Oceans of diamonds always shine

California, I think about your gentle mornings when the snow cover has hardened the earth underneath it and the sun glares overhead anyway.

I was thinking that the gypsy wasn't lyin'

Good god.

Life goes where it does.

This is one of my favorite albums of all time. I cannot hear it without driving in Southern California in my mind's eye; up, up, over the arid hills east of San Diego, on the freeway curving down to the island, Coronado, gliding on the 5, the ocean on one side and the daunting, vast military base on the other. The towns on the PCH hang from it like gems on a necklace - San Clemente, where Nixon maybe found soulful peace in the horizon line, Dana Point, then, after not much at all, increasingly less lush seascapes at Laguna and Newport, and then Huntington with its oil derricks. The topography is always stark and the sky is perpetually pink. The car navigates the curves as though they are coming from inside me. In Los Angeles County, the 10 is a conveyer belt moving you west to Santa Monica; it drops you into  wide boulevards until you can make some left turns and find the ocean again. But it's below, too far to seem churning, or even real, but it is.

Everything here is foreign and familiar at the same time.

I'll Even Kiss a Sunset Pig

See you in ten weeks, people I dig...