I'm at a garage sale. Quite a garage, too. Cavernous, deep. Far down its stony throat, on the shadowy back wall, I find a huge realist oil painting, only half swept clean of cobwebs. I ask the bored teen at the sales table. She says "My grandparents never had a space big enough to show it, neither did my parents." So it hung here in the dark for decades.

It's a mythological subject--a 19th Century maiden (except lean and yellow-eyed--part coyote? part spirit?) and a huge griffin, conversing on a ledge in a craggy canyon. Might be Ancient Greece, might be California.

Conversing up close and personal. Are they lovers on a picnic?

Looks like an Albert Bierstadt, though a strange subject for him. He's famous for rugged landscapes like this--especially Yosemite--but not for figures, gestures, emotion, interaction. But these two are really expressive. Sexy, strange and compelling. I like it.

So I offer to buy it. For $100,000! I think it's worth even more, but it's all I can raise, and given the owners' treatment, they undervalue it. I'd have to sell off some of my retirement fund at a loss in this Trump slump, yet pay capital gains tax for the realized gains. So I'd have to resell it for nearly $150,000, just to break even, and I can't possibly afford to keep it. Yet I make the offer anyway.

Because it ought to be seen. I'll offer the right of first refusal to the De Young Museum. If they say no, try other museums. I want this out of the closet. Oops! Garage.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Girl and griffin in Mediterranean landscape: I just reread Tamora Pierce's Squire; Kel, a rather stoic girl, raises an orphaned griffin cub. The setting is Tortall, a land with Mediterranean climate--hot dry south, central groves and meadows, a cool rainy north.
• Albert Bierstadt: a Romantic realist who did paint California, notably Yosemite, but not mythic beasts.
• De Young Museum, California, girl & mythic feline: in the De Young, an epic Bierstadt painting of California in spring hangs close to a small work by Elihu Vedder: "Sphinx of the Seashore"--both mythical cat and girl. The dream linked these museum-neighbors--split Sphinx's human and feline aspects, and put them into a Bierstadt canyon.
• Money, calculations, tax: need to do my taxes for 2024. Deadline approaching!
• ACTION 1: Tackle the IRS's (shudder) Capital Gains Worksheet.
• ACTION 2: Draw this. I'm not Bierstadt. Draw it anyway.
• ACTION 3: While drawing... take breaks, and stretch like a cat. I'm pretty sure the image is urging me to give human and animal sides equal respect, equal time.

ONE MONTH LATER

Trump announced monster tariffs, declaring economic war on the world. Business, labor, economists and consumers all understandably protested--not just bad policy, but he consulted no one, no one knows what's next, so no one can plan. Instability is not a friend of either democracy or prosperity. Like Trump cares!

So... the economy stalled and the stock market tanked. Down went my retirement fund. How much did I lose? $100,000 to $150,000, of course!

• ACTION 4: Get rid of Donald Trump. By any means necessary. But while smashing plutocracy, take breaks and stretch like a cat.

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