Maybe I should just try Paris...

We just returned from four days on California's northern coast, a few hours up from San Francisco. Karen and I brought Jonas and stayed at a nice cabin with an ocean view outside Mendocino. It was just a quick getaway -- no anniversary or anything.

We saw some amazing parts of California -- parts that sometimes looked more Apalachia than Left Coast -- but it's funny how much differently I'm absorbing these trips than just a year ago. I feel like I'm squeezing in the last bits of my great California adventure before heading...somewhere.

I doubt I ever thought we'd live here forever, but it always felt like an accomplishment to have made it so far from where I started. After a youth in Alabama, even the nice northern parts, I was starved for a place with culture. And strangely, the neon Santa sign in Fort Wayne, Ind., just didn't cut it.

To be honest, I've about had my fill of California culture. Some days it drowns you, like a mint chocolate shaving submerged in a grande decaf mochachino, no whip. In each town where I've lived, I have learned to appreciate the pockets of greatness that make you feel at home. In Indiana and Alabama, they were the places that broke away from the anti-intellectual vibe. Here, they're the places that break away from the sea of pretense that has drenched as far inward as the Sierra foothills.

Part of me still longs for that Hemmingway-in-Paris excitement about my location and my career. But then, Hemmingway didn't stay in Paris for good. And he self-prescribed a 12-gauge shotgun for his crippling depression, so you always have to be careful about role models.

The moral is, this weekend trip made me realize that my mental switch has already flipped over from "arriving" to "leaving" California, like I just crested a hill and am fighting the urge to run down and be done with it. But then you're faced with the only potential worse than having to move: What if that new offer doesn't come? What if I have to go about my daily life indefinitely, distracted with the future to the point of endangering it by messing up the present? (I was at a management training seminar once where they referred to those as "employees who have quit but haven't left." I love that phrase.)

Luckily, there are a few reasons to be optimistic. And, of course, there are worse places to be stuck than in Northern California.