writing from california
The Giant Cultural Parasite, Part 2 Let’s begin with water. Imagine a clear pond. Smoothly polished stones lie at the bottom. Small trout hide in the dappled shadows, waiting in quiet repose. All is still. Further out, the soft morning light reflects green mountains off the surface, and the golden shoreline is so uniform as … Read more
Introduction and Overview I remember the exact day that I first encountered the theory of memetics. I was lying on a picnic table bench across from my wife in Bishop, CA in July of 2017. We had just finished the High Sierra Trail and had hitchhiked to town only to find that our reservation for … Read more
This year will be the fifth since I hiked the Pacific Crest Trail. When I reached the Northern Terminus on that freezing October morning, I worried that I had squandered the four and a half months I had spent on the trail. I had expected big changes, but I felt like I was pretty much … Read more
We climbed Berryessa Peak in the blistering heat to catch the last of the wildflowers. Two years prior, James and I had taken this same trail and been stupified by profusions of poppies, paintbrush and lupine spilling forth from the mountainside. It was the second of back-to-back superblooms in California, each of which was an … Read more