No, not autumn. Not for months, yet.

Posted on by Harmless Weirdo

We had a heat wave here in Seattle that lasted almost two weeks, from the end of June through the first 10 days of July. In a normal summer, the grass on the median strip along 17th Ave. NE would just be starting to go dry, and you wouldn’t see an accumulation of dead chestnut leaves like this until mid-October. I’ve seen lots of immature chestnut pods fallen to the ground, too.

I am by no means a big fan of summer; give me autumn and early winter, then talk to me again in the spring. But one of the things I have always loved about summer west of the Cascades is the intense, profound greenness of it. These chestnut trees in July and August are usually so heavy with foliage and cast such a deep, cooling shade shade that even on the hottest days I can walk underneath them and feel reassured that cooler days won’t be long in coming. But this year? Not so much.

Setting the tone.

Posted on by Harmless Weirdo

Okay, I might as well admit it–I have no idea what I’m going to do with this blog, other than use it as a repository for assorted passing thoughts, and photos of stuff that interests and amuses me. I’ll probably post some art here, too.

But at the moment I really don’t have any grand ambitions for it, or dreams of monetizing it, or desire to promote it. I don’t even want to be such a beast as a “blogger”–I just want a place for my stuff that won’t get lost amid the clutter, vomited upon by cats, or saved to a flash drive that gets left behind in a library computer and never seen again.

Origin story.

Posted on by Harmless Weirdo

I swore I wasn’t going to start one of these bloggy things.

But earlier this evening, on the University campus, as I pawed through trash cans in search of used Starbucks cups, a campus cop wanted to know what I was up to.

I explained. “There’s a sculpture I want to make, and I need empty Starbucks cups to do it.”

“Why not just go to Starbucks and ask if you can buy some cups?” he asked. “I’m sure they’d sell them to you.”

“But I can’t do that!” I told him. “It’s against the rules I’ve set for this particular project. The cups have to be used once, then tossed. Buying new ones would go against the core premise behind this piece.”

I have no words to convey the expression on his face at that.

“Look,” I said. “I know I’m a weirdo, and what I’m doing makes absolutely no sense to normal people. But I’m a harmless weirdo.”

And then he laughed. “Yeah, I guess you are,” he replied. He wished me luck with my sculpture, and that was that.

One sign that you spend far too much time online is when you utter a phrase in casual conversation, only to walk away thinking that it would make a cool domain name. You trudge up the hill with your drippy bag full of discarded coffee cups, and wonder if that domain’s taken already. When you get home, you look it up, and–much to your surprise–it’s not. So you register it, just because you can, and then decide you might as well do something with it.

Thus, here I am.