Systema Seminar
Planned By - Both Heather and Marty
DAY ONE - From SF to Carmel, CA
Description: Wherein Heather and Marty embark on a VERY LONG road trip to LA (it takes 6 hours to drive LA, they are going to do it in 5 days! Starting from San Francisco and heading down Coastal Highway (State Route) 1, first stop in Carmel, CA.
(Marty's Report):
We didn’t make a quick or early start, but rolled out of bed around 10a, and spent an hour packing. We’d booked an AirBnB in Carmel, and didn’t need to get there at any particular time. Heather had the great idea of starting as close to the coast as we could, so we got our gear all packed (a duffle bag each, and of course, our book and computer bags), and headed down Geary, picking up tea on the way. We headed down the grade past the Seal Rock Inn (from “The Birds”, and purveyor of terrible breakfast food), and towards the ocean. But Heather, being a packrat, has not cleared her phone, so we haul around again and take the video with my phone, which is pristine and with lots of open space.
We took the coastal route down along Great Highway, hootin’ and scratchin’ about whatever goofiness was on our minds, and met up with Hwy 1 in Daly City, starting down towards Pacifica. We past the store where we bought our pistols (I felt nostalgic), and past Gieve’s house (“He lives up there” Heather points), and stop at the surfer Taco Bell, at Linda Mar Beach. It smelled so richly of fish and sea salt, and had that lovely surfer vibe. I know that some beaches supposedly can be full of the dickhead version of surfers, but not this one, and never one I’ve experienced in S.F. I have all the surfing skill of an old man overdosed on vicodin, but have lots of fond feelings and thoughts about the culture, so this was a great place to get junk Mexican food.
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| Foraging successful! |
Heather and I have had a rough history with traveling together, and me with “vacation” (I loathe the term now in the same way I loathe “escape” as a positive term), but we got this one going on a great note, playful and light. We continued on down the coast, seeing whales in Half Moon Bay, passing Raman’s chai shop (the Soup Nazi of coffee shops) but not stopping. Heather read to me from an ecologist called Shahid Naeem, who she was introduced to in her intro to conservation biology course. The first one I’ve heard of who actually seems to be able to think about ecology, who has a truly Integral approach and who is a scientist. He refers to his lab as “ecology without apology” and talks about ecology as complex, including the conceptual realm of ecology. Exciting stuff. Heather’s thinking of contacting him to see if she can interview him, which I was pushing her to commit to.
Click here to see our first AirBnB Private Country Tiny House!!!
Sorry about the weird side perspectives!
We got down to Carmel in the afternoon, with Waze routing us through the rich-funky little town, and then up into Carmel Valley to find our AirBnB (I wonder what this whole field of temporary housing will look like when I read this in 20 years?), a trailer camper parked on a piece of property mid-valley. The area reminded me of areas around Sacramento, densely populated, but with large parcels, open but not empty. We did a few back-and-forths before finding the place, tucked back from the road, past a pasture with two lamas, and a tiny nursery. Turns out, both are owned by Martin, a sweet middle-aged man who invited us to feed the lamas (Coco and Henry) and pet the kittens at the nursery. We settled in, then did indeed do both.
Llamas are odd creatures, a strange mix of pinpoint curiousness, without any interest in actually connecting with you. They wanted you as an access point to food, which they’d snortle up with their quasi-prehensile lips (which struck me as strangely dry), but try to pet them or make eye contact and they’d scuttle away with a kind of “What, what? Wha’ you doin' and stop it.” They struck me as similar to succulents, those ancient plants which don’t really care much what they look like, just that they function sufficiently. Flowers are actually interested in attraction and looking pretty (more bees!), but these llama-succulents don’t seem to give a damn about their ungainliness, or puffy furry coats all matted like a Rastafarian. Just feed me, Agent of Grain. Heather had heard that they are great guard animals, though Martin said they ran away when they had goats who were attacked by mountain lions (Heather adds that apparently they attack "dog-like" creatures).
On the other hand, the three kittens, and three adult cats (including the two parents, a male tabby and a beautiful pearl colored female) were like an oxytocin hot tub. We both sat on the tarp that covered the ground in part of the nursery, and snuggled and stroked these and manhandled these oxy-bombs. Heather was particularly affected. The astrologer Caroline Casey said to her that she was one who “loved the world so much that it scares her,” and this seemed to a clear demonstration of the chemistry underneath that phenomenon.
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| An actual video store!!! |
We wandered the whole strip and settled (after being turned away by a high-brow Italian joint with a two hour wait) on the Trail Side Café, where I had a delicious pasta dish (once salt-n-peppered). Heather was worried about the lack of patrons when we got there, but it filled up over time. There was a couple sitting close by, with a genial narcissistic wine character and his wife. I get the heeby jeebies from wine people. I can’t stand that aspect of Sonoma, which is most of Sonoma, and I can’t stand it here. They creep me the fuck out. Usually they have money, and carry a kind of self-satisfied tone that goes unjustified by their contented half-conscious lives, in which they place the Higher and Greater within the safe contained confines of a wine bottle and pseudo-culture of controllable spirituality.
Interestingly enough, the beer guy who served us seemed like my people. That seems to be true, that I’d much rather be around beer connoisseurs than any other drug culture. Well, I don’t want to be around any of them, but something seems more respectable about beer. I never realized there were relative reactions to subsets of drug-oriented human life, but sure enough, not all alcohol fixated culture is the same.
We jabbered on—seems like we talked all day—then decided to see “The Martian,” being Ridley Scott’s adaptation of a first novel by the same name, in which Matt Damon’s botanist character is stranded on Mars and the story revolves around his survival and rescue. The theater was in Monterey (which kind of blurs into Carmel), at an outdoor mall theater that was packed (it was opening night). It was such a piece of craft from a novel that I think Heather described as, to paraphrase, a functional story. Everyone did an excellent job, and as a piece of implicit propaganda for both NASA/space travel, and the human desire and need to explore (“Interstellar” is the other recent version), it was without flaw.
It’s another example of why we get to be proud to be human.
The film got out about 11:30p, and we drove back to Martin’s trailer, and lit a fire (which he had, with loveliness, already prepared for us). Heather wrote, since we had agreed, and I had forgotten, to write after each day of travel. I sat and cogitated layers of reality, then drifted off to sleep, then awoke and confirmed tomorrow’s AirBnB, helped put out the fire, and then crawled in bed and beginning a new novel by China Mieville, called “The Scar”.
I’d finished “Perdido Street Station” maybe a year ago, and apparently found it so potent that I’ve not been able to pick up his writing since then. But, scanning my books before leaving, and deciding that Greg Egan’s “Incandescence” was not going to hold me for the trip (and was requiring slow, titrated injections of its coolly mind-fucking ideas), and that I’d OD’ed on Neil Asher’s polity novels, that I needed something else to sink my teeth into. Mieville stood out of my unread Space Opera shelf (he’s technically “New Weird,” but the ethos is the same as Space Opera), so he got tucked in my computer bag. So far, so good. Like reading about a world that is located in a lucid version of that liminal realm between waking and sleeping, where instead of being foggy or descending into dream, you are paused in that dive and held there, amongst objects that hang between the realms, permanently. I met a crab with a falcon-like hunting squid, who was unlucky to be close to an emergence from the shadowy depths of the ocean of nightmare beings, slick and fast and irresolvable into any fixed object. He’s got an amazing ability to do this to your head. There was a scene in a carnival, in Perdido Street Station, that left me breathless.
(Heather's Report):
So, woke up and had a leisurely departure from San Francisco, sleeping in is always nice. After stopping by the Trader Joe’s to buy Pickle Popcorn for the trip, only to find out it’s a seasonal item (NOOOOOOO!!!!!), we made our way down Geary to the Cliff House and turned onto the Coastal Highway. It was sort of my plan. It was also sort of my plan to record a little launch video starting at the Cliff House but, lo, my phone was so full of stuff it wouldn’t even take a photo. I sighed and thought “oh well” but Marty turned around and did it again and we took the launch video with his phone. So, all’s well. (Except by the time we got to our first stop in Carmel Valley, I realized I had left my blankey at home. This is a full on tragedy, I assure you. And yes, I still have a blankey, fuck off.)
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| Heather at Taco Bell. |
highway is a gorgeous drive and we saw whales in the little bay just by Princeton-By-the-Sea (where we come occasionally to eat fried artichokes at the Half Moon Bay Brewery Co). It took us about four hours to get to Monterey/Carmel, when I think normally the drive is about two hours. But we knew we’d be ambling along since, LA is really only a 5 to 6 hour drive and we’re taking five days to get there!!! It was a fairly smooth ride (for me, as Marty took the whole first leg) and I watched the coastline for more whale plume (none to be seen). We rolled into Carmel near 4pm, Waze directing us off SR-1 around a traffic jam (thanks, Goddess Waze) and basically arrived when we told our AirBnB host, Martin, that we would.
This was my second AirBnB experience and we arrived on this very nice piece of land with a little cute RV as our “room”. Martin, the host, came out to greet us and told us about his awesome place, llamas in the paddock next to the camper and a freshly minted batch of kittens in his little native plant nursery. The area had that country feel to it: we passed by a little tomato or fruit stand with a box for money on the table and an honor system. Martin said that’s how he runs his nursery as well. We feed the llamas, which were an odd mix of sort of curious and twitchy at the same time and then moved on to check out the nursery and see if we could locate the kittens.
The kittens were ridiculously cute, charging up to us with all the bumbling ferocity of the really young, and my Kitty-tocin was sky rocketed. Marty and I had a talk about an article he sent me about the brains of introverts being very sensitive to dopamine and that’s why we get overwhelmed quickly. I added in a sensitivity to oxytocin as well and Marty agreed. “You bond very deeply and closely, that’s scary and any break is deeply painful.” Very true and as we were walking back, I didn’t realize our rambunctious friends were following us and I accidentally kicked on that got underfoot. It let out a terrible screech and when I realized what had happened, my entire system immediately plummeted into hellish nausea and I felt so terrible. I picked the little guy up and he was okay, and like most animals, eventually squirming playfully in my hands again but, whew, I did note the instant sickness throughout my entire body, hitting like a hammer. Anti-Tocin and not my usual “playfully smack me and I laugh and feel better type Anti-tocin”.
After kitten playing, we went into the tiny “town” of Carmel Village and had dinner at the Trailside Cafe. I noted after eating my salmon with grilled veggies, that I did not feel overly full or generally sick. Which usually happens with this choice of food. A good reminder I should be on a more Mediterranean type diet. Grrr. Or Paleo (whatever THAT means… I have issues with “Paleo”, but the postmodern style of reducing starches and such seem to help me a lot). And after dinner we decided to see “The Martian” for which we had to drive back to Monterey for a movie theater but it wasn’t that bad of a drive.
I had read the book before it even was an inkling of a movie. I liked the book, even with all its deep science-y stuff, which I can follow along with more and more these days anyway. But, being a Marsophile, loving anything Mars, I will engage it. And seriously, what a “success” story. You self-publish your book and it becomes a best seller AND THEN Ridley Scott wants to work his magic on your book into a film. Yeah. I’d be freaking out. And Ridley Scott did work his magic on it, I think making it way more accessible to the general public. I worked hard not to be in tears at the end of this movie (I was a sobbing, howling, slobber fest after the new “Mad Max: Fury Road”) and Marty and I talked about movies that make us feel super proud to be human; movies that are essentially “Love Letters to Humanity” in their various ways. For me, that’s “Interstellar”, “Mad Max: Fury Road” and now “The Martian”. Why is a WHOLE other post.
We returned “home” and had a fire out in the pit, the wood already set up by Martin. I do believe they call this “glamping”. Glamorous Camping. Whatever it is, I think I prefer it to a tent and hard ground even with a pad. We tucked ourselves into the little bed and off to sleep. At least for Marty who could probably sleep on a bed of nails. I lay awake for quite some time, feeling a little smoothed but eventually drifted off to the sounds of night insects and some whooping thing we couldn’t identify. I still think it was a bird.
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