"A Day in the Life" - The Beatles

I'm back in Chicago, but I'm still in a California state of mind. Yesterday was a travel day, which meant I was locked into the routine of cars, highways, airports, planes. At the same time, I was in a sort of fever dream, (too much coffee, too little sleep, too much action) where everything seemed unreal, I was strangely disassociated from the phenomena around me. I perceived the things of the world, and I also watched myself perceiving. I hopped into a Mercedes Benz, big, black, sleek German styling (wasn't this the car where Lady Di breathed her last?) and flew through the neighborhoods of San Francisco to the airport. Music played on the radio, it was like being in a movie, someone else's movie. Shops, cafes, we passed some of the "down and out" parts of town, working class people doing their day to day tasks. The fog rolled in from the ocean, the wisps of cloud, like ghosts rushing in over the hills, while we rushed out of town.

On the flight back across the great expanse (only a Kerouac, or a Whitman or a Melville could even attempt to capture it) of America, (what a view at 32,000 feet - there's Lake Tahoe, there's the Missisippi River, there's the Rockies, there's the flat farm lands of Iowa) I sat in my seat with eyes wide open. My seatmate and I talked about how we "woke up," sometime in our thirties, our earlier existences (our teens and twenties) being an extended time of unconscious unknowing. I meditated, but even the meditation seemed to be the act of someone other than "me." My body went through the motions, de-planing, waiting in the taxi line, zipping along in a cab through the suburbs of Chicago to Evanston.

I opened the door to my humble sanctuary, and hugged the Lovely Carla. Happy to be home, still seeing everything as strange, other-worldly, not exactly mine, not exactly me. Alive in the changing stream. Changing even as the thought of change descended on me as my head hit the pillow.