When the engineer went to the bathroom, I looked up his account on the photo-sharing app and scrolled through: fog at Lands End, fog on Muir Beach, crashing waves, copper hills. The Golden Gate Bridge at daybreak, at sunset, at night. Half the photographs featured either his bicycle or a strip of empty road. They were, I had to admit, very high resolution. It seemed stressful to me, cultivating a public image, or a personal aesthetic—like the sort of mind-set that could lead a person to worry during sex about whether the lighting was sufficiently cinematic. I knew I didn’t fit into the
...more
