January 20, 2025
A Walk In the Woods (Mill Valley & San Francisco)
I needed to take a lot of PTO so I went to California for 9 days.
The raison d'être was to see Michael, a work friend from a former job at a church in Ohio, but the first leg of the trip would end up being a form of "friend Hajj" – I stayed with my friend Sam's dad and sister in a little town just north of San Francisco.
He'd made a Google map of must-dos which the family supplemented: a bookstore, a burrito joint, a trail, a particularly nice stretch of highway. So many Kaabas, so little time. I did what I could.
A few days later I'd take the rental car south, stopping in Santa Cruz for a few hours (where Sam went to college) before ending the pilgrimage at Michael's in the suburban wilderness of Anaheim.
Gregg County Airport (5 a.m.)
A disheveled mid-20s guy with the look of the chronically perturbed speaks slantways (barely audibly) into the mic:
"Folks... the captain is saying we have a de-icing problem. So... we're in a little world of trouble. Thank you."
A woman behind me chortles and repeats the unintentional turn of phrase.
"Little world of trouble."
"Aren't we all in one?", I think, quite self-satisfied. A heady observation.
Half-smiling in a knowing way, I return to whatever the fuck I was doing, probably looking at IG reels of soup-craft or someone eating shit on a dirt bike.
The de-icing machine had exploded. An employee had to "get sent home" with burn wounds and the maintenance guy wasn't picking up the phone. We'd have to wait for sunrise to melt the ice off the tail.
As we can see the plane from the gate, a woman gyrates her arms in a "turn around" motion at the pilots. If they turn the plane toward the sun, it'd speed things up presumably. Too obvious, I thought; there must be a reason they can't.
Is it a free-for-all on the tarmac? Is every movement legally prescribed or can they whip those things around?
Three and a half hours pass. The woman reprises her dance at irregular intervals, to no avail.
Mill Valley
Colors blind the eye.
Sounds deafen the ear.
Flavors numb the taste.
Thoughts weaken the mind.
Desires wither the heart.
A snippet of the Tao that resurfaces everywhere I go here, slightly mangled but still intact. This place is too beautiful. I can't hold onto it.
The lemon tree through the window of the room I'm staying. The redwood next to the illumined public library bench. Punjabi burrito in the soft gloom. I arrive in the evening but I have a sneaking suspicion that light always dapples here.
I take a few pictures and am immediately dissatisfied. My mom often takes pictures of the sky and it is, aside from the occasional rainbow, mostly a losing proposition. This place, like sun dogs and a gibbous moon, will never really translate in an image.
Also my phone battery isn't the greatest. If I take too many photos and videos, I risk getting lost on a trail.
I have lived my life with an unswerving deference to the authority of vehicles. Not the case here. Pedestrians bound into the crosswalk with a certainty that I initially confused for courage. But if you KNOW the Subaru Forester will stop, it is simple knowledge, not faith.
Growing up in walkable heaven and being consigned to pedestrian hell, I now understand why Sam mashes the crosswalk buttons in Longview every chance he gets, even if, or maybe especially if, it's unnecessary. F-350s, like corporations, aren't people, so fuck 'em. He can't even be bothered to give a friendly wave. I think he imagines them stewing in their cars as he flits past and he's probably right part of the time.
Editor's Note: Sam has requested that I add his commentary: "An environment where an F-350 is never annoyed is an environment where pedestrians can never exist." Speak it!
This is my first time solo-traveling and while my hosts are gracious I mostly only see them in the evenings. In between times, I feel I'm on a silent retreat, intermittently fasting from conversation. Maybe that's why it is all so overwhelming and inscrutable. I have to square it all with myself.
Sam's sister drops me off at a trailhead and wishes me the best. The first part is called "Sun Trail" and I see why: the first couple hundred yards curves straight up a bare hill, stabbed in a mote of light, before abruptly petering out into... someone's yard? I check my phone. Idiot. I double-back to find the actual trail and put my phone on airplane mode to preserve battery.
His sister had started calling me "Tay Tay" and his dad shortly joined in. "Taylor" could get turned around a bit, but "Tay Tay" is never living down a search and rescue operation.
San Francisco
An advert at a bus shelter near Golden Gate Park.
PostHog.
...
PostHog.
I find it upsetting that a group of people got together in a room and agreed to that.
Earlier that day I'd taken a screenshot of an IG post of a teenager with the little-shit haircut flipping a double bird to the camera and the caption: "12 YEAR OLD RUG PULLED AND MADE $30K..."
Muted terror. Maybe all the time now.
A Kaaba for Sam's dad: take the elevator to the top of the de Young Museum. You get a panoramic view of the city and it's free.
Upon arrival I had forgotten about the free part and ended up with a $20 general admission ticket before realizing my mistake. Now in the hole, I begrudgingly walked through a few of the wings.
It cuts against my quasi-intellectual bona fides but museums aren't my thing. I have this feeling that there's something I should be "getting," but most of the time I step up to the plate and absolutely whiff.
It is, as with most things, a matter of reps, but as soon as I am enthralled by a series of African tribal masks, I square up to a minor Rothko and swing at a slider in the dirt.
The view at the top is stunning but none of the photos turn out right.
After a couple bus rides and some moseying, I get to thinking that I'm surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people and my life is basically meaningless. The man who just whizzed past on the recumbent bike is an entire universe unto himself. Therein lies nihilism and euphoria and a great gulf of feeling in-between.
I might have more time to hone in on it, but my phone is dying and I have to piece together public transit before it goes.
The day before I leave, I need something familiar so I walk to the 9-hole local public golf course in the morning and get paired up with a sound engineer for the bluegrass-Americana band Railroad Earth.
He's a 6-handicap, which is just good enough where you can get really sullen and bitter toward the game, but luckily he's chill as hell. Which is good because, while also zenned out, I am, with the exception of a few beauties, spraying it all over the place.
I'm mentally resigned to losing a few balls to the redwoods and ravines ("Give it back to God," I say. You call it laziness? Try reverence.) Fortunately he's one of those guys that doggedly wades through the shit to pick up strays and by the end I'm playing with a rescued vibrant pink Chromax.
I throw it in my suitcase after the round. A few days later, a TSA officer at LAX swabs it for God-knows-what. Everything has a residue nowadays amirite?
I'm gifted insight into my condition after the fact. A reading this morning from Simon Critchley's Mysticism:
To borrow Heidegger's language, it might be more accurate to render mystical experience in terms of sheer human being-there of Dasein, rather than consciousness or Bewusstein, which always reduces that which is, Sein, to a cabinet of interiority.
There is a minor Rothko and a Muni bus and a ticket for a carne asada burrito numbered "1776". There is a bottle of conditioner being hawked out of suitcase. There is the ferry's twin-jetted wake, and people in all makes, models, manners, and modes.
Contemplating a new place in long spans of silence, it takes on an ecstatic hue. It is "outside of oneself."
Or maybe it's just very beautiful and a lot to take in.
