I tell myself I'm not going to do this again, I'm not going to go through this again next year. Not another year.

But I'm doing it this year, I'm going through it this year, and why? It doesn't matter why, I am. That's all that matters, whether I am or am not. And I am. Next year, I will, no doubt, do it again and go through it again.

Inshah'allah, it will be in the deserts of Tucson, where maybe I will be wearing short sleeves watching a sunset, and anyone I might see or be with is someone I didn't know existed a year ago. I will need a sweatshirt soon, as night temps in the desert go pretty low.

San Francisco and its rain and weeks of drear and mean pretension will be far away. New Jersey and its family and empty meaninglessness and dead of Winter will be far away.

In college, I used to tell myself that a suicide attempt (gesture really) was necessary every once in a while. Push myself so far down that the only way to go is up.

Perhaps the new paradigm is to pick up and move to a new city every once in a while. But Tucson is for some reason very specific. It has the same population as San Jose, so I'm not going to a smaller city. San Diego is desert, why not San Diego? Maybe because I'm romanticizing Tucson? I need to go visit Tucson. It might be just another crummy U.S. city.

Funny. I watched the sitcom "Greetings from Tucson" last night and Tucson looks like every other U.S. city. Imagine that. But with a misogynistic, abusive, Latino father figure. Yea, that's funny.

current soundtrack: Tara Jane O'Neil - "Peregrine"