Driving down the 101. California here we come. Right back where we started from.
On the stereo. Listen as we go. Nothing’s gonna stop me now.
California (Phantom Planet)

LAX, Santa Monica, Carmel and Monterey, Big Sur, San Francisco, Napa, Yosemite, and back home. Amazing what you can do in a week. It is a special anniversary and we decided to mark it.

What I had not anticipated was Pádraig’s presence. He had been here before us and he was with us travelling up the 101, California 1, into Yosemite. Full of his incredible youthful energy, carefree, joyful, can-do, attitude.

I am signalling you through the flames.

The North Pole is not where it used to be.

Manifest Destiny is no longer manifest.

Civilization self-destructs.

Have wide-angle vision, each look a world glance. Espress the vast clarity of the outside world, the sun that sees us all, the moon that strews its shadow on us, quire garden ponds, willows, where the hidden thrush sings, dusk fallen along the river run, and the great spaces that open out upon the sea … high tide and the herons call … And the people, the people, yes, all around the earth, speaking Babel tongues. Give voice to them all.

Make it new news.

Write beyond time.

Reinvent the idea of truth. 

Reinvent the idea of beauty.

Question everything and everyone, including Socrates, who questioned everything.

Be subversive, constantly questioning reality and the status quo.

Read between the lines and write between the lines.

Avoid the provincial, go for the universal.

Don’t be so open-minded that your brains fall out.

Sweep away the cobwebs.

Resist much, obey less.

Come out of your closet. It’s dark in there.

This is from a book by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Poetry as Insurgent Art. Amazingly, it was first published in 1975, yet it reads as if it was contemporary.

Ferlinghetti co-founded City Lights Bookstore in 1953 in San Francisco’s North Beach, a central meeting point for the Beat Generation, including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. A few years later, he famously published Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956) and was arrested, tried for obscenity for publishing Howl, and acquitted, marking a major victory for free speech and artistic expression in America.

Next week will not be back to normal. ‚California‘ here we come. On our own 101. Those 1,000 miles just got us going. Nothing’s gonna stop me now.