It was nearly four hours in the wrong direction, but the drive alone was worthwhile. I drove first out to the coast, then down through the redwoods, on slaloming roads that swallow cars and the people standing beside them, staring to the heavens. Passing through their shade, in and out of sunlight, I experienced a sense of calm I felt coming from these trees.
The writer in me felt a twinge of jealousy for Eli. Among these Coastal Redwoods, a sense of humility dawns on you with unbelievable weight. It’s not in any way crushing, but instead warm, and light, like a gentle reminder that despite your day-to-day delusions, you are still just a small part of something bigger. An unburdening reminder of inconsequentiality. And Eli lived here, feeling it every day.
I pulled up to his cabin as the last of the day’s light faded. The door was unlocked, and he greeted me rudely: “Sup, retard?” He was lonely.
Since I’d first helped him move down here, he’d settled in in a way only fitting of his personality. The walls were littered with a first draft of decorations; tapestries and posters and pictures hung up in the order they were unpacked, displayed with no rhyme or reason. He had a couch now, two of them actually, so I’d be sleeping off the floor this time. In the middle of his living room were amps and mic stands and cords strewn about. His guitars sat organized on their stand against a wall.
He’d recently had two visitors, briefly, friends of ours, but other than that he’d effectively spent the past two months alone. The trash bin in the kitchen, a deep well of take-out boxes, brimmed. I asked if he’d taken it out a single time since he moved here. He laughed, but didn’t reply, and took it out right then.
Our options for the night were, “the worst stand-up comedy you’ve ever seen in your entire life,” or an improv comedy show, currently unreviewed. Naturally, I opted for the stand-up.
On the drive down to Eureka, I asked him about the show. He’d only been the once, but remained adamant it wouldn’t be any better this time around. He billed it as indescribably bad, ineffably awful. I told him he’d probably just gone on a bad night. He told me just wait.
We pulled up to Savage Henry Comedy Club half an hour before the show began, found seats mostly vacant, and parked ourselves three rows from the front. We got drinks, as it was, “the only way to make it remotely bearable.” The show began. The show delivered. I ate my words. Save for the drunk opposite the aisle from me, the laughter only ever seemed to come as a response to it all. The crowd laughing nervously at the silence that follows jokes. The drunk’s girlfriend looked to be embarrassed by her loud boyfriend. I was too.
More than once I turned to Eli, who would already be looking at me, his head rolled on his shoulder, collapsed, his eyes burning with emptiness. He passed back and forth between two expressions for the duration of the evening: incredulity, and vacancy, like he couldn’t believe that this is what his life currently amounted to.
We left halfway through the last act, when a comedian was joined by a pianist who played in accompaniment to the jokes. Devastating though, that the only humor was how poorly the nonsensical piano paired with the stories. Stories which, Eli informed me on our way out, were the exact same this guy had told last week, only without the piano. “They were bad last week, and they’re even worse with a backing track.”
On the drive, Eli comforted himself the way he always does, with music, and then decided to stop at the bar a mile from his house. A beer or two gone, a game of pool played (and lost, on my end, which led to my receiving a barrage of insults regarding my fine motor skills and cognitive abilities), we headed home.
Nearly as soon as we walked in the door, Eli said goodnight, rather abruptly, and went to bed.
I walked out onto his front porch, not only to gather my thoughts about the day but to appreciate the serenity of the woods around me. Except within seconds of standing on this deck, from over by the road, maybe from the other side of it, I heard this deep growl, or yell of some sort. It felt not quite human, but not quite animalistic either. What it felt like was the emergence of something deep within, a place visceral and violent, a place that responds to and delivers fear in its purest form. I froze, and remained that way, thanking myself for not having turned on the porch light, for being tucked away in the dark, hidden. My heart raced the way it does when you’re at a crossroads, when it seems a chapter might be coming to an end. I went inside and bolted the door.
Lying on the couch, I thought of the story the bartender had told us. The one of the serial killer, Wayne Adam Ford, who’d spent the night before his arrest sleeping in the lodge down the road, the one with the bar where we’d shot pool. Our bartender sold him the room. Nothing seemed off about him. He was arrested with a woman’s severed breast in his pocket, but nothing seemed off about him.
Coastal Northern California fascinates with its inauspicious beauty. The days present awe, and wonder, the kind that doesn’t diminish after weeks, months, or years. Places like this are rare, and they keep pulling you back. But when the fog rolls in, and when the night comes, a pervading gloom creates the backdrop for your life, and it comes with a sense of permanence. This feeling of unease, it transcends the visual. It swallows you whole.
I woke up the next morning before Eli. Though I’d brought a book, I read only a handful of pages. Instead, I scrolled aimlessly online before finally putting on some slow music and returning to the porch out front.
The transition from a small university town to a cabin in the woods is a jarring one. It’s jarring for me for a weekend; I can only imagine how jarring it is for a year or two. In Ashland everyone knows everyone else. You see the same people time and time again, and it’s only a matter of time before you become acquainted. Out here, in the woods, you’re on your own. You have neighbors you might wave to, but the solitude washes over you.
Here I am, this is where I find myself.
I can think of two pastimes: distraction, and introspection. The introspection is forced, the distraction offers refuge.
Eli admits it himself, there is no one more chronically online than he. In a place like this I understand it. We would spend many hours this weekend in the living room, the TV playing, while both scrolling on our phones. Comfort. In a state of such isolation you seek it out when and wherever you can. It’s difficult to meet people out here, yet you seek connection, or something close. And perhaps the simplest form is through social media. Here are other people I might not be able to touch, but I can see and hear. Here are digital creature comforts.
The alternative is to open the recesses of your mind, those chasms normally hidden away, the ones that consume you completely. They can reduce you to nothing.
These are crossroads. Spending time with yourself, living with yourself, these lessons catch up with us sooner or later. My proverbial cabin in the woods was an apartment in Long Beach. It too came with highs and lows. And while lonely in a city is different than lonely alone, these things emanate from the same place. The core feeling is the same: looks like it’s just me again.
It was Labor Day weekend, and Eli picked a hike for us to go on. Said it’s one he’d been saving for my visit, one that was recommended to him a while back. Per his request, I’d brought with me some LSD I’d gotten in Ashland (in the form of crushed up Tic-Tacs—don’t ask). We considered taking it before we left, so we’d come on right as we started our hike, but decided against it. We would drop at the trailhead.
We spent forty-five minutes winding through the forest before turning onto a dirt road, on which a few cars came back our way. Of the two cars ahead of us at the booth, talking to the ranger, the first pulled a U-turn and drove away, the second, after talking with her (the ranger), drove on through.
Eli told her which hike we were there to do. She asked if we had the permit for it. We didn’t. She told him we needed a permit, one bought online, prior to today.
Eli turned the car around with the resignation that would permeate the remainder of the day. He pulled off to the side of this dirt road, sunk into this seat, retrieved and lit a joint, lowered his window (mine was stuck), and started driving again.
He put on Elliott Smith, turning it down only to ask me to look up other hikes. I didn’t have service.
“Yeah, of course.” The music turned up again, and he contemplated his rotten luck. It made me chuckle, the whole thing. A few years back Eli once asked me, “So are you gonna be such a miserable sack of shit for the rest of your life?” I’d surely thought so at the time, but I’d somehow learned to get out of my own way. So it amused me, the way these things circle around.
Returning to the main road, it wasn’t long before we found some service and Eli pulled off to the side. He told me he’d never seen it this busy. By my standards it wasn’t, but standards vary sharply. I found a hike, tame in terms of elevation, ten or so miles long. And free parking at the Visitor Center.
“It’ll probably be pretty busy,” he said.
“I don’t think most people are going to opt for a ten mile hike,” I said.
Eli took a deep breath in and sighed. He pulled up the center on Google Maps, and then he let out a laugh, the first of the day. He showed me Google’s live info: “As Busy As It Gets.”
“Fuck my fuckin’ life dude.”
“Let’s at least go check it out,” I said.
Eli twisted his head but said nothing, just started driving.
Passing through towns with populations of 300, roadside stands found their benches now full. The check-out lady in the market in Orick seemed genuinely excited to be seeing so many people, expressing what felt like too much gratitude for my purchasing of a Powerade. But it was sweet. It makes me think about the isolation out here, how prevalent it must be. If we aren’t hardwired to be around other people, if these small holidays that bring in city folk from Sacramento and San Francisco don’t offer something resembling reprieve for the locals.
One thing was for sure; Eli is not wired to be a local of these parts. He couldn’t decide whether to fume or wallow as we pulled up to the Visitor Center parking lot. As busy as it gets. People were parked on the shoulder even before the Visitor Center. Families watched a herd of Elk gathered distantly in the field.
I was relieved we didn’t take the LSD. Finding a spot in an over-capacity parking lot full of minivans and families is the kind of nightmare distinctly fueled by psychedelics. Everyone would be watching us. Everyone would know. We didn’t even know how strong the LSD was, we were just gonna dip a finger in and find out. I considered it luck.
“Let’s just go to the beach,” Eli said.
“Fine with me.”
“How can it be possible to be denied by a hike? My fucking luck…”
The sun was shining, and the sky uncharacteristically clear and warm. We found a spot off the highway, and over and behind the dune we heard very little of the traffic. We laid out a blanket, and before we even sat down, Eli was cursing again.
“I cannot fucking believe I didn’t get beers at that market. Oh my fucking god, dude.”
We spent two hours in the sun, listening to the waves break, watching the occasional sea otter lift its head. I don’t remember what else we did. I believe we just sat there.
It was a classic misadventure for the two of us. Murphy’s Law and all that.
When I had moved to Long Beach, I’d made a series of bad decisions, and was left to grapple with them alone. Suddenly I was in a city where I knew nobody, and my evenings were spent in a bare bedroom where it seemed that God was playing a cruel joke on me. (Eli, when visiting me, described my bedroom—accurately—as looking like that of somebody who had just gotten out of prison.) I had created these circumstances myself, similar to how Eli had picked his house and his job in this secluded part of the country. The situation was one of my own making, and it was mine to reconcile. The difference now was that I had graduated from my loneliness, and he was still in the thick of it. It all made me laugh, not at him, but at the situation.
In my graduating, I had learned to avoid the melodrama of my misery. Perhaps it’s one of those lessons one continually learns throughout life. Reaching the next plateau offers a break, but Eli was still climbing.
Driving home Eli told me he had a crush on this girl working one of the roadside coffee shacks. He wanted to go buy a coffee, just to see if he might see her. A sight for sore eyes. “let’s go,” I said. But then he seemed to regret saying anything to me. “Nah, it’s just fucking sad, dude.”
That night we watched TV while both on our phones, and Eli went to bed early again.
I pursued escape in the laziest means possible. I tried to connect with strangers on the internet. I felt an artifice of community. In two days I’d be heading home, and I’d be happy to be on my way.
Once, in San Francisco, in Golden Gate Park, Eli and I had gone skateboarding and gotten separated from our group. It’s embarrassing now, but I’d been miserable. I’d worn a gray sweatshirt and black shorts. And we were on mushrooms, with this big group of people, and I wanted to be anywhere else. Everyone was in high spirits and I’d committed myself to spending my remaining mushroom hours (and we’d just gotten started) suffering in silence, so as not to disturb anyone else’s joy.
Eli was the one to suggest he and I go for a skate, and not long after our group migrated and then, we were, technically, lost. And it was when we were lost, skating down long, smooth, curved roads that I felt my shoulders lift. I made fun of Eli for looking goofy on his board. He made fun of me for chewing the temples of my sunglasses, some kind of oral fixation. It was fun in that childlike way.
And though we were tripping on mushrooms, and we wanted nothing to do with our phones, Eli took a call. The only information retained was that once we got to the horses, go left. This became our mantra. “Horses go left.” We skated through the park, carefree, giggling to ourselves. “Horses go left.” “Horses go left.”
Monday, Labor Day, was slow. We left the house at 1pm, and drove to some pickleball courts in Arcata. It was somewhat windy, and our ball kept getting carried away. After a few games, fifty-something year-old man arrived, his face lathered in sunscreen, and asked if we wanted to play with him. He was the one who informed us that we had indoor pickleball equipment. Lighter balls, paddles less grippy. Eli: “Yeah, typical.” Before we left the man told us to come again, filling Eli in on when their group got together.
We drove into town, and there we went into a bookstore, where Eli bought for himself Thoreau’s Walden, and I bought for him Catch-22. It seemed to me that Eli would resonate with Yossarian’s plight, his war on futility. Joseph Heller, an absurdist, made futility funny. This, I think, is the only way.
Eli informed me that in Nigeria, people, when angry, don’t say, “I’m mad,” but rather, “My enemies have succeeded.”
Eli feels he has many enemies, and that they are winning right now. The evidence is there, but from the outside in it’s more funny than infuriating. At every corner, it seems a new inconvenience presents itself.
Walking around Arcata, Eli was apparently unable or unwilling to walk beside me. He maintained a pace always two steps ahead, as if passing on some inconvenience to me, as if demonstrating the current metaphor for his life. Similarly, he drove in a way not overtly assholish, but far from consistent. He drove fairly slow, unphased by the string of cars lining up behind. When passing lanes came up ahead, he’d pick up the pace. It’s not that he wouldn’t let cars pass, but he made them have to speed to get past him, because once back to a single lane, he meandered along again. This was how he gave back.
We walked to the North Coast Food Co-op in Arcata, which offered a wide selection of food from a hot bar. It was a nice place, very modern, and I said as much. Eli was unimpressed. He was uninterested in being impressed, by anything.
We drove back to his cabin, grabbed some drinks, and left for the beach. Before pulling back onto the street though, Eli stopped the car in the driveway for a view of his cabin, struck by a ray of light.
“You know, sometimes, like from here, it actually does look quite nice.”
Objectively it does. It’s quaint, homey, borderline idyllic. But we see it through different eyes. He sees it as a prison of his own making, a cute exterior housing his helplessness. I see it as the place where my friend will once have lived, then long ago. Years from now, I’ll drive down that coast again, and when I do I’ll go out of my way to turn on to P—— Drive and pass his house. One day it will be empty, or else occupied by someone new. I’ll think about what it was like to be in that house in the summer of ’24, when Eli lived there. I’ll send him a photo, and he’ll call me, and we’ll laugh about it all.
We set up camping chairs on the windy beach, and read our books. He read Walden, and I read Heller. I thought about Thoreau, widely believed to be living in complete isolation, but actually hanging out with neighbors in his cabin and having dinner with friends. He, like the rest of us, required community. I told Eli to return to the pickleball courts. He shrugged.
I cracked open a cider, and as I brought it to my lips, Eli yelled at me.
“Use the glass!” He pointed to the cooler bag, where a glass lay waiting for me.
“I didn’t know you’d brought me one.”
“You think I just brought one glass for myself? Jesus.”
I’d like to point out that Eli was in no way a bad host. If anything he presented a very humorous dichotomy: the angry but upright host. I took nothing personally, because I understood. I’d been the same host when Eli had visited me in Long Beach so long ago. I know what it is to feel defeat.
As the sun set the wind picked up, and we soon headed home.
That night I sat writing on the couch and Eli played the guitar, standing in the middle of his living room, facing away from me. He played How Deep Is Your Love.
That was my last night, and I left early the next morning.
Driving up on the cliffside, the clouds hung below, blanketing the ocean. The sun was shining.
I wondered how he felt watching me leave, watching me get to leave. He told me he couldn’t stay there, but he’d maintained that thought for the past two months, unmoving. For me, the outsider, just passing through, his living situation is a lot more romantic than it is for him. It’s the kind of retreat for which wealthy city-slickers pay good money. For Eli, it’s an unceasing reminder of his commitments, to a new job, and to a rental contract.
I told him I looked forward to his EP, which I implored him to make. If ever there were a time to produce his own music, it was now. He shrugged it off, and I didn’t push it any further.
Maybe his enemies are succeeding, as mine once did. But then again, I only had the one.
Toilet Review 
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