December 28, 2003
I woke up today thinking about analogies between illness and natural disasters (I have no idea why.) Anyway, a heart attack (my preference for a way to go) is like an earthquake - sudden, infrequent, only lasts a few seconds, and when it's over you either survived or didn't. You know the "big one" is coming sooner or later, but it's easy to forget about in between the little ones. Cancer is like a flood - it keeps raining and raining and raining and you keep telling yourself it's going to stop anytime now, while you sand bag and run the sump pumps. But sometimes it keeps coming and then you're floating down the river on your rooftop. Infection is like a fire - most of the time the small ones can be easily extinguished, but if you're vulnerable or not paying attention it can roar out of control and consume you, and people around you. Mental illness is like the wind - an invisible thing, it can be a gentle, barely perceptible breeze, or a nagging little draft that tugs and pulls at you from dawn to dusk, or a howling gale that shifts this way and that with little warning, or a tornado that carries you away and then spits you out and disappears, leaving you blinking in the calm sunshine and wondering what happened.

December 26, 2003
Yesterday was one of those wonderful California winter days, with the warm sun offset by a cool breeze off the ocean and lots of changing cloud formations blowing across an "every blue in the box" sky. (The rest of the year, the skies are cloudless - they're either blue or grey, but pretty flat.) I rode my bike along the beach and stopped every now and then to watch the kite flyers. I got some fabulous photos and some of them will probably turn into paintings. I came back from the bike ride and started right in on a little painting of the Cliff House. I managed to finish it on one sitting - I'll post it on the web site later. It was great fun to do and gave me a lift, in terms of getting back to this big commission that I need to finish ASAP (a vertical painting of the Golden Gate Hotel.)

December 23, 2003
I finished the commission that I've been working on (or at least one of them, the one that's due for christmas) and I just got an email from the client that she wants to pick it up on christmas day. I had been thinking of going to see Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times" at the Castro, but maybe we'll do that later. Almost everyone I know is out running around having their pre-christmas nervous breakdowns, and yet for Dave and I, this time of year turns into a very quiet, reflective period that seems just right for the winter solstice. I don't mean to imply that I'm prescient or wise about this... I just found myself in this place more or less by accident, as a side effect of following the artist's path (with the accompanying financial restrictions and need for solitude.)

December 22, 2003
The power went out here around 6pm last Saturday, but it had been flickering a while before that, so we were prepared. Dinner was done, the computers were off, and all we had planned for the evening was reading, so that's what we did - by candlelight. Power came back up Sunday morning. So it was no big deal for us. Apparently it was a big deal for a lot of other people. I heard a lot of complaints about the cold, but I was plenty warm in just a short-sleeved t-shirt.