Today's Daily Double is... geology brain!

Took a long walk in the headlands today, no agenda, and about a mile in I caught myself doing what Al calls geology brain: stopped mid-stride, hand flat on a roadcut, thumbnail dug into a green-black seam, completely gone from the present tense.

Serpentinite. Slick, waxy, gray-green, California's state rock, and one of the strangest things you can casually touch on a Tuesday. It is a piece of the earth's mantle, actual mantle, squeezed up through the crust over tens of millions of years, and now it sits there holding up a bike road while the lycra guys blow past worrying about their watts. The whole headlands are like this. Franciscan complex: ocean floor and deep-sea chert and volcanic islands scraped off a subducting plate and shoved onto the continent. Mt Tam is wreckage. Richardson Bay, where my whole house floats, is a drowned river valley that flooded when the last ice age let go maybe ten thousand years back, which in the units I was trained on is not even a moment ago.

I have a geology degree from UNC Chapel Hill and I use it professionally never and personally every single day. Grew up in Cary on piedmont red clay (saprolite, rotten rock, the ghost of mountains that were once Himalayan-tall and are now soft hills you drive past on the way to the Outer Banks). Spent a field camp summer out west with a brunton compass learning to read a hillside, strike and dip, which way the beds lean, what happened here and in what order. Worked in parks after college pointing at rocks for families who mostly wanted to know where the bathroom was. Loved it, was broke, went to a bootcamp, became a guy who root-causes software instead of hillsides. And I promise you it is the same job. Here is the anomaly, here is the layer that shouldn't be there, what happened and in what order? A stack trace is a stratigraphic column.

What the rocks are for, in a life like mine, is perspective. I work in an industry where the tools I mastered in October are quaint by spring, and then I put my hand on a chunk of ocean floor that took two hundred million years to get here from the middle of the Pacific and the panic drains right out through my palm. The world runs a much longer release cycle and it has never missed one.

Walked home the long way, tide out, mudflats shining, every one of those muds a future rock. Lady met me at the gate doing the full-body wag. Seven years old, four billion in the making, no idea, doesn't need one.