Stephanie — Here I am in Fortuna, California. The last time I was here would have been freshman year of college on spring break in 1999. I drove south from Portland with my friend Nico, and we stayed the night either here or a little bit up the road in the town of Eureka.

Now I’m here again and Nico is also out traveling, but he’s spent the year in Asia and Europe. Yesterday I woke up at a campsite on a bluff overlooking the Pacific and listened to a new track that Nico had recorded and e-mailed to me.

Back in April I was camped in the desert in Utah, and I opened and read a letter that Nico had written me in Thailand and mailed me from Malaysia. I’d received the letter a few days earlier, right before I gave up the P.O. Box at my old address — in fact I got it the very last day that mail could reach me there — and I’d saved it to read while traveling. I was four nights into my trip, and it was about the time that loneliness takes hold if you don’t shake it off, and reading his letter was nice.

That was kind of a long tangent. So now it’s thirteen and a half years since Nico and I passed through Fortuna, and I suppose it’s obvious that the passage of time is on my mind. Nico was the first person to point out to me that I have something of an adversarial relationship with time, and that I seem to resent its passage. And I think he was on to something. That was back when were just out of college, living together in a house we rented from a guy named Dave.

Dave was a neat guy, but all my memories of him were formed standing at the front door of his place, handing him the rent check. And so in my mind Dave will always be a fifty-ish dude who’s just slathered about a pound of highly aromatic cocoa butter on himself before smoking an ounce of pot and then being surprised to see me at his door.

That was also kind of a long tangent. I’m not sure where I’m going with this. But Dave was a pretty good landlord, and Nico was and is still a good friend, and Fortuna still isn’t much more than a brief stopping point. (Sorry, Fortuna civic boosters.)

I’m not sure where to take this without getting into boring personal territory. I guess maybe I should thank you for reading and tolerating this; this is pretty much what it looks like when I ruminate on “what am I doing with my life” kind of questions. Anyway.

Well, clearly I didn’t go to art school. It’s a little hard to tell what all these drawings are. 02: Great Lakes shoreline. 03: Wildflowers. 04: “Cornelius” the mascot. 05: Rock formation and clouds. 07: Highway 50, sun, and a UFO.

This is a little sketch of Kaida lounging in a meadow at Salt Point State Park on the Northern California Coast. We’re in I think Sonoma County, an hour or two or three north of San Francisco, and it was tricky work sketching Kaida because her head kept moving as she listened to various sounds from nearby woods. There’s a bit of a fog bank or cloud moving through, and depending on how thick it is an any given moment the trees on the other side of the meadow look either green or gray or blackish-greenish-gray.

This is my first real hike since the pig attack that landed me in the hospital two weeks ago, and I’m perking up at about half of the forest sounds to make sure they aren’t announcing the presence of an angry boar. I can hear traffic on Highway One way down below — I’m up high on a hill — and earlier there were these weird, distant, metal-on-metal noises and a few gunshots. Every once in a while there’s the sound of the wind picking up.

It’s between 10:45 and 11:00 a.m. right now, and it’s getting to be time that I should think about picking up and driving to a new campsite. I talked to another Vanagon owner and he suggested a beach that’s maybe 90 miles up the coast from here. I’m not sure what else to say here. This is my first full day of travel since leaving the Bay Area, and my brain feels foggy and tired.

Mike: Ben, how do you find inner peace?

Ben: I don’t.

Mike: Can you recommend any substitutes?

Ben: No, I think you’d want it, but I think activity is the closest thing you’d get to that. Activity with the feeling toward forward progress.

Mike: How do you find the motivation for that activity. Is it something you either have or you don’t?

Ben: I think when you lack an overriding goal in life, you can have calm and a sense of progress when you’re always moving forward.

Mike: Do you believe in free will?

Ben: Depends on what version of free will people talk about. The answer is sometimes yes and sometimes no.

Mike: Do you think that we live in an entirely deterministic universe? Excluding small-scale quantum stuff.

Ben: Yes.

Mike: Are dogs the best?

Ben: Yup.

Mike: Double bass or double guitar?

Ben: Double guitar.

Mike: Electric violin, or playing an electric guitar with a violin bow?

Ben: Electric violin. Great question.

Mike: Anything else you’d like to sound off on?

Ben: No.