The irony is that I am always looking for the sun precisely where it is not.

Cryptic, I know.

The issue is that I was supposed to get out of work around 10 p.m. last night. That clearly did not happen. Instead of trying to drive home completely delirious around 3 a.m. in the morning, I stole away into a call room and slept until morning, thinking that I could grab breakfast at the cantina at 6 a.m.

Naturally, I am disappointed.

So, for once, I decide to take my Fate into my own hands and drive to the nearby Peet’s Coffee, get myself a strawberry-vanilla scone and a nice big cup of coffee, and hot foot it to Torrey Pines State Beach.

I am enamored by this stretch of beach. For some reason, it feels like it’s out of place. Like you’re driving through this biotech industrial zone, some grotesque symbiosis of Orwell’s Ministries of Truth and Peace ominously prophesied Cassandra-like by Dwight Eisenhower himself, Republican extraordinaire, and all of the sudden you’re dropped off into a paradisial Californian beach. It’s this wondrous stretch of old US-101 basically surrounded by water on each side, before entering the suburban poseur-bouigoisie hell of Del Mar. It is the subject of numerous picture-postcards, worthy of being the study of many paintings. And if you look down to adjust your car radio or CD player, or answer your cel phone while you’re driving by, you could very well miss it.

So I park my car on the edge of the road, eat my scone, and sip my coffee, with the sun’s rising glare behind me. Staring at the sea, staring at the sand. I love staring into the seeming infinity of the Pacific Ocean, the cold, green-blue, brackish, briny sea roiling off into the hazy horizon, coming to this perfectly air-brushed boundary with the icy steel cold blue morning sky. I gaze at the seashore, watching the tiny figure of a woman in white who is herself gazing into the near-infinity of the sea, lost in thought. If I were a painter, I could make millions of dollars off of capturing that moment.

It is interesting to see just how many people come to this shore at 6 a.m., with the sun just breaking over the horizon. If I could somehow bottle up this moment, and in times of great stress and terror, just uncork it and escape even for the fifteen minutes it took me to leisurely swill my coffee, I would be a well adjusted man, quite possibly simultaneously making SSRIs obsolete.

I drove away back to work with a slight smile on my face.

As B once pointed out to me, it’s the simple pleasures in life.

And, because she happened to be the last person I spoke to before I decided to go sleep last night, I can’t help but think about M³ and all the inappropriate thoughts a man can have about a coworker who is engaged to be married.

Why do I insist on chasing phantoms?

I also, quite randomly, think of C and the bright bits of wisdom she has left me with (making me try to feel like I’m a part of something even when I’m by myself.) Why am I afraid to set my heart on something that might possible? (I use the term “might” quite generously. If the probability is non-zero, how much more hope does a simple man need, after all?) And I discovered the other day that it was Eleanor Roosevelt who supposedly came up with the nice Hallmark-esque quote that I so enjoy: “Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is mystery. Today is a gift. That is why we call it the present.”