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Saturday, February 26, 2005
Burning state 
| | I wrote this in an IM to Euan (who, with his employer, just got some cool coverage by James Enck and Om Malik), when the line went down. So I'll put it here: |
| | I sometimes think there are no Californians. There can't be. We're all just visitors here. The place is too temporary by nature: our culture here is just a Burning Man that lasts a few generations instead of a few days. |
| | Stand in Western North Carolina, below the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Then crank the clock back a couple million years. The mountains will be a little higher, the foliage a little different, but the shape will be about the same. Do the same anywhere in California, and the whole place disappears. Everything we see is still in the process of up out of the depths by lithospheric plates crunching against each other. A train crash in slow motion. |
| | Look at redwoods. Why do they grow so tall, with thick bark and short flimsy branches that don't commence in a mature tree until you get past 150 feet of trunk? Because they're adapted to fire. Look at the the state flower: the California poppy. It's ideally suited to soil minted fresh from exfoliated and otherwise destroyed rock. In other words, adapted to earthquakes. |
| | Look where we live. Our house sits on the former contents of a mountain whose face slid seaward in late Pleistocene time. Our hill is a cake of Eocene sandstone rocks and boulders ("fanglomerate") with a frosting of topsoil. In spite of its violent provenance, it's far more stable ground than almost anything in Los Angeles, where the bedrock is mostly shattered and the topsoil comprised of recently deposited alluvium. The latter is easily disturbed and even more easily liquified by rain and then washed away when its sides are exposed. We feel fortunate. Relatively. |
| | There's more where that came from, but I gotta get some sleep. |
Uh-
She's that good
| | I don't like blog awards. They remind me somehow of the gold stars they gave the good students back when I wasn't one (starting in the first grade and continuing for the duration). Like the kids whose differences we camouflage by calling them all students and sorting them across bell curves, blogs are unique, and personal. Individual. Autonomous. Even august, in the sense Whitman meant when he wrote, |
| | I know I am solid and sound.
To me the converging objects of the universe
perpetually flow.
All are written to me,
and I must get what the writing means.
I know I am deathless.
I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept
by a carpenter's compass,
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| | I know that I am august,
I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself
or be understood.
I see that the elementary laws never apologize. |
| | I exist as I am, that is enough. |
| | I've said it before (though Google and I are having trouble finding exactly where); but that won't stop me from saying it again: If anybody deserves to be on everybody's blogroll, it's Sheila. |
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