Damn the microbiotic gauntlet, damn the rain.

Shing says there’s a special place in hell for people who shop for Christmas gifts exclusively at airports, but I’ve found airports are where I’ve received the most intense, truly full-bodied hugs. The ability to embrace someone as at an airport outside of the airport setting is not unlike the ability to cook authentic ethnic cuisine outside of its home country. On my visits to California, it seems every hug is an airport hug.

Holiday celebrations in the ceaseless glint of sun were imbued with the frustrations and physical improbabilities of bowling in a rowboat, and the ’storm of the century’ that threatened the late part of my stay hardly materialized. It didn’t rain on Thursday night, though I undertook my usual observances to tempt the clouds. The downtown skyline visible from Montebello as I headed north on the 5 indicated rain more than the Santa Ana winds that really cleared the last haze of 2007, and as Thursday settled bittersweetly into dry lavender darkness, I considered, as I had been for the dozens of hours spent in Los Angeles freeway traffic on my 17-day vacation—one day for each year of residence—how much I left behind.

My friends, you left me feeling deeply regretful, a shit, an ingrate, a damned fool. But I know that my leaving was in part responsible for the highs of the experience, concentrating years of friendship in a few evening hours, freeing those relationships of the loose grit of petty drama, overtaking the oxidized copper with a lustrous patina, sanding wood splinters into smooth recesses. So many friendships in stasis from my departure lent my stay the air of a parallel life I only in California donned as my own, felt but at a distance, as though images from a television that displays a picture not from an electron gun or liquid crystals connected to electrodes but from the light of a single candle reflected and refracted and refracted and reflected by thousands of swirling, rotating brilliant cut diamonds, a picture not simply vivid and clear but expressive, a screen that does not display scenes of tragedy but the toil of absence and loss, not smiling faces but deeply felt contentment and happiness.

And though by Sunday night, as it seemed respiratory illness struck down everyone I ever called ‘friend’ and the rain made concrete mirrors of freeways, I gave no thought to halting my revelry: damn the microbiotic gauntlet, damn the rain. Though we were be blind, nicotine-withdrawn, and chronically anxious, Pink’s and Pinkberry conquer all.

And to those who could not join us, to those who have not visited and to those who have no intention to visit, my orbiters, Capricorn girls, once-and-former ravimail clan, godbrothers, and aunts and uncles to my unborn children: here’s to another year of instant messaging and transcontinental distance, debonair charm and emoticons, postcards and ice cream. Restaurant Week lies ahead, as do an increasingly indistinguishable slate of concerts, weekends in New York, graduate school applications, and hot chocolate.

Wish you were here.