Some chick dies--finally--and that's the news. That's the news? Meanwhile, desperate prognostications that we are all in for it, that the earth's feeding tube is about to be unplugged, woosh by unnoticed, like that flock of birds that should be gliding overhead, but isn't, because the species went extinct.

Mother nature--our mother--what is the phrase? She isn't quite herself today. We've ripped her apart, stuffed her full of sawdust and stitched her back together, propped her up in a chair. She looks pretty bad, and it's hard to pretend anymore. Maybe once she has become totally dessicated and...well, she has smelled really bad for a long time now, but we stopped noticing... but maybe when her head falls off and rolls past our feet, we will think... huh... we killed her... and then we watched her rot... Prolly shouldn'ta done that. :(

Nature again rears its hideous head with scythes for teeth and takes a bite out of humanity's side. Though, frankly, earthquakes don't kill that many people. I mean, really, let's blame the manmade objects that fall on top of them, okay? Ouch.

What can one do about this business? According to the news, offer condolences. That's what Americans do best: offer condolences and canned creamed corn, a little pocket change. Oh, and prayers. Prayers are the glue that bind the sticks together that make a house in Indonesia. Of course they use other materials; you can see, too, they live just like us! Crap everywhere.

Purists say thatched works best. Thatch crushes less people. There's a rat problem though. Rats like old thatch. They like barbecues on balconies in south OC, too, my friend Robert says. He could use an owl. Should we send owls to poor and impoverished Sumatra? Won't help prevent an earthquake, you're right. Wasn't thinking. Just tossing out ideas.

Too much work. No time. Besides, very few--two--readers last week.

Rode last night under an irrelevant moon and the perpetual day that exists in southern California anyway. Have a bicycle headlight, but what fer? The rule, essentially. Won't get run over, and if I did, who would notice...no one right away, except the boss. I watch the rings of the soft light smooth out the pavement in front of me, as the orange lamps make my bike into a crisp silhoutte for traffic to squash.

Then it took a long time to drive to LA today, what they call a looooong time. Sixty miles is relative; I think I could have traveled it by horseback long ago and camped under that moon. It hasn't changed much except for some 35-year-old footprints and a flag, and maybe a few more dings and dents from meteors opening their doors too carelessly.

But I don't have that option of traveling slowly and under the moonlight now; everything is rush-rush at a slug's pace, no matter what time of night or day. Price of gas? No problem. Just waste money. Go. I had to; I'm down here and doing crazy things like riding my bike at night. Gotta go back to the city once in a while and eat Thai.

Out of town a few days along the (rainy) Central Valley, over a couple blossoming hills, through a few muddy canyons, beside topped-off lakes, along flooded orchards. Banners say "Food grows where water flows." Water is flowing.

At the base of the mountains, acres of purple flowers look like a tilted pond in the near-drowned sun; on the way back, cattle swims in the clover. The water in San Luis Reservoir is as choppy as broken glass churning in a tumbler. A tornado hit south SF, but missed me by an hour or two. I was already east of Gilroy, a garlic town seemingly owned by Con-Agra nowadays (based on the signs beside old farms) following an RV through Pacheco Pass. All this open space to the untrained eye looks undeveloped, but it's being worked: migrant workers, stored water, wine and cows. Some is "saved." Early last fall if I remember right I stopped at Pinnacles and hiked; one day I'd also like to visit a mysterious place quite a bit south, and possibly Henry Coe St. Pk. higher up...all by myself.

In the City Friday morning to kill an hour I got soaked walking from my parking space to the book shop to Mission Dolores, which I guess is a religious establishment. I only wanted to see it because of its relevant history. It was, coincidentally, built at the base of a bunch of empty hillsides, too.

No, really, that's okay, no fish, please. Too smelly. Oil prices are NOT sky high. A gallon is still cheaper than other stuff, and if we'd stop driving so much, we could save enough Lincolns to buy another DVD or make some more cell phone calls while stuck in traffic. I have a novel idea; move closer to work. In another kinda non-sequitor, China sucks. Or does it? I don't care. Used to be my stuff was made in Japan. It was a little sleeker, maybe. Can't remember. I love oil, like to scramble eggs with it instead of butter fat. Also it's good in lip balm and plastic bags, cuz ya know they don't even axe if I wants paper or plastic no mo', just load everythin' up in plastic; takes the worry out of it, saves me about three seconds so I can wait at the stop light a little longer and burn some more of that expensive petroleum distillate I love to read about. Oh, it's all just too much.

Our Chancellor and his oil Nazis want to go Krystalnacht on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and plan to propose a final solution next week. Undeveloped wilderness is forever the put-upon minority, but in this case America will not be there to fight the war in its defense. In fact, nature is an unwilling ally, part of the coalition of the willing strong-armed into the fight against terrorism, Iraq and all things great and Arab.

The so-called elite du jour made much of their money by sucking up oil like a mosquito on the frontier's neck. If you found it in your backyard you became rich overnight, bought more land and kept on drilling. If you never found anything, God didn't like you. Tough beans!

Texas, the Germany of America, dried up years ago, and OPEC has had a one-up on the oil lottery by being in the right place and the right time for far too long, says our President, friend and whipped slave of Herr Moneybags. Backdoor deals in the stealth of night and roundabout politics make for interesting history, but for now they mean gobs and gobs of gooey cash for guys already living in more than one mansion.

This leads us to the essay question part of the exam:

1) Why do people complain about gas prices when they drive trucks three times the size of anything they reasonably need?

2) Why are people willing to listen to anyone with a quick fix to their diminished McBudget when the plan is neither quick nor a fix?

3) Why do people blame foreigners and environmentalists when they themselves have increased demand and decreased supply?

4) Do people seriously think they can solve their "problem" by allowing the Bush-Cheney cabal to tear off a piece of Alaska's coastal plain merely to polish its pride?

5) How much of the money we've spent "supporting our troops" and "rebuilding Iraq" has gone directly into the pockets of the same investors hoping to tap into ANWR?

6) Does the promise of short-term "energy independence" mean we have to go to war with China now because it supplies everything else we consume?

More ranting later; I'm sure you're tired. Or, if not, here's some counter propaganda. Don't be offended; it's pro-business.

On the beach there are more people than gulls; waves filled with human flotsam, not kelp, surfboards hide the sharks. Everywhere I go someone else is already there. We have a dearth of empty places, open spaces; climb a mountain, someone's up there on her mobile telling her husband how, like, beautiful it is and that maybe later he should pick up something to eat from Baja Fresh or should they order out from Papa John's? Nowadays something that seemed inaccessible even 20 years ago is not; you can go there if you want to and you're totally entitled; you can fly there, rent an SUV, drive up to it, climb with high-tech shoes and a squeeze bottle and chatter about how great an accomplishment it is the whole time. You don't have to be serious and plan ahead much; National Geographic Adventure spells it out for you and with precision. Besides, you can't get lost, you have your GPS and you could always call and ask for help if you trip and knock your head against a rock (but that will never happen because nature is so feng shui). Wilderness as sport has made the only way to get away the Kevorkian way, and that's no fun, who wants to do that? Hmm.

My brother wants me to write about seeds. I don't know about seeds. I think most people don't. That's why they can take seeds out of our hands. They shouldn't, but they want to. Who are "they"? I don't know. Aren't all seeds genetically modified? Not in a lab, but by breeding and select cultivation? For thousands of years people altered plants and animals (chihuahuas and Granny Smiths aren't exactly nature's way), but suddenly a company can patent a gene. Explain.

My friend Marie sent an email that supports a petition to warn Warner Bros. against bastardizing decades-old cartoon characters that by all logic should have become part of the public domain years ago (their creators having all died by now). But in this case, the "they" still exists in corporate form and so "it" can do whatever the heck it wants. Frankly, I don't see why the WB shouldn't be allowed to devil-up already devlish characters. I think we should all have access to Bugs Bunny and do whatever we want with him because he shouldn't belong to anyone. Maybe secretly Time-Warner is adapting because eventually it will lose ownership of the original. Of course, that eventuality is upwards of 120 years from when Bugs was born, so maybe around 2050 we can start putting him in a suit instead of a dress.

Meanwhile the President in his ad nauseum way talks about an "ownership" society where people "own" their own money (in contrast to social security where the government, "belonging to the people," watches our money for us, which, in a sense, turns out to be "us" watching our own money). But we can't "own" anything unless we have tons and tons of $, which we don't. We have a few thousand dollars culled from our paycheck over the years, and the money still won't be ours--it will be invested for us, into the very corporations that don't want us to own anything. We can't buy land and protect it from them; if we do wrestle a parcel away from agribusiness or real estate developers, we won't be able to plant with "their" seeds, and if we turn on the TV in the afternoon--which we shouldn't--we will only see what they think we want them to think we want to see.

Seeds of confusion.

On parole in L.A. my feet find their way. I know I'm not really missed (I made no impression while I wandered here for 10 years or so), but it is still a comfort as my shoes greet the sidewalks all friendly-like.

The city is a blanket that curls up around me for a hundred miles. Out there in neosuburbia, my feet stick out. I like the trails, the sea, but I get cold toes.

Here in the center of my old home I'm all warm and cozy. I know it's tattered and smelly and threadbare, it's stained with spots and needs to be stitched up in a lot of places, maybe even thrown out. But how do I rid myself of something so comfortable? Its patches of exotic cloth may clash, but they exist at a known intersection, they somehow belong. They are like my memories of living here, of all the walks along the boulevards and avenues in the baddest moods, seeing the same homeless faces every day, hearing all the noise, smelling all the funk. I am selfishly fond of these moments.

Maybe if I didn't know the history, it wouldn't mean as much. But I'm aware that Cherokee, a street where I used to live, is inaccessible today, near the nucleus of that wide circle protecting the Oscar ceremony from the lower classes. A few years ago they wouldn't have thought they'd come back to this filthy place, but the stars, such as they are, have returned. I can't blame them.

I could sense by the volume and duration of Friday night's 12-hour downpour that a lake had formed over Laguna Canyon Road again. And sho nuff some time before dawn one of those stealth divisions of local government had snuck orange cones across both ends, redirecting mindless drivers who thought they could carry on as if the sun was shining Saturday morn. A deluge is a deluge, folks. Stagecoach needs to rest a while.

People have so much faith in their own survival and in the infallibility of their plans. They can't wrap their mind around this nuisance known to the rest of the world as weather. Southern California is designed for the sun. If it rained like this every year, a lot of people would pack up and move on to Mars.

It's Tuesday morning now; still coming down. It's disappointing when the curtain of water rises and it quiets for a spell. I don't know what to do, I feel like the popcorn bag is empty, there's nothing to watch on the screen, only static on the radio and a blank canvas on the wall. It's all so post-modern, until I remember those lovely words: "scattered showers." Ah, here comes the rain again.

So this is sorta pointless, like I said before. Who's gonna read it besides so and so and what's his face, familial familiarity and some people who click with curiosity and flee quick finding no nekkid pix and nothin' to needle the needy neurochemicals of noodles all dry and gasping from too much prattle on the TV. I am this close to dropping away from the cliff, no catcher to intercept me from the field of rye; that field long gone since roundabout 1975 they mowed it down and made it into a subdivision, addition, development, community what have you, and called it Cuesta Verde or Quail Oaks or Ho-Hum Estates. Gotta woods behind my house with a fort; we build an igloo in the winter, no plans, but it works, it's nice and cozy but kinda small near the swingset, though it melts so fast; winter is always over really quick. You hate it too long to start to love it when it's gone.

Back and forth a few times on that wide wet street (raining again), circling parking lots, getting out of the way of countless Ford F-150s, chasing street names that change east to west. Finally I find the numbers outside a high-rise by the airport, follow the "P" into the innocuous pale garage, "P" my car up a level, walk down, cross a paved walk and push, then pull, a glass door. An old guard at a desk says something, but I'm not sure what at first, until I see another set of glass doors to my right. He has greeted me with the words "Welcome to the museum." It is much more like entering a bank.

The exhibit opened today; small works by an adept California Impressionist, the victim of an incapacitating automobile accident who had lots of time on his hands afterward. He painted the coast near Monterey and up to San Jose, sometimes further, over and over again, demarcating familiar place names on board and paper. You can see the seasons and the years change, you know old from new. The hues range from purple to green to gold, as they do here in California. The foreground is flowers or grasses or rocks, a twisted cypress or a crashing wave in the middle. The horizon alters from hazy to crisp as the edge of a dime.

This is my favorite kind of art, even though it makes me furious. William Wendt got me hooked with a giant canvas at LACMA. He painted in full detail what lies beneath the last century of incorrigible growth. It isn't just that the past has been recorded so accessibly (and then used to thwart its own subject). It is that one cannot really access it at all. What is there is so strikingly realistic but unreal, so frustratingly close to what we know but so far from where we actually live.

There's a 24-inch painting by Wendt available at a gallery in Laguna Beach, sort of where I live, but it's $145, 000. That's a good $400,000 cheaper than the average price of a house out here. Somebody loan me the money.

It's another of those classic 75-degree, gorgeous, preturnatural days in Southern California that makes you realize why 20 million people live here, over 10,000 on Skid Row alone. The constancy of freeway traffic--its never-ceasing blur of noise filling the valleys like a perpetual locust cloud--whispers into our ears with the familiarity of an old friend. Discarded fast-food detritus chases itself playfully across the streets, meets at corners, rushes off to other parts of town. Advertisements scroll across the horizon leashed to biplanes, a fine linear aesthetic parallel to the waste-capped waves on the oily ocean below, always rolling, never at rest. Palpitating helicopters, private jets and whispy industry clouds seem content to linger in the rain-washed sky, blue for at least a day. I love to see the mountains and the sea at once, I love the gleam of semi-trucks hauling their wares to Wal-Mart and beyond (the smaller ones to Chinatown, its scent of ancient grease, its sidewalks scuffed and pocked). Ah, nature! I love to shield my forehead from the sun, to stand still in the breeze, to feel an ant meander across my hand.

Black and slippery birds continue to bubble up onto the beaches of southern California. The cause, some think: abandoned wells and pipelines in Ventura County that leaked a little, jogged loose by last month's rain. That's north of L.A., where the previous century meets suburbia and an influx of people has induced industry flight. Corporations not only hit the road when families show up, they help build houses. Even the military has to tiptoe around suburbia. Dried up factories can't pollute carte blanche, and petroleum companies, eyes on Arabia, choose whether to do the right thing or run for the hills -- or out of them, leaving the land to fend for itself. I wish we could place bets on the latter.

A gruesome gray lesion on the earth's soft skin, the cancer of the angels stubbornly grows. The east-west range of the Santa Monica mountains remains green, protected by a hurried '70's mandate and today completely surrounded by festering sprawl. Compelled by liberal wealth in Malibu, the protection of that acreage stands in odd contrast to the south end of this metropolis, where a land baron's inheritors have stopped to think--sometimes at legal gunpoint--and tossed portions of their loaf to the starving wild, making it corporate earnings policy without Federal intervention (except that their old ranch happens to house a few species covered by the threatened ESA). Then between the thickening edge of L.A.'s five counties and the tip of San Diego's burgeoning 'burbs, the thumbprint of a Marine Corps base provides evidence of the past. Camp Pendleton is the only chunk of truly undeveloped land outside of the Southland's impossibly craggy national forests. Thank Allah we're at war.

Bald, black-cloaked, he hunches over and ignores the circling crows, who tease and chatter insults as he unwraps a rodent sandwich. Gone when I return, next afternoon he roosts on the sidewalk as if waiting for the bus: blinking, silent, passive. A neighbor says they used to hang out in Nellie Gail, where you have to be a member of the homeowner's association to ride the horse trails or at least pay up; but the wealthy denizens of that former ranch didn't like the bad element and pushed them out of the neighborhood.

On Point Reyes 500 miles north, say, 13 years ago, I saw a flock perched noiselessly over a sea cliff. As I gingerly stepped across the rain-charged grass, they remained suspiciously still, as if I'd stumbled upon a drug deal. Though it's likely he has simply come down from the wintery mountain to vacation in warm suburbia, this stranger on the street corner seems similarly up to no good. He's the first I've witnessed since that sketchy encounter in '92.

I'm not sure why we assign human attributes to animals; maybe we're so related that we see ourselves in their behavior. But it's a bummer buzzards get such a bad rap. The California condor, an older cousin of the turkey vulture, remains mostly behind bars. Estranged family members down south have had trouble, too -- though it was nice to learn they saw a little freedom yesterday.

The Pacific from here to Santa Barbara has lately spit out oiled birds. Perplexed scientists offer the survivors a free bath and a return ticket offshore. At the same time, giant squid have slopped onto the sand DOA in Orange County, and public dissections in Dana Point reveal few clues. These may be separate mysteries or one combined. Those in the know have eliminated "natural seepage" from possible postulations. What a relief! All nature needs is another black mark on its sketchy rap sheet, even if lately the whole thing's a frame.

The squid, some think, have traveled from South America to replace a predator paucity in local waters. Sharks and the like have little space between nets and kayaks to do their thing, and poachers have helped push down populations cuz jaws look cool on the wall and shark fin soup is dee-licious. Why the squid have lately turned belly up is anyone's guess at this point.

The oil sludge has a source either undiscovered or unreported by a slippery conglomerate. Men have dug down into the primordial muck to suck up dinosaur guts and run them through internal combustion engines for so long -- and in so many places -- that we can't even figure out which pipe has burst. Well, we gotta drive, ya know. And often.

The tsunami human toll now tops 225,000, an enormous blow to millions of families. Still it's increasingly clear people could have avoided most of those deaths by not covering every island half a foot above sea level with hotels and trinket stands. Also heeding well-documented precedent and getting the heck back from suddenly water-absent beaches might have helped. Nobody rightly deserves to be washed out to sea, but, really, how embarrassing.

Meanwhile the California super storm a couple weeks ago takes the blame for broken sewage lines, and raging rivers of filthy city flotsam have turned the ocean into a bacterial porridge. Surfers ride in peril, children risk life wading, but it's not overpopulation's fault, or non-existent urban planning. It's all that rain.

Sad, huh.

Wait, the sun's about an hour from the sea, but still the scraps of wild stitched and mottled seep with rain. The trail has narrowed at its pit and grows so steep I run along, shifting weight from stone to clay. Beyond the city's patchwork, snow deflects the afternoon: mountains here? And underneath a half-lit moon, high above the wires in a long-forgotten sky, the white turns pink. Puddles left from yesterday draw brazen bugs and skittish prey (I can only wave the flying ones away). And then I stop to keep from sliding, since the path has evened out; eye-level with a raven: black back shining, circle widening, underneath, returning to the canyon, he settles in the brush. Preserved, reclaimed; limestone segues into sage, cactus, crippled oak, this narrow snag of nature, wrong shade of an old frayed thread, retouched. See.

Where I drive to get out of here, rumor has it catfish roam above the asphalt, deposited in the middle of the street by swollen lakes. Helicopters hover overhead now that the rain has stopped, to capture footage of the vast mud puddle forcing people to drive three miles out of their way. The news brief before "The Simpsons" claims that Laguna Canyon Road is under water, but it's not true. That section of the fabled route leading Charlie Chaplin and Bette Davis to their cottages by the sea -- a narrow byway lined by sky-brushing eucalyptus groves and California oak -- no longer exists. Last summer I watched orange-vested men break it into pieces and build a wide replacement somewhat higher off the ground. This improvement isn't finished, but it is --more accurately-- what has flooded: the brand-new four-lane highway connecting the twelve-lane freeway to the eight-lane toll road. The former, 20th-century Laguna Canyon Road sits in a big pile, gray chunks of history forming a temporary dumpsite. But it's not as bad as it sounds. The new design, they say, is better all around.

Roughly 30 years ago when rainwater cascaded and leaped from the roof gutter, in heavy white drops that splat on the driveway and melted away, I called it popcorn. The way it bounced and arced in all directions would have, I guess, reminded a child of the sight and sound of popcorn's slow-motion spectacle, back in days pre-microwave.

I hear the same sound outside my bedroom window now. The low accompanying strings of wind above my high ceiling are like the afterthought of a master furiously conducting the percussion of his winter symphony. I don't watch the local news and don't know the width or length of this storm. Should I? Above this hillside acreage of apartment homes, the backbone of a coastal ridge could, conceivably, crumble into pieces. Who knows? Maybe mud is moving my way. A seven-year-old wouldn't know the difference, he wouldn't care; he would only delight in the energy a storm infuses into his small world.

In Southern California, rain like this is so infrequent I can remember specifically the last time -- eight years ago this month -- when bewildered businessmen built sandbag levees on Santa Monica Boulevard, and BMWs floated down the same river as shopping carts.

That may be happening now. I should find a link or two.