The lizard who had to grow a new tail

The Alligator Lizard had to grow a new tail

because someone tried to eat him.

He moves like a snake

and shakes his head side to side.

But before he moves his hands and feet

his tongue flicks and his new tail of a different pattern swings.

Woke up it was a May, 2013 morning

The right now

Morning birds in mountain view, a humming sewing machine while Jacob works on the cases we'll carry our clothes and other such things in on our backs this summer. The right now is morning, just before 8am on a saturday in May. The right now is sunny with the light streaming in through the window. The temperature is mild and the wind is absent of but a slight breeze. The building next to us is lit up, and I wonder if others have woken from their slumber. They might wake to the sound of the sewing machine. I am sufficiently caffeinated and I was using the iPhone app Jacob added to his library for me-the Audubon Guide to Birds. I can listen to recordings, and try to put a face to a sound. I use John Muir Laws Pocket Guide set for the San Francisco Bay. I listened to the barking hoot of the Spotted Owl and wonder if my recordings are an interloper to the resident singers outside. My friend Jazelle is on a drive from Tucson, making her way up to California. She is working on the Northern Spotted Owl project in the Eldorado National Forest near Lake Tahoe this summer. Jacob and I walked through that area two years ago and it was still very much covered in snow in July. She asked if she would need warm clothes. She'll be on an owl clock for her work, so I think she might need some new clothes. Owl work requires a different, night-rythym.

The where

Lone Oak apartments in Mountain View, the cement was laid around the lone oak of which our building was named. A young avocado tree is growing through the pavement in our backyard parking area, growing up against a fence that divides our building from another. It's struggling, many leaves are dead or dying. I try to pick out the dying or dead leaves to help the tree. I don't know how well it's going to fare growing in pavement. That would be tough.

Mountain View is a tricky place to people watch. Many people travel in their metal box protectors and move quickly, and it makes it difficult to watch. It's possible to glimpse as they speed on by. Even at a coffee shop where they sit, it's difficult to watch them, their image projections a tricky mask and the performance an addictive distraction for my imagination. I try to imagine other things about them, but there are so many shiny things. Sometimes there are breaks in the performance but I usually have to do something to confuse them, or entertain them, or put them off to stop long enough to properly watch.

The Who

Sometimes I'm just an image projection. Even this writing is an image projection-there is a great distance between the world and the word and what I try to share and sometimes I fail.

The Why

I like the potential for random encounters or the possibility to stumble over odd events or images. I fall on my face sometimes, and sometimes this is nice to meet gravity. I sometimes see someone or something do something different, something I could never imagine. I like learning something new from or about Jacob, the person I think I know the most. I'm interested in limits and constraints and open spaces and narrow tunnels and the light shining in an iceberg and river edges and river channels, and stories about discovery and stories about ordinary things. I like perambulatory excursions where I'm immersed in experience and sensation. I like the rhythm of walking. I like learning about how other animals move on land, how some use their appendages like us, how some use their body as propulsion like a snake, and how some roll up into a ball when they are scared. Sometimes we are just walking on by and kick up some dust and there are little and long worm-like larvae that leap into the air, coil themselves up, and hit the ground spinning as a fear and wind-powered wheel. They can't run, the wind carries them to safety. That's how they roll.

Concrete is

... a substance not so easily impressed.