So that 5.0 earthquake in Lennox threw me off for a bit, and I’m just trying to reassemble my thoughts.

It’s only been a couple of weeks since I finalized my move from S.D. to L.A., and I didn’t realize I would actually miss it. I decided to take a trip back down to S.D. today to hang out with some friends at the North Park Street Fair. I took the train down, something which I apparently haven’t done in a while, and it occurred to me that, yes, I’ll gladly pay the extra money to avoid driving.

The day started off foggy, as is typical for this time of year, with the marine layer coming in as far as downtown L.A. The whole trip down, the train was enveloped in drear grey clouds. But as the day wore on, and as I made my way inland, the sun burned through the grey.

I didn’t really stay for very long, and started my trip back up with the sun still high in the sky.

I do fine on my own during the day. It’s really the nights that got to me. I started hating the loneliness of darkness. It didn’t help that I wasn’t working. And then, I starting not being able to sleep. I didn’t have anywhere to go. And I didn’t have anyone to talk to, unless you count people on the Internet.

So, in the end, I guess I really couldn’t have stayed

The thing I really like about taking the train up and down between S.D. and L.A. is that it literally runs along the coast for at least half the trip. It’s been a really long time since I’ve hung out at the sea. I used to do it more, when I had a little more hope in my heart, when I still dreamt of impossible things. When none of those things came true—it was inevitable, and even though hindsight is always 20/20, I already knew it as things were happening—when it became impossible to pretend that things were going to turn out OK, I stopped going to the beach and watching sunsets.

Again, I didn’t really think I would it miss it that much.

Even at 6 p.m., the marine layer still hugged the coastline, and under the grey sky, I watched the waves crash upon the shore, dissolving into white foam. And I thought about how it seems like the universe is just the remnant aftermath of the clash of titanic forces. Vast and powerful energies that meet head-on, almost completely annihilating each other. We’re the wreckage, the detritus of this clash.

In a literal sense, this might be true. At the moment of creation, massive quantities of matter mixed with massive quantities of anti-matter, resulting in near-total annihilation, and it just so happens that a small fraction of matter remains.

So it is with the foam in the sea. The vast sea rising up to crash against the earth, and the random patterns of foam are all that remains.

This is perhaps why John Wheeler’s metaphor of quantum foam arrests my mind. Our lives are the threads formed out of that seething randomness.

It’s hard to see where I go next from here. I spent the last view months just getting into a rhythm, and while I don’t have it completely under control yet, it gets a little easier every day. But with more leisure, there’s more time to think, and a lot of people have warned me about my propensity for getting mired in my own thinking.

Well, here’s hoping that Heraclitus was right, and that it really is impossible to step in the same river twice. Because I can’t bear the idea of history repeating itself on such a short and personal time scale.