Lately it seems like all I’m doing is cooking and exploring. In the last two days I’ve made tortilla soup, granola, cookies and a loaf of whole wheat bread. Looming large on the whiteboard is GINGER BEER in graffiti type, and “feed sourdough Wednesday night.” Whoa man, you’ve turned into a house boyfriend.

When I’m not cooking I’m exploring. Yesterday I drove north to Patrick’s Point. I parked outside the park to dodge the fee and set off randomly through the woods, trying to hack my way into the park.  My goal was Agate Beach, and after a detour down a muddy fire road, dank deer trail, hard highway and through a Yurok village, I made it.

The surf was glassy on the north side of the point.  I walked two miles along the beach to Big Lagoon, and spotted twenty agate hounds.  Like guys with beards and dreads, technical outdoors wear, and the long pinchers one might use to pick up trash in the quad, only these dudes were picking up rocks.  I wanted to go up to one and ask him to show me a good agate, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.  I looked myself–I think I have some pretty good beachcombing eyes–and found a few pretty stones, but nothing worth taking, so I arranged them in the hollow of a log next to a dying bumblebee.

I don’t think my goal is to be a house boyfriend; what it feels like I’m doing is trying to rediscover my inner stoke, which is a reorientation of the inner compass towards clean, inspired living.  That’s a tall order, but I’m trying, and it seems Humboldt is a good place to do it.  In my early estimation, about half of the people here are happy, disarmingly nice, and in the place they want to be.  Like the old man with the foot long beard in a pair of overalls whom I met on a bird walk, who went way out of his way to wish me a good walk before pulling away in his turquoise blue thunderbird.  However the other half are wildly unhappy, unsatisfied, and fighting with eachother; they seem stuck.  Like our three pairs of bickering neighbors, living in beige townhouses, wearing Raiders gear, and microwaving their meals.

Obviously I want to be in the first camp.  There is incredible beauty here if you go looking for it.  I just need to add a job into the equation, and figure out which type of facial hair I’m going to grow next.