When I first decided to start a blog, I was daydreaming in the backseat of my brother’s Canadian Honda as he drove to Point Reyes.
This trip was very similar to another we’d taken the previous month, in the company of my brother (Brett), his wife Catherine, and my boyfriend Greg. Greg and I were staying with them in the Marin County town of Fairfax.
Earlier that day, Brett had waved his hand at the nearby mountains and asked, “You guys want to go to the beach?”
We responded enthusiastically, and piled into the car. We took a tortuous road through the coastal, forested mountains, and drove with the windows down. Twenty minutes into the trip, Greg asked, “Um…how close are we to this beach?”
Brett leaned against the steering wheel and gestured up the road. “Oh, not far at all.”
We resumed our conversation. Thirty minutes later, at a break, Greg asked again, “So, how much farther is it?”
“It’s really close,” Brett assured him, looking surprised.
Catherine and I, in the back, burst out laughing. We teased Brett about his non-specificity, teasing that he accepted with grace and a few chuckles of his own. Then Greg pointed out, “You know, he only said he was taking us to the beach. He didn’t say what beach. As far as we know, it could be a beach in Mexico.”
I guffawed. “What a great road-trip story! I mean, seriously…”
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A month later, when I was visiting my brother in Fairfax again, we decided to spend the day in Point Reyes. This, for you non-Northern Californians, is a protected peninsula thirty miles north of San Francisco. We took Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, and were giggling over nothings as we drove past the kind of tiny, white-painted Northern California towns that, as an author I recently read put it, “you could get swallowed whole in and forgotten.” I was watching the tree-dark mountains through the grainy windshields, and I was wondering if every church we passed was the one where I would get married. This is a habit I picked up in my mid-teens; it only surfaces in wild country.
Certain moments in life come at you like clues in a murder mystery, wrapped in their own eeriness. That was how it was, when I had the flashbulb idea to start a blog. The key, I think, was realizing how colored the landscape was by my own strange perspective.
Hurray for strange perspectives!
This blog will be about my travels, whether they’re physical or in the imagination. I am an author: I’m sure I’ll talk about works that inspire me, and my own work. I’ll talk about film noir. I’ll talk about science fiction. I’ll talk about California. And, appropriately, I might even talk about the universe.
Welcome to the Intergalactic Coffeeship!
We’re going to the beach.
