works because the current student sees it and feels a lot of this intuitively. Also, it’s a fair amount more sophisticated than what I was taught in their shoes a few decades ago. How could it not be?

Moving from the University College of Dublin we moved to The New School in New York, with a short piece that Kate Eichhorn wrote as a lay supplement to her brilliant work about the online media environment.

My research suggests that these users aren’t outliers but part of a growing demographic of tweens and teens who are actively curating their professional identities. But should 13- or 15-year-olds feel compelled to list their after-school activities, academic honors, and test scores on professional networking sites, with photos of themselves decked out in corporate attire? And will college admissions officers and job recruiters start to dig even further back when assessing applicants—perhaps as far back as middle school? The risk is that this will produce generations of increasingly cautious individuals—people too worried about what others might find or think to ever engage in productive risks or innovative thinking.

The second potential danger is more troubling: in a world where the past haunts the present, young people may calcify their identities, perspectives, and political positions at an increasingly young age.

I got the impression that this one is something that many in my class already begun to internalize at an individual level. Getting beyond that, considering the broad, general and societal impact(s) is, perhaps, something you can only touch on until you see demonstrable examples.

That let us wrap up with Derek Thompson’s recent piece in The Atlantic, which is just brilliant.

And so what? one might reasonably ask. Aloneness is not loneliness. Not only that, one might point out, the texture of aloneness has changed. Solitude is less solitary than ever. With all the calling, texting, emailing, work chatting, DMing, and posting, we are producing unprecedented terabytes of interpersonal communication. If Americans were happy—about themselves, about their friends, about their country—then whining about parties of one would feel silly.

But for Americans in the 2020s, solitude, anxiety, and dissatisfaction seem to be rising in lockstep. Surveys show that Americans, and especially young Americans, have never been more anxious about their own lives or more depressed about the future of the country. Teenage depression and hopelessness are setting new annual records every year. The share of young people who say they have a close friend has plummeted. Americans have been so depressed about the state of the nation for so many consecutive years that by 2023, NBC pollsters said, “We have never before seen this level of sustained pessimism in the 30-year-plus history of the poll.”

I don’t think hanging out more will solve every problem. But I do think every social crisis in the U.S. could be helped somewhat if people spent a little more time with other people and a little less time gazing into digital content that’s designed to make us anxious and despondent about the world. This young century, Americans have collectively submitted to a national experiment to deprive ourselves of camaraderie in the world of flesh and steel, choosing instead to grow (and grow and grow) the time we spend by ourselves, gazing into screens, wherein actors and influencers often engage in the very acts of physical proximity that we deny ourselves. It’s been a weird experiment. And the results haven’t been pretty.

It was interesting to watch what happened in the conversation here. People gravitated to the aloneness versus loneliness part, which is only a part of what Thompson is getting at. And, as young people living in this world, they seem to appreciate what he’s saying about the physical isolation, but the room would split and go back and forth about the value of online interactions. This is great because in the last few weeks one of the things we’ve been talking about is how that technology has removed geographic considerations. How you can find like-minded people wherever, not just on your street, in your class or at your gym. But when they read this they could also see the other side of it — and so many people are emerging with this healthy realization that there’s good and bad, too much and and too little, pros and cons. It feels like a broad thought in a sequence of semi-critical analyses. If that’s one of the four things they get out of this class this semester, I will call it a success. One of the other things is that I was, last night, able to talk about the difference between correlation and causation. What Thompson writes about is, presently, just correlative. Someone asked how much correlation does one need to see something as causal. This gave us the opportunity to briefly revisit the scientific method, and I hoped that some of this might bounce around in their ears until it can latch on to a semi-permanent memory.

If it did, that’d be a great second thing to take from the class.

The other two things are software and production-driven, and they have grades involved with those and they will work themselves out naturally.

These were just the next few video clips off my camera from our recent dive trip, but they line up and feel like a best of collection. There’s some great sponge, your standard issue reef fish, a nice long overhead view of a ray, a regrettably wide shot of a small sea turtle, a close up of the always hypnotic anemone and a closeup with a shark.

It’s amazing to watch a fish or a shark swim along and, when someone gets to close, they put a stop to that. And, in the case of that shark, it was just one big whip of that powerful body to create the distance.

We didn’t check in on the cats yesterday which, despite the many awesome SCUBA photos and videos, remains the most popular feature on the site. We should do that now.

Phoebe just wants your attention. She will jump on any surface and reach out to grab you, if necessary. Unfortunately, that silly portrait feature was highlighted when this happened.

How could you not want to pet her at every opportunity? Look at this face.

Poseidon, not to be outdone, is also a paper bag model.

But if there’s no bag available, he’ll just find some blankets and make himself cozy.

No idea why he, a strictly indoor cat, thinks he wants to go outside all the time, when he needs to be warmer inside the house constantly.

As you can see, the cats are doing just fine. We’re all just waiting for the sun to return, but everyone here is having a great time on the inner coastal plain — where the heavy land and the green sands meet.

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27
Feb 24

Mostly words about reading words

I am grading things. This is a week of a lot of grading. I made the mistake of grading the simpler stuff first. I thought it would build momentum, but now I’m not so sure.

There are a lot of things to grade this week. The only thing to do is take them on one by one and try to provide useful feedback to everyone along the way.

In class last night we talked about social media and how it is used, sometimes for good, sometimes for less desirable purposes. These are the four readings the class had this evening.

#BlackLivesMatter and the Power and Limits of Social Media

Social media helps Black Lives Matter fight the power

It takes a village to find a phone

From hope to hate: how the early internet fed the far right

The thing about this class is that I’m always eager to see what they’ll think about the next readings. I hope they come to see how all of the things they are being asked to read over the course of the term come to complement one another and, ultimately, come to work together.

What I’ve been grading today are assignments out of that Monday night class. This assignment asks them to chart several days of their personal media consumption and write about some specific things in that context. First of all, everyone should do the charting exercise now and again. We all think we have a handle on how much we read and watch and listen to this and that, but there’s nothing quite like seeing it on paper. Every time I do this assignment students come away surprised by something or another. That’s useful for some of them, and some come to a conclusion that they want to make a few changes to their personal habits. But the writing is interesting, because they have to tell part of their own story, and you learn a lot.

One student watches 1950s variety shows on YouTube to unwind. Another introduced me to some new music. Still another name drops some bands I played on college radio a million years ago — that must have been an interesting childhood soundscape. Another wrote, beautifully, elegantly, about the impact Little Woman had on her life. It’s a nice assignment.

Then, of course, I spent a few moments reading Louisa May Alcott’s poetry. Her stories, I think, are better than her poetry, but maybe that’s me. Or her books, some of which are magically timeless. Perhaps I should add Alcott back to the list of things to read. She might be another one of those authors that is lost on us when we’re young.

Speaking of books. I finished When Women Were Birds on Sunday night. It was 54 essays Terry Tempest Williams, who, was gifted her mother’s journals. As she lay dying, she says these are for you, but don’t read them until I’m gone. Some time after her mother passes away the daughter is ready to look in those journals, eager to gain the insights of a woman she knew, wanting to learn about the woman she didn’t know. They’re all neatly arranged, these journals, waiting for her to discover what’s inside. They’re all blank. And, from this, Williams writes about her mother, the birds of the west, womanhood, faith, family, and what is there and what’s missing.

It is a writer writing, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

I think I finished it in four late night sessions.

The next problem is that I have so many things to read, how do I choose what to read next? I have a random number generator on my iPad and I let it decide. It decided that, next, I’ll read Brian Matthew Jordan’s Pulitzer Prize finalist book, Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War. Jordan teaches at Gettysburg College and this text has a great reputation for the depth of its research. I saw that right away in the footnotes.

I bought this in December of 2020, and it’s just been sitting there, waiting for the random number generator to call it into action. And chance has good timing. I like to change up the periods I read about, and haven’t read anything from the 19th century since the end of 2021, somehow. (All of which is to say I need to read more, obviously.)

This photo isn’t good, and breaks a lot of the supposed rules of photography, but I love it anyway.

It is the way the light dances at the surface, how the water is blue and white. Sky and clouds and water and you could go any direction you wanted to right here, at least in your imagination. My dive buddy, my lovely bride, is facing away from me, but that’s OK. I like the composition.

Makes me want to go diving. Go figure.

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20
Feb 24

You’re going to watch the video and follow all of the links, right?

Once this day got started, this day got productive. Let’s see, there was a late breakfast. And then I gave Phoebe some extra milk. I did dishes. And then I checked email, and updated various computer things. I pulled in the day’s delivery from the front porch.

I recently met someone who works at the local Amazon distribution center. She told me about the many different kinds of jobs in her building, and the one she’s doing now. I promised to check with her before we ordered anything heavy. Make sure she’s not working that day, ya know. Of course, I could barely pick up the box that arrived today. I hope she didn’t have to heave that to and fro.

I also took care of the garbage and recycling. This was an involved process. There was an extra bag of garbage. And more recycling than usual, owing to cardboard. I haven’t moved this much cardboard since we moved. Some of the cardboard that I recycled today was, in fact, from the move. The move was last June.

Standing at the giant bin, breaking down cardboard boxes by tearing tape with my keys, I narrowly avoided giving myself a cardboard cut. Paper cuts are bad, but cardboard should be registered and require a permit. Dangerous stuff. The guy that works there was patiently waiting on me to finish the task. He was standing down by the two cattle gates at the entrance. I was the last visitor of the day, according to his watch, which said 4:51, but he was ready to get out of there a little early. This was not the regular guy, Milton, that I’ve come to wave at, but another fellow. People are punctual about their early dinner plans, one supposes.

Anyway, the sun was out and it was an easy enough chore, even if it all took the better part of an hour this time. When I backed the car out to set off for the inconvenience center I looked into the yard and the trees beyond and said, “Spring is starting and you can’t convince me otherwise.” I said this to no one but the cardboard and the other recyclables, because there was nowhere to put a human being in my car. But nothing about the drive, the chore, or my return made a convincing counterargument, either.

The long-range forecast calls for the low 60s this time next week.

In class last night we did not talk about the weather. I warmed up, though, with a little history lesson of Voyager 1, the golden record and Blind Willie Johnson. Voyager 1 has been flying my whole life, and more than twice as long as my students have been alive. And these last few months, Voyager has been slowly, sadly, limping to its own end, decades after exceeding its mission parameters. It’s no less sad for the over-achievement. Perhaps more so. Doug Muir wrote something beautiful about it.

Also, a student asked me what I thought about Jon Stewart’s return to The Daily Show. Short version: It felt right. Last Monday’s re-start was a start, a clearing of the throat, a framing of the conversation. His return is going to be best understood over time. So let’s see what he does between now and November.

And what he did last night. My goodness.

My lovely bride and I did our first research in grad school on Jon Stewart. It was one of the first 2,200 or pieces of scholarship about the comedy-satire-politics show. I think the preemptive criticism in the run up to his return was overdone. Stewart still has one of the most unique and powerful voices in the much broader genre, and the circumstances today aren’t that different than nine years ago when he walked away. More acrimonious, but let’s not forget from whence we came.

If anything, the show runners have to consider how the Daily Show’s style of accountability — via the technological breakthrough of database queries and video playback — is finally more widespread now. That, if anything, blunts the ability for him to tackle his first real target, contemporary media. (People forget who the real satire subject matter is.) That part will need to be reshaped, perhaps, and along the way, he’s going to annoy everyone sporting a little letter behind their name. I could do without making the superficial punchline an ad hominem attack, I never liked that part, but he’s still got plenty of punch in his gloves. And the ratings are there too, much to the chagrin of last night’s subject matter.

For the actual class we discussed Ellen Ullman and Nicholas Carr. Basically, what is the internet doing to us, and why is it all bad? The Ullman piece was prescient, she wrote it in 1998, still stands by it, and, what’s more, was correct. The Carr readings date to 2008 and 2010. The latter is a book chapter of his, but that essay in The Atlantic should give us pause.

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts,
watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link.

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.

The first time I read that piece I saw a lot of the same complaints. And so I’ve been trying to change my habits — sometimes with more success than others. I think the change has been fruitful, when I’ve been most successful at it.

One of the assignments the students have to do soon includes an element where they chart their own media consumption. If this is done well some people will look at that and think, “Yes, that seems about right.” Others, however, will look at the data they’ve collected on themselves and be stunned.

Maybe that’ll mean something for them going forward.

Let us go forward together, back under the surface of the water.

I made this video before class yesterday with the intention of publishing it then, as well. Only I made a critical error in the rendering and exporting process. (A two-paragraph explanation of everything between now and then goes right here. An explanation made all the more hilarious because I teach this stuff. So I figured: Tuesday. Today, suffice it to say, instead of having to remake the entire video, I remembered Premiere Pro has a pretty decent autosave function, which was a big time-saver.) Having correctly rendered and exported the video, I was able to upload it and remain quite pleased with the result. I think you’ll like it too. I think the beginning and the end are the best part.

Also, enjoy the flounder, the sea anemone and the beautiful eagle ray.

Tomorrow, I’ll have a few more diving photos for you, we’ll go back in time to meet a local 17th century man of considerable importance and I’ll probably try to find a way to talk about riding my bicycle in place. Because, right now, I’m going to go ride my bike.

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13
Feb 24

An officially unofficial day

We generally observe today as the anniversary of us being a couple.

It was a friend group, you see. There were about six of us who were all in the same grad school cohort and within the group there were the two of us palling around all the time. Nineteen years ago we were at a small dinner party and playing board games. The next day we were hanging out again and somewhere in there realized that people thought of us as an us. People, in our group and in the larger cohort and some of our professors too, thought of us as a couple within the group. Where there was the one there was the other. So we celebrate today.

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Tonight we marked the occasion with a late dinner at an empty local little restaurant. I also commemorated the evening by teaching myself to hand-fold envelopes, in which I put two little love notes.

Last month, of course, we were celebrating under water. It’s amazing how much material I can get out of a few days worth of dives, no? You should see how many of my dive buddy I’ve not included

And I’ve only added a few of my lovely dive buddy’s photos to the collection. Here’s one now, and that’s me in the middle distance!

I love that wide composition. Like it’s just you in the water, all by yourself. It’s a nice feeling, especially since you’re not. There’s a handful of people not too far away, but you spread out, juuuuust enough.

Here’s some young yellow tube sponge growing on this coral covered outcropping.

And I got lucky floating directly over this nice bowl sponge.

Tomorrow, I’ll show you something else I was lucky to see: a giant turtle.

Last night I had class where we talked about the Super Bowl, and the Huxleyan dystopia. The readings and the schedule lines up perfectly. Also I had the chance to make fun of myself and one of the students absolutely nailed the punchline. I should have dismissed class right there. It was perfect.

One element of some of the readings in this particular class is to help create a healthy skepticism of the media around them. So we also talked about Edward Bernays. And then, as a palette cleanser, I offered them astornaut and author, Ron Garan.

On the way out I saw this on a bulletin board.

Imagine that! They’re publicizing their scholars’ work to the student body. Novel concept! I’ll be sure to attend some of those.

Tomorrow, a giant turtle, and more from under the sea. I’ll put some flowers here and we’ll see one of the oldest courthouses in the land. Be sure you’re here for it all!