Nothing finer than cruising through the mountains expressing awe at the fabulous scenery, and that's just what Jay's been up to for the last couple of weeks. As he prepares to celebrate the 34th anniversary of his 29th birthday (you do the math), he rewarded himself with not one but two trips to the mountains. He even sprung for a new pocketable camera for the second trek, and except for eating batteries for lunch, it's a gem.

Verbiage, even the storied kiloword, does a poor job of expressing the visual, so here are some pictures, with links to larger versions on RedBubble.com.

More are in Jay's RedBubble presence now, with still more to come. There are more extensive captions there, too, but really, just look at the pictures and enjoy, and fill in with your imagination any details that might be lacking.

First up is The Light Center. It's on the scenic (to the max!) Highway 9 near Black Mountain, North Carolina. A geodesic dome (think 1964 New York World's Fair and the 1970 South Carolina Tricentennial celebration), the cool space has shaped windows that admit streams of light. The Center is located on a one of the many vortexes (vortices, whatever) in the area, and if you're not familiar with those tune in to some of the frequent Visitations from Distant Planet episodes on cable. Mystical or not the dome made for cool pictures, both inside and outside.

The nicest thing about Tennessee is getting there, 'cause from here you get to drive through the mountains of North Carolina and through some of the most beautiful parts of Tennessee, just over the North Carolina/Tennessee line. In the mountains, of course. Can you tell Jay likes mountains?

Anyway, the occasion was a wedding of friends and former neighbors of Jay's in Knoxville, and here's a cool shot of a small stream close to the outdoor ceremony. The weather was quite hot, with humidy far above the Richter scale, so Jay got overheated, but managed to survive. He snapped this picture and many others before retreating to the cool confines of the hotel for a rest.

And this one, a simple slatted wooden chair. Jay likes pictures of chairs, always has, and harbors many of them in his collection of Photos that Few People Appreciate.

More chairs.

Now back to Black Mountain for a pleasant stroll around Lake Tomahawk in the middle of town. It's more of a pond than a lake, and a small one at that, especially by Lake Murray standards, but don't let on, as the locals treasure it. It's home to a fine bunch of feathered friends, too, some of whom posed for portraits as Jay and his friends made the half-mile trek around the lake to take in all the sights.

Cut to: Fine feathered friend on the fly, or almost so.

The park's management has taken pains to installed a Watercraft Launching Point. Looks like the ducks are observing the rules and launching without bringing in any vehicles.

It'll be hard to tell from such a small print, but this is a butterfly, posing momentarily in the middle of the path. Normally, Jay would enlarge to the max and zoom in on the little creature, but in this case he likes the shadow of the setting sun, and the textures of the path and the lawn's edges. So this is what you get. Small butterfly in a large space. Live with it.

Back to downtown Black Mountain, where a store named Chocolate Gems makes these masks out of, well, chocolate. This one's inside a plastic wrapper inside a glass showcase.

Jay pronounced the place a suburb of Heaven.

Pictures of Jay's late father are way scarce.  For one thing, he was always the shutterbug, the one who yells "say cheese" and unleashes the Flashbulb Dots Vision Syndrome. The few exceptions have largely been consumed by the dysfunctional family's long-lasting dis-functions.

Nonetheless, this is William Gross himself, photographed in glorious black and white by Jay, himself, with his Hasselblad 500c while the Old Man photographed Jay with the Kodak Instamatic that he's holding.

Says Jay, "We clicked each other at dusk on the lawn in front of my photo lab. The Old Man spent most of the latter part of his life in Rochester, New York, annually revisiting the South to pursue the elusive fish of central Florida. Some summers he took the car train, but when he drove the whole route he stopped off in town for a chat and a night's rest. Born in Rochester, he didn't mind the winters there. I was born in South Carolina and didn't mind the summers here. So... Well, you know."

Here's another one, courtesy of Jay's Cousin Chuck Jermyn of Rochester.

It's a cool old 1940s portrait that suffered greatly from cropping, perhaps to fit into somebody's too-small frame, but Jay managed to Photoshop a scan of it into usefulness.

Then there are these shots, also courtesy of Chuck.

Bill and Joephine (Bill's girlfriend in Rochester), and...

Bill and his sister Irma, in the 1960s in front of the family's home in Aiken.

Jay often wonders. He wonders a great deal, and pretty much weekly he wonders why restaurants insist on being closed when he wants to eat. Jay's no stranger to the art of cooking. He knows how to assemble a sandwich, chop a proper salad and apply salad dressing, preferably in copious amounts. He knows how to marinate, how to broil, bake, and stir-fry. He especially knows not to, most especially in the summertime when it's blazes hot outside and heating up the stove makes it even hotter inside, as well as putting a strain on the airconditioning that's readily reflected in the electric bill. So aside from being too lazy to cook - the truth outs - Jay likes going out to eat for other reasons. Coolth conservation in the summertime, and a handy reason to escape the confines of home otherwise. He also likes walk-in-sit-down restaurants and mostly doesn't relate to drive-through food.

Not to say Jay doesn't like fast food. Indeed, that's his most frequent choice because it's simple, uncluttered, and predictably mediocre-at-worst. Jay likes food and other things - life, really - uncomplicated. He doesn't need hype to tell if food is good, and hype doesn't make the dishes taste any better anyway. That "garden fresh salad" as promoted by the picture-perfect theme-restaurant menus is usually dunked in nasty chemicals to keep it from spoiling. Not interested. One thing Jay has learned in years of restaurants: it never looks like the picture.

Mostly, Jay doesn't care for fancy food. Or things that look like they might bite, or food that spent too much time near the pepper pot, or disgusting looking creatures passed off as delicacies. You know the ones. From years of vegetarianism and near-so, Jay's not a fan of steaks, but he can be tempted now and then. He generally tries to hold the calorie count down, at least out of scientific notation, and lately has to skip everything that even vaguely resembles dessert, by far his favorite stuff. Lately, Jay's become far more predictable than he likes to admit, but he's mostly a night person. He's frequently hungry when most restaurants aren't open. Ever been to a "late night" place late at night? They're always packed to the rafters. So why, Jay wonders, are all the other places closed? Surely they'd like to serve up some food and rake in some dough from the late night rush.

Jay fondly remembers a time when there were many fewer corporate restaurants in Columbia. Better days for sure, and better food and more choices to boot. The Capitol Café, which was open all night, served up an extensive menu of food from a multiple-page menu stitched into green plastic. So now we have an endless array of characterless, close-at-ten-o'clock-sharp, corporate exemplaries with grills and fryers and a limited menu of stuff some ad agency pushes very hard. Open till ten, or maybe you can queue up for an hour at the drive-through window while the minimal staff chews gum. The late-night choices continue to dwindle.

Jay's not an enthusiastic headline writer, so you take the good with the bad here. Headlines sometimes pop into the brain and literally write themselves. Good ones, even. Bad ones, alas, can take much agonizing time to concoct while the Muse laughs and cackles. There are people who have a natural talent with headlines, and Jay's met lots of them, but doesn't count himself among their number. When it comes to headlines, he works for everything he gets, and often gets little for his work.

The same is true of poetry. Jay's Muse came for a stay a few decades ago and dropped pithy lines all over the place, trusting Jay to gather and record them. He did that, troubling the Muse on occasion for a completion to something well begun, but never achieved the stardom as a poet that some people enjoy without even working up a sweat. It's all there, the vocabulary, the imagery, the finely honed appreciation of the nuances of language. But it doesn't come without the Muse's inspiration, and Jay can't even force it to work, as he usually can with prose. His entire poetic output is but a thin sheaf of lines that he hasn't incremented or polished, or even looked through in years. Indeed, the few people he permitted to look at his work were all in agreement that it was, on the whole, worthless. Exit Muse, stage left.

But this week, again, deadlines loom, so have to do with a picture to tide over till another time. A little abstraction this time. Jay particularly likes abstract images that are something to begin with - abstracted ways of looking at reality, perhaps odd angles, extreme closeups, or lit in some unusual way. This picture starts off as a simple picture of a green plastic float, floating in the swimming pool here at the apartment complex during the annual pool party last week. The apartment management puts on the party to celebrate summer with hot dogs, burgers, and humidity. A good time was had by all. To bring out the plastic floatness of the plastic float, Jay added some Photoshop filters. It's a shot taken with his pointy shooty aim-and-mash-button pocketable camera, and the odd natural light gave it the alien look you see here. It didn't need much color correction. He applied a tonemapping filter that enhanced the midtone contrast, plus an Orton effect that emphasized the pillowy look of the float's folds. To the small version for this blog he added several whacks of unsharp masking to accentuate the texture. If none of this technospeak means anything to you, you're fortunate. Just enjoy the picture. Click it for a bigger view on RedBubble.com.

Time's short this week, too. Paying the price for all that procrastination in past weeks. Anyway here's a few further thoughts on various subjects already discussed, and then a picture, and then off to work. Grind to the nosestone.

Jay likes swing. A lot. And big band, and jazz, and of course the blues. His collection includes two gems of Muddy Waters, plus a few Ruth Brown CDs that stayed in the player for months after he got them. Indeed, the Muddy Waters CDs were replacements for treasured old vinyl that got lost among Jay's many vicissitudes and resulting moves from one tenement to another. He also loves boogie woogie, which he recently re-discovered after years of deprivation, having forgot that he liked it so much. Oh, and ragtime, definitely ragtime. If you're not familiar with it, re-acquaint yourself with its wonders with a search on YouTube. Their boogie woogie selection is particularly rich, with many clips from the Old Days When Television was Good. And monochrome.

Check this out, too:

But time is way short, so here's a freshly minted picture to tide over. It links to a larger version on RedBubble.com. Jay's been going for walks at the river in the evenings lately, and spotted this scene a few evenings ago. He tried to getit with his pocketable pointy-shooty thingus, but ended up returning the next evening with tripod and wideangle.

We used to all make jokes about elevator music. You know you're old when "your song" is relegated to Muzak. How true, but these days, elevator music is the good stuff. Jay's noticed an unpleasant trend among the cheap restaurants he frequents - radio stations instead of even the lowly Muzak. Bad, bad, bad radio stations. Bad music, worse audio. Maybe if the audio were decent the music wouldn't be so nerve wracking.

In some places, they're playing solid Oldies, which in today's parlance means bad, bad music that grates on the ears. Real Oldies, maybe deserving of being called "classical" by now, would be no problem, but even the few places that play it are using horrid Corporate Radio to pipe the world's worst audio signal to bad store speakers. Pity poor ears. Pity the poor audiophile!

Actually, Jay's not one. An audiophile, that is. Mainly, Jay's wallet doesn't permit such indulgence, although his ears would surely relish a treat. There's a limit to how much lack of quality he can stand, however, and low-quality MP3s broadcast over FM radio stations littered with noisy DJs and stupid contests push Jay's limits to the max.

His long treasured FM receiver having bit the dust a couple of months ago, Jay's suffering along with computer driven audio till the microeconomy in Jay's immediate vicinity permits shopping for a replacement system - might be a while. He's converted a few dozen of his favorite CDs to computer audio (at maximum quality, uncompressed thank you very much), and sends the audio out through dinky but decent speakers at a few meager watts. Doesn't quite drown the drone of the computer and its external harddrives, but Jay has to make do till the "big" receiver can be replaced.

Don't even suggest repair. The thing is almost 20 years old. The company that made it has been bought out and re-bought out, and the likelihood of finding parts is low, much less someone capable of performing the repair at less than astronomical cost. It was good in its day. Not by any means an audipphile's dream, of course, but way decent, with all kinds of (revolutionary back then) video inputs and an on-board 10-band graphic equalizer. Now it's past its prime, clicking and popping, with dusty pots and sliders that squawk when operated. Its LCD display is long kaput, so there's no telling what the receiver's doing unless you've lived with it for over a decade, which Jay has, and can discern its "modes" from listening to its results.

Really, though, it's only Jay's fourth or fifth system for all his merry days. He tends to hang onto stuff that works until it doesn't. (It's beyond hot here, so that's why the refreshing pool picture, which has zip to do with audio.)

The procrastination gremlins have been having their way lately, so here's Jay again, typing away at this blog despite having many other things he ought to be doing. We left off last time in a hurry as a result of previous procrastination episodes, before taking up the Conch Republic.

In Jay's view, the Florida Keys have a big problem: Florida. Namely, you have to travel through all of Florida to get to the good part: Key Largo and parts south. Travel in the state is impeded by enormous amounts of traffic, mostly homicidal drivers of large, obnoxious vehicles. Well, Florida has more problems than that - and we won't discuss politics here - but when it comes to the Keys, getting there is a very long drive. Understatement of the week.

Jay's made the drive many times, mostly in the scorchiest days of summer when the only the heartiest of Southerners venture out. Jay discovered the Keys in summer in the mid-1970s. He'd just bought his first Hondacar, a yellow Civic CVCC 5-Speed with no airconditioning, which he chose for high fuel efficiency so he could roam around on the cheap. He met a friend in Miami and for fun they trekked to Key West to see if local yarns about it were true (they were!). In those days all the bridges were narrow wooden affairs, rather scary, especially the infamous seven-mile bridge. Jay was happy to be driving a narrow car. Jay and his friend dined like royalty in Key Largo - a quaint little German restaurant where the friendly owners grandmothered the diners. The food was exquisite.

They checked out John Pennekamp Coral Reef Undersea Park, but did so from the bank, and climbed its lookout tower, and made a note to come back again for a better look. Wandering around all the Keys in turn, large and small, they eventually landed in that other world known in this one as Key West. Amid many creatures of a time long past, aging hippies mostly, Jay felt at home, especially when he found out that the Big Event of the Day was the sunset. Jay's a fan of sunsets. Key West's locals and tourists gathered daily on the docks at Mallory Square to admire the sunset. Local sailboaters and colorful characters took turns riding off into the sunset so the tourists would get nice snapshots. The Cookie Lady peddled cookies from her bicycle's basket, and musicians congregated to jam and jive. In short, a good time was had by all. Jay and his friend went back to Miami with smiles on their faces and stories to tell.

Besides Ernest Hemingway's cats, its bars, and some other things, Key West is famous for Key Lime pie and Conch Fritters. First the fritters. The pretty sea shells that she sells you by the seashore and you hold up to your ear to hear the roar of the ocean? Those are conchs. You coax one of those defenseless little critters out of its shell, batter it, fry it up and smack it on a bun with condiments of your choice. Ding! Conch fritter. Jay admits to consuming exactly one conch fritter - when in Rome - but after seeing them being roasted in their shells at a Long Key campground he swore off permanently. Too barbaric.

Key Lime Pie, on the other hand, is a delicacy Jay can get into. In fact, it was first on the list of local foods to try when Jay and his friend first visited Key West. They stopped for afternoon snack at a disreputable dive - because that's where his friend insisted on stopping - and surrounded a memorably unmemorable meal followed by absolutely divine Key Lime Pie. The place's signs touted their pie as original, genuine, native, home-made, and everything else that gets the tastebuds into high gear. It was.

For the Key lime pie uninitiated, don't think green fruits and Corona cerveza. Limes and Key limes are different fruits altogether. Key limes are much yellower than green limes, and they're much sweeter, with a distinctive taste more like lemon chiffon than plain ol' lime. Jay and his friend returned to Miami a few days later, raving about the pie - naturally they ate it constantly at many different places. "Oh," said his friend's mother, "I've heard about that. Let me see." She walked out into her back yard in Coral Gables and picked some Key limes off her tree! In a couple hours she proudly served home made, phenomenally delectable Key lime pie. What a treat. Jay has never had better, and he's tried many, many times.