Yesterday we drove to the coast, to Ecola State Park, and climbed down the rocky hill to the beach. I'd never been there, it was beautiful and reminded me of Monterey, but without the overdevelopment and thousands of people. I like to look out onto the vastness of the ocean and feel overwhelmed, it's a pleasurable experience of controllable hysteria. I wonder if this sensation would persist if I lived next to the ocean. People say they find the ocean peaceful but I don't. I enjoy it but it's far from peaceful, instead it fills me with fear and replaces my quotidian concerns with a general feeling of purifying nihilism. It's hard not to have one's mind reduced to ludicrous Freudian categories when confronted with the ocean. That's my definition of pleasure, the substitution of my regular apprehensions with more exotic or profoundly disconcerting ones.

More of this on the hike back through the primordial forest. Jurassic-looking ferns and eerie silence, a feeling of the relentless fecundity of nature and how I'm just one not-particularly-interesting manifestation of it. We were the only ones there, thankfully; I can't stand to hear the inane chatter of others in such an environment, especially children, who treat nature as a big playground. People say this is an example of the inspiring playfulness of children but I see it as just the opposite, it's a failure of blinkered young imaginations to recognize true primal horror when it's right in front of them. This is why the old scary children's fables are so important, as a crucial early corrective to an overly optimistic worldview.

Enormous felled trees lay in our path and had been sectioned with chainsaws to allow easy through-traffic. What a sad and idiotic fate for a tree, to go from majestic ancient giant to pedestrian obstacle.