Ahhh, the weekend of the fourth of July. So full of memories for me. There were childhood summers at the beach, bonfires and fireworks.

In more recent memory, there was what stands as my favorite work story to date — the epic saga of is she crazy or ain’t she, and might she really ever stab anyone? It was a warm July 2 or 3, much like the one I am enjoying today, in which I agreed to haul my ass up to Marblehead, MA, a lovely, well-heeled town by the sea, and meet with a psychologist to take a psych test to determine what I already knew — I’m neither violent nor crazy.

It was a lovely chat we had, the therapist and I, about writing and comedy, Lenny Bruce, shivs and non-conformity. Then, I quietly answered questions on a worksheet meant to elicit my mental state. I didn’t need a therapist, but turns out the kick in the ass (or the kick out the door) by my employer was just what I needed.

About nine months after the “layoff” as I politely refer to my termination, as sanctioned by the lawyers and paperwork, I pointed my old Beetle convertible west. And, seven years after the trip to Marblehead, here I am about as west as you can get relaxing by another ocean.

Meanwhile, I still have friends and family back east, who I miss, of course. A group of them with whom I try to reunite (is that what reunion means?) when I’m back for the occasional Christmas, had an impromptu gathering at our chosen restaurant. By the wonders of technology that barely existed when we first became friends, we chatted on cell phones, restaurant east to highway-driving west. Turns out I had interrupted what Steve referred to as avoiding what Socrates implied was a worthless life. In Braintree that night, my friends and contemporaries were drinking wine and talking about where their lives had led and what should happen next.

The best part was that as they passed the phone around, two different friends told me to check in with one of the others. Each was worried about the other needing to figure out some fun in our middle-aged lives.

Around the same time period, a friend I had met through comedy approximately a thousand year’s ago back in Massachusetts at a place called “Angie’s Clams” started a blog. The blog, called “The Year of Living Joyously,” is about her own experiment in rethinking her life (now in L.A.). I’m not the least bit down with the Abraham-Hicks stuff, it causes my skeptical meter to channel off the charts, but I can dig the desire to shake up the status quo.

All of this stuff got me thinking about myself. Really, just about anything could trigger me thinking about myself. That’s how I roll.

Where, though, would I be, what would I be doing if I stayed back in Cambridge in my old condo? Would I have gotten another job much like the one I had? Would I have done something else? Would my liver have survived the no-doubt late nights at comedy clubs with cigarettes and beer?

It’s unknowable.

What I do know is that I left. I came to California without a job. Then I got one, a cushy one. I came to California unsure about the guy who I spent months with on the telephone, but we decided to give co-habitation a try. Now, we own a cute, airy ranch near the beach together. In absolute truth, I think, the risk-benefit skewed way, way out of my comfort zone. I did it anyway.

In my self-examined life, taking that flyer, packing up the car with clothes and driving away was just what I needed. Or maybe I just needed to make myself do something so extreme that every nerve ached and every fiber of irrational fear and anxiety shivered.

Today, I’ve met people who may as well be from another country or planet, and I appreciate their outlook in a way I never expected.

Sure, California has a deserved rep for shallowness, wine and hot tubs. I have no doubt at all that the empty phrase “Have a nice day” first was uttered in this neighborhood. I think it’s the temperate weather that causes a special kind of vacuousness.

At the same time, however, people here know how to enjoy things more than I ever encountered in the East. I can’t think of one person I know now that doesn’t have at least one, if not a dozen, outside interests that they actively pursue. It’s exemplified for me in the president of my actual job’s signing up for our softball team. He’s not just the president, he’s not just an intellectual far, far, far more than an athlete, he’s a dude who is literally retirement age by all definitions. But, the man ain’t afraid of doing something just for fun or getting tagged out at third.

If I had stayed in Massachusetts, even if I stayed working among academics, I never would have cracked a beer on a picnic table at a suburban park with a former dean of a major university just as they turned the lights out for the night. That I know.

I wouldn’t own two wetsuits and a skateboard (admittedly, I suck and can’t ride it, especially on our undeveloped town’s shitty roads). I wouldn’t pick fresh lemons from our backyard whenever I need a splash of citrus. I wouldn’t wake up to M.’s having made fresh coffee and smilingly serving breakfast in bed. Maybe I never would have tried Dungeness crab or co-hosted a Chinese New Year’s party in which we served a full roasted pig, ugly head and all.

Nothing is perfect, and I still kick myself almost each and every day for not writing more or doing more with writing. Work is still a necessary grind to keep the bills at bay. I still wrap myself up with worry and doubt, especially of the insecure, self-doubt variety. I’m hauling some extra tonnage and for the first time in my life my stomach rolls over my waistband. (I’ve always been big-boned, as they euphemistically say, built low to the ground like a fire plug. Blessed I was, though, with a flat stomach, which I TRULY miss both bitterly and wistfully.)

If I had never left Cambridge, all of the above would likely still be true. The difference would be road trips to Napa, boogie boarding, amazing food, conversations I didn’t know I would have and a relationship that seems like it’s going to stay. It was a risk worth taking.

(And, if M. ever reads this entry, yes, I’ll stop “blaming you for dragging me west,” as you called it. But, if a major earthquake hits, all bets are off.)

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