The Sweet

I had plans to write these crazy stories about my trek to Santa Barbara last weekend, envisioning it as a way to get my act together and start working again. Certainly I had my share of absurdities on the trip, just the fact that perfect strangers were coming up to me at the reception and asking about the book - wanting to know what I was going to say about them if I wrote about the wedding - was uncomfortable and worth exploring. Then I realized it would be just like all my other pieces, and well, I'm looking to go in a different direction.

But there was a point where something meaningful happened, something significant, and I would hate to miss the opportunity to reflect on it. Sunday morning about 5:20 I woke up on the floor of my friend Pablo's condo, sweating profusely, still in my suit from the wedding, and I realized that no matter what had happened up until that point, and how much my soul would soon hurt, I had to watch the sunrise. I changed quickly, grabbed a triple espresso at the Daily Grind - my favorite coffee joint in the whole world, with the most beautiful assortment of pastries in the front glass (I had a Raspberry Scone and every bite of it was magical) - and drove to Leadbetter's Beach while the new Foo Fighters song "The Pretender" crashed through the speakers. And just as I hiked down to the water the sun started to come up, and it was like a whole new world had opened up for me, and I was convinced, in that moment, that I would never experience true bliss like that again.

Of course we're conditioned to feel this way about walks on the beach - they have to be profound and life-changing (we have a million cheesy Hallmark cards and Herpes commercials to thank for that) - but still, it didn't matter.

Within six hours I would be stopped in a place called King City, in Monterey County, the road getting a little too blurry to continue driving, and for the next eighteen hours I would be holed up in a Day's Inn with nothing but a case of water, some dried cranberries, and a pack of Airbourne. It was there that I nodded in and out of sleep, while HBO played in the background, until the next morning.

Four days later I'm knee deep in shit, stressed out at work and grumpy and ready to tell the world to fuck off, only I know I have to be quiet if I want to keep the few things I have left, so I go on, day-by-day, hour-by-hour, dreaming of all the girls I fell in love with in those small little beach towns, dreaming of steak tacos and ska music and those early mornings when it's so warm you just wear shorts to the water's edge.