My very first morning in California happened January 15 2022. Two years ago and this was the sunrise from the Holiday Inn. The hotel was just north of Sacramento, I wanted to go further but the way my my fatigue was set up that night I pulled over. One of the things I learned along that cross country trek was to plan better. I hadn’t mapped out the trip sans Route 80 and each night was a new adventure of where would Nicole sleep and shower. This was easily the ‘best’ of the hotels, and it was the most expensive.

I’d eat my first breakfast in California there, and I still had to wait to call my people. Even though we were now in the same time zone, the way my body was still on East Coast time, the little one wasn’t awake and it was too early to hit up the random man from Philly.

I got on the road and hit a 1/4 tank of gas right after Fairfield and gassed up in my soon to be home city. The gas station I filled up at is one I drove by back when I still had to pick up Iron Man for our visits. It was still in the ‘middle’ of COVID and there were no bathrooms so I left Vallejo, went to American Canyon because they had the closest Dunkin Donuts, and peed at Mountain Mike’s next door to the coffee shop.

I drove BACK through Vallejo to hit San Fran and meet with the little on and her mom. Then it was BACK onto I80 and ….home:

This is what was waiting for me inside. Also waiting inside were a HOST of issues that kept me from sleeping here my first night.

That was 2 years ago today. That was a Saturday, this is a Monday but here I remain.

So I was looking for a photo to share and landed in the video thoughts file of my Dropbox. One thing the random man taught me was to record everything. Those videos were from May of 2022, less than 4 months after that happy photo above. jesus they are raw. They are also documentation though, and I can kind of kick myself for not revisiting them earlier. I did today though. I shed a couple tears for that woman. You can’t look at it and not shed tears. I am no longer her though in the sense that she was confused and lost and uncertain.

I am no longer confused about the random. I am no longer lost. I am no longer uncertain.

24 months from my arrival, 10 months from my heartbreak I am living working dating can you say thriving? What’s valuable from those videos is the fact there was never the expectation anyone but him would see them. Why? The content just continues to support everything I’ve said all along.

Anyway – time to finish editing my show and get ready for that which comes next.