Year: 2011

The other day I was minding my own business and heading towards my local bank to deposit a check. (That alone is remarkable; usually, I’m giving checks to somebody else.) On the way there, I walked past a tattoo parlor with a sign in the front spelling out the kind of people they don’t want in their store. The sign was remarkably inclusive. Here it is, for your reading pleasure: “NO CHILDREN. (Ningunas ninos.) IF YOU ARE drunk, on drugs, sick, pregnant, sunburned, dirty, smelly, eating, drinking, broke, trying to sell us something, looking for a deal, or otherwise obnoxious, please come back when you’re not!!”Near the sign, someone has put up a sticker: “People love us on Yelp!” http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Thank you, everyone, for a great event. There is always that scary moment — just before starting — where you wonder: “Are people going to show up??” That’s how I felt right around the starting time. “Where is everybody?” Then, right at 1 p.m., a good crowd came in all at once, bearing platters of cheeses, breads, tortilla chips, salsa and a home-made torte with almond flour, orange peel and chocolate. I met people from throughout the Peninsula including a ranger who patrols a nearby park (I was glad to see he was in the middle of reading David Wicinas’s Sagebrush and Cappucinno, which he saw on my list of reading recommendations at the back of The Cactus Eaters.) and a Palo Alto resident who is just about to through-hike the Pacific Crest Trail with her college-age daughter. She is a veteran of the Camino de Santiago — in fact…

See you at the book group Saturday (see Jan. 25th’s blog entry below). Photo courtesy of Jen. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Around 10 p.m. WST I saw a slow-moving orb of light traveling over the Seabright area. I thought it was a star at first but it kept shifting position in and out of the clouds and making a long, slow arc. Bands of light came out of it on all sides (it looked like a badly drawn hydra) — and I thought at first that the bands were retinal flashes — but the shape of the bands remained the same even after I blinked my eyes several times. It took a total of five minutes for whatever-it-was to make its way from one horizon line to the next. Peculiar, to say the least. A satellite or an experimental aircraft, I would guess? It’s probably not aliens, but I’ll bake muffins just in case. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

My name is Dan White. I am an author, lecturer, freelance writer and web editor. My first book, The Cactus Eaters: How I Lost My Mind and Almost Found Myself on the Pacific Crest Trail, was published by HarperCollins and was a San Francisco Chronicle and West Coast indie bookstore bestseller. I have taught poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction and a required essay-writing class at San Jose State University, and a freshman essay writing class at Columbia University. I also led the inaugural Bookshop Santa Cruz Outdoors writing and hiking event, guiding a group of Cactus Eaters readers into the woods for reading, poetry and nonfiction writing. My travel writing appears in the New York Times and other venues. Between 2007-8, I was a Steinbeck Fellow at SJSU. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

This was a great event; at some point I will post some thoughts on this (linked to another page so it doesn’t take up too much space.) The desert winds blow through the work of Paul Bowles. “Why go?” Bowles once wrote. “The answer is that when a man has been there and undergone the baptism of solitude he can’t help himself. Once he has been under the spell of the vast, luminous, silent country, no other place is quite strong enough for him …” This Saturday, Edmund White, celebrated author and creative writing professor at Princeton University, will reflect on the dry country’s beauty and dangerous magnetism during his keynote address, “The Desert and Fatality: Learning from Paul Bowles.” The talk begins at 3:30 p.m. at UC Santa Cruz’s Humanities Lecture Hall. Here is a complete itinerary of the weekend’s scheduled events. I’ll be there, taking lots of notes….

Out on Beach Street, I saw a young woman steering an SUV with her elbows. She was holding a breakfast burrito in one hand and what appeared to be a new-model iPhone in the other hand. Pedestrians scrambled (so to speak) to get out of the way. Not only that but she was talking with her mouth full. Illustration at left. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

The countdown begins for Literary Orange. I’ll be speaking on the adventure panel in the morning, and will stick around for the rest of the festival. See you April 9 in Southern California. (oops. In the previous post, I said it was 90 days. Whatever. I wasn’t a math major.) http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Thank you to the newly launched Bay Area book group Reading in Good Company, which has chosen The Cactus Eaters as its inaugural choice and invited me to participate. I will be there for the discussion, which will take place at 1 p.m. on February 12 at the Atherton Public Library in Atherton, Ca. Forgot to mention that this is a casual pot luck so bring a dish. This Mothra photo is from the Toho archives. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

A slightly different version of my New York Times piece on Santa Cruz will be featured in an upcoming, illustrated travel anthology. Times Books will publish the book, in collaboration with Taschen Books. Look for it this summer in your local bookstore. Meanwhile, the article also got picked up in the Huffington Post with comments. The book version of the article won’t mention my favorite tourist attraction in the entire idea, the Glaum Ranch Egg Vending Machine, but you can’t have everything. I guess you’ll just have to see the 24-hour chicken vending machine for yourself. Make sure to bring your own close-able egg cartons and three crisp dollar bills or you will regret it. I’m speaking from personal experience. Another attraction that I did not mention: on Cayuga Street in Seabright, there’s a history marker on one of the houses, close to the main entrance. The marker says, “In…