Hunter S. Thompson famously quipped: "In a closed society where…
obligatory california post
Southern California is a lovely, lonely place. It’s full of East Coast transplants like me, and we all have the same look when we first get here: a mix of reticence and disbelief. It manifests subtly, self-consciously. We’re all lucky travelers and we know it, and we feel this whole southern California thing slipping away from us even though it never really goes.
We see how easily the natives (such as they are) take it all for granted, balling up a sunny day and casually discarding it like a hamburger wrapper, and we know we’re not long from doing the same thing. The fine weather feels impossible, the people too friendly. We know the lifestyle promises us more than it can possibly provide, and we get wrapped up in the torrid seduction.
SoCal is an eternal liminal phase, somewhere in between where you are and where you want to be. The beach and palm trees and casual lateness and surfboards all just… happen… to you and then you’re wrapped up in the lucid fantasy: the ocean is warm, the housing is cheap, traffic flows freely, and the possibilities are endless.
But maybe you’re shaken back into reality by a trip home for a white Christmas; or by the itch of mosquitoes somewhere hot and humid; or by a raw-weather downpour in a northern city. The first time you go back east, the warm memory of California is checked aside on the open ice, no more real than a Disneyland commercial. You might lie awake, listening to a thunderstorm, wondering how you found yourself living where the world goes to vacation. The sparkling thoughts and sunny days guilt you and maybe you move back home, but it doesn’t matter. You’ll chase the dragon forever…
…unless you come back to California, and you always do, and you come to stay. You adapt to (and even like) the pleasant narcissism. It’s reassuring to know you aren’t alone in your indulgences; you need them, but you don’t like them. You eventually succumb to mimesis, imitating the culture, the clothes, the flip-flops, the attitude of non-attitude. Southern California is then your weird, isolating, shameful dalliance that gives you false love and fake enlightenment, and you take it, even though you know that in the end all you’ll have to show for it is an empty wallet and a tan.
