I could never imagine living in Southern California, but this region of the world has pretty much always served the same role for me. It’s basically the exact role in my life that it pitches to everyone everywhere at all times with carefully spent marketing dollars. Southern California is a place to come and relax and leave your cares behind.

It’s not something that SoCal would be for me if I didn’t have a continual stream of friends in La Jolla or Pasadena or Beverly Hills or other vacationland sounding destinations with their sun and smog and beaches. And what I end up doing in SoCal is usually a lot longer on video games and all-night conversation than anything beachy. And yet, when I think of SoCal, it’s exactly like watching some minds-eye palm-tree laden commercial, knowing that days or weeks spent in this area will recharge me and get me through whatever obligatory nonsense I feel I need to complete (college, work, etc.) or emotional wreckage I’m in the wake of (see, for instance, May 2000). If only I’d had friends in SoCal in the summer of ’97. Or ’90 for that matter.

It makes me wonder if, long after all my friends have left LA, I’ll still feel this emotional attachment to the area as the place to go to rest up and regroup. Not that there’s anything particularly daunting facing me now, beyond another April/May that will hopefully be my last two months of day jobbing for at least two years. Maybe I’ll always have friends in this area. But I attach such emotional significance to place that this association will probably transcend the scale of whoever ends up living here. Would I still come here in the aftermath of something really trying even if there was no one to see? I guess it’s unlikely, since in the end, truly, people are home to me and place is just association.

For the purposes of chronicling, highlights from this particular incarnation so far have included Denmark beating FIFA on the second hardest level after just a day and a half, actually filming crazy celebrations of same for possible YouTube clip-show purposes (stay tuned), epic chess matches of an hour of calculated brilliance usually coming down to some tremendous blunder, buying Russ a coffee maker because it’s cheaper than going to Starbucks for a week, the inevitable revisiting of the year where every move we made held the universe in the balance (quadfecta, etc.), and watching our most recent YouTube creations conquer the Internet.

We’re gonna ride it till we just can’t ride it no more.