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La Cuesta Less Encantada
San Simeon is an oddity of a beach town along the Central Coast. While houses in neighboring towns jostle against one another and crowd the shoreline like penguins on ice floes, the only readily visible residences in San Simeon are a handful of tile-roofed Spanish style villas on manicured lots near the shore and, of…
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Some Random Thoughts at the Beginning of 2019
– This time two years ago I was curled in a chair with my laptop watching an angry sea in San Simeon. I planned to return this month, though according to the forecast the ocean would be placid and the skies blue. But a year of too much travel and a bout of post-Christmas illness…
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Falling into Fall
Unlike San Luis Obispo, which is sometimes jokingly described as having two seasons: “day” and “night,” Atascadero – over the Cuesta Grade and out of reach of coastal temperance – can boast of at least three and a half. Every decade or so it is even graced with a peek at four, when an extreme…
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Driving the Future
A year and a half ago Tesla was not a car manufacturer that was particularly on my radar. I had heard of them, and vaguely remembered seeing Elon Musk in an Iron Man movie, and maybe that George Clooney owned one once, and that was about it. I only knew that they were starting to…
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The Inevitables
When I was younger (how did I get old enough to use that phrase?) virtually nothing felt inevitable. Not bad things like doctor’s appointments or my parents getting into yet another shouting match, and not good things like the beginning of summer vacation and Christmas. Reality might twist into some hitherto unknown shape and accommodate my will…
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Speaking Freely
Provocateur Alex Jones’ ongoing rampage across social media recently encountered at least a speed bump and perhaps a cliff as Spotify, Apple, Google, Facebook and – when he tried to use it as a last-ditch refuge, Vimeo – purged the bulk of his content from their sites (in addition, as I was writing this, Twitter…
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Last Days
My mother’s end begins, as most bad things have these past six years, with a phone call. A series of them, actually. On Friday, May 25th, her private caregiver S. calls to tell me that she is mostly incoherent and largely unresponsive. On Saturday Anna, my mother’s favorite nurse at the skilled nursing facility, calls…
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At the Zoo
2017 was not a good year for photography and me. The reasons were all over the map. Rainy days keeping me indoors during the winter, outrageous heat doing the same in spring and summer. The allure (read: guilt) of long-neglected projects keeping me close to home, the feeling that I’d mined local opportunities for photos…
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what you made me feel
the fortune teller On high school graduation day a teacher asked me to stay after class. He sat me down, and took my hand, and said, “I want to tell you your fortune.” I looked at him expectantly. “So high school is over, and you didn’t go to prom, and you weren’t a popular girl.…
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Back in Big Sur
On Friday the 13th, Big Sur rejoined the world. After a winter that saw the region drenched with over 100 inches of rain, massive slides along the always precarious Highway 1 blocked the road to the south just past Ragged Point and so severely destabilized the Pfeiffer Canyon Bridge to the north that it had…
smallstonebuddha 