As M. and I have been majorly occupied with scouting houses, I’ve been waiting irrationally for a sign. I mean with housing costs so high (about as high as my fear of commitment), you don’t want to be eating government cheese on a granite countertop in a cozy nook of a regretted purchase.

Actually, we found a condo with a small back yard, a seemingly non-retarded Homeowners’ Association at reasonable rates and a huge garage the current dwellers have tricked out with a work bench and some fitness junk. I can totally grok inside my mind’s eye my crafting away on the work bench getting all artsy messy, while M. does manly pull-ups on the rings suspended from the ceiling. Totally doable, livable, if we got a fair price.

But, it’s definitely, definitively, qualifiedly, certifiably the suburbs. The second to last house on the border between upper, upper middle-class, braggable school districts and the genuine capital-G ghetto. We dig that juxtaposition actually. But, the true and true, red, white and blue, ‘burbs. We still could call that place home.

We scratched our heads and thought about what would a couple of double-income no kids folks like us need with pure suburbia. Maybe, there was another niche between the city and the suburbs, and M. thought one up — THE SEA. The actual ocean, that she devil, not the bay that gives the Bay Area its name, tamed with landfills and split-level ranches and developments. No, the wild cliffs and not at all pacific Pacific Ocean side of the coast. The full on left coast, she is a wild mistress, the sea.

Monday, we dined on fried sea food at this little burg just south of SF on the ocean side of the Peninsula called Pacifica and had ourselves a look around.

Plug the town Pacifica into a search engine, Google it, as the young might say, and the single most prominent characteristic would be fog. Like John Carpenter’s The Fog. (The good one from 1980, not the crappy one that M. and I saw together at the moving picture shows this millenium.) But, presumably, without the leprous, revenge-seeking ghosts, although I’ll have to read up on town history.

I thought the movie might have been shot there. Some places nearby definitely and the “Northern California town” with ocean and fog could have been a whole lot of places. But, in my research, I realized something better. In fact, flipping through Youtube.com, I realized how I’m living in the midst of film greatness all around me.

One of the world’s best fucking movies ever was filmed up and down the places I go every week. And, the ultimate scene was filmed in the backyard of the town we are considering. I love this movie and through it I realized I came to appreciate Pat’s quirks and how there was more going on inside that head than mere teacher/mother white-bread complacency. It was the only movie I remember her quoting or retelling.

Harold and Maude, Hal Ashby’s masterpiece. I have it downloading on iTunes right now, because I realized I should own it (which I may have done on VHS, but my tape player is far, far gone and possibly still sitting in a Boston comedian’s den or family room).

The cliffs to which Harold sacrifices his Porsche hearse very well could become my view in a daily commute.

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