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· 17TH OF SEPTEMBER, THE YEAR 2006

IT WAS A TIME OF DARKNESS. IT WAS A WORLD OF FEAR. IT WAS THE AGE . . . OF MUSHROOMS!

I guess I’m so busy these days that I missed a week. Believe me, you would crumble under this shame, but on me, it looks positively jaunty. Well, perhaps not that busy. I had time to go look for mushrooms in Sam P. Taylor State Park today. It’s far too early, of course, but I saw tons of them up in Mendocino on my unfortunate solo camping trip last year, and that was around this time of year. It’s almost porcini/cepe/king bolete season, so I was hoping I’d get lucky with my first, but no such luck. I did, however, find this nice little crop of of oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus ostreatus).

They’re quite edible, but it was my first find in the field for this species, and I wasn’t 100% sure of my ID, so I let them be.

You also might be interested in knowing the Gargoyles might have been the best animated adventure TV series ever made. So incredibly good. A few bad eps of course, including one that’s basically one big, poorly animated fight between Goliath and MacBeth, but when this series was on, it was seriously on. Animation, writing, plot, characters are all so perfect. I guess you have to be into kids lit / TV to appreciate some of the more cloyingly didactic episodes, like the one about how guns are bad, or about how everyone should read, but hey, in that gun control episode, one of the gargoyles shoots his human friend Elisa with her own gun, hospitalizing her. That seemed a more disturbingly real and honest treatment than the subject might receive on just about any other kids show. And anyway, guns are dangerous. And people should read. And gargoyles should ditch their psycho revenge-crazed exes for foxy human cops. These are all important lessons to instill in children.