The Fry’s chain completely taps into MSE: Male Shopping Energy. This is to say that most guys have about 73 calories of shopping energy, and once these calories are gone, they’re gone for the day—if not the week—and can’t be regenerated simply by having an Orange Julius at the Food Fair.
Douglas Coupland, Microserfs.
The OG. The first Fry’s, before the empire, before the madness spread across the valley like some beautiful, doomed fever dream.
And they went Wild West with it.
Not ironically. Not in that winking, aren’t-we-clever way that makes you want to put your fist through drywall. They committed. Each location had its own thing, its own weird, ambitious theme park aesthetic… but this one? Saloon doors. Wooden facades. The whole cowboy fantasy, right there between the RAM modules and the HDMI cables.
It was absurd. It was perfect. It’s gone now, of course.
American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash — all of them — surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered with rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if no other way, we can see the wild an reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index. Driving along I thought how in France or Italy every item of these thrown-out things would have been saved and used for something. This is not said in criticism of one system or the other but I do wonder whether there will come a time when we can no longer afford our wastefulness — chemical wastes in the rivers, metal wastes everywhere, and atomic wastes buried deep in the earth or sunk in the sea. When an Indian village became too deep in its own filth, the inhabitants moved. And we have no place to which to move. John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America
According to the artist Peter Richards the 72 telephone poles draw attention to the artificial and unstable nature of the landfill park. Today many of the poles are no longer vertical on account of the subsidence of the garbage buried underneath. In the 1960s, garbage dumps along the shore of the San Francisco Bay were converted into public recreation areas. In 1990 the City of Palo Alto hired Hargreaves Associates to create a master plan for the 150-acre Byxbee park located on the sanitary landfill. The design’s goal was to balance a public desire for a 19th-century-style picturesque park with the necessities of highly sensitive environmental systems and with site development restrictions inherent to building on landfill — no impermeable surfaces (all paths are of crushed oyster shells); no trees whose roots might pierce the clay cap; no irrigation (so only native grasses are used). However, in recent years the City of Palo Alto has begun destroying several of the original park’s features such as leveling most of the hillocks that represented the middens of the native Ohlone people of the region, and burying oyster-shell paths that were a reference to the shellfish harvesting of the past.
Children of the future Age Reading this indignant page, Know that in a former time Love! sweet Love! was thought a crime. William Blake
This is the sickness, right here. The moment we decided that ecstasy needs credentials. That you can’t just be happy, you have to justify being happy, prove you’ve earned it, demonstrate its utility. Meanwhile, misery just walks in the door. Depression needs no references. Despair is always pre-approved.
Look at this photos, three people in some black-box theater in San Francisco, making the case for what every animal on earth knows without thinking about it: that morning feels good, that being alive occasionally doesn’t suck, that sometimes, not always, not even often, but sometimes, there’s a reason to keep going that can’t be reduced to bullet points.
Blake knew the score two centuries ago. He saw them coming, all the future scolds and accountants and puritans who’d want to put love in the dock, who’d demand that beauty justify itself while ugliness gets a free pass. The ones who insist you explain why you’re not grinding yourself into paste for someone else’s profit margin.
And Maher, centuries later, still fighting the same fight. Still staging the same trial. Which tells you everything you need to know about how we’ve “progressed.” We’ve got better lighting and sound systems, but we’re still prosecuting the same crime: the crime of feeling something real without permission, without paperwork, without a goddamn whitepaper explaining the ROI of waking up and not wanting to die.
The indignant page. That’s what Blake called it. And that rage, that’s the tell. You only get indignant when something precious is under attack. When the barbarians aren’t at the gates, they’re inside, wearing badges, demanding you prove you have the right to experience a moment of grace.
Mickle Maher There Is A Happiness That Morning Is Phoenix Theatre, 414 Mason Street, San Francisco Performers: Geo Epsilanty, Valerie Façhman and Scott Baker Directed by Katja Rivera
As bohemias go, Perry Lane was Arcadia, Arcadia just off the Stanford golf course. It was a cluster of two room cottages with weathery wood shingles in an oak forest, only not just amid trees and greenery, but amid vines, honeysuckle tendrils, all buds and shoots and swooping tendrils and twitterings like the best of Arthur Rackham and Honey Bear. Not only that, it had true cultural cachet. Thorstein Veblen had lived there. So had two Nobel Prize winners everybody knew about though the names escaped them. The cottages rented for just $60 a month. Getting into Perry Lane was like getting into a club. Everybody who lived there had known somebody else who lived there, or they would never have gotten in, and naturally they got to know each other very closely too, and there was always something of an atmosphere of communal living. Nobody’s door was ever shut on Perry Lane, except when they were pissed off.
Perry Lane
It was sweet. Perry Lane was a typical 1950s bohemia. Everybody sat around shaking their heads over America’s tailfin, housing-development civilization, and Christ, in Europe, so what if the plumbing didn’t work, they had mastered the art of living. Occasionally somebody would suggest an orgy or a threeday wine binge, but the model was always that old Zorba the Greek romanticism of sandals and simplicity and back to first principles. aWolfe, Tom. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. New York: Ferrar Straus and Giroux, 1968. p.34
Number 9 Perry Lane. Just to the right of that telephone pole. That’s where Ken Kesey lived from 1959 to ’63 while he was enrolled in Stanford’s Creative Writing Center.
His neighbor, Vik Lovell, a Stanford psychology grad student, had an idea. The CIA was funding research. MKULTRA. Menlo Park Veterans’ Hospital. They wanted to know what happened when you gave people LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, cocaine, DMT, all of it. Kesey volunteered. Then he got a job there as a night aide.
Those night shifts, those drugs, that hospital, that’s where Cuckoo’s Nest came from. Published in 1962. Written on Perry Lane.
The parties. Jesus, the parties. Hawaiian luaus spilling into the street. Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh playing music.g Black, white, brown, everyone together, which in 1960s Palo Alto was apparently too much for the cops to handle. Racially mixed gatherings. That was the crime.h
The Perry Lane Olympics. A naked woman on the back of a convertible, holding a toilet plunger with a burning rag jammed in the cup, riding up and down the lane like some kind of dionysian torch bearer. That happened.
August 1963: developers show up. Number 9 and the other cottages get bulldozed. Ranch homes go up. Clean. Respectable. Boring.
Kesey and the Merry Pranksters pack up and head to La Honda. The party moves on.
Perry Lane becomes just another address. The weirdness, erased.
One RV. One of hundreds in Palo Alto. Families living in these things because rent in Disruption Town is no longer a number that makes sense to anyone who actually works for a living.
State and city laws say they have to move every 72 hours. Can’t get too comfortable. Can’t put down roots. Keep moving, keep moving.
This family? Parked in the foothills. Fifty meters from Tesla headquarters. Fifty meters from SAP. You can practically see the executive parking lot from their window.
Tesla, of course, has since moved its headquarters to Texas. Elon’s a genius like that. Take the tax breaks, the infrastructure, the talent pool California built, then leave when it’s time to give something back. Genius.
Meanwhile, the family in the RV moves again in three days.
The future, they keep telling us. This is the future.
Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed. Herman Melville
I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Look at this shit.
Emerson Street, Palo Alto. A driveway. And in that driveway, a lineup of chairs that looks like someone staged an intervention for ergonomic seating and nobody showed up.
They’re just standing there, office chairs, stools, the forgotten furniture of knowledge workers who’ve moved on to standing desks or yoga balls or whatever the hell comes after you’ve optimized your lumbar support into oblivion. No “Free” sign. No prices scrawled on cardboard. No explanation whatsoever. Just chairs. Waiting.
This is pure Ionesco. This is The Chairs relocated from Paris to Silicon Valley, where the absurdist playwright’s fever dream becomes someone’s actual Tuesday afternoon. In his play, an old couple spends ninety minutes arranging chairs for invisible guests who never arrive, building toward a message that’s never delivered. Here on Emerson Street, we’ve skipped straight to the punchline: the chairs themselves, arranged with mysterious purpose, tagged with numbers that signify nothing, existing in a void between utility and disposal.
Who did this? Some engineer who finally cracked? A startup that pivoted into oblivion? Did they sit in these chairs while building the future, coding the disruption, only to discover the future didn’t need their asses in seats anymore?
The photograph captures it perfectly, this quiet surrealism that Palo Alto has mastered. The absurd isn’t performed here; it’s ambient. It’s in the air like eucalyptus pollen. Ionesco would recognize this immediately: objects multiplying beyond reason, systems that organize chaos into more chaos, the creeping sensation that meaning has evacuated the premises but left the furniture behind.
Thoreau said he had three chairs: one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.
These people need a dozen just to process the void.
[T]hat old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air … Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year’s mistakes had been wiped clean by summer. Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
Do you get why I’d paddle out into the cold Pacific just south of Davenport on the exact day when the light tips into something else, when summer finally admits defeat and the whole goddamn world exhales?
That Stegner quote: “another fall, another turned page”, that’s the whole thing right there. This September feeling. Doesn’t matter if I’m not in school anymore, doesn’t matter if I haven’t cracked open a textbook in thirty years. My body remembers. Something in my DNA says: summer’s over, time to get serious, time to reckon with what I’ve been avoiding while I was drunk on sunshine and denial.
And so I go to ********. I go at dawn when the water’s slate-grey and unforgiving. Not because I’m punishing myself, but because there’s something honest about it. Something true. The equinox doesn’t give a shit about my problems, my deadlines, my existential dread about getting older. It just is. The waves just come. And for a few hours, that’s enough.
This is California’s dirty secret, not the tech billions or the wine country or the farm-to-table horseshit. It’s this: cold water, empty beaches, the ritual of suiting up when any sane person would stay in bed. That’s where the real locals live. That’s where you find something like grace.
Bodies defying the institutional geometry, movement carving rebellion into all that brutalist concrete and those sterile fluorescent slashes. This is what I’m talking about. This is the escape velocity made flesh.
I’m talking about that electric moment when you’re three drinks deep into a conversation that matters, when the music’s so loud it rewires your synapses, when you’re careening down some back road at 3 AM with strangers who feel like prophets, or when you’re mid leap in what’s supposed to be a temple of respectability, some academic fortress designed to contain and categorize and make sense of things, and you launch yourself into empty space like you’re trying to punch through the ceiling into something truer. That’s the shit. That’s the only honest currency we’ve got: those moments when the membrane between who you are and who you could be gets tissue thin and permeable, when your body describes an arc that says fuck gravity, fuck floor plans, fuck everything that tells you to stay grounded.
The mundane kills more dreams than failure ever will. It’s insidious, this comfortable death. People call it “growing up” or “being responsible,” but it’s really just fear wearing a necktie. They build these elaborate prisons out of should haves and can’t dos, then convince themselves the bars are load bearing walls. Meanwhile, the architecture’s trying so hard to impose its institutional calm, its measured lighting, its professional surfaces. But movement doesn’t negotiate.
But here’s something to consider: consciousness is meant to be altered. Not dulled. Altered. Sharpened. Cracked open like a fault line. Whether you’re chasing it through art, sex, speed, sound, or the particular derangement that comes from staying awake for forty hours straight working on something that matters, or the ecstasy of pure kinetic faith when you commit your full weight to the air and trust that something (muscle memory, momentum, sheer audacity) will catch you before gravity wins, that’s where the truth lives. In the extremes. In the wreckage. In those moments when you’ve burned through every safety net and all you’ve got left is nerve and instinct and three seconds of flight before you land.
The man built a wall that refuses to be a wall. It doesn’t keep anything in or out. It just exists, this undulating spine of sandstone crawling through grass and under trees, going nowhere in particular, and that’s exactly the fucking point. It’s not trying to be profound. It’s not begging for your approval. It just is.
What I love about Snake River is how honest it is about time. Goldsworthy knows this thing is falling apart from the moment it’s finished. The stones will shift. Moss will grow. Weather will have its way. He’s okay with that, no, he’s counting on it. That’s the work. Not the construction, but the slow, inevitable decomposition. The collaboration with entropy.
There’s something deeply human about building something beautiful knowing it won’t last. We do it anyway. We have to. Whether it’s a stone wall or a relationship or a moment of clarity at 3 AM when everything finally makes sense, we grab it, knowing it’s already slipping away.
That’s not pessimism. That’s the deal. Goldsworthy just made it visible.
We often forget that WE ARE NATURE. Nature is not something separate from us. So when we say that we have lost our connection to nature, we’ve lost our connection to ourselves. Andy Goldsworthy
There’s something obscene about freezing a body mid-flight against all that falling water, obscene in the best way, the way that makes you understand why cameras were invented in the first place. Ive got these LINES Ballet dancers, people who’ve turned their spines into questions and their limbs into arguments, and I’ve set them against something that doesn’t give a shit about line or extension or any of the precious bullshit I pretend matters.
That waterfall was there before ballet, before photographs, before anyone decided the human form should be disciplined into something transcendent. And here I am, catching these two, Babatunji, Madeline, doing exactly what they’ve been trained to do, which is to make the impossible look like it’s the only reasonable response to gravity, to air, to being alive at all.
The thing is, it works. It shouldn’t, but it does. Because what I’m really documenting isn’t dance or nature or the collision of the two, it’s that moment when something rehearsed and artificial becomes realer than real. When all those hours in the studio, all that muscle memory and controlled breathing and pointed feet, when all of that dissolves into pure gesture.
Not performance. Necessity.
Reunion Island, Indian Ocean. Middle of nowhere, which is another way of saying middle of everywhere that matters.
