Two quotes, from two great minds, along the same lines of thought:

'I have become an enigma to myself, and therein lies my sickness.'
-Augustine

'Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, Where have I gone wrong?
Then a voice says to me, This is going to take more than one night.'
-Charlie Brown

So where have I gone wrong; have I even gone wrong somewhere? Why does everything seem so bittersweet these days? That's kind of how I feel about California, like it's a land of mystery, most of which I'll never discover. Stuart Hampshire, the priggish English philosopher we're forced to read for Philosophy 2, actually had an interesting point about how certain places, or certain sights, or certain scenes freeze in our mind and make us feel happy and yearning at the same time, as if they touch some long-lost and possibly never-realized part of our memory. Maybe it's sweet because of the good times I had with people, or myself, and bitter cause they're unrecoverable.

I used to go up to the top of the Campanile (before it closed down) and stare across the bay at Mt Tamalpais. Sometimes the bottom half would be covered in clouds or fog so only the top was showing, floating in the sky, and it felt like something magical must have been happening on the mountain. Later I would drive there and hike to the edge of the ocean and stare across the water. The sea was always so calm and expansive and I wondered if there was a giant Poseidon-type guy who lived miles offshore and made really huge splashes in the water, just for fun, when nobody was looking. The point of this silliness is that sometimes it feels like the exciting, mystical things are on the edge of my vision, and I can never turn my head quite fast enough to catch them.

I just realized that I've been capitalizing the beginning of every sentence...I must be in a damn serious mood...better stop before somebody gets injured.