I open my eyes and the first thing that hits me isn’t the Pacific light knifing through those salt-stained windows or the fact that you’re horizontal in a room where somebody once fucked their way through the Summer of Love, no, it’s the absolute silence. The kind of quiet that makes me understand why people lose their minds out here.
Years I walked past this place. Wetsuit on, board under my arm, another dawn patrol mission to paddle out and get worked by Bolinas indifference. And there it was, every single time: the Jefferson Airplane house, sitting there like some acid-damaged sphinx, keeper of secrets I wasn’t cool enough to know. I’d think about Grace Slick waking up in here, probably hungover, definitely not giving a single fuck about my reverence.
But now I’m alone in it. Actually inside the mythology.
The thing nobody tells you about sleeping in someone else’s legend is how profoundly ordinary it feels until it doesn’t. The floorboards creak with the same physics as any other floor. The morning tastes like salt and eucalyptus and time passing, which is just how every morning tastes in Bolinas. But then I remember, Grace Slick breathed this air. Grace Slick stood where I’m standing, probably naked, probably magnificent, probably wondering if the whole beautiful disaster was worth it. I once did a musical with her daughter China at Castilleja, which seemed random then but feels like some kind of cosmic breadcrumb now.
I realize the house doesn’t care. The walls have absorbed decades of screaming amplifiers and whispered confessions and awkward morning-afters, and they’re done being impressed. They’ve seen genius and they’ve seen mediocrity stumble through in the same torn jeans, and the distinction matters less than you’d think.
I walk to the window. Same beach I’ve been surfing for years. Same waves that have been humbling me with their casual perfection. But now I’m looking at it from the inside of the thing I used to look at, which creates this weird recursive loop of perspective that feels almost psychedelic without any chemicals involved.
Maybe that’s the point. Maybe the house was never about who lived here or what music got made. Maybe it’s just about this moment, standing in the salt light, alone with the ocean and the ghosts and the relentless present tense, finally understanding that I was always inside the story even when I thought I was just passing through.
The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.
Galileo Galilei