Monthly Archives: October 2011

From the South-facing beaches here on Coronado Island, you can see Mexico as some indistinct blobs of hillsides, just some darker patches in the side of the hot blue sky. It’s only a 17 mile ride to the border crossing from here, and I figure I’ll take that ride on Sunday. It seemed right to … Continue reading »

Yesterday, waking up North of Malibu, I thought: today I will get the finger. Maybe several times. It seemed inevitable. The next state park was on the other side of over 100 miles and the entire coastline of the sprawliest place on the planet, one of the most hopelessly car-centric realms ever devised, the city … Continue reading »

This has nothing to do with my journey to the end of the world, except insofar as it represents the final culmination of the era of my life that I am drawing to a close: after roughly five and a half years of furious, espresso-addled writing and revision, my debut novel is today loosed upon … Continue reading »

I can only hear the words “Pismo Beach” in my head in the voice of Steve Buscemi. Why? It was days ago in Monterrey that I first caught glimpses of the sort of archetypal imagery that comes first to mind when someone says “California”: the land of big box stores sitting on high sunny hillsides. … Continue reading »

I. A long uphill is both the ultimate scourge and the gateway to another consciousness. When you’re hauling yourself and one hundred pounds of steel and camp supplies and gas station groceries up a half mile non-stop stretch of hairpin switchbacks, hearing your breath hiss through your nostrils in industrial rhythm, feeling your muscle fibers … Continue reading »

It becomes like swimming, biking does, when you’ve been at it long enough. You feel like a Mer-person with wheels instead of flippers. You become at home in the highway shoulder, and when you stop and stand on unmoving ground again you feel oddly constrained, like gravity is too strong, like you want the world … Continue reading »