Life, Search Engines and Panty Thieves

that could sum up my real blog, which is at http://360.yahoo.com/lauralippay

An Eggers-Inspired April Day

by me, laura.

This morning:

sun drenched			laughing so hard
	modest mouse						the orange shiny wood of the guitar
		chris's lamborghini coffee cup
			chris's warm chest		hugging

We drifted from dreams (mine somewhat sexual, and his of me with two rows of teeth) into a slow, bright saturday morning. I dont know how long we laid in bed, moving around, hugging, draping our legs and arms around each other, sleeping and waking and talking and laughing and kissing and sleeping again...

Summer is coming back and we have have Saturday mornings like this. I feel like it's been months since we've had one. We always hang out in bed until noon or so, or until the thought of getting in the car and throwing the top down and cruising the coast hurls me out of bed an into a celebretory dance for chris while he (laughs at me? thinks i'm weird? wonders why we cant just stay in bed a little bit longer?). It's always rubbing my nose in his chest, touching his hair, falling back asleep, waking up and looking at each other, laughing about the night before. Chris has this funny way of waking up and immediately, emphatically being funny.

We talked about going to Muir woods. I laid there and went through a collage of pictures in my mind of us on Lombard street (the regular city street part, not the famous curvy part) in the convertible with the shiny red leather and the san francisco sun smiling down on us and heading out to the Golden Gate. Singing. Being funny. Winding back and forth through wooded switchbacks. Bopping along through redwoods looking for the paths that the tourists don't take. I laid on his bed with my face in the window, that spot where the sun comes in so warm through the window and I feel like a sunning housecat. I was thinking how if I could be any animal on the planet I wouldnt pick something exotic or that could fly or whatever people usually say. I'd be a housecat because I dont know if there's anything better than sunning in windows, playing with bugs, and getting massage all day long all of your life.

I started chapter 11 of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius where Dave and Toph are driving across the Golden Gate to Black Sands Beach somewhere in that huge natural playland of ocean-side state park on the other side: "...and in a second we're driving parallel to the water, a few hundred feet up of course, for a while without even a visible cliffside to the left, just a sheer drop-and then suddenly we see the Headlands whole, green and mohair hills, ocher velour, the sleeping lions, the lighthouse far to the left, unbelieveable given we're ten minutes from the city, this vast bumpy land, could be Ireland or Scotland or the Faulklands or whatever..." Chris walked in. He was wearing a white t-shirt and his baseball sweatpants, disheveled hair, wispy red hairs on his unshaved face, and a coffee mug in his hand, and basked in the morning overlooking Lombard street - GOD he looked good.

I was in tears laughing about the night before at Holly's place, we were all so drunk, and I whispered to Chris about sneaking out like we sometimes do instead of saying goodbye - just leave when no one's loooking. He whispered back that we were the only guests left and that just might not work. This morning I imagined me & Chris and Holly and Mike in their kitchen talking and talking and talking about whatever we talk about, and then me & Chris giving each other the look that means ok lets disappear, and then just turning around and walking quietly to the door, "sneaking out", while Holly and Mike watched in confusion. I laughed for 5 minutes.

He sat on the edge of the bed, in that sunny spot in the window, and played his new orange guitar along to Dramamine on the stereo. I looked over his shoulder at where his fingers were going and admired the bright orange wood that was so darn shiny and wondered what that shiny stuff is that they put on there and how do they build guitars like this, and I dont remember ever seeing wood stain in such a beautful orange color in hardwares stores...

We got about 8 feet down Lombard street towards our adventure to Muir Woods when we decided we were going to go back and get the Eggers book and find Black Sands Beach instead. I remember it mentioned the exit and described the drive. Alexander exit I think.

Somehow these lazy Saturday mornings are also days to have late morning fast food. We usually take it over to that beach at the end of the Marina and sit on a bench and laugh at people, especially people running. On our first visit to this beach we discovered that most people run funny. One kind of older, kind of squatty-looking gentleman jogs twisting to the left and right at the same time. This again, is one of those things that I'd wonder what aliens (if thre is such a thing) would think about when they saw this. The beach is always littered with white and khaki linen parents with their small colored-linen children, strollers that are big and fancy and technologically advanced, small gaggles of overdressed japanese tourists jeweled with cameras, awkward people with foreign accents, joggers, strollers, wall-sitters, and the occasional weirdo.

But today wasn't a sloth day, it was a day of exploration! Although some good junk food was still in order. We rocked our way across the bridge and passed the Alexander exit on our way along the winding Marin highway to In-n-Out Burger. Being that I'm not a born and raised Californian, I think I am missing something. Generally the fast food industry is frowned upon and highly ignored by northern Californians young and old. But In-n-Out Burger defies the walls of veggie-tofu-organic californian snobbishness and is held in high praise by everyone. It could be the name, In-n-Out, ha ha, or it could have been a very successful, huge advertising campaign that i missed, or it could be because they have that secret thing you can order that's not on any In-n-Out Burger menu, called Animal Style. The restaurant's popularity remains a mystery to me, but I enjoy this phenonmenon nonetheless.

The place was crawling with more people than it looked like would be allowed by building safety codes. It's always this way, every In-n-Out, everywhere, every day. Despite having 23 orders before us, the wait for our In-n-Out burgers was amusing, as it always is. A good glimpse at Americans, I say.

We ate, in the sun in the car, and listened to a girl on npr telling a story about working at a quiznos store that didnt have any money to pay vendors or employees, and didnt have any food in it, but wasnt allowed to be closed.

We went back to the Alexander exit and checked the Eggers book to see how he described their drive and if we're doing that too. We were on our way to Black Sands beach, which Chris nor I had ever heard of before the book, on the tourist- and bicycle- packed snakey road up the tall hill that looks down upon the Golden Gate Bridge and the white, glimmery Oz-like city we call San Francisco.

A few miles in at the very top, just like Dave said, there was a turn-around where it looked like the end and funny enough that I guess all the tourists are so star-struck by the mesmerising view of the ocean and the city that they dont see the little one way road that veers around and down the other side.

The road is on the very, very edge of earth, teetering over the ocean that's down there somewhere. It's so steep to my left that sitting in the drivers seat, daring to look out, I dont see road, or cliff or land of any sort, just a 5 mile view across the entrance to the Bay and out into the ocean. It's so high up, and as it winds down overlooking the pillowy hills and cliffs into the sea, even at 8 miles an hour it feels a rollercoaster.

Almost immediately there is an old fort. We're in another world. Eroded concrete bunkers where they had cannons that protected the Bay in the 1800's. When you run around and explore on the coastline north of San Francisco you'll come across these old forts and Bunkers with little kiosks telling stories and showing old black and white photographs of a time when the entrance to the Bay was guarded by lookouts and cannons.

We sat on a bench that surprisingly wasnt already occupied (although people are still around, this is how we know we've gotten far enough away to be out of the tourist shuffle) and acknowleged how we were just directly across the other side of the Bay last weekend walking along the path that goes from the park at 33rd & Geary, out to the ocean and around the top left corner of the city, through the windblown trees and above the cliffs, over to the bath houses & Ocean Beach.

We walked out to the edge and looked down and saw a black sand beach! It was probably 300 feet below us, small and shimmering dark gray with big black rocks haphazardly jutting out. There was a small little person way down there strolling on the beach and if you squint you could see someone with an awesome spot on one of those tall jutting rocks in the tide. There was a teeny path that led down there in the crevice of the hill we stood at the top of. It was steep and it didnt look well-worn. Must be the way down.

We weren't completely convinced that that was the same Black Sands Beach, and we continued on. Just after chris swooned over how the Bay Area is such a beautiful place that so many people write about, a runner on npr was saying that his favorite place to run is in the Marin Headlands. We cheered.

We found ourselves curving around a piece of road that hinted that there was a lighthouse nearby, so we parked with all the other cars and decided to go observe. In an effort to stay away from the shufflers, we opted for the dirt path instead of the main one and found ourselves looking down a cliff at the lighthouse to our left with no way to get there, and some partially naked big men doing something (what are they doing?) on our right. We headed back to the main path. I made chris smell the stinky cow parsnip and excitedly awaited his reaction, anxious to see the sour puss look on his face when he took a big whiff of the foul-smelling plant. I would have laughed, pointed at him and laughed and reveled in the moment! But it didnt work. No reaction. Oh well. He calls me a daisy sniffer because i smell everything along the way.

A half mile out a jutty on the side of a small cliff was the lighthouse. On the path along the way, the cliff wall to our right was littered with succulents and flowers and cactusy-things. On the left, 200 feet down on some rocks in the water, sea lions were gloating in the sun. We walked through a tunnel under the cliffside that smelled like flowers and imagined how much it must have sucked to chisel this tunnel out, and on the other side we walked across a little wooden bridge that is only supposed to hold two people at a time to the little lighthouse. Smallest one I've ever seen. An old man sung stories about how the Spaniards orginally named this place Point Boneta after a spanish bonnet and some guy came along and crossed out the e and put in an i and now we call that place Point Bonita. Well, he wasn't really singing but he definitely enjoyed telling his stories. I liked him.

A regatta of brilliantly colored sailboats was coming in from the Pacific. There were probably 40 of them and they sailed silently right towards us. A huge cargo ship preceded them.

From the path on the way to the lighthouse you can see a cove where there were lots of shipwrecks years ago. Because of the fog, ships had trouble finding the entrance to the Bay and would often end up in this little cove to the left of it and run into the cliffs or each other. The thought is amusing to me - random ships bumping into the coast all over the place. I picture it like bumper boats. Why didnt they just build bumpers? There were remnants of a place that was built here just to rescue shipwrecked people. The rescuing men were called Surfmen. Cool.

There were little hopping birds in front of us on the way back to the car. Chris imagined outloud that if they were 50 feet tall - how crazy that would be. Chaos. We imagined giant hopping birds pounding at us through the hills at mindblowing quick-hopping speed and laughed in delightful horror at the thought.

Somewhere along the way, in one of the spots between peaceful hills and slow curvy road, we saw another antiquated defending spot. This one was inland just a little bit on the land side of the road and had a big white missile among old shacks and other unidentifiable old stuff. The pictures on the kiosk show the same hills I was looking at, and how the radar from big round things that arent there anymore would target the plane and the missile would hit it. Evidently they also shot 700 pound ammo out at ships in the ocean that were seven miles away. I imagine the mouth of San Francisco Bay full of pirate ships and cannon battles. And silly ships bumping into the cliffs & falling apart.

A few sunny miles up the coast we could see an expanse of beach with land behind it at sea level and we traversed our way there singing to Talking Heads on the radio. We wanted to get there just to see if that was in fact Black Sands Beach, and not the little hidden cove at the bottom of the cliffs that we saw earlier. As we drove into the little parking strip along the road behind the beach two fire engines shrilled past us to navigate the tiny curvy cliffside roads somewhere.

We had come upon Rodeo Beach (not Black Sands) and Fort Cronkhite. This fort, unlike the first one, was littered with light yellow buildings, like the ones in the Presidio, old sunny army buildings in green, peaceful surroundings.

We pulled out the book and read over the parts about Dave & Toph's drive this way and verified that we had seen the same things, and felt the same curves and determined that the little spot at the bottom of the cliff was definitely Black Sands Beach.

Knowing that we had found our destination and much more, we wound our way back through the hills and the curves past the grasses and the forts and the occasional houses (who lives there?), leaving the foreign land of the marin headlands behind us. Back across the bridge, and it's another day.