California, Theoretically

San Francisco was on the calendar—a week of loosely defined professional activities I’d mostly imagined as getting coffee with people who make apps and taking photos in neighborhoods I’d already seen in photos. The NSA was presumably already tracking the itinerary. Fine by me.

Then I saw the Alethea shoot in Purple and reconsidered the whole structure of the trip.

Purple runs editorial spreads with a studied carelessness that makes every other fashion magazine look like it’s trying too hard—no concept, just a person and a place and whoever had a camera that afternoon. This one was California coast, outdoor light, very little clothing and then none at all. A woman who looked like she’d never once been self-conscious about anything in her life. I sat with the pictures longer than I’d planned.

The revised plan: cancel the meetings entirely, spend the week at whatever beach that was, operating on pure hope. The probability of catching a repeat performance was essentially zero. Still the most appealing itinerary I’d considered all year. California, at minimum, sometimes looks like that. That’s enough.