the opposite terms? What got some people to stay while other people couldn’t wait to go? I suppose if you’re somewhere for an extended period of time, you build up relationships and comfortability that you don’t want to lose. Of course, every time that happened with me it seemed like I wanted to leave. But was that a good thing or a bad thing? The further I got from LA the more things changed. There were still dreamers out here but they were a different kind of dreamer. Out here you have little towns where time seemed to stand still. The people here seemed like they were all headed somewhere, but they weren’t in any particular hurry. They were slow and lackadaisical here. They made it seem like every day was Saturday and that alone was living some kind of a dream. Even though I’d hesitate to
call these places normal, there were still plenty of aspects of normalcy all around you. The bars were full of normal people with normal complaints about their husbands, wives, kids and jobs. People even made an attempt to personalize their surroundings…with gum. It was quite a disgusting expression, but an expression like you’d have anywhere else nonetheless. But what was normal anyway? For these people this was normal. One strip of businesses, usually on a street actually called “Main Street”, and the ability to walk around town and know pretty much everyone everywhere you went while hopping on a bus or train that only went to places that were convenient to you was just the way things were for the people who lived here. I suppose it was a matter of perspective. I certainly wasn’t used to such “normalcy” since I grew up in a city where you’d be lucky to run into one person you knew whenever you ventured out of the house. But even in places that were too big to get to know intimately you got to know the same people and places by seeing them on a frequent basis, which was the same concept at play here. The only thing different was the scale. I wasn’t used to the ruralness of the place or the surroundings, but it was easy to see why people wanted to live out here since the area is breathtaking in every sense. I got to appreciate the ocean in a whole new manner just by being out here and seeing the birds that would swoop down and into the water looking for fish. I don’t know what about it struck me, but I couldn’t help but just stand and stare at them for I don’t even know how long. Maybe it was the sense of naturalness that the whole setting exuded. Maybe it was just the feeling of being so far away from everything that I could even see and experience something like this. But even taking a moment to sit back and listen to the ocean waves was really powerful. This was the kind of stuff that I had never done before because I never had the time. Whenever I had been going to one place or another I was