We'll Outride the Wind, We'll Outrun the Sun

I prepare for my trip home tomorrow.  Today I was lazy and took advantage of my resort hotel, going to breakfast then back to bed, rising to download some music and then go to the gym for the lightest of workouts.  I went to the pool and lay in the sun for an hour or so, sleeping in the gentle northern solar rays so different from the brutal things back to which I go.  This is California and everyone who is rich is beautiful.  Young girls walked by me with perfect postures and perfect bodies unknowing.  Smooth mothers and slick fathers played tennis or drank daiquiris by the pool.  I wish I could live like this forever, but I am just a poor boy. . . wait. . . that's Paul Simon.  I only mean that I wish I didn't have to worry about how much things cost.  I am good at all the rest.  

I drove back up to Berkeley on Highway 101.  I'd not driven that stretch of highway before.  It is haunting and beautiful, different from Big Sur, but almost as empty and austere.  I made too many stops, however, first in Monterey which should be avoided, then Santa Cruz which probably should be avoided, too.  Then I got lost in the hideous and horrible Daly City by taking the wrong highway, so the trip took over four hours.  Still, I listened to KZSC and KPFA all the way so that the songs and the landscape melded in mythic memory for the rest of my days.

"Tee roodle, tee ridle, set high in my saddle. . .
No rider can catch us, no rider can pass."

Berkeley is dirtier than ever, if that can be believed.  Parts of it.  Telegraph Hill is a sick mess of closed shops and "glory riders."  Even College and Shattuck Avenues are sloppy and poor.  4th Street and environs are still pretty, but no more than ever before.  Tired and blue, I stayed in my room and on the hotel grounds more than I went out.  It is a Colonial outpost in a fallen world.  O.K.  O.K.  But I have been able to do little but lie about.

I will go to bed soon.  I will be up early in the morning.  It is a long day of travel followed by the shock of home.  The same old troubles lay in ambush there.  But there will have been this to draw on as new troubles arise, and we will have been armed with new ideas and sounds and sights, and we'll not be defeated by pygmies and oafs whose lives are smaller than this.  No, no, no.

"Jump up in my saddle, and hold the reins easy.
We'll outride the wind, we'll outrun the sun."

(Pictures to Follow)