My morning begins with walking out my back door to watch the almost unattended gardin between the buildings to study the birds, squirrels, and the occasional rat and the plants of the gardin. It looks like an Impressionist painting there in real life. I study its relationships. An occasional butterfly comes and goes from the small all white to the yellow monarchs. There are several species of birds from the bright green humming bird to the small sparrow to the fat robins, a couple of mourning doves, and the terrible shadow of the crows, cawing high above.
There is a growing wonderful dark brown-green moss on the cinderblock across the way that goes into damp shadow before noon. It reminds me of shadowed walls of Yosemite granite.
There are a few fruit trees of plum, hard green apples, and some bright annuals for color. There are some cactus in a planting box I built for my kid when he was nine. The big ones have a bright red bulb as a flower that will build the next generation of slab suckulant with spines.
The Jewish gardener who lives downstairs attends this space with careless but soulful attention. We don't bother with a vegetable garden because the homeless will pick it clean. The Chinese peasant landlord both violates and loves this tiny plot. He just painted my back stairs a bright pink with heavy orange overtones. I told him this morning he was having too much fun, and he laughed. We are in a contant war with my other neighbor who has transformed his pschosis of violance toward the plant world into plant attrocities...a hard to explain mental disease. Most of the Spring he was commited to genocide against Ivy.
He loves cutting Camilia bushes to death with a machete. California popies die by manual lawn mower. He of course is convinced it is for their own good. Maybe it is... He showed me his painting of the universe, where a black spider lives at the dark hole of the galaxy, with the web as the gravitational field lines of the nebula.
Then there are my new neighbors, an Iranian girl and her French Iranian roomate who want to bargin wifi sharing on my account with att. I gave up on internet genius long ago. You install it with hardware and software and it's okay by me.
Well, that's Berkeley...in the dog days of afternoon.
CG