I'm just flying across the land, trying to get a hand, playing in a travellin' band .  Actually I work in sales these days, which means spending a lot of time away from home and working into the wee hours in hotel rooms.  Not an existence that I'd reccommend particularly, but it does have its moments.  I was able to secure 4 hours for myself in San Francisco the other day, as I try to do when I fly in and out of SFO.  If I travel often to a particular city, I tend to develop rituals or habits that I engage in when I'm there.  For San Francisco, I try to have enough time to take the BART downtown to the Embarcadero station, then walk alongthe bay down past Fisherman's Wharf to the little park below Ghiradelli Square.  There's a small beach there, and a beautiful view of San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge  My wife and I went there on our honeymoon years ago, so it always feels kind of strange being there by myself, even though I've been to San Francisco more often alone than with friends or family.  Sometimes I'm able to channel that bifurcated sense of dislocation into writing, but often I just stare at the water and try to decompress from the rest of my life before I have to take the train back to the airport and get back on a plane.

There's a curious kind of suspension I often experience when travelling, a kind of Zen sense of being neither here nor there, but between places.  I've actually grown to like it, because it's freeing in its own way.  I can let go of the cares and responsibilities of wherever I've left for a while, and I don't yet have to deal with the difficulties which wait ahead of me at my destination.  I can just sort of be in that moment, and meditate a bit on my life as a whole, from the outside, as a sort of temporary non-being.

Does that make any sense?  Probably not.  I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that I've gotten about 12 hours of sleep over the last 3 days. ^_^