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24 December 2025

No. 8,849 (cartoon)

You’re delusional.

You’re paranoid.

I can’t trust anything you say.

25 December 2025

Happy Birthday, Carlos

Today would have been Carlos Castañeda’s hundredth birthday, but it’s not, because he’s dead.

Or is he?

All I know with certainty about Castañeda is that I know nothing about Castañeda with certainty. And so, I’m being even lazier than usual and republishing what I wrote about the delightfully slippery hombre on 6 March 2023.

Fifty years and one day ago Carlos Castañeda née Carlos César Salvador Arana made the cover of Time magazine. The cover featured an illustration, with tightly cropped photos inside that Eddie Adams made of the anthropologist and author.

Or did he?

There’s a good reason the profile described him as, “an enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a tortilla.” That may be an impostor Castañeda sent to the photo session. His supernatural experiences with a Yaqui Indian sorcerer named Juan Matus probably never happened ... or did they? Was he really married? And so on.

My opinion is that Castañeda was the rarest of performance artists: a good one. And not a bad philosopher either; here’s a passage from Journey to Ixtlan I’ve always appreciated.

This, whatever you’re doing now, may be your last act on earth. It may very well be your last battle. There is no power which* could guarantee that you are going to live one more minute.

Reality aside, that’s some real good thinkin’ right there, with or without peyote. And so, I’m pouring me a glass of wine while there’s still time.

*All my electronic editors are screaming at me to change “which” to “that.” I wonder if Castañeda had a real editor or if this is an example of magical grammar thinking.

26 December 2025

Boxing Day Rum Cake

Julian insisted—insisted!—that I have some of his Boxing Day rum and raisin cake. When I didn’t reply immediately, he added, “It’s gluten free!”

“Thanks,” I replied, “but I like gluten, and I don’t like sugar.”

“I didn’t add sugar. Hell, I didn’t even add raisins.”

“Thanks, but I also don’t like cake.”

“I didn’t bother with the cake part, either.”

“Okay, so it’s just booze,” he admitted, then pulled out a fresh bottle of Lemon Hart rum.

“Why didn’t you just say so in the first place?” I asked. “Splice the mainbrace!”

27 December 2025

Beast Buffeta

Lucile left us earlier this month, and the last favor I’ll do for her is a posthumous one: arranging for her body’s cremation.

When I imagine cremation, I always though of baking a nice meal in the oven, then getting distracted and leave it in there for days until it’s reduced to charred cinders. As is frequently the case, I thought wrong.

I’ve spent weeks, as in “geeks” with a “w,” filling out form after contract after questionnaire after document after payment paperwork, and I think I’m finally done. I thought I was finished with the returns before, and I can’t be certain until I’m scattering her ashes in San Francisco Bay.

As a result of dealing with this Byzantine bureaucracy, I’ve changed a line in my will from “cremate me” to “dump my grizzled carcass in a deep ravine and let the critters feast on a beast buffet.”

28 December 2025

Sign Out of Order(?)

I was headed out to visit Sandra this morning, and don’t think I wasn’t. As I was waiting for my train in the Berkeley subway station, I made a curious observation. The electronic sign on the platform displayed “SIGN OUT OF ORDER,” but it was clearly working since I could easily read the illuminated words.

I had to pay to reach the train tunnel, so I don’t know whether or not that qualifies as public conceptual art, but I like it.

29 December 2025

Brigitte Bardot and Other Cash Cows

When I read that Brigitte Bardot died yesterday, I didn’t think about her movies since I never watched any of ’em. I do remember her passing involvement with Greenpeace, though. I can’t find a citation, but I remember her prediction that harp seals would become extinct in a few years unless sealers stopped clubbing the photogenic baby seals to death.

I photographed the critters on the ice floes off Newfoundland, and I can attest that the furry little buggers were indeed photogenic, dead or alive. They were Greenpeace’s cash cows for so many years because they were so appealing, as in fundraising appeals. Eventually, even the nonprofit capitalists had to admit that their survival was secure for the foreseeable future. (The last time I counted there were about seven million of ’em.)

Bardot may not have been that smart, but she clearly loved animals. And, like so many animal rights advocates, she was also a misanthrope who spewed racist and Islamophobic hatred.

It’s obvious that I never liked her; I only mentioned her death as an excuse to republish my cute baby seal photograph for the first time in almost a decade.

30 December 2025

Another Great Nurse Story

I take care of my friends, they take care of me, no one keeps score, and we all do very well. Life doesn’t get more perfecter than that. I mention this to provide the context for a message I received ...

Hi Mr. Rinehart, I am the Director of Nursing at [Human Warehouse with Nurses]. You are listed as emergency contact for Mr. Michael X, who is discharging today.

He is stable and ready for discharge, however we did want to inform his loved ones that he was found with two empty bottles of hard alcohol in his room. We just wanted you to be aware to help support Mr. X and to know what to look out for. Thank you for caring for your friend!

Now that’s what I call helpful advice. I smuggled the cognac bottles into his room, but he didn’t tell me that he’d polished them off. Thanks to an alert nurse, I now know that I need to get him another bottle.

The health care [sic] system is managed by parasitic insurance parasites, so I’m grateful to nurses like Tahlia for going out of her way and showing such care and compassion by telling me my friend was out of booze.

Close call!

31 December 2025

Best Yet, Making Every Day Delightful! (Two Baguettes and a Bag)

Without realizing it, Ina gave me the idea for this photograph when she asked me to grab some things from her car. I knew I had a new piece as soon as she said, “two baguettes and a bag,”

I was even more pleased when I saw the printing on the grocery bag, “Best Yet, Making Every Day Delightful!” All I needed to do was combine the two thoughts in a photograph to make, Best Yet, Making Every Day Delightful! (Two Baguettes and a Bag).

I like the latest piece, but I can’t call it, or anything I’ve created, my best yet. This entry marks the conclusion of three decades of publishing this stuff daily on the Internet, and I can’t say that most days have been even vaguely delightful, let alone all of them.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2025 David Glenn Rinehart