Aimee Mann's last album.

Last night I went to Newport Beach. There's a pier there that has functioned as my touchstone.

When I was in Catalina sometime in college, a student from Evergreen University asked me what it was that drew me to the ocean. It was part of her documentary. I said the ocean's rhythm is ours. The crash of the waves, the complexity of the undertow, the seeming placidness of its surface -- these mixture of forces mirrors what happens inside us. I go to the ocean because it reminds me of me.

Her assignment--from an apparently liberal college--was to use public transportation to travel down the coast from Oregon.

I have important memories of this pier in Newport Beach. I imagined what I normally imagine at the ocean: How deep is it? How far does it go? What happens when it gets angry? What happens if it decided to stand up all of a sudden? In what would be an imperceptible flinch in its massive body, it could swallow me whole. In the dark, the ocean merely adopts the characteristics I project.

A Tibetan monk checked my charts and said I was a naga in a previous life. Another psychic that lived on top of a jewelry store in Jaipur said I need to stay away from natural bodies of water. Somebody tried to drown me when I was a small child. When I was 12 and experiencing my first real anxiety attack, I heard the competing voices of a devil and an angel in the white noise of my shower.

There are times when I understand things with real clarity. I undertand the patterns that surround me, and patterns are patterns, and learning to define them empowers you to see where they will go. Part of growing up is coping with these patterns, part of living a full life is embracing these patterns and understanding that a system that ebbs will flow.

"I was in bed last night and I thought, I'm almost 30." I said this as a friend and I were driving towards the pier.
"Don't say that," my friend said, "because I'm almost there too."

I'm going for this.