2011-07-29 - 2:05 p.m.
It's true that humid-heat is nothing like just regular hot-heat, which is to say that I'm back home after eleven days in California. I miss the San Francisco fog, is what I'm saying, though just two days ago I was cursing it. The grass is greener, and all that, a saying which is also very true. Just now, I checked on the thermometer out on the little deck, which sits atop a tar roof, and the thermometer reads 110 degrees. We drove Big Sur, going eighteen, twenty miles per hour, green-and-tan hills to the right, frigid gray-blue crashing surf to the right. The redwoods still calm me and are resistant, it turns out, to just about everything except chainsaws. I liked Sacramento much better than I thought I would. Yosemite is still just about the best thing around, and San Francisco is big and foggy and expensive and half classy, half swollen-lip.
I enjoyed not having access to the internet. It allowed much more free-brain time. And so:
- It's true that, from time to time, just about every girl is a girl I'd like to touch, or get close to. It's a feeling of being less discriminate. That's how I felt in California.
- The seat belts and the tray-table-up routines on airplanes are totally absurd, huh? Do they make you do this to create an illusion of order in an inherently scary situation (giant metal cigar hurtling toward ground)?
- Went to a great aquarium. The scope of life is breathtaking. A million kinds of jelly fish. Seahorses! What the fuck. They are incredible and bizarre and took a billion years to come about. And it's so easy to wipe the earth clean of these things. We are destructive, we humans. It's a cliche by now, but if National Geographic magazine had a thesis, it seems clear by now that that thesis would be: Humans are destructive to all that is non-human.
- Except ideas. We are good at ideas. National parks, trolley cars going up and down crazy San Francisco hills, legalized weed advertised in the free weeklies, big government buildings, co-op restaurants in Arcata, recycling water bottles and egg cartons and aluminum foil.
- People. Seen: Christian motorcycle gangs, Germans and Swedes and English tourists all up and down California, vegan-punk-radicals running excellent restaurants, street-kids in Arcata fake-hassling you as you walk across their perfectly manicured town square, tattooed writer-bartenders serving $3 happy-hour Anchor Steams, pretty park rangers with pink fingernails stuffed into gray-and-green uniforms.
