This Is Fine

Let's do more Santa Cruz stuff. The beach is the interface to the Akashic memory of the ocean. It is not a place, but a space out of time.

First of all, the Aptos Farmers Market is the best farmers market in CA, maybe the US, maybe the world. Fight me.

I love this farmers market, and I've been to plenty around the Bay Area. Saratoga is good, but not the vibes. Some North Bay ones might rival Aptos. Aptos has the best vibes though. I spent time talking to my sprouts guy about drum sound buddha and I had a great convo with the nice Japanese woman, who was like a '20s party girl for Halloween, about making koji and stuff with it. I discovered koji thru her last winter and it really put me on fermentation in general. There were also multiple witches wandering about shopping for whatever is needed on Hallows morn. I am no great conversationalist by the way, usually just go and get my grub, but I'm trying to have weirder, more authentic conversations. At least they feel weird to me.

I had a terrific morning and day and ended up on the beach in the afternoon. It was cloudy and kind of chilly, a day only for the hearty beach explorers. Myself, I'm always in shorts and no shoes walking the tide line whatever the weather, even in winter or pre-dawn hours. I have severe Raynaud's, so my hands and feet go numb easily. This usually doesn't happen on the beach tho. The water feels warming.

Walking the tide line is the best foot exercise ever. You get beach feet after walking many miles. I do some balance training sporadically throughout the year and have a foot balance tool specifically, but it's not the same. I have my beach feet again after a couple of weeks. I'm sure this helps with trail running too. I often focus on "soft feet" while running. You really have to feel the terrain and adjust in microseconds, which is just one small part of the flow state that is trail running.

It's impossible not to notice all of the dead sea life this year, many seals up and down the beach. But today it was birds. It's been birds. I've seen them actively dying on the beach over several days I've been there. Sometimes people pick them up and try to help them back in the water. Their legs are paralyzed and their wings don't really work. They've been washed ashore.

Today on the high tide line dead birds litter the beach. It looks like some kind of invisible oil spill. I step around one that surprises me floating in the water. I see many offshore in their death throes, bobbing by themselves just past the tide break. This may sound normal, but I'm an astute observer of beach bird behavior and it isn't. You do sometimes see birds by themselves, but these have a very sick look. Just bobbing. Not moving purposefully the way a healthy bird would.

These are effects of peak red tide around this time of year. The red tide is made worse by the warm ocean. There are news stories about the ocean bulge around the coast caused by the warm El Niño this year. The red tide algae blooms are eaten by everything and thrive in the warm ocean. The algae produce powerful neurotoxins that lead to this gradual loss of motor control that I see in the onshore and offshore bobbing birds.

Deep Dive: Domoic acid: what the local paper found

The Capitola Soquel Times ran this as its November 2026 cover story: Sea Life Suffers from Domoic Acid, by Claudia Iseman. Here's what it reports.

The toxin is domoic acid, made by a microscopic alga called Pseudo-nitzschia. "Red tide" is the everyday name for blooms like this. Small fish such as anchovies eat the algae, and seabirds and sea lions eat the anchovies. UC Santa Cruz professor Rafael Kudela says the toxin damages the brain and leaves animals confused and losing control of their bodies.

It has happened here before. In August 1961, sooty shearwaters flew into buildings and power lines in Capitola and crashed on the beach. That event helped inspire Hitchcock's The Birds, and researchers later traced it to domoic acid. On Oct. 12 this year, a herd of confused sea lions wandered onto Sandholdt Road in Moss Landing.

The numbers are well above normal:

• The Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito has rescued 266 poisoned sea lions and seals this year. A typical year is 75 to 90.
• Most of the sick sea lions came from Monterey, Santa Cruz and San Mateo counties.
• At the summer peak, the center was taking about 600 calls a day.

The water is warm. NOAA researcher Nate Mantua puts it near 63°F, six to seven degrees above normal. Monterey Bay is full of anchovies, which would normally be good food, but this year they carry the toxin.

Not every dead bird is poisoned. International Bird Rescue has taken in about 300 common murres this year, and its CEO, J.D. Bergeron, says these birds are starving. The fish have moved deeper into colder water, out of the murres' diving range, and many of the birds also have feather problems that make hunting harder.

There's some good news. Kudela's lab now tracks the algae with passive samplers left in the ocean and watches copepods, the tiny animals that feed on it. That gives an early warning before the toxin builds up, which also helps protect people who eat local fish and shellfish.

The trend is bad, though. Kudela says the blooms have gotten bigger, lasted longer and turned more toxic since 2011. He expects the strong El Niño forecast for this winter to make things worse for marine life.

To volunteer or learn more: Marine Mammal Center and International Bird Rescue.

A story this week put a date on losing the coral reefs, just 50 years out, within my kids lifetimes. California has already lost so much of the sea stars and then the kelp to warming oceans. The mass of ocean heat wave is called the Blob, which helped along sea star wasting disease and in turn gave rise to an explosion of purple sea urchins, which in turn overgraze the already taxed kelp. It's not really new news that the oceans are dying; it's just the pace and visceral experience on the shores that is jarring.

For some reason dead birds washing up in droves as a foreground to the great concrete and glass beach houses of Aptos is stark. A canary of sorts in the coal mine? The tide is coming for those houses and all the huge concrete barriers constructed will not hold it back. Rows of multiple million dollar houses whose fate is as fragile and as inevitable as these birds'.

This leads to many thoughts. First-- looking up at the sprawling houses on the cliff. Those aren't safe either. It takes my eyes up to the beautiful sky today, checkerboards of puffy white mini clouds spread out across a gradient of blues from the muted sun out over the ocean.

Since my early days of taking hikes around the high perimeter of the Washoe Valley and realizing that I could get the same panoramic views and much better up above the high priced view homes on the rim of the valley, I have realized that the real beauty cannot be owned. The sheer audacity and beauty of the sky is easily outdoing these expensive sprawling houses clamoring to get their view of the ocean.

There was a spectacular skeletal dragon across a quarter of the sky at sunset the evening before. It was again lit across a gradient of turquoises and sea greens and every shade of blue that I didn't even know the sky was capable of.

The sky is dying too, but it is our last metaphor for freedom, pristineness, vastness in nature. I spent a lot of time this year watching David Byrne's Who Is the Sky? tour from fan YouTube videos. Really love the way that show is set. He is such a genius, but the sky. The sky is still mostly unpopulated, uncrowded, until the flying cars and the delivery drones come for it. Then, where will we look to? Out to the vast simmering void of space? Earth will be dead. And we will make our home in the stars.

Photo I took in NYC, walking to work in early 2015.

Earth won't be dead. Gaia lives while others die. Life finds a way.

This all reminds me of a couple years ago walking these beaches when a simple word was spray painted on one of these big concrete barriers-- FREE. This word has come up a lot for me in the last several years. What was the meaning of the artist? Property and land should be free? A personal achievement? A day later I walked by and another artist had added Buddha. I'm guessing the second artist was making a juvenile statement about pot. But, maybe just maybe, they had the same idea that popped into my mind seeing this pairing. These are synonyms. Buddha is free, free is Buddha. I'd been working on a definition of free for a while. Somebody spray painted it on this weird place out of time and space that I walk and experience all memory at once. Beautiful. Not just the sky is beautiful.

It also occurs to me how matchy match these million dollar Aptos homes have become. They are all becoming these large concrete bunkers in a squared off U shape with the open side all glass pointing at the ocean. There used to be more diversity and California charm to these. This leads to a whole nother thought. There are stories everywhere about how AI is making everything the same. All the quirks and variations of human creativity, even the mistakes, smoothed out in a great Bayesian blandness.

Where have you been, my friends? This has been an ongoing process for at least the last 100 years, and striking over the last 50 years of my life. Have you not seen the great sprawl of sameness take over every area of the map? Chain everything bleeding further and further into any pocket of difference. Cars, you do have to make an exception for that Cybertruck. Sameness in every product. Sure there's much more variation of everything since when I was a kid, but it's the minutest variations over sameness. This manifestation of AI we are seeing now is just late stage capitalism. And capitalism likes sameness. Ok, truthfully, the sameness is a feature of the particular local maximum of AI that we are currently sitting at.

Speaking of AI, I'll spend more time on this. How can you not? It is the defining idea of our last, well, 2.5 years, 3.5 if you got there a little early. I'm not afraid of AI. I've already come out as a sun worshiper. Well, I'm not just a solarist, more of a universalist, and none of this is new from a universal perspective. Intelligence does not just occupy our locally evolved wetware substrate. Consciousness is more than likely a fundamental property of a universe experiencing itself, maybe even synonyms again.

AI may not bode well for us, but the universe favors ever increasing complexity in intelligence and opportunity for consciousness to explore itself. Lots of things don't bode well for us. We aren't particularly kind to creatures, even and especially people that we consider less than. I do hope you have noticed this. We also have removed ourselves, at least psychologically, from the interbeing and ecology of our planet. Gaia will correct this. The universe does not get stuff wrong.

When I walk the beach I pick something up: a small piece of driftwood, a piece of beach glass, a flat rock. I use it as a fidget. I'm not necessarily fidgeting on the beach, but it keeps my mind flowing while I turn it over and around, feel the weight of it. It gives some part of my brain something to do tactilely. Finding every curve, shape, bump, dent, way of turning it. Sometimes I bring these home and use them as fidgets while I'm in Zoom calls all day. It connects me, grounds me, feels natural and performs a lot of the same function for keeping the more distractable parts of my brain occupied.

When I got my autism diagnosis I went and looked on the internet at fidget spinners that people prefer. There are all sorts of varieties. There are whole companies that just make these. You can pay over a hundred dollars for a fidget spinner. Can you see the sameness in all of the variation tho? They are poor replicas of tools we have been using for a very long time that are more natural and more grounding. So, I personally said no to big fidget. There is already a natural abundance of fidgetsAutism-pediaStimmingRepetitive movements, sounds and sensations that many autistic people use to calm down, focus or show feeling. How the community uses the word, where it came from, what studies of autistic adults report, and the long effort to stop it.Read the entry →.

Today's field notes were brought to you by:

• The new stand out acoustic rendition of Jlin's Black Origami. Such a groundbreaking album, such a great reworking.
• Djrum is a rhythmic, genre piltong genius.
• 10LEC6, also new to me, caught my ear. Apparently, the name is a pun you have to say out loud in French: ‘dix-lec-six’ = dyslexique.

All on my Oct Albums playlist, 60 hours of blissful (my idea of blissful can be a bit stretched) shuffle for your walking meditation adventures. Enjoy.