My San Francisco sojourn couldn't feel like a bigger failure. Eleven years there, and all it took was a few arbitrary decisions for it to be no more. All I was so familiar with, all those experiences, all those people, and I turned around and it's all gone; can't go back. No roots. No reason to stay, no reason to leave.

It might as well not be there. It might as well not have happened. I won't ride on those streets again, or watch the fog, or know the clubs, know the traffic, know the people. I won't plot bike routes or give a stranger directions anymore. And it doesn't matter at all, because it might as well not have happened.

What was that about? Why was I there? I went forth into the world to make my fortune, and what happened?

And now I'm in New Jersey, where I started from, and I still have nothing. I know the area, I can get around, I just don't know where anything is. If you told me where to go for a haircut, I could get there easily enough, but I don't know where to go.

But there's no me here, either, and I don't want there to be. I'm back here, this is where I started from, but I'm a different person now. A lot has been added to me that has no association to here. What I listen to, what I watch, what I've become. And no one here gives a crap about any of that, particularly my family, the only people who know me here.

I went out on my journey, and if this were a story, I would have come back in ruins, in disgrace. Let me tell you my story. Let me tell you what happened. Let me tell you what I saw. But there is no story, there is nothing to tell. I went out on my journey, found nothing, and came back.

Now I'm here. What am I going to do now? I look back at the past eleven years and shake my head with pity and empathy. Then I look forward ten years from now, looking back at the past ten years, and I don't think I want that to happen again.

Rest Area in Nebraska:

July 2, 2004; 7:52 P.M.