Journal entry #1, of that should-cry emotion

There was a sliver of the thumbnail moon, shrouded amid the glow over the rolling lumpy hills that stretched and leapt past the growing little fancy town of El Dorado Hills. It was barely visible and looked much like a cloud wisp. Frilly parts of other clouds were illuminated in an odd gray-white by the not-yet-risen sun. The sky was amazingly clear, given the massive torrent of rainfall that had dropped over the past few days, weeks, months. I'm not looking forward to Saturday's 100% chance of precipitation. The rain is important to me; what some take as a burden I try to envision as just another necessary step in a cycle that involves me and the sad sky and the sprouting ground and oxygenated breaths and so on, which it is. So when it comes, I opt for a mood of joy, or at the very least, indifference. But sometimes, say when plans have been made and cannot be easily changed, and to weather the weather and its fickleness would require extended purchases and slower driving and more difficult, colder outdoor excursions to apply vehicle chains, then I find myself becoming less and less accommodating. 100% chance! And it's only Thursday morning.

We made great time from Placerville. I can't ever really force myself to be on time, to leave early or actually strive to feel that elusive awake-feeling that some strange individuals revel in, especially when I don't want it. Plus my stomach acts up in the early mornings; it needs to stumble awake at at least eight o'clock to feel well-rested, available and opportune. So we left at 6:24. 24 minutes late.

In the carpool lane we resided. I was completely out of gas. (I thought I had a 12-gallon tank, it turns out it's probably 14, because once I finally filled it up on my way to work it took 13.5 gallons, a new Sentra record.) But onward, without hesitation! There's something amazing (have I repeated myself yet?) about watching the sunrise. I definitely appreciate the sunset - I love it and could watch it every day and never tire - but it's so routine, so expected. The sunrise I scarcely ever watch, unless it happens to be on a terrifically long drive from Utah, the likes of which is starkly beautiful in a way that changes each color of the landscape into something new and completely different, a special effect of the tantalizing rays of the newly broken star I suppose. This morning's sunrise was quite similar, and as we breached the Folsom Hill, the cities were spread out at our feet, a welcome mat for the valley, the all-night lights still blazing, birds charming the daily commute's air, peak to peak with washboard trees, picturesque blue skies, all strewn about the clumped walls and brick substructures of sub-urban activity.

Because my eyes hung so drearily still, and my ears were sensitive as they should be during the 6 AM hour, I kept the radio low to endure conversation - casual but indicative of the lack of need for anything at all above casual. Traffic kept itself at bay, eluding even the most unhurried of travelers, another morning blessing. We arrived at the Greyhound station far more quickly than I had predeterminately anticipated, and with no available curbside in sight, I ignited a right-hand blinker and we paused. He gathered his things up, nearly forgetting the new smokehole-infested coconut piggy bank from the thrift store, and again we paused - there's never much to say when one's in a hurry and the bus in the traffic lane behind you is gaining ever so slightly and a ticket must be retrieved and gasoline must be purchased and moves must be made and work must be done. So with minimal goodbyes, he departed and I departed.

I felt like I should cry. That should-cry emotion. Sometimes there are those moments when this happens, you feel a strong emotion, which may or may not be tied to other goings-on but most definitely strikes you at that one particular moment. But I didn't cry. I just drove on, steadily, characteristically going the wrong way, passing through the emptiest Old Sacramento in my memory and taking the other way, eastward again. Past 65th Street where I logically should've gotten gas, past the new huge apartments-or-strip-mall complex off Mather Field where they're adamantly attempting to redefine Rancho Cordova as a new, hip, up-and-coming realm of desirability. Past the occasional walker, the construction workers, the barely-active gas stations, over the canal, to Costco for gas.

There the sun hadn't yet overtaken the horizon formed by the buildings off toward White Rock Road. So I sat and read with a green hat perched precariously atop my head so as to obstruct the blinding sunlight once it revealed itself. I could've slept possibly, but instead I read, for oh about 15 minutes. There was that should-cry emotion again - while listening to "Oh Comely" - but I know that it just keeps coming because of everything, and that soon - so soon, too soon - I'll be moving and on to not bigger, not better, but different things. In a land so completely foreign to me I find it straining to even tell others of it. And I've lived there before! It baffles me, I have no need to be 'from' this land or 'living in' this land, yet I'm going there regardless. To learn some things, no less, things that I may or may not come to own, to love, to feel.

In the halo of that should-cry emotion, I trekked to work, alone, like a dog retreating silently to the owner that so recently struck him, with my new backpack and my glasses on, uncombed hair, my brother dropped off for a melancholy journey on a Greyhound bus bound for Santa Cruz, California, with a full tank of gas, an empty pocketbook and a mile-high mound of debt, and the knowledge that in time all things come to adapt and find themselves comfortable - a comfort I wish to steer clear of, avoid, a bottomless chasm that leads straight for the molten heart of derelict pressures and the remote opportunity of habitual contentment. Somebody save me. There isn't anything left at all.