Hogback Road

In the mail today a puffy blue envelope, not the usual thing \o/

I'm already filled with glee just because of that. Nothing can make me unhappy. I tear it open at lunch. A tiny note falls out written on flimsy receipt paper with chicken scratches on it. I must call upon my greatest hieroglyphic deciphering abilities. I must conjure them and put my mind in that place where those things are no wait it's English. "Go crazy and get something you would not ordinarily." \o/

I already did. It's already spent. \o/

I am stunned. This is wonderful. Who could have imagined? Who could have anticipated? This is disconnected to anything. I don't even have to pay for what I just did. I did it then money for it came in through the mailbox. There is a proper card with more words. A friend, newly reacquainted mature female who identifies as male at least sometimes problematically somewhat assertive. Pushy.

"Another unusual event arrives and the world is in turmoil but we are serene and placid. We must stay this way to have a lot left to do."



I don't know what that means but it's funny! I had just read an email from my younger brother. Just now! That address this precise thing about serenity. I had asked him if he and his wife dance. I asked him if his two boys dance. He took dance lessons while dating before meeting his wife. He told me he's very good. Top of the class. That he's used by the studio to dance with the difficult cases. I can see that. I'd expect that to transfer to family life so I asked. Because I asked, he posted two videos on YouTube of his two boys running around the house. For me. I am the only person who's seen them. The first video is the two boys running a circular pattern around the house the exact same way that my dogs did. My dogs did it briefly for fun, the boys do it all day. The full 9 minute video, two boys in their underpants running around like maniacs and my brother encouraging them to dance. They don't dance, they run. The second video is himself unseen supervising the boys at play. The entire back porch and what appears the entire back yard double fenced and devoted to play. One giant playground completely packed with toddler playthings with no empty space. The household is devoted to two boys having fun. The youngest climbs onto a glass top patio table to jump on a small round trampoline and my heart leaps to my throat watching. The three-year old boy in his underpants jumps from the glass-top patio table like a frog, jumps, collapses his knees on landing to crouch and clings to the trampoline edge like a bird landing on a bouncy branch. He does not use the extra height for extra trampoline bounce. The whole time I'm thinking he's going to smash his little head into the patio roof but he does the opposite of trampoline intention and climbs and jumps to cling to the trampoline edge over and over and over, "See what I can do, Daddy!"

I told my brother the idea of two little monkeys flying around all day is impossible to think. By comparison this place is a temple of meditation.

He answered rapidly. The little monkeys are an incredible pleasure, their curiosity and excitement and level of involvement is a pleasure to witness and experience.

Shut my mouth.

And now the card addresses the same thing.

Gift card and message received. Thank you very much. I already spent some on a giant photo canvas reproduction. Your gift will be a permanent fixture around here and man is it ever impressive. It's big as the four dinosaur ridge photos I showed you put together, four feet long, less than that high. Big as it can be. And it will make a statement like nobody's bizwax POW designer statement, right in the kisser. Entering the room you will live it.

I got 80% off regular price, nearly so, 78%, so I went big and it was still only a little over $100.00, pretty good deal, eh? So I still have a lot left.

I can't wait for it to be done. It's enough to motivate me to clean up the whole room, dust, vacuum, pick up clothes, the whole bit and it's not even been six months yet.

That was my thank you note.

Of all the people I've shown these photosets taken around Morrison my two brothers responded the strongest. That tickles me. The new largest piece will replace a smaller framed oil painting of the crab nebula, nearly entirely black with smears of red and blue color, white dot stars. Out. The new piece is much larger and closer to home. So close you can walk into it.

The first outcropping seen upon entering the park from the 3rd entrance, our usual entrance off Morrison Rd. We'd park at its base, rush to this backside showing above and scramble up. Now a path with rail fence leads visitors well away to this most distant point. I could have cried right here in public. The separation I felt was vast and intense and heavy. My German shepherd and my three Belgian sheepdogs climbed all over these rocks and we had the time of all four of our lives right here. 

This photo is taken at the focal point of the first photo. Immediately behind the pointed rock that is showing in front of this spot. The flat slope behind Tina the Wonderdog received a lot of climbing action. The diagonal line above the dog's ear leads to a vertical line that my older brother taught us how to crawl up the seam of between vertical monoliths by applying sideways pressure against the vertical faces, alternating arms and legs, holding and reaching, much as a spider one imagines while doing it to get to the tippy top, majestically conquer the whole thing and trounce around up there from end to end front to back victoriously and gloriously until all that victory and glory wears off. The dog cannot go up there. It is the one thing the dog cannot do and we cannot assist it. It is a place dear to my heart. And as I realized through emails very close to both my brother's hearts too \o/ 

They are sure going to like sleeping in this room when they visit. 

It will be like being there in the place. In post-modern form, perfectly acceptable. Front view, side view at the same time or front view and front view arranged incorrectly, the important bits showing, the ones with emotion, possibly rearranged with other important bits absent. 

We would stand at the top of a portion of ridge that runs for a hundred miles, like baked bread dough cracked open, the edge of a ancient sea that is lifted a mile in the air and imagine dinosaurs milling about where now houses encroach like moss growing up to its limit. 

When you are intimately familiar with the places, their details, and love them then being in the room with its large photos is like being between these two spots in the valley between Red Rocks and ridge followed by Hogback Road. The most perfect place on Earth to take a dog off-leash. If they're a shepherd dog they will not have you out of their sight. There will be no abandoning of the dog at Hogback Road, not with a shepherd dog. They live to know where you are. 

So, the photo at top printed large as they go, inviting you into the park again, the other side the scars on dinosaur ridge, but the wrong side of dinosaur ridge but that's okay, this is art! And Dreamland is like Picasso coming at you, front eye smacked onto profile wrongly, this doesn't have to be surveyed perfection, shots of both Red Rocks and ridge scars taken from one single point as if sleeping there. That is not this.

It was horrible selecting a photo. That is not a pleasant task. I agonized over several excellent candidates. Several better than this one for their own reasons. This is not the best photograph. Not the best lens for something like this. The telephoto is fine, very fine, but it is not extraordinary at each focal length as other lenses are. It cannot be. Something's got to give so fidelity is sacrificed for excellent telephoto ability 18-200 is quite a range and the photos are great but it is not possible for telephoto to be mind-blowingly great as other lenses can do, and have done in the same set. Choosing was nearly impossible.

Finally, I excluded excellent ones because I didn't want people sleeping between hard rocks. This was chosen, oddly for its softness compared to others and for its personal emotional power. A good photo to sleep under. I think. Although others are better for art.

Through all this sorting through hundreds of photos of Colorado, not just this park I realized why people tagged the place, "Colorful Colorado." For years I did not understand that. Hadn't they been to other places? Other places are more colorful than this. It is not particularly colorful. I didn't get it. It's not lush. It's not flashy. Not that many flowering trees nor spectacular gardens compared to other places. The idea dawned on me slowly over years actually driving back and forth skiing under varying weather conditions and a road trip circling the state. Right from the highway one beholds scenes that look like paintings. As the road winds and wends around each curve there is a new painting, usually simple, often no focal point, just pattern, the loveliest patterns of patchworks of vegetation and geology all the same shade, casting all the same shadows, against a solid field of background color interrupted with patches of negative space of snow. Vertical aspens disguised in a fog and light colored aspens dotted with dark green pines half coated with snow, sage dotting a hillside half of each plant savaged by weather the other half of each individual plant thriving. Pattern as if applied with a sponge or a stamp. Pattern after pattern, painting after painting, color palette after color palette. It is a unique beauty. It is not your usual idea of beauty. Like having culture shock arriving in Japan grasping for their conception of beauty, and then here in Colorado a similar thing, everybody agrees apparently "Colorful Colorado" but I didn't get it. 

It is the idea of palette that grew on me. Daily using Photoshop eyedropper tool for various things. In adjustment there are three eyedroppers. One is more useful, the "white" eyedropper. Used to pick a pixel from the photograph to instruct the program to make that pixel the most white and the most proper of all available whites and base every other color pixel on this new brightest white. If you've shot at the wrong light temperature then this eyedropper can adjust the entire photo at once to satisfaction. Same with proper black and proper midtone but those two eyedroppers are less useful. 

The regular eyedropper tool with all the other regular tools picks a color from the source photo to use somewhere else like spray paint or brush or text in another layer. You can click the tool for two colors, foreground and background and alternate between them, but imagine if you could use eyedropper tool to pick colors from a photograph or from a physical scene to fill a palette for a painter to use to duplicate the image. That is what Colorado is to me, a series of color palettes with tones as if picked with an eyedropper tool for that specific limited scene in that moment. It is not possible to drive around Colorado roads and not imagine the artist's palette that created the image your wondering eyes behold. Colorado is pattern and artist's palette, over and over and over and over, endlessly, honestly, the next hour the image and the nature of the image will change, the angle of light, its penetration, its glare, its tonal quality, frost covering an entire hill and its contents one minute gone the next, snow on speckled trees around one curve the same type trees the same density with no snow on the next slope and a different canvas pattern, the experience in sequence is kaleidoscopic. My photosets of Colorado are kaleidoscopic. Pouring through the photosets reinforces this sense of limited palette with unlimited possibilities and constantly changing.

Gifter responds. That is great and exactly what I had in mind. Something very memorable on this occasion and that you can enjoy everyday, all day. Look forward to seeing the masterpiece in person. ANTICIPATION!

Ha. Come on. Please. It's just a photograph. 

[Incidentally, when you open Google Earth and enter Morrison Colorado and have "show pictures" opened in the sidebar, then clicking on all those photos in the park and on dinosaur ridge is the exact same thing as going through my own RR and DR photosets. As if I took all those photos myself, but they are not mine.]