the thing about userpics iconc

This is the first geode that shows up in the list but it was about the fourth I made. The geode is my default template because of the H.G. Wells story "The Crystal Egg" which is one of my favorite stories ever. This is "Blue Land" and it depicts an agricultural vista. I don't use it much anymore because it doesn't express what I'd like it to.




Because of the rule to pick every fifth one, I had to miss the "Golden City" geode, which is one I use when I feel especially accomplished, and "Hazy Mars" which is for anxiety and uncertainty about the future. This is "Meadowlands" whose description is "que te quiero verde" -- "how much I want you green," a line from one of Federico Garcia Lorca's best known poems, which is about the impossibility of desire, but that's not what it means here. Here, it's about fecundity and late winter (which is the greening time of year where I live).




This geode has a mimulus in it. Mimulus is a genus of funny-faced little California wildflowers. Some of them are yellow and orange sticky monkey flowers which grow on waist-high bushes and can cover whole hillsides of disturbed earth and bloom from midspring into fall. This one is a bright pink Death Valley one that grows very low to the ground.




I had to skip the cat's-eye and the wave geodes. The cat's-eye looks angry but I don't think it especially means anger to me. I think it's more about alertness. The wave is the one I use for grief and allied emotions.

This is a picture of Shawnadithit, Truganini, and Ishi, the stars of my story "Tasmanian Flower Basket" and all supposedly the last of their kind. Each of them spent their final days demonstrating their lost ways of life for the people whoi had exterminated their people. And it turned out that none of them really were the last ones, but I have yet to figure out what that means.




I cheated and skipped the genderfuck one because I explained it recently (it's from a wall in Berlin). This one will be my default until I make a new geode or something: it's me, standing next to Bertolt Brecht. I imprinted on Bertolt Brecht when I was really quite young -- ten? nine? -- because KPFA used to run Lotte Lenya singing bits of Brecht and Weil and there was some of his work around the house. Later I discovered his poetry. At the park where this statue sits, there are gauzy banners printed with his poems. They hang at person level, like Japanese door curtains, and you can walk right into the poems. My favorite one is there: "To Posterity." There's a photo or three of me wrapped in it, but not something that would make a good icon.

on another front, I got to sleep at around three this morning because of a combination of reading a stupid novel in the parking lot of the Watsonville KMart where I had gone looking for storage cube things for Frank and coming home and playing a stupid video game.