After Batshit and the Ferry we head off, first to pick up her boyfriend, she shows me the rocks around their house, then grab a 6 pack of beer and we're off...

Everything here, all these local hikers and nature enthusiasts, they need their beer or vodka or brandy or ganja to get them through, only the tourists are sober...

First stop we head to Riondel, up the east shore...

The old mine adit, filled with Debris...

explore around the one adit, then down to another by the old ferry landing...

This one, it's fantastic, a hundred foot cliff, the base of which is filled with debris, climb the small hill (sharp, jagged rocks - careful not to spill your beer!) and you find a lip that drops fifty feet into the entrance, and this entrance, choked as it is with rocks, is not entirely blocked, bats flit about the entrance and you know this mine goes deep, many kilometers, below the level of the lake, and there's the promise of great adventures ahead, when we can return with flashlights (and somehow I'm thinking maybe more sober companions, underground things can get dangerous). 

From here back, but I've just missed the ferry, and so they take me to the Crystal Beach, a "local" spot - old smelter and workings, the crushed tailings from the mine strew the beach and if you get down on your hands and knees you can find the bits of quartz crystal that have survived the crushing...

(old smelters)

On hands and knees, by the torchlight of our phones we pass the next hour combing the fine gravel for quartz crystals, the sun has gone down and we're picking them from the slag, my evening's haul:

Fine, delicate, most broken, but some a centimeter long and of excellent clarity, fine raw material for more dexterous and nimble hands than mine...

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Category: Images

On the way to the East Shore with M**, the waitress at work who's been turning up some very interesting rocks, we're going rockhounding together.

Waiting, in line at the Ferry, and who should saunter up but my good friend Batshit, grizzled, sunglasses, he pops his head through the window to inform us that it's his birthday...

"But you just had your birthday last week" I exclaim, and remind him of the pack of cigarettes and bottle of Fireball, and he smiles slyly, changes the conversation to his art in progress, he's been dropping off random pieces at the restaurant for me, and can he have a couple of cigarettes?...

His got his tales, anecdotes, the time he smuggled Mick Jagger into a Stones concert, tales about his designs for the Black Panthers, how the Cosa Nostra in Palermo funded DeVito's movie "Get Shorty", about how the Birdman of Alcatraz always made sure he had the best India Inks, how Marilyn really died of Graves's disease...

...and he's promised me a wonderful painting of Sophia Loren from when she posed naked for him when she was 38, it'll be dropped off soon, and it's keeping me on the hook...

His art, the latest batches, an page torn from "The Jumpstart Recipes", another frontpiece from an old book, Jane Austin, only he's colored over her and made it into something else, cryptic mirror-writing statements that have to be read in reverse, puzzles - maps, - Kokanee Creek Park - fantastically ornamented with instructions and directions, any piece of paper he finds he turns somehow into something he can give me and pass for art, rocks, wood, even, and there are more references to his personal mythology, "The Man from La Mancha" - he himself as Don Quixote, all of it combines is a personal map of his eccentricity, I say eccentric because I'm not entirely sure he's crazy...

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Category: People

Picked it up in a free bin at the dump, needed some easy reading to get back in the habit of novels and longer reads.

Good, after it's fashion - while I'm wary of Castaneda - most of his writings, passed off as true, were later called into some question (amazing they weren't questioned at the time) - but, like a lot of writers his fiction is a means of expressing a deeper metaphysical or metaphorical truth. And despite the queer circumstances of his later life (read the Wiki here and The NY Times and Salon on his legacy), it was worth giving him the chance - don't judge the book by it's author, as it were. Vaguely inspiring.

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Category: Books

It's Batshit's birthday, and he's outside the restaurant waiting for the Ferry. I sit down to talk with him, he's still working on my nude - not the one I requested, but another he thinks just as good, a couple, and he's showing me pictures.  And we're talking and he lets me know that it's Sophia Loren's birthday coming up, and he'll be going away to visit her for it, and he had a little leather purse made for her to honor the occasion...

And I admire it, because it's proof, in his mind, of their acquaintance, and a lot of money to spend on somebody if you don't know them to honor their birthday...

I've googled him, his real name ("Batshit"'s mine), and found no references. It's unique enough that somewhere, somehow, he should exist online. But he doesn't.

The next day he drops off the paintings (drawings) - and I would post them here, but for this disclaimer I discovered in the corner of one page:

So I'm bound. Damn. Because his stuff - it's good, great, in that outsider/mental-health sort of way. In future I'll content myself with describing it - large breasted women, photocopies, collages, found objects (posters, cards, flyers, etc), pencil-crayon, felt marker, mixed media. Absolutely nuts. 

But there's something curious about them I'd like to share - and that's the reference to Baron Munchhausen. It's made again in these artworks, and - for those who don't know, Baron Munchhausen was famous for telling elaborate lies and exaggerations about his supposed adventures. Which hints to me that he's got self-knowledge, you only need the education and similar points of reference to make sense of it - he knows, and he's telling me - and without it I knew, but in this we're probably on the same page...

I will support him further, I'm his newest and favorite admirer - for the moment - and, should I collect enough of them I'd love to arrange a gallery showing - with the artist in attendance. This is Nelson, after all, and This is Fantastic.

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Category: People
  1. A shimmering blue carpet in my fathers room
  2. Bus in Foon
  3. Prop Dick
  4. Where are they now?