the pinakes

A fabulous travelogue of San Francisco’s Sutro Baths, a frequent haunt of mine when I was young. Now I’m reminded of how long it’s been since I visited there, despite living only a few miles away. Well worth reading in entirety.

briennewalsh:

I know that people from San Francisco must be habituated to it, but I was shocked by how beautiful the coastline is in the Bay Area. The last (and only other) time I visited the city, I was with Blara, and we spent the entire time smoking jazz cigarettes, feeling paranoid, and eating Nerd ropes. One night, we went to a birthday party, and each consumed 15 cupcakes. That is my most vivid memory from the trip.

Otherwise, I have vague recollections of being impressed by the redwoods, and the deep cliffs on the beach where we drove one afternoon in my friend’s cherry-red Mustang convertible. But I was 20, and I hadn’t traveled much. My priorities revolved around boys and eating junk food and escaping my parents for a week. I thought that everywhere in the United States must look similar to San Francisco, and that the rest of the world was much more beautiful.

Returning now that I’m 29 and an adult, I was impressed first by the lawlessness of the city—the lack of police officers, the people will dreadlocks openly selling weed in Golden Gate Park, the fact that we parked for 2 hours in a tow-away-zone without getting ticketed—and second by the immense power of the bodies of water that shape the city. In New York, we weather seasons. In San Francisco, they weather the moods of the Pacific Ocean.

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(Source: briennewalsh)