Summon: Rainbow Monkey Writer Guy!
Had a bit of trouble choosing a Category for this post...technically, it's an On The Road: Afterword post, but then, everything is now. There's before On The Road, and after. That journey is a clear boundary in my life, like September 11. Everything changed afterwards.
So, I suppose it's in an attempt to reach for the new normal (such as it may be) that I simply throw this into the catch-all Verbiage category.
And what is this "new normal" of which I speak?
Well, it's this apartment I'm sitting in, lined with new Ikea bookshelves that have my familiar books on them. It's furniture that used to be in New York, now in Santa Barbara. It's my music studio, set up in the corner, with Cocteau Twins playing on the Mac. It's looking out my window during the day and seeing the Santa Ynez mountains, or stepping outside at night and seeing tastefully lit palm trees in the complex. It's biking to work in the morning.
Mostly, it's the steadily growing realization that I've done it. The nebulous, fearsome, unknown thing I set out to do back in May of 2006, as I pedaled away from Yorktown. It was this. Uprooting, relocating, beginning.
Which is not to say that I'm settled in. I think I've been unsettled my whole life, and this is no different.
But the approach I'm taking now, ah, that is different. There's nothing like spending weeks at a time in strange places in total isolation to convince you of the value of people, and the wisdom of cultivating relationships. There will be no repeat of my five-year Queens crucible, holed up in a dark apartment in the slough of alcohol and depression.
I was born a few miles from here, and spent the first two years of my life here.
It's good to be back.
