Wednesday, 19 October 2005 | Candy shop

Beauty, particularly landscape beauty, is hard for me to completely enjoy sometimes, because I don't know what to do with it. I don't have that problem with, say, chocolate cake, which I can devour once I'm finished admiring it. It's possible to hug a person, pet an animal, or chug a glass of wine. Even music isn't difficult, because I can turn it up, or (even better, somehow) I can kill the insatiable feeling, simply by playing the song over and over again until it loses its initial secret.

I kept thinking about that when we were driving a convertible (!) along the California coast, and the landscape was so good-looking that it seemed almost unfair. I took pictures of it, but the small, flat, digitized version of the world isn't quite the same, and it doesn't at all capture the feeling of driving around a bend and being wholly impressed by what you see in front of you, so much so that all you can do is grunt, "Look." and point at the windshield.

My favorite part of the trip was between destinations, and although I like San Francisco and the people we saw there, I didn't want to arrive, partly because the drive included things like eating freshly picked road strawberries, standing on the edge of the continent and dodging salty wave debris, getting lost for an hour in a giant maze made of straw, and visiting an ornate and tacky hotel where the men's urinal is a laser-operated man-made waterfall.

***

Unrelated to anything, Scott P. told me that the students in his class just voted on the name of their class hamster. One kid suggested the name "Lisa," which got two votes, but it ultimately lost to "Candy Shop."