Tagged — Jamie Lyons
The beach isn't about escape. That's tourist board bullshit. It's about confrontation. You stand there where the land gives up, where everything solid admits defeat and dissolves into something that doesn't give a damn about my mortgage or my meaning. The ocean's indifferent in a way that's almost holy, the kind of indifference that makes every human concern feel both ridiculous and somehow more urgent.
There's a ritual to it, sure. I arrive carrying whatever garbage I've accumulated: ambition, resentment, the persistent hum of anxiety that passes for consciousness these days. I plant my ass in the sand, and the rhythm starts working on me. Not the waves themselves but the spaces between them, the pause that reminds me breathing is optional until it suddenly isn't.
People talk about churches like they're places you go to feel better, to find answers. The beach offers no such comfort. It tells me I am small, that I will be dead soon, that nothing I build will last. And somehow (this is the weird part) that's the good news. Because once I accept the cosmic joke, once I let the salt air strip away the performance of myself, I might stumble into something real. Not peace exactly. More like permission to stop pretending the noise in my head matters more than the actual sound of water reshaping rock over millennia.
The beach doesn't save me. It just reminds me that I never needed saving in the first place.
Industries / Wanderlust 2026
The sky looks like it’s thinking about violence. Not cinematic violence. Not the slow motion hero shot nonsense. The real kind. The kind that does not care if you are ready, if your leash is waxed, if your head is right. The kind that has been doing this since before our species figured out how […]
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Engineering 2023
Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore You know what’s fucked up? Here’s this sign. Had a […]
ReadWanderlust 2018
Devil’s Slide is the kind of place that makes you understand why people drive off cliffs. Not in some morbid, suicidal way, though Highway 1 has claimed its share of souls who got hypnotized by that impossible blue, but because beauty this raw, this uncompromising, it does something to your brain chemistry. It rewires the […]
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Wanderlust 2017
The thing about watching a dog run, really run, is it strips away all the pretense we wrap ourselves in. No existential dread, no performance anxiety, just pure kinetic joy translated into muscle and breath. Sharka doesn’t give a shit about my Instagram feed or my quarterly earnings report for the board. She’s a four-legged […]
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Speculation 2016
Backstage Nausicaä: in wildflowers for Sophocles tragedy at Pillar Point… Here, in the weeds behind the curtain, where ancient Greek tragedy meets California wildflowers. Judy moving through that grass like she’s already halfway to Phaeacia, This is what you never see: the in-between, the breath before the dive. The wildflowers don’t give a shit about […]
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Speculation 2015
A place is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. … It implies an indication of stability. A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense […]
ReadSpeculation 2015
Speculation: exploring a new performance space… Euripides‘ Andromeda? Walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects, etc., the trajectories it “speaks”. All the modalities sing a part in the chorus, changing from step to step, stepping in through proportions, sequences, and intensities which vary according to the time, the path taken and the walker. These enunciatory […]
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FalseArt 2014
Andres Amador is out there on some windswept strip of beach, dragging a rake through wet sand like some deranged Zen monk, creating beach art, massive geometric mandalas, that would make the ancients weep. Two hours of work. Maybe three if he’s feeling ambitious. Intricate, precise, beautiful beyond any reasonable measure of beauty. And then… […]
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Industries 2014
You’ve got these three women, Dread, Horror, and Alarm, the Graeae, those primordial hags who share one fucking eye between them, and they’re not tucked away in some theater where the already converted file in with their tote bags and good intentions. No. They’re at Aquatic Park, which if you know anything about San Francisco, […]
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Speculation 2014
Lear is a play [that] contains a great deal of veiled social criticism — but it is all uttered either by the Fool, by Edgar when he is pretending to be mad, or by Lear during his bouts of madness. In his sane moments Lear hardly ever makes an intelligent remark. George Orwell, in Lear Rodeo […]
ReadWanderlust 2013
Wanderlust along the Coast: Beach Piano I had never before thought of how awful the relationship must be between the musician and his instrument. He has to fill it, this instrument, with the breath of life, his own. He has to make it do what he wants it to do. And a piano is just a […]
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The City 2013
San Francisco does this thing, this cruel, beautiful thing, where it gives you the Golden Gate Bridge and then takes it away. Not entirely. Just enough. The fog rolls in like it has somewhere better to be but decided to fuck with you first, wrapping that iconic span in gray wool, turning one of the […]
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The City 2012
It is true that we learned our trade because there were no better offers but we learned it in the magic heaped on the hills of San Francisco. And you know what it is? It’s a golden handcuff with the key thrown away. Ask anyone about San Francisco and the odds are that he’ll tell […]
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Wanderlust 2012
You stand here long enough, looking out at that impossible blue stretching to forever, and you start to understand why Henry Miller said fuck it to Paris and ended up here, clinging to this ridiculous edge of America. Big Sur is the California that men dreamed of years ago, this is the Pacific that Balboa […]
ReadWanderlust 2012
Let us venerate the dog. The dog (what a funny creature!), has sweat on its tongue and a smile in its tail. Victor Hugo , The Man Who Laughs Victor Hugo nailed it over a century ago: the dog has its sweat on its tongue and its smile in its tail. And here’s Sharka, this […]
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The City / Wanderlust 2012
It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince You don’t stick hundreds of roses in the sand at dawn on New Year’s Day because you’re well-adjusted. You do it because something broke open inside you, or because you needed to make […]
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Wanderlust 2009
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 […]
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Wanderlust 2006
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 […]
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