August 9, 2004

see the ranch. sea ranch, see!

hmc and i went up to sea ranch to get away for the weekend, in (early) celebration of our one year wedding anniversary.

according to the history of sea ranch,

The original Sea Ranch concept directed that people would join the natural environment with minimal impact. Overgrazed lands were to be rested and natural processes allowed to take their course, with indigenous planting where needed. The Ranch would become a wildlife and game refuge. Improvements would involve a minimum of grading. Utilities would be located underground, and population density kept low. Residential design would allow homes to blend into and become part of the natural landscape.

in any case, a couple of friends of mine have been up there, and they really loved it and raved about it as a nice place to go and get away. perfect escape from lawsuits, computers, jobs, bandwidth, rent control, etc. you can rent vacation homes up there, and we ended up renting a nice little unit close to the beach.

it was really quite lovely. a nice little house with a hot tub, with really more room than we needed, but it was nice and quiet, and the beach was in view just a short walk away. we could see the fog rolling in and out, and the best part was all the wildlife wandering around. there were lots of deer loitering about the houses, and lots of different birds, rabbits, spiders, bugs.

very nice, very relaxing.

we really didn’t do much. just sort of slept around, and sat around the house and read in the sunshine, listening to random songs on the ipod, which i plugged into the house stereo.

i read through mcsweeney’s quarterly #13, which only kept my interest because it was the issue dedicated to comics, and comes in a lovely fold-out large comic sheet, with two small comic books and a bonus 264-page hardcover book. along with all the stuff that i love already (c.ware, j.&g.hernandez, l.barry, a.tomine, d.clowes, c.burns, etc.), i made two discoveries:

  1. ben katchor: i’ve seen his stuff around (i think it gets published in the sfbg), but i’ve never bothered to read it. it somehow is not visually appealing to me, or maybe, as hmc posits, not graphic enough. but faced with several pages in the quarterly, i read them, and it’s really brilliant.
  2. the other is more of a relevation, that editors when assembling literary compliations like this also have to think about order and flow and sequence, much like dj’s do when constructing a set or a radio show or a mix tape. somehow that never occurred to me. although i guess it’s less strict, as people are more wont to skip around or just skip to the next thing, which if you’re a dj means that you pretty much aren’t doing your job. but still…

finally, in case you were wondering, the appropriate one-year wedding anniversary gift is paper. or the “modern equivalent” is clocks. yes, i looked into paper clocks. but with 160 hour-long precision construction steps to build your own, i don’t think that this is really the thing you want to test your marriage. or maybe it’s something to make sure your marriage lasts: we can’t get divorced until we finish this damn clock!

i ended up getting her a philosophy book and a subscription to the economist. because that’s what she wants.

and that’s what it’s all about.

Posted at August 9, 2004 9:48 PM
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