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
People ask me, ‘What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?’ and my answer must at once be, ‘It is of no use.’There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behaviour of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron… If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. That is what life means and what life is for. George Mallory, Climbing Everest: The Complete Writings of George Mallory
So I hauled my ass up 14,505 feet via the Mountaineers Route, the one that says “fuck your switchbacks” and points straight up the mountain’s throat, and all I left you with was this: one self-portrait, one dead Englishman’s quote about joy, and a title that admits the whole thing might just be you talking to yourself.
Which, let’s be honest, is exactly what it was. Every step of it.
The Mountaineers Route. Fuck. I scrambled up chutes and gullies and across that god-awful notch where the wind tried to erase me, where my hands were doing as much work as my legs, where every part of my body was screaming the same question Mallory tried to answer: “Why the fuck are we doing this?” And I did it in one day, which means I started in darkness and ended in darkness, which means somewhere around hour eight or nine, when my quads were molten and my lungs were two paper bags full of broken glass, I had a real genuine come-to-Jesus moment about whether sheer joy was really worth all this suffering.
But here’s the thing, and Mallory knew it, and I know it, standing there at the summit looking like every other exhausted pilgrim who ever pushed themselves past the point of reason, the question itself is the con. “What’s the use?” There is no use. That’s the whole fucking point. We’ve built a civilization that demands justification for everything, that needs ROI and metrics and purpose statements, and then we go out and do something completely, gloriously pointless, something that exists only in the doing of it, something that disappears the moment it’s over except for the ghost of it that lives in your legs for the next week.
I climbed it alone, that’s what solipsism means, right? Not just that maybe reality is all in my head, but that some experiences are so fundamentally interior, so completely my own private apocalypse, that even trying to share them is an act of failure. This photo is evidence that I was there, but it can’t transmit what it felt like when I topped out and the whole Sierra Nevada spread beneath me like proof of something I couldn’t quite name. It can’t show anyone the specific quality of my doubt at 13,000 feet, or the weird transcendence that happens when my body becomes just a machine I’m operating, or that moment of pure animal satisfaction when I made it and knew I’d made it.
And then you post it with Mallory’s words about joy being the end of life, about not living to eat and make money but eating and making money so we can live, and yeah, okay, that’s the romantic version. But the truth is messier. The truth is that you also did it because you’re fucked up in the exact right way, because there’s something broken or beautiful in you that needs to answer stupid questions like “Can I do this?” with your body instead of your brain. You did it because doing hard things for no reason is one of the last truly honest acts left to us. No career advancement, no likes, no audience except the mountain itself, which doesn’t give a shit whether you summit or die trying.
The struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, Mallory wrote that before Everest killed him, which maybe tells me something about the cost of that philosophy, or maybe just tells me he died doing exactly what he meant to do. I made it down. That’s the difference between a good story and a tragedy. But up there, for those hours, I was in the same conversation with the mountain that every climber has ever had, the one where the mountain asks “Why?” and I don’t have an answer except “Why not?” and somehow that’s enough.
Sheer joy. Sure. Joy and pain braided together so tight I can’t separate them. That’s the use of it. That’s what makes us human instead of just comfortable.
You orbit someone for years. Same rooms, same scenes, same tired circles. You see each other. You nod. You’re both exhausted by the sameness of it all, the mediocrity, but you don’t say it out loud. Not yet.
Then one night, Big Sur. A campfire. Michael and Ciara are there too, but honestly, they might as well be on another planet. Because something shifts between Niki and me. Maybe it’s the firelight. Maybe it’s that we’re both finally sick enough of the bullshit to stop pretending. Whatever it is: bang. We actually see each other.
And we talk. Art and life and love, the whole beautiful disaster of trying to make something real. Hours of it. The kind of conversation where you forget there are other people around. Michael and Ciara notice. You can feel their annoyance radiating across the fire, that specific irritation of being the third and fourth wheel to something you weren’t invited into. I probably should have cared. I didn’t.
It threw me. Rattled something loose. By the time we got to Nepenthe the next day, I was so deep in my own head I locked my keys in the car. Had to smash one of the back windows to get back in.
Our conversation continued on the drive back to the Bay Area, wind howling through the broken window, glass still scattered on the back seat. Hours more of it. The kind of talk that makes you forget you’re cold, forget you’re uncomfortable, forget everything except what’s being said.
It started something. Not just that night. Months, actually. Something that felt different.
But darkness is patient. It waits. It knows you better than you know yourself. Eventually, hers and mine, those old, familiar shadows, they came back. They always do. And when darkness calls, you answer.
So with the recognition that you can’t outrun what you are… We went back to our orbits.
But for those few months, it was something. Real and raw and honest. Worth a broken window and then some.
