It’s good to take a vacation. On a vacation, writing might happen. But I was just away. When you’re away, so is writing.

I could blame California, because that’s where I was a few weeks ago. Los Angeles, specifically. I hadn’t been there in years, and never before spent time in downtown LA. I was there for work, ostensibly. More tenebrously, I was there to be away. Because I live in Chicago and in Chicago it’s winter.

I mention this not to gloat about jet setting in Lala Land, primarily because I never gave much thought to what “jet setting” is actually supposed to mean until I typed it just now and felt it might in fact apply to something I just did, but because California is significant.

California is significant because, though I’ve been there many times to see many people over many years, this last time it struck me as the land of open and acceptable contradictions. Being a person, I am naturally quite full of contradictions, perhaps even brimming with them, such that a gale-force Chicago breeze might easily produce some ripples on the surface of my soul and cause a bit of spillage of these contradictions out from the cup of my being, as fulleth it do run.

In short, I felt at home there, in an odd sort of way, and at the same time touristically captivated. In California, “touristically” may be a word, for the simple reason that people travel there from all over the world just to see what it’s like (or to turn it into what they want it to be), and Californians therefore need a proper adjective to describe how visitors behave. It’s fun to be touristical, even when you’re traveling for work. Californians may not agree but I may soon be one, once home and I move there. Because fuck winter.