Incomplete Essay: Dreamin' California
On convincing myself not to move West (yet)
If you would like to listen along, here is the audio transcript of the essay ~
“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image…”
Joan Didion, The White Album
It’s well into February and I haven’t read a Didion book yet. In 2020, I read Slouching Towards Bethlehem on a plane from Key West to Portland. I still have my Delta napkin and ticket as bookmarks. I have it next to my copies of The White Album and Play It As It Lays. I always liked Didion’s resilience at the start of the year. I’m afraid still to read The Year of Magical Thinking but I will, I will (having cried so hard during her documentary, I know I will cry while reading). It’s mid-winter in Maine and the cold has turned bitter like argument unresolved, creating a new felt reality of hostility, eager for a break. I eat my winter citrus as it is shipped out to local grocery stores and dream of rolling groves. I pass the horses on frozen fields, blankets of wool on their backs, and I dream of them wild & running free in the valley. It’s mid-winter and I am doing like the Mama’s and the Papa’s, dreamin’ of the West.
Often in my life, I get asked about California - am I from there? Have I been? Something about me. I dress in fringe and leather and clogs, smoke my little js w/ tea blends, talk like your burn-out dad and listen to his records. I talk about love like that because I believe it will save us. I am as passionate as I am thoughtless, all my dreams stuck in the desert. I’ve always worn faux fur w/ my jeans and most of my projects are incomplete. I always have sunglasses and a deck of cards in my bag, living fast in a different kind of world. Something about how I move, between a snake in the grass and the Big Lebowski. I was at a poetry reading and went out dancing w/ some poets in the summer and got asked about California in both settings, so I wrote about it.
In truth, I have been to California only once, San Francisco, before puberty. My mom got scalped tickets for Alcatraz. We bought winter coats in the summer. It was a quick weekend, a paper cut-out memory, out on the piers. I haven’t been back despite wanting to. I was born outside of Boston and grew up in New Hampshire and went to college in New York. The Northeast has shaped me into stone. Home is green and brown and gray but I dress in browns and reds and oranges. In youth, when I pictured my future, it was always in the sun, but I grew holding tightly to my seasonal cycles - how winter makes the summer that much sweeter and how time metamorphoses throughout the year. When it snows, I listen to Lana sing about Venice and guitars bleeding in the desert and live shows where California talks back while the record spins.
I am not reading any books on California right now, but I am considering rereading Slouching Towards Bethlehem. My fantasies these days involve sitting cramped in a car, the sunlight glaring into the windshield, gas station coffee, long moments of silence between long moments of laughter, almost nothing to see on the sides of the two-lane highway.
There’s a little fear about California for me, w/ all its heat, its mythology. I imagine her slower, more room to move around. Didion, Babitz, Kesey & Cassady, the Doors and Zappa and the Runaways, all the cults and dreams, all their water being moved around like that. Anyone who knows me, knows the Doors are always in my orbit, that I want to walk where they walked, want to see what makes the West the best. It seems everyone in California formed into notable groups, stronger and more isolated than art collectives of the East. Frank Zappa and the GTOS living and creating. The merry pranksters of the Acid Tests running off the rails of society - my book copy/ all beat up and swelled with rain. I watched the 2010 biopic The Runaways when it came out and discovered a desire I didn’t know I had. Joan Jett became an idol for me. My best friend and I watched it on repeat in high school, asking how do we do this? She picked up the guitar and my writing got darker but we never formed a band.
Often the ‘California effect’ is in tandem w/ the ‘born in the wrong generation’ accusations. The mythology precedes itself, creates a kind of comparison, a kind of competition between there & here, then & Now. It comes w/ an aesthetic and a hazy lazy view of life. As if the hippies blew their sunflower seeds into the future and some of us were warm soil. As if ‘free spirited’ was a kind of disease, as if wanting ritual and community was an outdated idea that would be smothered in the time of late stage capitalism, or should have been. I don’t feel honored or offended when a comment comes my way, that I was meant for a different time. Not anymore, at least. It used to give me a trill of pride, that I was different from my peers, a free thinker, an artist, a wannabe activist, a wannabe anything. Soon, that pride turned its back and made me an outsider of my world. Soon, it felt like I was adding distance when what I wanted was integration. I was getting all my inspiration and insight from the Hologram but didn’t want to acknowledge it, feeling the Hologram and developing technology was a kind of evil. I grew past that, started to marvel at what our world looked like, how it functioned, where it had all sprung up from, the same old fights being fought over and over again.
Perhaps I am romantic and free spirited and simple-minded but no, I don’t believe I was born in the wrong generation or the wrong place. I was born here and Now, reasons known and unknown. I see a lot of mirrors between that time and today - deep rooted, long standing struggles between the people and the government, compulsive art making and alternative ways of living gaining popularity, the people needing to believe in each other, needing to believe in something beyond what they have been given, finding their bodies again, their world unimaginable and on the verge of breaking. I believe I chose to be in this iteration of life, where the past and the future overlap in this funny way, where the world again needs revolution and art.
There is true darkness in California in all that sunlight, all the art says so, everything growing and dying in the desert. As I grew older, I became fascinated w/ the dark stuff, cults especially. I have a big book of archives from the Source Family cult that serves more as inspiration than a warning. I have a coffee table book that is a photographic collection of groupies, their art and their jewelry and their posture, more and more mirrors. I have books on the Free Love movement and Helter Skelter and the gold mines and indigenous rituals.
I have a habit of writing about the desert though I have never been. An unfinished short story about the early formations of a traveling cult w/ fire and secret marriages in the sand & a playlist to go along w/ it (below). A hallucinatory desert world under my family’s kitchen table to follow a late relative in some existential reverie. The crossroads in my mind are always in the desert, always w/ snakes and desert blooms. It is a landscape that feels generative in its extremity, feels so familiar to me. To Jung, to go to the desert is to unearth the soul, the true self in solitude, in search under the sun, where the ancients found their soul, too. There is a journey inherent to the desert, a journey of selfhood on the scorched earth. It is a journey I have begun many times and have not completed, trying to soak up all the Northeast rainwater from the ground to get to something dry.
Perhaps romance is what is stopping me, because w/ romance comes disappointment. So much of this California daydream is not relegated only to place but to time. I think California today would break my heart the way all cities do these days - too much of it seen for the first time online, too expensive to move around in, all the history locked behind plastic & stolen from time and place. California is the land of the mirage, the glamor, the illusion, where life is a game all twisty. Everyone in the canyon is a tech bro, I’m told, everyone in Hollywood living on their phones w/ plastic in their bodies. All I hear about now are the agonizing highway miles and overpriced wellness scams, lines and lines around blocks and blocks or isolation all day in the sun. It became uncool in my lifetime to live in California, nevermind dream of it - vain and in vain. Someone w/ so many desires should not live somewhere that needs to be desired like LA does. Writers in New York, it seemed, wrote about the world. Writers in LA, it seemed, wrote about themselves and, well, LA.
It was in this stubborn Northeastern spirit that I decided to go to New York instead of California. I chose poet over artist, student over vagrant, dressed up as the Beats, as Warhol, as Fran Leibowitz, as an academic who chose their head over their heart and suffered - would suffer either way, but yes, I chose New York, the city that would never be mine.
Growing up in New England had given me an edge. I had tried to beat it in Georgia but I felt protective in the humidity. I returned North, my life in the woods only a few hours away by bus. In Brooklyn, I met people from California and they all said the same kind of thing. Over there, everyone is nice to your face, they love you, they wanna kiss you and hold you but they would sell you for a phone charger and abandon you at a party in the Hills w/out a second thought. Here, in New York, New England, touched brutal by winter, we are brutal in nature, our tone harsh, tactless, our ambition worn right on our face, but our hearts, our hearts, soft and huge underneath it all, under calluses and beat to death leather. We keep ourselves warm to keep each other warm. That always felt like a good reason to stay Eastside. My family is all here. My friends are mostly here. The ways I know how to love were born here - all wrapped up tight to the chest, hard fought and hard won, at arms’ length or crushed so tight in our arms.
New York didn’t love me how I wanted it to, or the other way around. My love leaked out into the gentrified streets around campus and was buried in the snow. When I was in college, a friend of mine reconnected w/ me after moving to California. We went to the same high school, worked at the same inn for a summer, friends but not all that close, friends (it turns out) because I didn’t want us to be more than that. Anyway, he moves to California and tries to get me to move out there, right on the coast. He would buy my plane ticket, would ship all my shit for me and set it up w/ his, would cover my rent. He had some kind of dream in his head, pure California. Around that time, I met a friend of a friend who grew up in Maine but moved to Brooklyn for love. When I met him, he had been living on the street for over a year, hopping from dorm to dorm to stay warm. I would have gone for California, for her sun, but not for the boy. I stayed where I was w/ my own dreams in my head.
My dreams were changing all the time back then. I struggled trying to believe in myself and struggled trying to dream free when I had loans and an advisor to report to, when I had nervous parents & no desire of my own to stay in one place. Opportunities to grow involved selling myself as something. Everything: a due date, a resume builder, a lonely fight for a best seller, the words of our souls debated in the mornings and teachers who had been trying to get out of the system for a years, their opus stuck behind tenure. My most distinct memories of New York are in the bitter cold. Grabbing a slice of pizza after a gallery opening, our legs red and purple raw under jeans from the wind. Walking to the jazz bar in the last real snow storm the city has seen, karaoke and soul food and too many gin and tonics. Sweating, sweating on the subway and falling asleep, missing my stop, my sweat freezing on the even longer, even darker walk home. Stubborn, I stayed. Dutifully, I graduated. California way too far away.
W/ my heart in my hands, I moved to a smaller city by the sea w/ someone I love, thinking maybe this city has something to tell me, only me. Portland has been in my ear ever since. Each summer, my skin is more sensitive to the sun. I use good lotions and pack fruit and water. Each winter, I wonder how it gets so heavy. The tension grows in my body top down, like freeze, like frozen. I find the sun in my home, upstairs in the corner or down here flat on the ground, soft on my wool rug. The cats know where to go. I never can relax until we get a week of warm days, sometime in May or June, where I have everything I could dream.
My partner has no desire to see California, has a lot of disdain for the people and the place, would be happy to see it sink into the ocean tomorrow as it’s going anyway. He sees it as a sieve of our resources, too much money spent to keep the wealthy exactly where they are. For a long time, I agreed w/ him. I agreed that what I would be looking for would be obsolete by the time I got there and, in its place, a money grab and a painful divide between those who have and those who have not. I worried about giving up my life now, chasing after this desert lust, and for what? I worried I would just be another “free thinker” getting nothing done. A visit, I could justify always, but not a life.
But in truth, it’s just more storytelling I was doing and the story was trying to keep me here, keep me small. That’s OK sometimes, OK for a little while. When I went to New York, I expected the city to fill in the voids in myself. In Portland, I did all the work myself. If I go to California, it will not be an empty pursuit. I chase what I imagine California to be where I can find it right here at home. I let New England surprise and delight me still. Our beaches rocky but alive. Our protests smaller but louder. Our architecture sculpted by the sea, our poetry the same. When we are isolated, it is only for this certain time of the year where the snow blocks us in w/ ourselves. Our fruit all ripe in the fall. I don’t have anything waiting for me in California. I don’t have the freedom or the funds to get myself there. It is still only an idea, but maybe one that feels more personal to me than it used to - not mine to claim, exactly, but an experience of the Some-Day variety.
How has New England been home and how has it been a hold up? It seems silly to waste so much back and forth time on the fantasy of a place, eventual or not. Today, I read poets from New York and California, New England and New Mexico, Greece and Australia and Michigan and all over. The words are unique to the voices, not their cities. I look and see how everyone stretches into their world. Writers in New York will always tell you. Writers in LA will always apologize. All writers will always give themselves away when they give you a story.
Too many people have claimed California. New York, too. I want to claim Portland. I am letting her write herself into me. I swore I would never write about the ocean, but she changed that. I swore I would be lost to the world forever, but she changed that too. I swore I needed to fall into an art scene but she’s teaching me how to build it for myself. I am writing of my city while I’m in her, teaching myself commitment and determination through love. My favorite time to be here is in the summer but we love year round. She gets hot too, sometimes, her beaches aplenty, her own specific chaos called up and out from cobblestones, the smell of the sea even now in February, always salt, always crashing.
In all my hazy reveries of what California could hold for me, a new one has started to form. My dreams have more fear in them than they have in some time, so this dream has a bit of a leak. I imagine myself w/ age in California, my youth spent stubborn in the cold - I wear all my silver and fringe, I add paisley muumuus, I sing w/ the dead. I go mad in California.
I examine my youthful frustrations w/ time and temperature and trick myself into thinking California has none of it. Time unreal and temperature unchanging, only getting hotter. I will find somewhere to go when I am done w/ the world, or when the world is done w/ me, whichever comes first. At the base of me, I am looking for somewhere to go fully insane, to unwind my reality completely, in a home of windows and hardwood overlooking the canyon where the music was born, sun sun sun. I imagine mid century furnishings and smoke all around. I imagine true isolation, sealing me off from the world once and for all, finally making all my art, finally having the time to let it take me over. No overhead lights & nothing to prove. I don’t imagine cooking or cleaning. I don’t imagine driving at all, not around the block and not hours and hours to the city, never going home. I imagine throwing house parties where no one knows who the host is, I imagine hearing “The artist’s house, they’re….around here somewhere…”
When I have written my books. When I have seen the spiral jetty. When love has made me all that I am. In the end, I imagine the desert; my journey never-ending, my knees strong until they’re not, after years of keeping them tense underneath me. After I have staked my claim, the Earth will claim me. I imagine myself becoming part of a moment that outlives me and fading fast and loose into obscurity, my art a conversation w/ the mad mad artists that came before me, mourned and collapsing into the rising, vengeful sea. If I disappear, you know where to find me.
This home is not in California, but I would happily lose my mind in a home like this one.