Today’s run: 7.06, 1:15:05. Yay – awesome awesome run!! My training called for 7 miles easy, but I took advantage of my usual energy peak at miles 4 and 5 to run them race pace, and I definitely finished strong at race pace as well, with good attention to form. So enjoyed this run – rich with mental wordsmithing.

Driving on Culver toward the beach, everything changes after the stretch of warehouses when you cross Lincoln. A two-lane road cuts through the tall grasses of the Ballona Creek Wetlands. Today, in middle June, the grass is rippled with patches that are tawny with thirst and dotted by small yellow buds.

Since I got back in LA, I’ve been saying that it has been like a return to the womb, a respite from unrelentingly unfamiliar stimuli in New York. Today no metaphor seems more apt as I drive into the amniotic soup of salty, wet ocean air. I truly feel like it’s feeding me. There’s nowhere I feel more relaxed than at the beach – except maybe in the ocean itself. It’s the place where I feel comfortable with living and breathing, and comfortable with not breathing too. Like  I could so easily, painlessly be reabsorbed into what made me. I got it when Jeremy Blake waded into the ocean at Rockaway and never came out. Not the desire to self-destruct, but the chosen method.

It’s so easy here in Los Angeles to settle into the cool breeze of an uninterrupted season. That’s probably why so many people wash out. The status quo, even for those who show up in their Toyota Tercels with a suitcase and never trade up, is pretty damn amazing.