Symbolic, no?

Show me the way to go home, I'm tired and I want to go to bed...I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. In a perfect world, I'd live there still, but I was priced out of the area. I've been known to say, in more solipsistic moments, that so far as the nations economy is concerned, the rest of the country can burn for all I care if it means I can move back.

I mean, Thomas Mann is on my right shoulder telling me "You can't go home again." I've been back once or twice over the years and there's a lot of truth to that. Trouble is, Dorothy Gale is on my other shoulder telling me "There's no place like home."

Right or wrong, that's the goal. You ask me, where would I like to be to be really happy? And the answer is, living in the San Francisco Bay Area again. There's nothing for me here and there never has been.

The only thing I can say this period of semi-enforced isolation has done for me is make me a better writer. Which certainly doesn't suck. And if I'd stayed, who knows whether I'd have come up with the characters that I have (or met some of the friends in "real time" that I have)?

I saw the picture above on the Flickr blog. And what it immidiately said to me is "Here is the goal. But it's obscured by a lot of fog and I don't know if I'm ever going to be able to see it." I suspect the fact that I'm feeling the anxious vulnerability and exposure that comes from actually having a query letter out there has something to do with it.

Say, you know what I'd like to hear right now?