Who said dissent is dead in America? And no, I didn’t write it.

(Irony: I live at the end of that dead end.)

I’ve been thinking today about how generic beauty seems sometimes.

Having a mind that could be described as autistic, my perception of the world is sharply divided between the known and familiar and orderly, and the unknown and unfamiliar and chaotic. So I’ll spent a lot of time doing things I’ve done before, simply because they’re reassuringly familiar, rather than take a risk on the chaotic.

Today, for instance, I pruned the big cedar tree some more. I got some limbs I didn’t get to last time.

There’s another big evergreen in the yard (I’m not sure which kind), and it needs pruning more than the one I worked on. But I worked on the familiar one, the one I knew.

So I sat on a limb up there in the tree and looked out at what of the neighborhood I could see. It’s been a bright clear day. The kind of day that makes the Seattle winter worth it. Well, almost worth it. But you get my point. People walking their dogs, schoolchildren walking home from school, the characteristic whir of a line trimmer half a block away.

And it all seemed so normal, so average. So unexceptional in its intrinsic radiant beauty. The golden sun slanting through the filter of cedar leaves… Yeah, just like the last dozen times. Forget that winter kept you inside and insane, forget that you’ve arranged your sleep schedule so you don’t have to encounter people walking their dogs, or kids coming home from school…

The beauty of it is just ordinary, and thus, unexceptional, and thus, unchaotic, and thus, I can enjoy its unthreatening routine.

…

Part of me hates the suburbs. This is the part of me that wants to tear down all edifices and reveal the throbbing painful truth underneath. It’s also the part that wishes it could blame my inability to deal with life on some stereotyped version of my upbringing in the ‘burbs. But another part of me, the part that is getting more powerful the longer I live alone, knows that the suburbs might as well have been designed for the autistic.

I’ve lived in a dense, bustling urban setting, and couldn’t find any stillness there, much less any reassurance. I’ve spent enough time in the mountains to know that living there would be too great a tradeoff in loneliness for solitude. I’ve lived in shared housing, and spent all my energy desperately trying to balance my obsessive needs with a harmonious household.

I have a need to live alone in a quiet place.

Props to boingboing for the link:

“Welcome to the website of the California Coastal Records Project. Our goal is to create an aerial photographic survey of the California Coast and update it on a periodic basis.”

They’re taking the pictures so they’ll have historical documentation of the coastal environment. They’re in hot water with Barbara Streisand, however, because one of the pictures is of her seaside mansion.

So I started looking for places I’ve been, along the California coast.

In this picture, the road (in the shadow of the hill) is the 101. There’s a pull-out to go to that beach, and to walk up the trail on the point. The image was taken at high-tide, apparently.

It’s the first place I ever touched the Pacific ocean. I remember a lovely setting sun, a chill in the air even though it was summer. I took off my shoes and waded into the surf, cupped my hands, and took a sip of ocean.

On another trip, I got there to find a sick sea lion, being guarded by some local folks who had called the rescue team. I remember being impressed that there was a rescue team, and that people would care enough to sit there in the dusk waiting for them to arrive.

Here’s a picture of the town of Trinidad, which is one of the most beautiful towns ever to exist. None of the pictures of it do it justice. This one is from the south, instead of the west. Neither pic really shows the giant hunk of rock sticking out of the ocean that makes the bay (and the bay makes the town, historically speaking).

When I was there, it was summer, and the water was clear and green. There were a half-dozen or so yachts moored in the harbor. I parked my car at the little white building you can see in that second linked picture, about a quarter of the way from the right. The one at the T-intersection, from which you might be able to walk down a path to the beach.

The whole scenario was like being inside one of the Myst games. Treacherous coastline, protected cove, clear water, looming mountains. Etc.

I sat on a piece of driftwood and drank my orange juice. Watched the pelicans and gulls. Should have stripped naked and gone for a swim.

Yesterday, I organized the back patio. This is a task that has intimidated and overwhelmed me since I moved in.

C. (my landlord) left a couple dozen empty plant containers on the patio. The black kind that come with the plants when you buy them at the nursery. Some are huge, and some are merely medium sized, but few of them had been stacked.

The patio is directly under the most active branches of the cedar tree, so it drops its needles right exactly there, and over the time that no one was living here, they filled up the plant pots.

This, combined with the unending winter rain, meant that I had a couple dozen tiny compost heaps in my back yard.

It also meant that there was about an inch of topsoil on the patio, composted from other needles that had missed the pots. I had another garden’s-worth of ground cover growing on my patio.

So each of those pots got emptied into a bona-fide compost heap, and the soil was shoveled onto the heap and the remainder washed away.

Which isn’t a very interesting story, except that I did it all barefoot, and I stepped on a rose stem clipping which didn’t cause enough pain to draw attention to it, but did enough damage to let in the compost. So the ball of my foot is a little swollen. Nothing serious, just one of those things.

It’s still not an interesting story, but if they have to amputate, at least it’ll be worth it to crutch myself out to the neat and tidy patio, eh?