INDIAN HILL

  Under soft light   the books   look delicious and ripe.  The Last Bookstore has an old-school vibe, a grocery or packing plant back in the day, angled shelves and back-lit racks of music on vinyl by the windows. Two long red  letherette sofas on a stage platform look good and I sit and read a few pages from 'Wild At Heart', about Lula Fortune and her uncle and he's groping her when she's fifteen or thirteen.    I want to study how Barry Gifford writes this stuff.  After I buy the book we stand outside on the sidewalk, smoking and talking. 

https://plus.google.com/photos/116570597784626887840/albums/5849157066400455681  ... where I live it's warm and we lack assertive boulevards and we don't wa lk in the rain with felt ha ts anymore, we don't wear good leather shoes and overcoat s because we don't have to but want to, so we look to the retro-past for scenes and visions like these . at least I do . there's cheesecak e in there some where, just down the sidewalk out of the rain and it's warm and the glass counter top glows and it's f ul l of creme-filled pastries and the smell of strong fresh coffee and c ho colate cake swirls around the place.   d owntown where I am a jazz bar with all kinds of six ties art work like this has draft beer and kids try and look cool. .. art that used to be called sid ewalk art or tourist art o r the art your parents b rought ba ck from Europe folded up in brown wrapping paper and made you want to go to Paris and see the real th ing somewhere in a ni ...

Big thanks and kudos to Je ssica Har dy and fellow artisans for bringing back the Artists on A Street in Old Town Upland. First Saturday of the month, put it on your calendar.  'W e wanted a place where ho memadeologist s can vend and build a business and build a network,' Jessica told me, walking through the tables on a sunlit Saturday in November. work by Pete Velasco http://sleepwalkersart.com/ Jessica Hardy Detail of a painting by Elza, who works out of Pomona, California. detail of a painting by Jessica Noel Artists on A Street 'Rather than share with importers,' Jessica Hardy says, 'we want to stay with artists who create here locally.'  Why not come on out December 1 for some Holiday shopping, and find something unique and special ?  Artists on A Street, in Old T own Up land, California.

This little guy was sitting up in my secret place today. I told him to leave.   He said, 'I was here first.' Then he stuck his tongue out at me. We settled the dispute and I looked around. Chaparral yucca spears glow like candles and are needle-sharp. The wind was my only companion, and there wasn't very much. The lizard found rock shade and settled in to warm his cold blood.  The East Fork San Gabriel River canyon, far below, is dry tinder, ready for fire season.  Slender shadows are the only relief from the blistering October heat.

The day starts out late , around 8:00 AM.  Coffee, the newspapers, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, checking emails, Facebook, Twitter, looking for something to get excited about. I’ve been working pretty good on my novel this week and last night around 10:30 I’m exhausted, my eyelids closing while I’m reading ‘Hong Kong’ by Stephen Coonts (it’s my first ‘Jake Grafton’ novel that I’ve read by thrill-master Coonts and it’s pretty good) and I’m re-thinking the scene I’m working on in the novel---I think I have the way to end it. Got it, I’m thinking, then considering whether to open up the computer again (it’s getting late and I’m already tired) but no, leave it for today and end it up when I’m fresh. But I’m not fresh. Coffee and the newspapers and computer and emails and web-surfing only put me in that never-land; mid-day blues thinking it’s either nap time, go-out-to-lunch-time, get-out-of-the-house-at-all-costs-time, hit email refresh over and over until someo...

Morning in the Snake River canyon. I don’t know when exactly it happened, but at some point I realized my life was following patterns; places I was living, things I’d do, people I’d meet, opportunities I followed. And so it went. Jackson Hole, Colorado, Southern California. Not everything went according to plan. There were heartbreaks, big ones, little ones, inconsequential ones and ones I made up to prevent myself from changing and compromising. More about that? No. Not now. In my mind I’d string together great thoughts about the reasons certain things were happening. My first radio job, getting into cable television, why I had to go to Colorado and the disasters that broke my spirit for a while. Getting down into Southern California thrust me into a culture of entertainment. Many of the cable networks had major offices there, and I did some work on live television producing and hosting shows featuring actors, athletes, politicians, and went on to co-host a show for the Lo...