Adjacency

This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: The only way to know a world is to live there. The whole series is here.

Although there were murmurs of it before, I trace the beginning of my life as an athlete to a bike ride in the spring of 2006, when I lived in Venice Beach. The previous year I’d ended up in a serendipitous roommate situation with a stranger, Larin, who became a close lifelong friend, and when I moved out of her place in Echo Park she bequeathed me a handsome vintage Fuji. She’d been working on it at the Bicycle Kitchen, a punky queer DIY workspace on Heliotrope Drive, one of those Los Angeles streets that sounds like it was named by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

My new apartment was a few blocks from the ocean, so I rode over that way and then made my way up the bicycle path. In a few minutes I’d crossed into Santa Monica, past the pier and under the dun-colored bluffs, past the lifeguard towers in robin-egg blue. After Will Rogers State Beach, the strip of sand narrows and becomes rocky and the bike path peters out in a series of parking lots. I rode as far as I could and then stood watching the sun wink out behind Point Dume, not far from where Keanu Reeves frolics with Patrick Swayze in “Point Break.” Los Angeles had never been my destination; tonight, as it sometimes would in each of the years I lived there, it staged the kind of show to suggest it should be.

Since then my bike has always been a vessel for finding the real topology of a place—not the one occasioned by commuting or consuming; the one of subtle invitations and adjacencies. You can ride past a little road or the branch of a trail a hundred times before you even notice it, then take it impulsively and find your whole conception of place altered, as if you’ve been homesteading in a coat closet off to the side of a ballroom. One day you trip and nudge the door open, and what you see there has a difference of kind.

I loved the Narnia books as a kid—the wardrobe leading to a world of fantastically greater proportion. One of the big dividends of both athletics and writing for me has been to know that this is a description of reality—that narrow gaps lead to vast new places, and nothing compels that ever to stop being true. The critical aspect of it is distance: that there isn’t any. Between you and the world you will know is only the most casual interference—a few blocks of Venice Beach, for example. Effort is not the tool here, or diligence, but impulse. It’s about honoring your hunger for what you can’t yet see.

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