A would-be writer at play.
Musings of a trip to southern California
I left my home in Mendocino early, taking the twist of licorice I call highway 1, cutting inland at Bodega, stopping off in the beautiful town of Petaluma for tea and toast. By 10:00 am, I’m heading down highway 101, toward San Francisco.
I’ve come to think of San Francisco not as a city; it is a midway Plaisance. People migrate to California to be set free, rid themselves of restraint, imagining the town to be somewhat a carnival. Indeed, to outsiders, maybe it is, but it is a town of serfs mixed with high-thinkers and robber barons, living in harmony with teachers, nurses, liberal parents, and a Board of Supervisors who, to the rest of America, appear to be a sandwich short of a picnic.
It is a city without rules, which is why the periodic discussions I have with the city’s Uber drivers reveals the sleaziness, no matter how grandiose the façade. The greed, and the political cunning, all drivers breathlessly agree, is why so much is corrupt in the running of the city. In coffee shops, the San Franciscan will explain why blacks don’t like whites, and wars kill the wrong people. But that’s okay because a life lived in a carnival atmosphere allows for any private fantasy.
One of which is, I can be called a writer if all I do is write notes to my dog.
Down the road, the cliffs of Big Sur stand tall, rigid, like their watchdog Redwoods, wearing a halo of ocean mist, guarding, looming, spectating, from their sloping grandstand view of the Pacific Ocean. Its cold surf thrashing and washing its stony extent, making music…rumbling… crashing…whispering…crying… choruses repeatedly evident since anyone or anything can remember.
I am lost in a late afternoon trance, remembering our first visit and still haunting my memory for its beauty. Remember, Jenny? We stopped at a small gas station set back from the road, white-washed exterior gleaming like a pearl against the dense green foliage, red dirt road fading to black, and disappearing into a mystery waiting for another day, but calling me, like your call, pulling me into your heart.
Everything again feels so familiar, roads, views, smells, trees, rocks, all of nature’s best mocking cities. My feet are firmly planted on the westward end of our continent, but my spirit soaring high above the mighty Big Sur surf line, its beckoning paths trying to lure me away from my intended destination.
It’s almost 10:00 pm, as I drive up to the Beverly Hills Hotel and hand my car key over to the valet, taking a room before tomorrow’s meeting. Apart from the audaciousness of the whole thing, there’s something about this hotel that I cannot square with the person I am. Everyone I talk to is playing a part. Every server is an actor going through hard times, and the extremities of the sorrows in the town are panoramic. Spiritual therapists are always on hand. There are no scrawny girls, those hanging around drug stores on the boulevard, in the process of becoming someone else.
The doorman is not shy about telling me how many tennis specialists, gossip columnists, stars of the screen, aeronautic technicians, princes and princesses, TV Realtors, and a thousand screenwriters he’s welcomed. The Beverly Hills Hotel is the luxury of capitalism. I have more exciting craps than interesting conversations in the Beverley Hill’s Hotel.
I woke up in the morning thinking I had to invent the wheel. What I needed was the safe and secure company of failures. I set off for breakfast, having dressed suitably, trying to look thirty years younger than I am. I looked ridiculous, and the same age as yesterday. Breakfast was expensive, but oh so good.
This is simply the musings of a would-be writer at play.