I am trying to remember what I thought I would remember, and in this process I am making my peace with the process of growing old - not that I ever had much of a quarrel with it in the first place. I once thought that the formative memories of San Diego would always dwell heavy and vivid in my memories, that the evenings that I spent walking the sands of Torrey Pines -- imagining myself in the context of Dylan's Tambourine man who wished to bury both the dreams of the future and the sorrows of the past in the whitemaned waves of the ocean -- that those bittersweet and melancholy evenings, always solitary among the crowd of silent silhouettes against the sea, always iridescent in the muted pastel sky which stood in stark contrast against the brilliant setting sun, would remain forever within my immediate sensory grasp. San Diego, despite my great hopes, appears to be receding though, as I now have to strain my memory to get into a space where the deafening silence that I once felt in the sun drenched wide avenues of North park becomes obvious and internalized. That feeling of deep isolation, of being in a state of mind where one is perpetually a step removed from reality, a state of mind galvanized so easily by the uninterrupted skies of the west where the sun beats relentlessly on roads which are always a little too wide than they need to be, a state of mind which I found particularly easy to slip into as I found the reality of the bustling cities of the west bleed so effortlessly into that of the ghost towns which litter the landscape of the golden state, those memories and that state of mind have retreated into a deeper layer of my consciousness now. And it is only with effort that I can access them again. However, this effort is always well spent as it was only in San Diego that I ever could put life in its proper perspective.