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Busy week ahead! Alas, I forgot to bring the digital camera back down to San Diego! But I did bring down my Minolta SLR and a tripod and my dad dug up a cable release, so maybe I can try experimenting with some nighttime / time lapse photography in San Diego? And then this weekend the plan is to go camping in Baja. Yay!

san diego

I don't know what to make of San Diego, but so far my estimation of it is on the up and up. The city is revealing itself to me patiently. As I write this I am reclined luxuriously on a cushion at Claire de Lune (2906 University Ave), in a district called North Park. The floor of the cafe is well populated by comfortable chairs, mostly plush and soft, in deep primary colors and browns. The room is airy and spatious, with high ceilings painted a deep blue; the walls are a bright yellow, interrupted by red curtains. The cafe itself is perched on a corner of Park Street, and outside I can watch the headlights of cars driving down the boulevard and look out upon the neon of -- is it a pizzeria? a name that starts with a G -- as if in a strange twist of that famous `Realist' painting "Night Owls."

It's a city for automobiles, but there are flavorful districts and unique morsels of urban life hidden among them. Driving into one of these districts you're likely to be greeted by its name in overhead neon: HILLCREST, NORTH PARK, NORMAL HEIGHTS, or the most fantastic of all, "The Boulevard" in gigantic pink script over an apparently important throughofare. I don't even know what decade this belongs to. It is out of my experience. In reconstituting my peripheral vision, my brain substitutes faded blue cadillacs with monstrous tailfins for the cars driving by, and suggests to me that maybe I'm actually within a David Lynch film. Normal Heights like a small ghostly town in the mist on a hill reminded of that town of Spectre, and I think I'm in love with Lestats.