I was driving down Highway 5 yesterday and I had a great idea for a book. A book that I really felt I must write. I'm not going to tell you what it is yet, because sometimes great ideas start feeling kind of thin after a week or so and then I have to keep explaining why I'm not writing that great idea I was spouting off about. But it got my blood pumping, which is good, and it also, even better, shed a bright light on the theme of Undressing. Basically it has to do with the 20th Century cult of the Self, and how we're still wrestling with that, still trying to valorize it and get out from under it at the same time. Which is kind of the heart of Bernarr Macfadden's life story and the True Story revolution. But more on that later.

I love that drive, from the time I turn off 101 at Gilroy until the freeway starts mounting up the hill around Lebec. Coffee and fruit-shopping at Case de Fruta, then past the rock towers at Pacheco Pass and down into the great alluvial horizonless flats. The Valley is just so flat, and so vast, and so unexpectedly changeable in the shifting light of afternoon. A hamburger at Harris Ranch, where the prosperous old farmers and ranchers eat with their families, the success stories of the old Valley. It's hot and the shade of the trees around the parking lot is dense, and when a breeze shifts to the south the air is sweet with the smell of cow shit. Then south again, always straight, straight south, to watch the sunset over the low hills from the hot metal chairs in front of the Starbucks at the truck stop in Buttonwillow, huge semis shifting in my ears as they build up momentum to get back on 5. The entire life of the highway is that for all of us, shifting up to climb back onto and keep with the speed, shifting down and drifting right to get off at its rare designated spots for food, coffee, toilets. Life is simple on the highway. Linear.

I've had a lot of good ideas driving up and down 5. Some of them hold up, too, turn into good work. That linear simplicity is part of it. So's the openness of the sky, I'll bet. But I think I'm feeling some kind of return to my core, too. I grew up in the Santa Clara Valley, Los Gatos and Gilroy, back before those towns were as big and urbane as they are now. Different from the Central Valley—you could see hills on both sides of Gilroy—but far more like it than San Francisco, where I live now. SF is lovely for its hills and romantic for its fog, but neither suits me at that native level that the flat hazy heat does. I'm not leaving SF any time soon: my kid's school, friends, Grotto, neighborhoods I can walk to and buy good coffee and have good conversations in. But something happens to my body when I'm in flip-flops and a t-shirt in 95 degree heat and I'm looking past row crops and orchards to yellow-grass hills. It calms down. And then my mind starts getting to fundamentals.