Sunday, January 11, 2009

Counting down my checklist before I leave for Japan, I finally got out to Half Moon Bay! I'm based in San Francisco at the moment, and after playing(?) Rod Humble's Stars Over Half Moon Bay I told myself I'd head out there and trace lines in the sky.



Pretty cool place, actually. Erosion has created a series of tiny soil cliff faces overlooking the beach, and as I walked along the edge one particular gulf caught my eye:



What's that blue thing doing there? I skidded down the cliffside a little further down the beach and backtracked to find it. The entryway was pretty hard to find, actually; I'm not surprised no one's ever gone in there and looted that broken blue thing. I had to brace myself against the dirt walls to walk myself through, which would have been tricky enough in a place where the walls weren't studded with jagged rocks and the occasional scatter of broken glass.

Still, it was only a journey of a few feet, so I was in there pretty quick. And it was definitely worth it: that broken blue thing was a shattered globe.



It occurred to me to wonder where the piece with Japan on it was. It wasn't easy to find, but eventually I noticed a big shard deeper underground:



I dredged it up, and not only did it have Japan on it, but the presence of the USSR offered a clue as to the age of the globe.

By the time I got out of there, the sun had set, which means I had to leave or pay for overnight parking and find a person who would let me share their tent. I had scheduled a sexy misadventure already, so I made for the parking lot.

I was presented with an unnerving vision on my way back: a seagull with a deformed beak, like a spread of rigid tentacles, strolled the beach in front of me. I was about to snap a picture, but as I raised the camera, a trickle of drool fell from the lowest protrusion of the seagull's mangled mouth. Though that seagull doesn't have the capacity for embarrassment,it seemed wrong to make a spectacle of a creature that can't even close its mouth. Hence: no picture. Sorry, perverts.

I hope that seagull wasn't an omen, because I can't imagine it was a good one.

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