Thanks to Lou Noble for the source image!

Ver­sion: 1.1 1.0a

I updated this story from 1.0 to 1.1 on March 30 based on sug­ges­tions from Tim Car­mody and Andrew Fitzger­ald. Rolled back! Here’s a ver­sion with the changes high­lighted. (Thanks Ken!)

This one was writ­ten on a whim and in a flash, with near-​​real-​​time edit­ing help from a crew of Twit­ter pals. Here are some snip­pets of their feed­back, if you’re curi­ous. But before you read that:

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I rode my bike to the beach on the last of the beau­ti­ful days.

Timon had to lure me out of the house. As a rule I’m unim­pressed by the sun, and I have this the­ory that beau­ti­ful days are totally over­rated. We all go crazy when the clouds part. Every­body gets dis­tracted and scram­bles out­side as if it’ll never be nice again.

I’m not cranky! I just have a deep faith in the future, you know? There are beau­ti­ful days behind us and beau­ti­ful days to come—so relax and play some video games.

But it turns out my faith was unfounded, because Sat­ur­day, March 27 was, in fact, the last beau­ti­ful day.

On Sun­day, the sky over the city was gray-​​​​green. Mon­day was worse, and the week that fol­lowed was a cage of dark clouds that trailed cur­tains of cold rain. There was light­ning. It went on like that, week after week, month after month, all across the city, the penin­sula, and the headlands—the sun sim­ply refused to shine. And today, about a mil­lion of us are still stuck liv­ing in a weather non sequitur.

Some­thing fun­da­men­tal has changed; some­thing impor­tant is broken.

But I’m not just talk­ing about the sky.

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The thing that sucked about the last beau­ti­ful day was that I didn’t get to spend it with Kate Trudeau.

Back at the begin­ning I lied: it wasn’t Timon’s coax­ing, exactly, that got me out of the house. Rather, it was the under­stand­ing that Timon is friends with Lacey Pell, and Lacey is friends with Kate Trudeau, and Lacey was def­i­nitely com­ing, so Kate Trudeau was maybe com­ing. I mean, they’re really good friends. She was almost def­i­nitely coming.

If this sounds ridicu­lous, it’s because it is. But I’m in a quasi-​​anti-​​relationship with Kate Trudeau, which means that we made out twice, hooked up once, got angry at each other 1.5 times, and were cur­rently trav­el­ing through some sort of roman­tic nether­world. Don’t look back, Orpheus.

There’s a spot in Golden Gate Park where you’re cruis­ing down the green-​​cosseted road and you make a sharp turn—there’s a wind­mill on your right—and sud­denly, there’s the ocean, so big and bright it messes up the color bal­ance of your eyes. It’s wide and white and waves are crash­ing and you can’t believe it’s been there all this time. And, espe­cially if you are coast­ing towards the pos­si­bil­ity of Kate Trudeau, it feels like the newest, biggest, great­est thing in the world. Like: wow, who invented this, and why didn’t I know ’til now?

But Kate Trudeau did not in fact come, so I spent the whole day pre­tend­ing to be inter­ested in Lacey’s new job and play­ing quarter-​​hearted fris­bee with some dude named Chad. Really, I was barely there; my spirit was out can­vass­ing other beaches, other streets.

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In the damp driz­zled weeks that fol­lowed, pho­tos from that last beau­ti­ful day gath­ered a strange power.

It didn’t mat­ter if they’d been snapped on Nokias or Nikons, because they all had one thing in com­mon: they were scarce. These were images tightly cir­cum­scribed in space and time, and with every gray day that passed, they seemed more and more magical.

Peo­ple posted their col­lec­tions like lit­tle online shrines. Every golden photo had a long wispy beard of com­ments, all mem­o­ries and long­ing. There were a lot of ellipses.

I got a lit­tle bit obsessed with these albums. One of my favorites was from my friend Cather­ine; it showed a sunny pic­nic in Dolores Park that, hon­estly, looked way more fun than fris­bee with Chad. In one of her pho­tos, I saw my old coworker Jay Gupta tak­ing a pic­ture of his own, way down on the park’s green slope. So then I found his album, and sure enough: there was Cather­ine with her cam­era, high up on the hill.

That’s what gave me the idea for Last Beau­ti­ful. I reg­is­tered the domain (dot-​​org, because dot-​​com was taken) and installed a photo-​​wiki thing. The idea was that you could import all your pic­tures, pin them to a map of the city, and con­nect them with oth­ers to make big col­lec­tive panoramas.

One big pic­ture of one last beau­ti­ful day.

Now, my secret hope was that, by bring­ing all of the images of that day into one place, I’d be able to find Kate Trudeau.

So it was kind of an archive slash com­mu­nity slash stalk­ing thing.

The pho­tos came in a flood, and the sheer scope of the imagery was stag­ger­ing. It was the view from a thou­sand pic­nic blan­kets span­gling the earth from Precita Park to Crissy Field. It was long snaking sequences that traced bike trips across the city, with the sun­light shift­ing from yel­low to white to red-​​violet along the way.

For some, that Sat­ur­day had been a boozy back­yard party, with a cig­a­rette hang­ing on every lip. For oth­ers, it had been a grand expe­di­tion with the kids, with chocolate-​​chip It’s-Its and match­ing Explorato­rium t-​​shirts. Every­where, in every kind of pic­ture, there was an effect that I loved more than any­thing: at a cer­tain hour on the last beau­ti­ful day, cot­ton threads and gray whiskers and chest­nut hair all blazed to life, back­lit and burn­ing like golden filament.

Maybe the same effect had occurred on the beach with Timon’s fuzzy beard and Lacey’s long hair as the sun came down. I hadn’t noticed at the time.

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It was in fact the pho­tos from Ocean Beach—so many pho­tos from Ocean Beach—that told the tale.

On the hori­zon, always vis­i­ble just over someone’s shoul­der, there was the hazy sil­hou­ette of a ship mak­ing its way slowly towards the Golden Gate. If you found the right pic­tures and put them in the right order, you could watch the ship crawl closer, frame-​​by-​​frame.

Then it exploded.

Not a movie-​​style explo­sion with ten­drils of red-​​black fire. Instead it just lit up; in the images it was sud­denly over­ex­posed, a bar of white light that might have looked like sun on the water if you didn’t have the film­strip to tell you that just a moment ago it had been a blue-​​gray vessel.

The explosion—or what­ever it was was—must have been sound­less, or maybe the sound was lost in the roar of the waves. I’d been on the beach when it hap­pened, and I’d heard nothing.

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A batch of images uploaded by some­one called elton_​82 revealed at last where Kate Trudeau had been hid­ing all this time.

There she is. Your girl—well, your quasi-​​anti-​​girl, the girl you made out with twice and were kinda mad at but were still, on some level, try­ing to make yours—is in the back­ground of a photo snapped on Fill­more Street, bend­ing to peer into a shiny shop win­dow, hold­ing her hair back from her eyes with two fingers.

It’s a store called Artemis that sells super-​​expensive, sustainably-​​manufactured ath­letic clothes for women: yoga pants, dance shoes, sexy anoraks. Her face is reflected in the glass and you can see that she’s not wear­ing sun­glasses, even though it’s so bright out. She never wears sun­glasses. She thinks they make peo­ple look like aliens.

Kate Trudeau is window-​​shopping alone on this, the last of the beau­ti­ful days.

There are actu­ally three pho­tos that include her, taken in slow sequence because elton_​82 appar­ently wanted to get exactly the right shot of his mom and dad. (Nice work, Elton.) In the last one, Kate Trudeau is stand­ing, look­ing down at her phone with a seri­ous face. Her camisole is rid­ing up and her belly is exposed; it’s a span of pale gold shin­ing through the lens of Elton’s iPhone and, actu­ally, it’s about the same shape as that mys­tery ship.

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I posted the pho­tos of the explosion—all three hun­dred of them—anonymously on Wik­ileaks. Two days later, the Chron­i­cle picked up the story and did some actual reporting.

The ship was the NOAA Ka’imimoana II. It had been con­duct­ing an exper­i­ment involv­ing deep ocean cur­rents and Copen­hagen res­onators. Appar­ently the cur­rents were too deep and the res­o­nance was too… Copen­hagen? Any­way, every­thing went wrong and there is now a very, very small black hole in the mouth of the San Fran­cisco Bay.

The gov­ern­ment made a $525 Cli­ma­to­log­i­cal Adjust­ment Pay­ment to every­body in the city. One help­ful com­menter on the Chronicle’s site pointed out that the amount was just $14 shy of a one-​​way ticket to Costa Rica.

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When I saw that band of belly on my MacBook—it was 1 a.m. and thun­der was rat­tling the windows—something fell into place in my brain, like the long straight Tetris piece that flashes and clears the screen.

The sud­den pass­ing of beau­ti­ful days had really, really scared me. It had demol­ished my deep-​​​​rooted belief in open-​​​​ended possibility—my faith in a future of bound­less days and bound­less chances to meet new Kate Trudeaus, and mess things up with them, again and again.

Out­side it’s dark and gray and bit­ter cold, and I think there might be a tor­nado form­ing over Bernal Hill. But I’m going to ride my bike to the beach. I’m going to bring my fris­bee and invite Timon and Lacey and Chad and yes: Kate.

We’ll miss these days too when they’re gone.

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Don’t miss this: Matt Katz parses the story with Python and ana­lyzes my sen­tence length. Sur­prise: it’s mostly tweet­able. So cool.