California.

As I put it in a letter:

I am still processing, and parsing, and finding words for the many things that happened to me there and that I thought and felt.

Some things: I became very inspired about youth and social justice and the arts and how they can and should combine, everywhere. I smoked more pot than I have in years, possibly the most ever in a concentrated period of time. I sunk into dialect - "hella," "get it," "tight." I rode bicycles, a lot, and the BART, which made me feel like I was on an elevated train into my parents' pasts. Bicycles. Why am I not owning/riding one? I need to get one. It's hard to justify that expense when you're living hand to mouth, but it's really time. The BART. You think the Buffalo subway feels old? The BART feels even older.

I spent a great deal of time thinking about polyamory, because I was with Mollie and her community and I have never known people who are so present, intentional, full, complex, careful, easy, laughing, with the love and sex and all the people who they care for, in their lives.

I spent more than half my time in the Bay up on Mount Diablo, a very green, very pretty mountain. Cattle grazing. The word "pastoral" comes to mind. We went camping with a big group of Mollie's friends. I spent a lot of time staring at the fire, staring at the stars. Eating Filipino feasts cooked with love. At night we slept without a tent, and the wind nearly blew us down the hill.

I spent some hours in Berkeley, talking walking eating with Craig. Talking global disaster, about which we have very different ideas, and life changes. Walking sun lit palm-and-evergreen-and-cherry-lined streets, stepping past the young and old homeless. People think Seattle has a visible homeless population? I've never seen anything like Berkeley. I wonder what the outreach scene is like there. Eating Indian food under a floor-to-thirty-foot-ceiling statue of Ganesh.

After, I biked to a different neighborhood, where I found Mollie and Sascha playing volleyball on the street while neighbors, sipping 40s from their yards, cheered them on. Cars blasting The Temptations and Marvin Gaye. It was the most like 19th st. a neighborhood has felt to me since 19th st., and I felt like I could breathe easy there, in the arms of a block where people were out in the street, talking to each other. How I miss that.

California. I don't know about it, I don't know if I would want to live there. It is beautiful, but I didn't see the most beautiful parts. And also, living here, I've become desensitized to beauty, I think. Or maybe spoiled into expecting a certain kind of beauty. I want water, and I want mountains with my water. And I want green, and flowers, everywhere. And if there are just a few of those pieces, I will expect all of them.

This is a time in my life, perhaps because I am surrounded by so much pain, when nature and natural beauty are particularly important.

There is this ease that verges on detachment, there, that I find troubling. I like places with rough edges. Where the raw, messy heart is split open in public. I have difficulty with Seattle in this regard, also, although I go far enough in my wanders and engage enough in my work to know that what is on the surface is not all that exists, here.

So anyway. California. I don't know. But I have important people there, and I didn't see San Francisco, I barely saw Oakland, I saw only the commercial center of Berkeley - I didn't see the redwoods, I didn't see Santa Cruz, I didn't see Point Reyes, Sonoma. I will have to go back.