PACIFIC COAST AT SAN DIEGO

Curling in cinematic slow motion

the Pacific teases the desert shore

saying I am the water you need

before rushing headlong across rocks

in an eternal game of Red Rover

to crash in chaos against the jagged foil

that will not ever let it enter.

Does the Gray Whale stop to sleep

out there in the deep roiling ink?

And the calf… is it afraid? 

No matter what you say

or how you touch me

I am utterly alone in the world

except for these bare brushes

of our individual existences. 

Slicing the darkness like an unseen arrow

aimed as surely as the moon in its course

A sea bird's call pierces my heart.

A flower doesn’t have to look like a flower to be one…

and just because something looks like a bird doesn't mean it is one…

Anybody who sees these pictures and recognizes the plant, a vine with strange sacks each of which opens into an even stranger blossom, tell me what it is. The vine is growing on the wall where I found yesterday's photograph on the Laurel Street hill overlooking the airport.

I have no idea what this round cover in a wall on Laurel Street is doing for whom or why... but I liked it so much when I saw it that I thought I might not find another image that comes closer than this one to being real art; so this is it.  This is the photo du jour... perhaps the photo du mois.  I'm going to have it printed so I can hang it on a wall somewhere.

WhiMSieS

Breakfast at Swami’s in North Park… Bike ride around Mission Bay… Daily check on the day lily in our yard that is opening one blossom each day.  I am surrounded by beauty and goodness, so the violence, the carnage and horror reported in my daily paper, seem more like fiction than accounts of real suffering and death inflicted by real people on real people. 

COMIC-CON INTERNATIONAL is a nonprofit educational corporation dedicated to creating awareness of, and appreciation for ——— comics and related popular artforms.

Today I was preparing to laugh at the idea that Comic-Con can be a nonprofit corporation, then I remembered Saddleback Church in Orange County and Pastor Rick Warren who wants permission not only to bolster his organization’s nonprofit status but to get official permission from the Federal Government to discriminate against a significant class of American citizens. Today in the biggest crowd I’ve ever seen anywhere in San Diego, I saw evidence that Comic-Con is an inclusive organization.  Obviously, nobody is left out… even those carrying signs promoting Pastor Warren’s religious ideologies are allowed to participate.

Most just pictures from a very good day...

Grandson Jeremy joined me today in the volunteer work at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park.  In such good company the work went quickly, so we had time to go through the galleries before setting out in the park to find our own photographs.  We began by making one of ourselves with the little new camera.  Art was happening everywhere... out on the plaza in front of the San Diego Museum of Art... and across the way in front of The Prado where a plein artist was working at putting orange umbrellas on his canvas... and women carried umbrellas that matched the crepe myrtle trees... and I stopped to get a picture of my favorite rainbow eucalyptus  near where I always see on the pavement the thinker probably wondering as I always do why some people feel compelled to carve initials and other symbols in the bark of innocent trees.  Back home again later I found the day lily had opened a couple of new blossoms.  What a day!

The images don't match the writing...  How do you picture hypocrisy?  

So here’s the deal:  The Reverend Rick Warren, senior pastor of the Orange County Saddleback Church and 13 other folks who describe themselves as religious and civic leaders have written a letter to President Obama asking for an exemption from the anti-discrimination rule for their churches and/or civic organizations.  In other words they want to continue two practices: they want to continue to discriminate against people whose sexual orientation offends them, and they want to continue to receive taxpayer money from the government which they now get to fund programs they have set up to provide service to citizens.  Also in other words, they want what the Supreme Court’s July 1 ruling gave to Hobby Lobby, a for-profit company.  Hobby Lobby got exemption from government mandated requirements which the company’s owners say God doesn’t like. The Hobby Lobby folks claim God doesn’t like sexual activity that could be considered recreational.  If you do IT just because IT feels good, you displease God presumably because God wants you to do IT only when you are participating in His plan to populate the earth.

But the religious and civic leaders who wrote the letter pleading for exemption this time aren’t asking for permission to deny contraceptive health care.  They assume their battle in that regard has been won.  What they want is the government’s blessing of their discriminatory practices regarding LGBT citizens, to go along with the huge blessing religious organizations already receive in the form of exemption from having to pay taxes.  Warren and his religious bedfellows say in their petition that the right to religious freedom trumps LGBT rights to civil justice, LGBT rights to be treated like all other citizens.  Reverend Warren and his other religious leaders say in their letter, “We still live in a nation with different beliefs about sexuality.  We must find a way to respect diversity of opinion on this issue.” 

What Pastor Warren and his clergy colleagues are actually saying is that religious freedom and human rights are incompatible, and they expect the country to bend in the direction of unrestrained religious freedom. 

Go online to read Michael Hiltzik’s piece in today’s Business Section of the L.A. Times.

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-lgbts-from-work-20140715-column.html#page=1

The yellow day lily bloomed this morning in my yard. 

I got the picture of the rainbow flag on a balcony in Hillcrest.  

I talked my friend Clyde into sitting for a portrait with whimsical devils at a temporary construction site wall.   Here, Pastor Warren, is a man of keen intelligence, extraordinary talent, and unquestioned integrity.  You and your friends would deny him and his spouse full civil rights. 

PLAYING AROUND… 

Sometime in the middle of last night the last of my orchid buds opened into full bloom.  I’ve had extraordinary good luck with orchids this year.  Three of seven of that I pamper on my back porch have bloomed this year.  There is no chance that I’ll get other blooms this year.  I can see already that one of my favorites, one that has bloomed each summer for the past three summers, is getting ready to bloom again next year.  I confess that I don’t know how to make an orchid bloom year after year.  I haven’t actually studied orchids beyond becoming aware that they shouldn’t be overwatered and they shouldn’t be placed in full, all-day sunlight. A remarkable thing about orchid blossoms is that they last a very long time after they open, so I can expect this new bloom to remain open and fresh for at least three months.

…so today I celebrated by making this new, this last bloom, my photo du jour; and I took great liberties with it in the editing process… Great fun.