On R’s advice (as you can see, I am very suggestible), I headed up to the Central Coast and am hanging around Cambria and vicinity (which includes such places as Cayucos, San Simeon, Morro Bay, San Luis Obispo, Atascadero, Templeton, and Paso Robles, among others.) Mostly, I just want to stare at the sea. (There is clearly something very wrong with me.)

I was supposed to take this time and focus my thoughts. Maybe try to figure out what I need to do with my life. Maybe even put some ideas down to paper (or at least HTML.) Ambitious things like that.

Instead, I find myself combing through old things I have written and then abandoned, briskly written snippets that fail to develop plot or character, or skeletal summaries of what I want to happen, with very little actual text to back it up. This activity has rapidly degenerated into reading old e-mails. I actually have a lot of messages archived all the way back to 1998. I have some stray e-mails from college (1994-1998) but most of them I wiped out deliberately. Lots of painful, ridiculous shit.

Interestingly, though, I have a pretty thorough archive of the e-mails I composed in 1995 and 1996. These chronicle my disastrous breakup with N and my subsequently even more disastrous infatuation with A. After that, my non-existent love life is documented mostly on paper, although I’ve blogged a few pointless episodes here and there.

I must say, it is interesting to note how I have dealt with a decade of being alone.

In other words, I haven’t learned a goddamned thing. But reading through those tortured e-mails is really interesting from a textual point-of-view. The progression from those blood-drenched, tear-stained epistles of utter despair, to my initial foray into blogging, to my current writing style is kind of amusing to observe. In a lot of ways, my writing has actually changed for the worse. But I think I am a lot saner now. I’ve still got a full-blown Axis I disorder to contend with, but at least now I’m on medication. Heh.

I was suffering from a little trepidation. I’ve been asking myself what the hell I’m doing here in Cambria, but now I think it’s for the best. It’s a nice isolated place where no one can bother me (because my cell phone has absolutely no reception) And I can stare at the sea until I’m cross-eyed. There were perhaps other ways to achieve this sense of solitude, but I’m satisfied. Thanks, R.