Archives for category: Uncategorized

266. ART: The Lord of the Northern Skies for the Blackfeet Nation – in the vicinity of Two Medicine and Milk Rivers

April 27, 2025 //

Imagine that by the time this story jangled down to me

It had passed through multiple variations and generations

I picked out a few choice morsels of ridges and hill tops

To paint on a piece of of plywood

To satisfy my hunger pangs

For the spirits of the rocky plains

Through the foggy windshield

This is is what I could see

Of a Blackfeet myth and dream

About a meeting with

The Lord of the Northern Skies

There was roaring drumbeat of hooves

Dust and a stampede

And bison jettisoned over cliffs to embrace the earth mama

A band of natives

With ground and scraped hatchets and knives

Taking the scene apart

Slivers along the skin and fascia sheath

Slits across the lines of tendons

Pops and cracks next to the rounded cartilage

Lathering in the puddling blood

Done well

There was enough goodness here

To last through the winter

All in all

It was a lot of carcasses

To process

The sky fell then rose again

Stars unveiled their brilliant finery

Several times

Still folks were at it

Slicing the animals apart

Chatting and laughing

Re living the hunt

Chewing bits of livers and loins

Reassembling it into food and clothing

It was late now

Without much warning

The winds with the pointed daggers descended

And a swirling snow storm blinded and smothered the band

No time to run

Nowhere to go

Stay put

A father and son sought shelter beneath a still warm bison hide

Praying for safety and protection

Under the makeshift shelter

The stored heat slowly faded

Liquid congealed into sticky curds and cold pastes

Frosty air snuck in the uneven folds

Chilling nose and fingers

Hardening wet skins and toes

Tightening that cavity round the ribs and chest

Death seemed imminent

Consciousness swirled and began to drown in white powder

The father and son

Belonged to the otter clan

In their final dizzying bewildered moments

Their minds flashed fish scales and clear rivers

Crayfish tucked in hideouts along the banks

And rainbow droplets jumping off the falls

White out

Black out

Fade out

When they awoke

Wasn’t sure

if it had all been a dream

The herd of bison, the slaughter, the butchering

Or, if they had parted ways with their nerves muscles brains and bones

And had arrived in the world above the sky

Before them was a gold lit teepee

With thunderbird feet and talons

The teepee’s skirt was icy pokers

And stars circled in the upper canopies

Right above the entrance

Was a grand and ancient red bison head

With yellow horns that had clobbered many a foe

Its tail in the back

Swished taut against

The disc rays of the sun

Crow feathered bells

Chimed for the day of reckoning

The otter pair hollered greetings

And decided to go inside

Have a look

A blazing fire rang within

Heat rose up and danced in flickers

As blackening wood shed ash flakes

Around the beguiled hearth

The black shadows were full of chatter

Caw caw caw

Ha ha ha

Caw caw

Hee haw hee haw

The bells were deafening

The Lord of the Northern Sky rose up from his smoke

He was dressed with garments of snow

On his breast he wore a tobacco pouch of mink

And otter pelts patterned his belt

In his right hand was branches of juniper

Ready to sacrifice themselves to the flames

In his left hand the black pipe was praying to the clouds

The Lord welcomed the hunters

Bade them to sit down

Make themselves comfortable

And relax a spell

While the storm paused to have a bowl of stew

And the drifts sashayed and settled into

A comforter for the earth mother

Otter man and his son

Were surprised

Elated

Joyful

Shocked

Awed

In summary

Cut up and swollen beyond recognition

By everything they had encountered

They quickly pulled up an offering

A six pound bison heart

A little bit on the cool side

But still beating with a very distant thumpity bump

The Lord of the Northern Skies

Received the gift with gratitude

And began to sing of pain and sorrow

And of tears fears and years

With that

There was a thunderous clapping flash o lightning

The explosion crept up slowly in the back of the throat

Ran zig zag kazam down the esophagus

Billowed chunks out of the lungs

And heaved the stomach into a galactic sized churning tsunami

And by the time the intestines were involved

It was all light and shock

Dust and faded memories

And Father Otter and his son

Were back on the plains

With the family

Sharpening edges and points

Plunging into flesh

Carving the soft parts away from the hard

And hanging meat to dry

In the mid day sun

Tags arctic, blackfeet, fiction, history, mythology, natives, short-story, travel, writing

Categories Uncategorized

265. DESIGN: A picture tour through a section of the Civic Center Complex in San Francisco

April 22, 2025 //

About twenty years back I worked for the recreation and parks department

Downtown in what is termed as the civic center complex

The complex stretched from civic center proper down to union square

and all the parks and recreation centers in between

in the tenderloin

then south to soma, potrero hill, and a lil east to dogpatch

it was a good time – always busy, often exciting, never dull

sometimes frustrating, heart wrenching, plunge you into the depths

let’s go on a walkabout tour of a few of the parks

back and forth through time

as seen through the eyes of a gardener and custodian

to understand how history, design, installation, and maintenance

create the patterns of these green spaces

in an otherwise hard and dull urban jungle

UNION SQUARE, SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – SEPTEMBER 17, 2015

Categories Uncategorized

264. MAINTENANCE: Compost & recycling -slideshow with notes

March 10, 2025 //

There’s this ancient symbol of a snake eating its own tail. It depicts that cycle of birth and death, creation and destruction, that we are all engaged in day to day. It merrily sums up compost and recycling.

In San Francisco we separate out our garbage into three bins. The black bin is for garbage that gets buried in the ground, landfill.

Blue is for goods that will go, hopefully, to be recycled:

Green bin is organic waste, to be made into compost. Meats are okay, plastics are not.

In parts of the far north High Arctic where reindeer go on walkabouts and eat lichens off the tundra, it is cold and dry, desert like in a way. There is not much biological decomposition happenin’, and stuff breaks down verrrrrrrry slowwwwwwwly.

In the moist tropical jungle where it is hot, humid and wet, stuff breaks down super fast. Organic matter does not get a chance to sit around. Fungus, bacteria, worms and all the rest of em hungry creatures descend on every speck of mineral, skin and bone, leaf log and twig, and eat it. It’s all food.

Butterflies in the tropics often gather around puddles of salts. A favorite activity of entomologists collecting specimens is to take a piss, and watch the butterflies all come in for treats.

They say the tropical soils are really poor in nutrients. The water, rains and floods leach it poor. No organic matter stays around long enough to build it up so to speak, like in the soils around the flood plains of a river like the Mississippi or the Nile. Yeah there’s a lot of tall green plants in the jungle,, but the soil is thin and not that thick black richness of accumulated millennia.

However, in the Amazon basin, there is a super rich soil associated with native peoples and the massive agricultural systems of olden days manioc, palms, chocolate, sweet potatoes, peppers, tobacco, and so on. The soil is called terra preta de Índio. It is dark in color, rich in carbon, and full of nutrients.

In the Pacific Northwest of big trees that live hundreds and thousands of years, imagine all the leaves and cones and bits of branches that fall and accumulate on the ground! It all slowly breaks down into massive spongy mats of… compost and organic matter.

In the soil of these giants live fungus. Fungus’ body looks like little white threads. It is eating the downed wood. Fungi are the ultimate recycler. They turn chunky pieces into fine lil bits, and make the nutrients available for plants to suck up.

Some fungus have a mushroom that smells stinky and carriony. This stinkhorn is one such mushroom. It is common around here on wood chip mulch, and looks like a lattice of red and orange with goopy sticky olive poo colored mass inside. Flies love em!

Another common mushroom around here is a potent magic mushroom that enjoys eating eucalyptus twigs and chips. If you touch or bruise it it turns blue.

Anyhow. That’s all for nature making compost on her own. We do the same thing, but in a composting facility like out at Vacaville. See all the banana peels, moldy oranges, rotten avocados, carrot tops, and spoiled ribs?

Folks got to sort through it, cause some people do not know what is organic and what is not, and what to throw in the green bin and what not to.

The stuff from the city green bin is mixed with brown carbony branchy material and stacked in long rows. It is watered and aerated too. There is so much biological activity (bacteria and fungus feeding and spawning) that the whole pile gets really hot! Then it is turned also by loaders.

After a while, all the stinky sticky yuck food and organic waste is turned into this dark brown black material that is great for vegetable gardens, vineyards, and farms. Sometimes it is sold at the local landscaping stone and mulch yard too:

Some folks try to make compost in their own garden. These black tubs were fashionable for a while around here. But to be honest, they did not work too good. A good compost needs air (turning or aerating), needs to heat up and cook, and ought to be in a place where it can get some sun. Like anything in the garden, it needs care and attention. Most of these black plastic bins would end up in a dark corner of the garden filled with slugs or rats. Not compost.

This here is a compost system based on bins that work. Oftentimes there’s three or more wired bins side by side. Check out Garden for the Environment, at 7th and Lawton Avenue, if you want to take an excellent workshop on composting.

At Alemany Farm, they make a fantastic compost too with horse manure and weeds and such. Here’s a worker watering the pile. Water makes everything come alive!

Alright, that’s all for composting. Onto recycling. Out on Bayshore Boulevard, there is a recycling yard. Folks come with bags or truck fulls and sell aluminum or cardboard or other such ‘recyclables’ for a lil money.

Or you can drive it down to the dump off of Tunnel Avenue:

Like the compost, it’s gotta get sorted.

Aluminum fetches top dollar. It comes from an ore. Everything comes from the earth and returns to earth in some way shape or form.

You see steel come apart all the time as rust. If a tools sits around, slowly it binds with the oxygen in the air and kaput away it goes. Ashes to ashes dust to dust.

Where do plastics come from? Well they are millions of years old plants and animals turned to black goo and gas. At the refinery, there is a stream of polymers that emerge from the cooking refining process. That is where the plastics come from.

Plastics. There’s just a few basic types you are already familiar with. (1) Polyethylene terephthalate is that nice warm polyester fleece you wear while working in the garden. (3) PVC is that white or gray, schedule 40 or 80, irrigation pipe we use. The one you put together with primer and glue, the smell that makes you a lil woozy. (4) low density polyethylene is the drip irrigation pipe, also known as ‘poly’ pipe. We commonly use the 1/2 ” or 1/4″ tubing, connected with compression fittings. (5) Polypropylene plastic you might know as a car bumper or syringe. (6) An example of polystyrene is that cheap cooler type styrofoam material great for making hyper tufa containers for a rock garden planting. It is light and takes the glue and cement easily.

Here is HDPE (2):

China used to take all or much of our plastic recycling ten or fifteen years back. Then they got tough on pollution and air quality in the cities and no longer accept it. Think it now goes to like Vietnam or other Asian countries where it is likely burned or maybe buried. Not sure. We sure go through a lot of this stuff.

Maybe somebody will eat plastics? That is tricky since the long chains of atoms are so tightly bonded. That said, there is tales of microbes in the oceans who have taken a liking to the stuff we dump so readily. After all, as tough as the stuff is, it’s still carbon hydrogen in chains and rings. And there’s some fungal scientists engaged in experiments of bioremediation, using fungus to clean up oil spills and such. This here is oyster mushrooms feeding on motor oil or similar substance.