What Are You Waiting For?

A brief reminiscence on writing my first book.

Hi friends,

I popped into Los Angeles for a quick trip before I head home to hot and rainy New Orleans. I took a nice long walk with Priyanka yesterday after I got here, a thing I have been wanting to do for a long time. She’s got all the ideas in the world, all the humor, all the life. I could listen to her talk for hours.

I haven’t been to California since March 2020, and I understand all the reasons why I haven’t been back here before now (pandemics, hurricanes, fires), but it still seems strange that it took so long to return. This was a beloved state to me, one that I’d had many adventures in as a younger person. I’ve driven up and down its coast a few times, lived for a period of time in Los Angeles and Napa, made many friends, taken many hikes. Swam in that wild ocean. That Billy Bragg/Wilco cover of the Woody Guthrie song, “California Sun,” lives rent-free forever in my head as a reminder of one of my favorite places.

It is also the place I wrote my first book, that summer in the woods in Napa more than twenty years ago. And it’s hard not to think about it here, reminiscence about all that went into it.