□ Placeholder: 13 — Two Walks and a Book
Hello —
And welcome to the 13th transmission of Placeholder — a newsletter about who knows what and we are still figuring out as we go along. All you need to know is this me, your friend, writing to you, as your friend. Sometime, somewhere our paths crossed and I took the liberty of adding you to this newsletter.
It's been a couple of weeks since I returned from San Francisco. Is this your first time in the States...? was the most common question I got. It started with the immigration official who perhaps read my face of discomfort after a 16 hrs flight and 3 hrs of standing in the queue. I figured her question wasn't inquisitive but rather rhetorical, subtly suggesting that I should get used to such discomforts while travelling west.
In SF, I lost my laptop but found new connections and an appreciation towards taken for granted public transport infrastructure of Europe (as well as Asia for that matter!). I have no idea about rest of the country, but in SF the public transport infrastructure was abysmal to say the least. Intra city — non existent! The entire city caters to the whisks and whims of cars.
However, once I ignored the flaws of the city, it was too easy to fall in love with the city and its landscapes. Technically you don't even have to escape the city to get into nature for walks.
On one of the days, I started walking from the side of Palace of Fine Arts and went all the way to Sutro Heights Park, covering Presidio and Land's End in between. It was a solid 16 km walk and it was right in the city. I would suggest this walk if you can't get enough of the Golden Gate Bridge. The majestic bridge keeps lurking throughout the walk, as you walk on the trail, as if keeping an eye on the walker. But when the eyes meet, the bridge doesn't seem frightening.
For my second walk, we — me and a friend from Poland that I bravely extended my invitation for the walk the previous night (or was it the other way round, I don't remember) — ventured little further from the city, into Marin Headlands. And since the public transport doesn't exist, after the Lyft dropped us, we were lost for the first couple of hours finding the trailhead. We started from the Bolinas Street in Manzanita and made our way to Muir Beach. We roughly followed the Coastal Trail which took us about 3 hours to cover an easy breezy walk of 15 km. It was Monday, and we came across just enough people to say 'hello' to with a genuine smile.
I was there for a week and mainly to attend a design conference called Config. It was full of inspiring talks and everyone who attended, more or less shared the common vision in the future of design tools — decentralised, democratised(?!) and that lives in the browser.
During the day of the conference, I summoned the courage to walk up to four — four! — people and said hello because I followed them on Twitter. I told them how their podcast helped me become a better designer; how their blog post helped me prepare for an interview; how amazing it is to follow along the journey of creating a typeface from scratch; and how inspiring it is to see that someone cares so much about implementing little typographic details that many self proclaimed designers like me aren't even aware about.
Post conference, I gathered enough courage to ask Craig Mod — one of the speakers in the conference — for a coffee together.
The next day when we met at Slightglass Coffee, I am obviously nervous. Devastated even. I don't know what to talk about. I don't want this chat to feel like a transaction — I ask a bunch of question and he answers and off we go. No. I want this to be an opportunity for further interactions. He eases me into by talking about Garmin Instinct smartwatch that we both strap on our wrists. He says, gesturing with his hands, how quieter it is than the Apple Watch.
Just read a tonne! he replies when I ask him how to look for the underlying structure in creative non fiction writings. We talked in length about the Structure that John McPhee often writes about and I decide if I had to have the same level of structure, I have to read. Read a tonne!
On my way back, I start reading the book called Flights by Olga Tokarczuk. Originally written in Polish, it was recommended by the same Polish friend. She was little hesitant at first in recommending — I am not sure if it got lost in translation, she said while handing me the copy in City Lights. The beauty of the book lies in it's indefinable genre. Sometimes, it reads like a fiction, while in others it offers an accurate description of preservation techniques of the human body parts. I was especially drawn towards the immaculate analogies to describe something. A specimen:
> I do think that the Peloponnese has the most beautiful shape. It's the shape of a great maternal hand, not a human one, that is dipping into the water to check if the temperature is right for a bath.
Look at the zoomed out shape of Peloponnese and come back to read this again.
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These were some of the interesting vehicles I came across during my walks in the California. I was especially impressed with their creativity with the vehicle's number plates - a GTA fan, a MUM BOY and a pure TSLA fan. Also, a cute pink two wheeler in the land of mammoth four wheelers.
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As always, thanks for following along.
Until next time —
K