I love things

I love Neil Youngs music. I have loved it since I was boy. One of the first vinyl records I ever listened to was Harvest by Neil Young, it belonged to my dad. Actually, I'm listening to it now as I type this, tens of thousands of feet up in the air, flying back home from San Jose California. I also love California, specifically, the "silicon valley" area of California, the area I am in the process of flying away from at his very moment back to my heart and soul, my wife and kids and my home back in Detroit.

Whenever I'm in is part of California, which is at least 2 or 3 times a year, more if I can manage it, I make a point to drive up into the mountains that separate silicon valley and all of the technology and the Pacific ocean. Up there on a winding mountain road named Skyline Blvd is a cool little restaurant named Alice's Restaurant after the restaurant from the famous album by Arlo Guthrie. While driving that crazy winding road I take solace in knowing that Neil Young's sometime home, Broken Arrow Ranch is also nestled in up inbetween the redwoods and cypress trees on that very road. I can't see the ranch, I can't get into the ranch, I dont see Neil Young walking around or anything, but somehow I feel like I'm communing with the soul of music that is area has inspired Mr Young to write.

They say that up there in those hills of La Honda, Jack Kerouac sat and wrote, inspired by the same feeling and aura I'm often inspired by when I'm there.

As I said, I'm on my way home now, to the Midwest, to Detroit. Ive spent the better part of my adult life trying to get back out to northern California, through business or by making friends out there could return to visit. I'm drawn to that place like no other place o earth. But it's not home. It's an idea. It's a connection o a part of me I wish I had held onto. It represents my creativity, my dreams, my aspirations that so often get replaced by the realities of adulthood, of parenthood, of mortgages and college funds.

I know I think that if I could just relocate my family to northern calironia, somehow the stresses and pressures of life would be lessened, somehow the same intangible feeling of positivity I get when I visit here would insert itself into our mundane and stressful lives. I also know that's probably just a dream.

Real life  has a tendency o be stronger than ones hopes and aspirations and it usual wins in a fight between it and ones dreams.

I think i need t learn how to bring the peace and inspiration I find in California back with me to Detroit, and not the other way around.