On the beach right now. Sitting in the sand of the Santa Monica beach watching the sunset. A mountain range to my right. The ocean and setting sun in front of me. Endless beach and more mountains to my left. And palm trees as tall as skyscrapers behind me lining a highway that winds on forever up and down the coast. Don't have sunsets on the east coast. Very cold here. Dry and cold. Somehow it feels different. California is very big. Too expansive for words. Just the sprawling beach, the sand between the pacific coast highway and the ocean is longer than a New York City block. In fact, the average California palm tree is a longer than an average Miami block. Everything is big in California. Driving through Santa Monica, sunset strip, west Hollywood, pacific palisades, Brentwood, Beverly Hills, it feels like any minute some guy in a Baseball cap is going to come out from behind a wooden façade with palm trees painted on it and yell “cut!” everything looks like a movie here. We found out tonight that Larry David lives here in this neighborhood a few houses away, and his show curb your enthusiasm is filmed here in this neighborhood where mike and Beth live. You eat at your local Italian restaurant and two days later you see it on TV. That's California.

Also very beautiful. It offers amazing greenery, great beaches, mountain views all around you. And more than that, the people seem real, more real, sincere. A lot less bullshit than on the east coast, which is funny, because everyone I have spoken to here says that you have to watch out for the bullshit or the fake and phony people. Maybe they have just not ever been to Miami or fort Lauderhell. The problem is that there really isn't a city here. there is just little cities all over the place nestled amongst sprawling neighborhoods. Neighborhoods and more neighborhoods that go on forever. But no city really. That is California.

Not the same kind of exciting energetic magnetic energy in the air as in New York. More sunny happy relaxed vibe. It's like they are hippies without consciously trying to be hippies. It's just in the air. The granola vibe. This is the same California of Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Crow, The Eagles, Joni Mitchell, Steve Martin, Randy Newman, and the film Magnolia. This is the place. The list goes on forever. Definitely a happening place. And not that it's not glamorous. What's not glamorous about Hollywood? It's just that in New York the glamour seems backed up by a certain intelligence, a certain hipness, a certain wittiness. In California the glamour seems backed up by big money and shiny white teeth. 

To me New York represents art and intellect and business. Everywhere you look you see something artistic or intellectual, on every street. It's in the blood of the city. The cab drivers are book critics. As soon as I get off the plane in New York I feel creative. I feel like creating something. Writing an essay. Starting a movement. Throwing up a mural on the side of a building a splattering it with my own blood. Writing songs every minute. It's electric. I've been here in California three days and I haven't even thought about our new album since I got off the plane. And Miami is just sex. Sex and beauty and style. God I haven't seen a beautiful girl since I got here. People talk about California girls. They just haven't been to South Beach. In Miami you're tripping over them. They're everywhere. Beautiful people are as common as the palm trees. 

The sun has now set. The sky is mammoth. It goes on forever. A dull pink and peach spreading itself all over the blue sky. People are walking home now. They are walking by me. It is not like in Miami where everyone looks at everyone else with this suspicious eye, glancing secretly, afraid they’ll look. No one here notices the strange long haired man sitting in the sand with the combat boots on, hunched over a laptop in the middle of the beach, with a smoking cigar dangling out of his mouth. For all they know it could be a movie. Where are the hidden cameras? California is too big to notice such things. In the next 24 hours we will notice so much more than that. This is California after all.

Could I live without skyscrapers? Could I live three hours behind the rest of America? Without the hustle and bustle of the big city? Without the style and fashion and beauty and the intelligencia that pervades east coast living. I don't even think they know that there is an anti-war movement going on in America here in los Angeles, or a possible war with Iraq. They're too busy going to self-realization workshops and trying to make sure they're produce at the local grocers is organic. It is true, I am more relaxed than I have been in months. That's a good thing. But I'm not on fire artistically or intellectually. I barely feel like writing. I feel like surfing. Or cruising with the top down.

And looking out over the ocean here and realizing that I'm looking towards Asia and not Europe is a weird feeling. You don’t think about that until you are sitting here staring at the ocean. But it's a strange feeling not sensing and feeling Europe over the horizon. It's like you get kind of homesick for the motherland, unless of course you are from Asia, then I guess it would be kind of comforting being here.