The Artist Presently Known As Ed

Hope against pavement

This ring of grass peeking through the pavement just gives me hope.

More hope

This too gives me hope. Along the southbound I-5 just above Downtown San Diego, there is a branch peeking out from the massive wall of concrete that separates the freeway levels. I don't recall seeing a tree anywhere nearby. I drove by the area countless times before it called me to photograph it and put it before you.

Rainbow over Mission Bay

This greeted me one day at work. I found my driving time to be filled with all sorts of miracle moments.

Soul break, 2008

One day in early 2008 I had to work on a Sunday and I was generally not liking it. I hate working on Sundays and I have gone to the HR cutting block a couple times for being a schedule stickler. But on this day, I got to Sunset Cliffs and had a moment of grace with the enormous and shimmering rain clouds that were surging by. My life was in transition; into the new job delivering produce; newly considering myself a person with no sanguineous family relations left; at a new church; recent dental surgery to correct more than a decade of neglect. A moment like this, stolen from the clock, was just the kind of thing that refreshed my soul and let me know the universe was an alright place after all. I think I was listening to a CD of Taize worship music that also penetrated into me at a deep level that season.

Dead Saguaro

This is not a picture of my own, but it is so great that I spent some time with it in 2010 after my Men's Rites of Passage week in Arizona and worked it into my birthday collage. It looks simultaneously like a cross and crucified man in one item.

Christmas Angel

Our traditional angel broke in the Christmas 2010 season. So we had to turn to something to replace her. And this was well suited, if you know our household.

Nik Kershaw

Nik Kershaw is one of my favorite songwriters and musical artists for over a decade now. A couple blogs tell the story in the music category, or tagged with his name.

Rush, 1990

Rush came onto the scene for me in 1990. Presto was my first Rush album, and in no time I entered my Neil Peart phase and stayed there for a few years. Lesser known is that I used to want Alex Lifeson's breezy blonde hairstyle just like in this picture. Look at my senior picture in the music gallery and you can see an approximation of it.

Top of the list

Every week my produce job posted a list of driver tallies. I usually did pretty well, but this week I got into the top spot. This got me called into the office and congratulated, for no one in my non-route driving position had been to the top of that list. Twas a nice feeling.

Runaway potatoes

On days when I got the big box trucks, it seemed like everything went wrong. I don't know how that happens. Anyhow, one loathsome fate is having multiple bags of potatoes open up on me, and pouring out on the floor or ramp. Spillage was extremely common in the biz, and I'd like to say that I had it under control, but geometry and physics are my sworn enemies in this business.

Hoe in my bed

I usually drove an F-150 truck for my produce moving job. It was all fun and games before the addition of a camper shell. That necessitated something to aid my reach. So I got the company to provide me with a hoe for my bed. On the company dime! I am the envy of politicians everywhere, folks.

In the club

After a few months of being an ace driver, and a coincidental giveaway of my CD, the company decided to promote me to doing shipping, an indoor job. So I got onto the board. It took nearly the rest of my time there before they actually got black dot for me. I guess that's because I was so fast they didn't know if I was coming or going.

Stupidity on parade

What, in the age of peak oil or global warming, is more stupid than driving a truck around in already-jammed traffic in order to move a billboard? These things also cause visual distractions and I came to hate them on many levels while doing delivery work. Trucks like this one, with scrolling ads or other moving media, are really bad because they keep attracting the eye. And the irony is not lost on me: this is an insurance truck, interestingly placed in such a role that it could cause an accident, and the claimant would be the insurance company if someone hits this truck. Wrong people to hit, thinks me. They already know how to vacuum money out of people's accounts. Surely there is no arguing with them if you rear-end their ad truck.

Fallen on hard times

Every day at my produce delivery job I was confronted with the pathos of life, the sad underbelly of the economic system. For a few weeks, these folks camped out in the driveway near where I parked my truck. My heart ached for folks like this. And I saw them all in the industrial areas of San Diego. Often, I grabbed surplus and discard foods that were placed aside for the purpose (after I nagged for a year and more) and either offered or just left it nearby where they might find it. For me, it was as if Jesus was crossing my path on the morning commute every day. A person can only deny that so long before the feeling wells up and demands some action.

Corner office

This guy was always on the corner at the same place in Mission Valley. It might have been the only corner office job he had. It had a view and fresh air. I always wonder if he made more money than me. After a while, I turned off the cynic voice and just tried to come prepared with some food or retired clothing so that I might be ready to offer something. Sometimes it comes in wholesale stock. I remember giving this guy a box of baguettes that were set aside for the fact that the box was broken open. I like to think that a guy like this could not eat all that bread, and would have to retreat and go share it around with Jesus and his fellow disciples under the bridge nearby. If anything, I tried to help such a thing, hopefully to enact a small bit of the Jubilee economics I support in other ways, but none so viscerally as this.

Breathless on Broadway

One winter afternoon in downtown, a homeless woman on the street had a whole emergency crew arrive to take care of her. I got parked in by the vehicles around me, so I took this picture. I guess I do this for about the same reason that Ricky Fitts in American Beauty shot video of everything from floating grocery bags to dead birds: to remember.

Worthless like cops at the scene of the crime

A BMW driver sped past me and zig-zagged in and out of traffic. He was shortly ahead of me when we got to this intersection where two motorcycle cops were out on one corner and a couple were across the street, setting up the Big Brother cameras. The BMW guy blasted through the intersection on the red. No response from cops or camera. Fine.

The intersection of Dick and Wynona

Do you think people have to craft a discreet way of saying they live on Dick? Or that they live "right where Dick and Wynona meet."

Don't call the rabbi

This restaurant is obviously not trying to get a corner on the Jewish market.

Mission Hills UCC Young Adults

This is one of the posters I made for our young adults group that I found myself facilitating in the summer of 2009. I was sort of passed the hot potato from the departing pastoral intern and her first volunteer, a young lady who wanted to do it but who was too busy, got engaged and generally could not take on more.

While we were numbering just a few, I conceptualized and posterized and tried to figure out a way to sell a group identity that suited a group that was never really a group! The tuning fork idea suited our check-in styled conversational gatherings on a regular basis. The fork in the road is a metaphor for the questions of life that are faced by people in the 20-40 bracket.

In the time since, we've developed into a great little decentralized community of friends who genuinely look forward to seeing each other, and helping each other. In the wake of the desolating losses of family and church in the 2005-2008 era, this group was very much my ministry, arising from a lot of painful rejections. I worked from that conviction and felt empowered to do something within the church. To that end, we've had potluck dinners, Thanksgiving dinners, house and dog sitting, and other interactions that just do so much to patch up the damage and make life good. We do some bible study time, some movie nights, and always have a good time. We've also been a first responder crew to new faces at church, extending our radical welcome and incorporating new faces who see fit to join as members eventually.

More banners

Piloting the bucket was never my job. But I was okay with the truck. It was kind of adventurous driving certain places. Always there was a need to be mindful of the bucket and extension. The banner guys up top would always be in there once we started a route. Due to certain positioning requirements, this job let me drive in some odd ways that no regular vehicle traffic is allowed. Zig zag, on curbs or grass, backwards, and so on.

Banners

For several fall-winter holiday seasons from the start of 2006 to the start of 2008, I worked on a banner hanging crew as truck driver. The boss is this loudmouthed but generous libertarian character with a rough German manner about him. He was kind of coarse but always paid favorably for such work, and was nice enough to take me in during some harsh periods of unemployment and basically save the season from financial ruin. The work was done usually in the middle of the night, barring only the rainy ones. It was winter and sometimes bitter cold. It is damned dirty, with road dust, jet fuel slime, and bird shit that accumulates on the banners and decor. There is usually traffic burning past on boulevards and sometimes parking lots are painfully slow moving from pole to pole, but somehow the man-to-man exchange of service for cash was very dignified and uncomplicated in a delightfully old world kind of way. I respected this guy a lot more than others with far more sightly and precise organizations that paid less, asked for the moon and stars, and wanted me to shave.

Doors and windows

Our goofy landlords waited until the dead of winter to replace our windows and the kitchen door. This was after we notified them of this work needing to be done—in APRIL. They did everything about 1/3-assed. I have to put it that way because half-assed was seemingly out of reach for them!

Doors and windows

They got the work done on the 2nd of January, 2008. They came by to tell us the day before that the crew would be there the next day at 7 am. We had just cleaned house earlier on New Year's day, and then found ourselves having to move stuff out from the window walls, making a holy mess. All that and the fact that the next morning Kelli was off to Florida and literally less than half an hour after the window work was happening, I was off to Riverside county for work that would keep me busy till the wee hours when Kelli was leaving. Heck of a way to kick off the year.

Wisdom to spare

In July of 2009 I finally got the wisdom teeth pulled after about 13 years of thinking I was wiser than the dentist. After a crazy stressful buildup, I found it quite bearable. Oh, what a dumb thing, waiting.

EONSNOW.org

I used to think I was going to be a peak oil activist-educator. To that end, I made a site in 2005/6 that tried to get those ideas together with links and my limited perspective. By the start of 2006, I had pretty much decided that I didn't know shit but for the facts available to me. It was about that time when I started meeting with Lee Van Ham more and found that I had a lot of spiritual work to do before I could take this topic to anyone and hope to convert anyone to new habits. These days (2011) I am doing better by doing the website for Lee and letting him do the material.

Union Tribune letter to the editor, 6/5/05

It was a good boost to my idea of being on the right track when my peak oil letter to the editor made it into the UT newspaper in town on the very day that I launched my EONSNOW effort with a showing of The End Of Suburbia at my church basement that night.

The Anti-EONSNOW

EONSNOW was short for End Oppressive Non-Sustainability NOW. I fancied the term a catch all for the oil-based lifestyle we lived, and by extension, the main face of that problem was the consumer society. Things like this silly cart point the way to what I rail against. The "oppressive" part of the name was a slight at the advertising-propaganda industry aiming to sell us stuff we don't need but buy anyway, often at the expense of our ability to be well rounded, versatile people interfacing with the materials used to make goods, and to get work done. Like, most of us turn over our consuming and maintenance decisions to the experts in a commercial transaction, without trusting ourselves to have the creativity or focus or skill to make, fix, or maintain items. The loss of empowerment was the thing I railed against.

Lost Hills, CA oil fields

I happened into the Lost Hills area on a detour route while driving for AV Concepts. I had no idea it was there, but I recognized it immediately from an encounter with the photographic work of Edward Burtynsky, who has a spendid vision for capturing the industrial dark side of the global economy.

Highway 1 northbound

I love this section of CA-1 in the vast empty stretches of the California coast. It is good for the soul to not see a bunch of suburban garbage.

Perilous drive

The drive to Big Sur can be kind of perilous at times. It is a breathtaking drive that I have done a few times, on my honeymoon, and once for a gig in Monterey.

Firestorm sky

On the first morning of the massive fires that took my county by storm in October 2003, this is what the sky looked like at my house, about 15-20 miles from the primary action. As the morning progressed, the fires came to points within about six miles from my house, and for the first time ever, I feared for my house, particularly since it was making a fast march across several miles with no containment in sight on that first morning. Kelli has a fascinating tale to tell since her house was in Poway, and she had to evacuate not just herself but Okua the dog and some other effects from Cindy Terry's place. Cindy was off at the hospital helping her daughter (Kelli's friend) Trinity deliver her first baby in all this! The sky was like this for a few days, and we all had to stay inside for at least three days. What a time.

The end of Hog Heaven

Hog Heaven Studio went out with a whimper in June 2005. The last jam I recorded was an acoustic guitar and bass recording with Glenn, who was living with us for six weeks in the midst of our drama. After that jam, I just put stuff into the corner and had to tend to the vast moving project ahead. That and the fact Kelli's car died. And that we both were out of work. Hell.

Quapaw patio, 2005

This was shot in the midst of our moving out, late July 2005 or so. It gives an idea of how the patio looked once my old man made his modifications, but this is really after he got busted and had to remove them. The block wall once was about as high as my chin, and above it was a shodily done window and frame that robbed even more light. By this time, all that was found to be illegal (I could have told him that), and he had to remove it while cursing through his teeth. Big work for a guy who needs to be slowing down, and a job I never asked him to do at my house. Alas...

Protesting the sale

This is a sign that was posted by the realtor that sold my house. I came to resent that place. Some people hide behind their profession as "just business." Even at 1%, the realtor gets about $5000 and more. Who knows whether that is buying an ATV or paying college tuition for his kid, but one day the owner of this Calsur place called me on some order of business and I gave the guy a piece of my mind, lambasting him for capitalizing on this family matter that has caused me a lot of misery, and has left my father able to profit stupendously on a property that he inherited with no contest. It was an exercise in futility on my part, but who knows. People sometimes have revelations from the situations that they encounter in their work, and I was there to offer such a situation to a guy who seemed not to be fazed by his part in my misery.

I wrote my protest on the sign one day when I came by the house and knew time was running out to make my last feeble but heartfelt statements. Among other game playing on my part, this was the cause for the last time I have seen my father in December 2006. After he got word of this sign (no doubt tipped off by a nosey neighbor he befriended), he came over to my then-current house and we proceeded to have a massive blowout in the street. That was the last straw for me taking his shit with this house.

Housing values

This is the actual page I visited to learn of the sale of the house in mid 2007. I wasn't given a written notice or other communication. After the day in 2006 when I stripped all my stuff out of the Quapaw house, and after the sign was written upon, silence fell between my father and me. Later searching turned up this page, which was partly relief and partly angering. But by then I was already three properties removed from it, so I was adjusting.

Trucky

My well-behaved truck of many years, since 1996. This shot is on the outskirts of Joshua Tree National Park in 2010.

Mileage 200,000

Just a few miles before I parked the truck on New Year's Eve, about to launch into 2007.

Mileage 200,006

Ending 2006 at 200,006. Cute, eh?

Mileage 206,167

Starting 2008 at 206,167.

Mileage 209,855

Starting off 2009.

Mileage 220,992

Mileage to start 2012 with.

37th birthday poster

I had to ponder how my 37th birthday amounted to anything. Falling between the more notable ages of 30 and 40, it was a number that took some justification. But it made sense once I happened into a way of seeing the last decade as a spiritual growth curve. Read the blog with full details.

Richard Rohr

Richard Rohr, OFM, at St. Timothy's in Laguna Niguel talking about the father wound and other issues of male spiritual life and quests.

Richard Rohr

Richard Rohr up close

Journaling at Red Mesa

This table is the one where I sat and wrote in this very same journal book ten years before. Back then it was at my house where my grandmother had just left for the last time, and in this picture, ten years later, it is in New Mexico at the CAC's Red Mesa camp. I chose to donate it in part to offload the extra gear, but also to share a piece of my old home life with people who might possibly appreciate the story of how it got to be there.

Kelli's forum at SCNC UCC Gathering

In addition to doing a third year of planning for the Annual Gathering of the SoCal/Nevada Conference of UCC, Kelli did a forum on disability, accessiblity and the church. Captured from a video we took.

Archive Boxes

My personal archive of documents, photos, and correspondence is contained in several plastic tubs, divided more or less precisely by year and other criteria. The year 2011 has been a key year for raiding the stuff and scanning for the benefit of the site. Some interesting journals and letters have been scanned and transcribed anew for posting. Audio archives have also been raided similarly.

38th birthday poster

The 37th birthday party was made significant by some arcane number games, but this year the math did not seem to really indicated much. I just started messing with images that reflected my year—the trip to New Mexico being the most distinctive and profound experience by far. And current events leading up to my birthday were of a family nature. As time passes, I am learning the lessons of gracefully and compassionately understanding my situation. On the very day of October 12th, even as I was watching the clock tick toward the hour and minute of my birth, I was writing a long letter to my sister Chris, who in many ways is as difficult to deal with as my mom, but in other times, has been someone I felt more kinship with.

The letter dares forgive her for sustained distance and estrangment and hostility but still holds her accountable for some things that show she is still operating out of a dark and murky heart-place. Bye Bye Black Sheep something that references their dismissal of me, but also my dismissal of their dismissal! The letter I wrote is something that tries to claim some lost dignity, and is far more assertive and bold. Of course, the reality is it is for me to do this work. I doubt anyone who would read it on Chris' end would give a care.

Kelli's file transfer project

Kelli has not the patience or interest in computer tech projects. I'm not much better sometimes. A project that drew on for about six years longer than it needed to was this one: getting Kelli's mid-90s word processor files from the floppies (with .wpt files) to a contemporary Mac, which is all we use now. The Brother word processor could convert .wpt to .txt but only one file at a time. It was arduous. I totally understand how she wanted to avoid it.

To do the project, we kept two older computers on hand just to get things across. The floppies passed .txt files to the rebuilt PC she had from about 2001 (and it was made of older parts), then the PC bridged the floppies to the Zip disks which the Mac could receive. And then it was just a matter of moving from one Mac to another. We've moved house twice since she started all this and upon bracing for a third move, I laid down the law. Time to do this and get rid of these damned machines!

Here, the PC and the old G4 share a monitor from one process to the next. Since the PC had nothing of modern communications, we had to use the disk drives. I later realized that we could have skipped the Zip stage by moving the PC hard drive itself into a Mac. Oh well. Now things are on their way to digital heaven!

Stripping the G4

This is the first Mac I got for $2500 or so in 2001. In the end, I gutted it for its working drives (not the CD drive, a piece which precluded me from teching the computer anymore since I couldn't run the boot up utility CD), and anything else of any worth. Then I took one of the smooth side panels off, featuring the gray Apple logo, and kept that as a souvenir. And then off to the e-cycling it goes.

This computer, my other dead G4, Kelli's old PC and iBook all coughed up a total of eight hard drives which I enclosed in new boxes and retained for various purposes. In recent times we've sent four computers and a word processor to digital heaven.