I remember when I was 17, Wanda and would drive over to Birdcage Mall in Sacramento at all hours of the night, pull off into the parking lot and play that game, sitting on the roof of my car with a couple friends, in bare feet, radio going through the windows, until a crowd would start gathering and the security guard would come kick us out.

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The kids are out there making caramel apples. I don’t even know how to make caramel apples.

I’ve been working for almost two weeks on a comprehensive 10-page service information kit. It has to be complete and distributable by noon tomorrow. I’ve only got a page-and-a-half left to finish. It took me almost 14 days to complete the other eight-and-a-half pages. Painstaking detail. Meticulous copy. Carefully orchestrated design.

Half an hour ago, arguably within the 11th hour period, I decided I didn’t like it and erased it and started over.

The load of laundry in the dryer is on its 7th spin for the day. At what point do cottons, after having endured excessive “oh, I’m just dewrinkling”, begin to disintegrate?

 (update: I got the new kit done with 40 minutes to spare, and the way it turned out, I’m glad I made the change despite the stress)

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As a teenager I had the requisite junker – a 1977 Toyota Corolla – that made every trip several times more frustrating and dramatic than it would’ve been otherwise. Overheating. Stalling. Flat tires. Crooked, uncomfortable seats. Clutch problems.

Still, that car is packed with more memories than any I’ve had since.

Trucking up the Virginia Range from the Carson-Dayton side to get to Virginia City, winding through the dusty roads of Gold Hill, car bumbling along in first gear the whole way up. Stopping a few times on the hillside to let it cool down. We once had to leave it roadside and go track down a jug of water in what was, in essence, a mostly-deserted ghost town. Walking along there, we’d see old broken down carriages and rusted tools in yards that had been abandoned decades ago. Old rickety gold rush era houses falling down. One lonely general store, still hanging open for the occasional passerby who, like us, found themselves in need of something in a tough spot. A 20-minute trip took more than an hour. But I loved it and did it again and again.

Heading down the California’s coastline along Highway 1, hitting Santa Cruz, Monterrey, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, LA, San Diego, sometimes on the way to Mexico, bouncing down the windy highway, dodging the coastal fog, and the road hypnosis late at night when the lines began blurring together. Everybody blowing past my old Toyota with the Doors blaring from the radio on the lap of whomever happened to be in seat next to me. Reclining the seat back and sleeping in turn offs and rest stops when we needed to.

Sailing through the Napa Valley, six or seven of us stuffed into that tiny little car, it would barely go, never doing more than 45 mph on the highway. My limbs and their cigarettes and our radios hanging out the window. The cop that pulled up beside us with a bullhorn and a warning, and the fateful time Jerry accidentally drove the car over a parking barrier. It was never quite right after that.

But what I was remember most of all was, years later, watching the brand new shiny Jeep Grand Cherokees and Minivans and slick, thumping Honda Accords driving up that route through Gold Hill in the rusty belly of the old Virginias, and wondering how the hell anybody could really enjoy that ride for what it was in 20 minutes.

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There is warm. Focus is both sharp and fuzzy, and you can change either at will just by blinking. The color it produces is different, though I cannot explain how. There are suddenly 25 and a half hours in every day, but only 970 minutes. There are complicated words that come and go in their emotional equivalents, like tempestuous and frenetic and transcendent. There is knowing and unknowing, and alternate comfortable and uncomfortable moments spent with both of those.

There is body. Physical sensation in incredible detail given the distance and absence. Perception becomes everything. And there’s running and playing like children in and out of those corridors; children who can never quite see each other clearly in the hall, but watch the shadows and the blur and hear the laughing in the other room, and set out with crooked grins to find and expose the other.

There’s flush red and hard. There is soft, and flexible. There is movement beneath things that would appear still on their waxy surfaces. A need that knows only momentary nourishment, only momentary ease before it comes looking again. And again. Voracious and fortifying in astonishingly delicate balance. And then there’s a perceived silence and invisibility for a little while. A moment. But even in that, there’s an infinite extractable body of something the English language provides no word for.

There’s momentary floating, followed by grounding and plunging and then spinning, and then settling like dust or a soft white sheet onto a bed after washing, when the windows are open and the breeze keeps it in the air for one extra decadent and suspended, solitary second… before letting it go. And then it rests there, long and easy, until the next gust comes and pulls it up from its edges and sends it sailing above its surface again.

And so it goes.

Afloat deep within that embodiment of fantasy and question and dream and imagination, there is an unmistakably raw and blistering reality. The source, from which the rest feeds and manifests.

Don’t tell me what I am or am not. But is this, in all its lack for man-made words, what love feels like?

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me: I wonder if people in simpler, more spiritual cultures must stand in the middle of anywhere and wait for that enormous sun to paint them as it slips down.
me: You can actually feel the heat change.
me: So huge and blinding on the horizon. Makes you want to believe in a God.
me: You think.. nothing that beautiful happens by accident.
me: But then you remember..
me: Everything that beautiful happens by accident.
me: If i could only go back to one spot.. one pinhole set of coordinates in Nevada.. ever again..
me: .. at only one time, one specific day and moment
me: I’d go back to where the 5am road splits and curves to the southwest and bumbles over the terrain for a minute before leveling out..
me: And i’d go in early October
me: 6:10 am
me: That for me was, up until that moment, the most religion I’d ever felt in a static landscape.
me: Just the right amount of fog on the ground, the sunrise piercing just under that cloud cover.
me: The colors were just right. The light was just right. The cold was invigorating. The ground was crunchy and flexible. The sage were frosted and twinkling.
me: So much silence, stillness. Seemed like if you could stop time, that’s what it might feel like.
me: I remember being able to see in such micro detail: individual ice crystals on prickly branches, the slightest shadow made by a rock a little bigger than the others in the dirt on the road.
me: How the sage flowers changed from red to rust to gold, in just the few minutes it took me to get my camera out.

me: That must be the axis of beauty and frustration for anyone who photographs.
me: The ephemeral is as enchanting as it is heartbreaking.

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“There are intangible realities which float near us, formless and without words; realities which no one has thought out, and which are excluded time and again.. for lack of interpreters.”

- Natalie Clifford Barney

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