just saw harry dean stanton as lucky, his last film. it's a beautiful rumination on death, and it is a beauty. i could say stuff, but it seems slight in light of the experience. you just have to experience it, and i'd say like mister, man if you don't get this guy, you are missing something inside.

oh, i just love kissing mister's nose.    -r.

mister went to the dog doc today for a blood test. he shows no sign of being sick.  
he's so alert and curious and happy. karin said, is he getting nicer or something, and 
how is it possible he could get sweeter? i said it doesn't seem possible, but it is. he is. 

the world is so sick today i think people withdraw into their own shells and go inside their own houses and make their own little worlds, but as a dog walker i have to be out all the time and i can't be on my personal device i have to be in my attention and notice my environment as a neighborhood even though it's mostly strangers and i don't know who's and obamite or a trumper and i mostly know the dogs and orient that way and it's exhausting anyway inside or out thinking about stuff and as a renter never getting ahead as they say and ever fearing the developers i can withdraw but not in my own space it's just a place i was lucky enough to find and be allowed to make a refuge in this frangible world but it's not my own not my own i know.

i feel like i am you and you are me or we are oneanother or something you know. it's rather scary in a way though i know that's just me not you.

i was wondering on the walk to the island this morning about surveillance in obamaland. i live by his old house and there is a continual surveillance on his street even when he's nowhere near. as an ex-president he will have that surveillance forever, and in obamaland the surveillance will expand and confiscate our park. for life. he will be lord of the park with surveillance, for life. i wonder if people think about that. everything connected to obamaland will be controlled and surveilled from now on. 
to me that, and drone strikes, and suppression of freedom of the press, will be obama's legacy.  
i was talking with a sympathetic birder who pointed out how much worse the trump is but i just see him as the next albeit far more hideous face of empire. 
anyway if we didn't walk this somewhat denuded green space i'd likely be too preoccupied with other things like assault rifles, school slaughters, and multiple genocidal wars. i wouldn't have noted that the security camera tree had shed it's camera. for the moment someone is still caring for the tree more than security. but we mostly can't keep surveillance in our mind. we don't think about being watched. the cameras recede, they seem like dead objects, not eyes. i like to see them laying on the ground. 
i'm thinking i won't want to walk in a theme park campus with a lighted tower next a golf course adorned with great lawns and security details. i'm thinking my dog and i will be considered domestic terrorists for the outrageous freedom we assumed today. i'm thinking of who will surveil and who will be surveilled and who will surveil the surveillers. in obamaland in trumpworld. in my heart. a sink.
i was thinking about guns again and freedom and security. i read that there are 101 guns per hundred people in america. after the valentines's day school massacre the trumps say let's arm the teachers, and lets teach the children guns save lives, let's let the kids grow up to be concealed carriers too. let's teach the kids to be soldiers in the war on terror, let's start them young, so they will not make the mistake of innocence and will know the law of kill or be killed. 
it happens, my mind trails off into these terrible thickets, just walking with birders in the park. it's not natural, i know. it's sick. mea culpa. i should be thinking about something else, about those adorable first buds of spring. i should be using my imagination to grow good things.

man there's so much rhetoric about obombaland it kind of reminds me of all the hoopla about settling the west. but the salient thing about that is displacement. and gentrification. and the loss of green space. and crushed dreams. the indians knew what was happening. i feel that way about obombaland. there were a lot of different people acting or being affected then, as now, but it seems like the same ongoing story of gentrification and the conquest of money over land and people. the people without the money will lose their neighborhood and the green space that was intended for all people rich and poor, that was not determined by wealth or race, that was open to all. what will happen in obombaland is clear to me, the rich are moving in, the corporations will benefit, and the people who are not homeowners or wealth will be pushed aside, looking for a place they can afford to live.
it seems rather bleak, like how can we compete with all the massed money and power that want our park and want to clean up and gentrify our neighborhood. but there's something happening all the rhetoric and the divisions don't address, consciousness rises mysteriously, independent of uncritical thought and propaganda. people sense what is happening as animals sense the coming of the chainsaws and bulldozers. people with good common sense know that there is something yet to preserve that is common to all. we have to hope that common sense and community and green space, that the voice of the voiceless will be heard, the commons that connect us all.

happily, r. found the tiny chip i lost with these pictures inside. i felt funky today, but mister was happy and friendly. he goes to greet people and i follow him. he knows people more than me. i'd be more of a solitary boy without his social charm. he went to a girl sitting on the stone wall of the point today and sat by her and put his paw in her lap. she was waiting with camera for her friends to come and propose and i thought of the time we walked into a proposal in osaka garden on wooded island and they said this is like a golden blessing. that's what it seems like every day with mister. i want to be with him and if i can be more like him and i think i am slowly under the tutelage of his buddha nature coming out of my thoughts and into the world. i wonder if i'll ever be as open sweet and unguarded as mister. i wish everyone could be.