I am saying goodbye to California for the last time as the person I am today. 

California: I am going to miss you, city of angels, miles of highways spilling metal blood into the desiccated basins of archaic rivers. No, California, I will not sift your hair through my fingers, and moisten your sand with my kisses. I am going to dust my hands and stand up. Look to the full moon from a different beach.

California: You and your immense interstate veins. You and your sacrilegious lights of sickly yellow where I only wanted the star light to guide my weary feet, leather ships in search of port. Where were you, when I needed you most? Always a road instead of a home.

California: I am going to leave to leave you, because home is a curious thing. Home is not just a place - it’s a time.

California, I did not know - could not possibly understand - how true it was, twenty-two months ago, writing the lines that now reside in American Auschwitz “California, I return to you now, if never again”.

California, I don’t know who I’ll be when I return, but I will, one day.

California, I love you.

***

Current musical obsession: “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again” - Bob Dylan.

Bob Dylan is the most brilliant artist to emerge in the last century.

As a musician, poet, and certainly most importantly, as an icon, he has revolutionized the understanding of the self as a malleable facet of art. In his imago, he was not only Bob Dylan, but he was the unwillingly prophet of a generation that adored his accusatory and baffled lyrics. From this desperation and alienation, Dylan produced two landmark albums, ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ and ‘Blonde on Blonde’. In the latter, we find the song aforementioned. 

All the perennial figures make a visit in some form of the other. There is the Ragman, the French Girl, the Railroad Man, the Senator, et al. And always, always, returning to the pleading:

Oh mama, 
Can this really be the end?
To be stuck inside of Mobile
With the Memphis blues again?

To know this feeling, one must spend a few days on the road, and understand the frustration that an interrupted journey means. 

That undeniable and addicting wanderlust.

Time to pack my bags.