Having finally wound down my resampling of the sixties with “Witness to the Revolution”,

a book within which comparisons to the present day are inevitable, particularly the clever way the Powerts have managed to conduct their Current [much longer and more profitable] War without the inconvenience of having so much of the population so actively in Opposition merely by keeping most of them out of the crosshairs. Other revolutionary parallels abound, often in mirror image, but fifty years later the ‘cultural’ aspect seems to have brought us acres of expansiveness across arts high, low and applied, a transformative digital ‘revolution’ [read Fred Turner’s “From Counterculture to Cyberculture” if you doubt that], the iphone, Burning Man, Coachella and endless other opportunities for public derangement while from the political piggy front we continue with militias, idiots with teabags hanging off the bills of their “Make America Great” caps, Planned Parenthood bombings, Newt Gingrich, Dylan Roof, the total polarization of the government, James Hodgkinson, Marco Rubio and, I suppose, Donald Trump. Demockery is coming…to the U.S.A.  Actually, it’s been here awhile; binins as usual.

But that was a dire digression, and I happily returned to researching RD, Richard Diebenkorn, a life much easier for me to identify with.  Turned out he fled south from Berkeley a year ahead of the so-called Summer of Love and didn’t return for more than twenty [settling then into what could have been my own once-upon-a-time dream of a country house] whereas I, twenty years younger, fled south the subsequent spring but returned by decade’s end, which may explain my somewhat morbid fascination with the era although, as Jon Carroll so aptly put it, “candidly, I don’t have a lot of patience with 60s nostalgia.  Never matches my memory of the time.”  Nor mine, exactly; everyone’s was different, though over us all hung Vietnam, as it still does.

Meanwhile our shyer-than-last-year’s Magpie coterie [not shown] grew raucously apace

as did the incendiary heaps of dying drying grasses and

[bugs]

the moon,  filling out nicely above the still wet playa [our next will rise over the Huajatollas].

Friday we were early enough to catch the young ‘pies awaking in their nightbushes, then

North to Alturas,

Thai food again,

a return over pavements recently wetted, fun roads

to wind and dust and colder weather through the weekend…

along with rat #9 [not shown; these are burros by the roadside] and then, also ripe

for relocation, rat number ten.

Later that afternoon an Expedition to water’s edge witnessed a gathering

of Avocets twenty years since their last appearance.

Monday an all-night rain, chill morning trip to the P.O.

and snow on the Granites in June…not totally unheard of but, recently,

yeah. The weather broke by evening,

with swallows too swift to capture, a train

and still some dusting on the Selenites.

June, with moon…