Three years ago today I was in Oakland and the three of us began leg two, west to Highway One. As the smallest, I sat in the middle of the truck cab, adjusting at every shift into fourth. We stopped for supplies at a CVS in San Rafael. I bought a disposable camera and got another for free. We rolled further westward through windy redwood-lined asphalt. It was Sunday and we noticed a garage sale, managing to park the truck between the shoulder and the erosion-exposed dirt wall ascending above the road. My companions were looking for a good pot for camping. Tristan instead found bicycle maintenance tools and I found what I thought would be a helpful and appropriate book for travelers through the cosmos, as the book advertises itself, introduced by Ram Daas. There’s no sense in deciding one is wrong about such choices. They are simply made, hardly even chosen by us, and we must live with their outcomes. And so, Emmanuel’s Book lies in the court where this all takes place, somewhere between another rough contour in the plane to a full-fledged player in the game. Hell, maybe it’s the sunlight by which any of this visible, though I would maintain that sunlight remains itself and we should keep metaphors away; in an important way it symbolizes the day onto which it falls while remaining eternally the light of the sun, and that’s already plenty.
Two years ago today I was in Oakland. We might have gone to a recently opened bar that featured two bocce courts named Make Westing, after a Jack London story. If it was that night it was one that represented the commodification, the static private side of everything we were experiencing, from bocce itself, to the role of West Coast literature in contemporary life, to fun, to drinking, to the occupation of space. It also might have been the day we played bocce with a mom and her son who was more interested in sharing with us his secret hideout at the shrub-lined edge of the park. I asked him if he was part of the occupy movement, he said he was not. Perhaps that was the same day. It was Live Oak Park in Berkeley and I declared it one of the best parks I’d ever passed an hour.
A year ago today I was still in Monterey County, taking my time to make sure I had all the pieces in place for the next few months. I was to release a book’s worth of material one stop at a time and I needed all of the text and the supplies to allow me to put them together and photocopy handmade copies as I went. I also needed clothes and things. I was also bringing my ukulele and my bocce set and a half dozen books that I would need for research, and I would have to walk certain distances with all this. Such is the puzzle with which I was tinkering a year ago today.
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