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I know the exact moment when I got my first eye floater. I was on CCSF campus at a bone marrow drive, October 2, 2012. It was windy and I thought something had gotten into my eye. It only took a few moments to realize that it wasn’t on my eye but in my eye.

I went to an eye doctor who said, “Yup, you’ve got a floater.” It hovers in my right eye, usually below and to the right of the focus of my vision, but it floats… it lags behind the movement of my eye like the answer-die in a Magic 8 Ball settling in to tell you “Concentrate and ask again.” Megan and I named it “Oliver” because he is all-over my vision. It bothers me because there is nothing to be done about it and there is a good chance it will never go away, an annoyance and obstruction to my vision for the rest of my life. If I’m lucky, some day it will catch on something inside my eye and stay in the same spot; then I’ll hardly ever notice it. But for the last six months, and right now as I write this, it hovers in front of every blank surface I look at: computer screens, blank walls, blue skies.

Blah.

I started writing this in 2006 and it has sat in my Drafts folder as a reminder of… I don’t know… a reminder. It’s about my first Burning Man experience. Dunno if I’ll ever finish it, it’s a good start though. Maybe if I put it out into the universe, it’ll get finished. So here you go…

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Black Rock City, September 4th, 2004:
I was having a fine time on Saturday night, the night the Man was to be burned.

I had brought my art over to near where I was going to fly it. I was having some technical problems with it so I got out my soldering iron and I was fixing it on top of a giant box labeled “Glass Ball” in the New Day’s Eve camp. Some guy was trying to help me but was just distracting me with his constant questions; he couldn’t hold the light steady so I rode back to my camp and fetched my head-lamp. When he said that he was going to find some punani to put his meat kilbasi into (yes, he really said that), I knew I didn’t need his help and sent him away. Maybe he was on speed, doesn’t matter.

I got the plane to light up. I recall the happy neon glow on the box and the annoying guy. I was close. But then I had 2 problems. The playa was completely filled with people wandering toward the Man; I couldn’t be assured of a safe landing spot. And I couldn’t fit all of the electronics inside the fuselage. Argh! It was just too tight. If I had just 1 more day to put it together back home… When I realized it was going to be more of a pain than it was worth, and potentially a danger to bystanders, I decided to forget it. I was standing on the Esplanade and could see the Man. He was going to raise his arms any second and the anticipation was too much. My friends were waiting for me on the playa. So I stashed the plane in the Asylum container and went looking for Marah.

The plan was for Marah and I to meet at the Temple and watch the Man burn from there… A nice secluded spot (and Marah isn’t much for ambling crowds). But as I rode out, past the Man, past the solar system, I realized that the Temple was way too far out. Finally making it out there and looking back, the Man was just a dot on the horizon.

I looked about for Marah but wasn’t having any luck. Then I heard her calling me; She was walking out, alone, to meet me. I found her about 80 yards away in the dark playa. She said that, yes, the Temple was too far out. We were going to meet up with friends at an art installation.

On the way back… And while I was riding out, I got to look at the sky. The huge, gigantic, tremendous sky. I recall standing out there, looking back at our homage to “The Vault of Heaven”. So many people had put forth a tremendous effort to gather and praise the heavens and, from my vantage point just 1/2 a mile away, it appeared as nothing but a thin strip of lights on the horizon. And then I looked up. Just a 1 degree above our party, stretching for a billion billion miles in every direction, the heavens hung. My eye followed the bright swath of the Milky Way galaxy across the sky. I felt, as one does the first time they see our moon through a telescope, “Ah! It isn’t a cardboard cut-out, it’s real! It’s not just a picture, it’s a place. I could go there if I had the means. Maybe people already do live there and I just can’t see them!” I recalled how Galileo Galilei must have felt, being possibly the first person on this little marble to look up and see that the objects in the heavens were in fact real objects and not perfect celestial bodies and pinholes in the black velvet of the night’s sky.

Image: Stiched panorama of The Vault of Heaven Horizon from The Temple, Burning Man 2004

(to be continued)

Made a Ruben’s Tube with Mark Rosin last month.

Saw my family in Florida for Easter

Had Squash Flower Fritters (my grandmother’s recipe!) for the first time in 20 years.

And Fried Smelts and Brustenge and all manner of foodly delights

Went to a wonderful party at Cindy and Carlo’s

At first I watched this video because it’s another Crucible thing, and an Exploratorium thing.  Then my heart welled up in my throat.

I’m lucky enough to be able to go and shake Nick Diphillipo’s hand, and Steven Young’s hand and say “thank you”.

I just signed up for an Alaska Airlines Bank of America credit card. I looked over the literature I got about fees and only after a third look was I able to find the annual fee because of this evil page break:

That is uncool, Bank of America.

You see, about 2 years ago, new consumer protection laws went into effect, making it so that credit card companies were required to inform customers very clearly as to what fees they would be charged. This is the first I’ve seen of credit cards trying to chip away at that law.

The Crucible has the chance to win a $25,000 grant from State Farm for our Bike Program, and you can help. All you have to do is vote on Facebook every day between today and April 22.

Click here to vote  on State Farm’s Facebook App. (You’ll have to give the application permissions, but only the first time.) After that, all you have to do is click “vote” to lend your support for Bikes for West Oakland, and it’s super easy to click 10 times in a row.

The Crucible’s Bike Program serves our West Oakland community with Bike Fix-a-Thons, Earn-a-Bike, Art Bike, and a drop-in repair times. This year six Bike Fix-a-Thons will enable at least 300 of our neighbors to access free repairs. 20 students in Earn-a-Bike will learn how to weld and explore other industrial arts in order to fabricate two bicycles and keep one — bikes are donated to community organizations and toy drives or sold to support the program. And Art Bike participants conceive and create unique artworks from frame to finished project.

The Crucible’s Bike Program was one of 200 causes (from over 3,000 entries) selected, which is a huge honor, and we only get funded if we reach the top 40. So please take a second to vote (or 10 seconds to vote 10 times), share with your friends, and check out The Crucible’s Bike Program in person soon — there’s something here for everybody.

Thanks!

If you want to join me at to a free weekly yoga session each Wednesday morning at The Crucible in Oakland (conveniently 2 blocks from West Oakland BART), send me an email. This isn’t open to the public but if you’re a friend, you’re welcome.

A little bit about the sessions:
Run by Roxanna Shohadaee, doing Vinyasa Yoga, there is music and the room is lightly heated. I’ve been twice and quite enjoyed it.

The Feedly RSS Reader for Chrome should not be trusted. Since they are cheating to get signups, it’s impossible to say what other bad things they are doing behind the scenes with your data.

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The face of spam keeps changing. It used to be email, then blog comments, now it’s comment stuffing (as in “ballot stuffing”). Look at this screenshot and tell me what you think looks fishy:

Let me give you a hint, the exact same comment was repeated word-for-word by over 40 different people in the review section of this Chrome Extension.

I know it’s a near impossible task, but you should always be on the lookout for fake people (AKA Sockpuppets) recommending products. I reported this incident to Google but it’s happened a lot before and it will happen a lot in the future.

An Obituary for CELLspace (via) Go to the original site for pix and other good writings!

CELLspace, community arts center, closed its doors at the end of 2012.

During the late 90s and early aughts, there was no better place to see the Mission District’s artistic, multicultural vibe than CELLspace. San Francisco prankster Chicken John was known to decorate the 10,000 square foot warehouse as a Las Vegas casino; the Flaming Lotus Girls created their first large scale fire installations in the CELLspace Metal Shop, and during Carnaval, the space would burst at the seams from the ritual drumming, colorful rattling costumes and sheer number of teenagers involved in groups like Loco Bloco and Danza Azteca.

Michael Sturtz was so impressed by CELLspace that he named his industrial arts school, The Crucible, after their art gallery.

“The name was inspired by the Crucible Steel Gallery, which was the CELLspace gallery at the time,” he said.
Continue reading ‘RIP CELLSpace’ »

This is completely amazing, my good friend Molly Carocci has received the highest honor possible for a civilian, she has been appointed Poet Laureate of Cheese Weasel Day by the esteemed Cheese Weasel committee!

Visit CheeseWeaselDay.com to read the whole story!

I’m honored to see that the esteemed committee discovered Molly’s poetic talents from my own blog!