Goodbye To All That…
…and hello again, Substack!
I’ve been on a sabbatical from ordinary life the last few months, during which I repeatedly told myself to use this extraordinary freedom to return to Theories of Everything. But somehow, I never did — until now!
A Personal Narrative…
I quit my job in June and entered a period of what my brothers — and others, no doubt — call “funemployment.”
I had grand visions for how I would fill this time: I would travel, read, watch movies, drink whisky and fine liqueurs, write… everything, that is, except what felt like gainful employment.
But time, I soon discovered, is like water: if it isn’t given shape by the chill of routines and approximate purposes, it melts through your fingers. Since I had already planned a few trips up and down the California coast, therefore, I decided to give myself a purpose by writing a travel journal about these several sojourns, à la Samuel Johnson’s record of his trip to Scotland or Humboldt’s narrative of his travels in South America.1
Alas, this plan proved to be one more good intention paving the road to perdition. To be clear, I wrote a fair amount during those trips: I filled my Notes app with numerous impressions of the things I saw. But I couldn’t bring myself to collect these notes into a coherent, thematically unified narrative. Time, once again, went trickling through my fingers.
Yet all, I’ve discovered, is not lost: that vanished time had trickled into the future. I couldn’t see it in July, but two months — and one new job — later, I found the pool.
Wracking my brain for what to say in my first post back, I revisited those Notes app entries, and was pleasantly surprised. Although they’ll never qualify as the sort of insightful inedita I recently urged students of history to read, they do paint an interesting portrait of one Raymon-Chandler-obsessed, wannabe bohemian denizen of Southern California’s take on the aspect and people of his adopted country.
So, as I say goodbye to funemployment, structureless days, and all that, I thought I would announce my return to writing about the philosophy of culture with a brief selection from the sketches I made of the concrete culture with which I am most familiar: my own.
…of the most ordinary journeys a Californian can make
June 20
I was flying north for a weekend retreat in Menlo Park. I got stuck at LAX, hence the excessive cheer of the first entry…
Humanity isn't at its best at airports. Ugly, smelly, yes; but there are all the other problems: the vanity of attractive people flaunting their attractiveness, the weak people snatching glances at the attractive, and the resentful holding the attractive in contempt; the constant barrage of noise and commerce. Every now and then I pass someone — often a preteen girl — looking quietly overwhelmed by it all, and I think: that's the right reaction. It is overwhelming.
— airports condense the hopeless complexity of infrastructure that depends on something like market principles: there's just so much information in circulation, so many bloody decisions being made by everyone, with no one being aware of it. It's like my brother’s description of NYC as godlike, but with a twist of Schopenhauerian acid.
Later: descending into Oakland. Thinking about one of my friends’ hatred of CA. It's the land of Raymond Chandler, Tom Wolfe, and Joan Didion: it's beautiful, but it's also significant: California, the West Coast, happened. Missouri never happened, Kansas didn't happen; but California did. It's as much a remembered event as a place: the magic of the 60s and 70s lingers here like the marine layer. Ha, we're descending through fog as I write this. Ironically, all the magic was cast in a time of conservative governance; when the heirs of the counterculture took power, they drove the state into debt and nannyism. But the magic persists: as Kevin Williamson wrote, California is still such an amazing place, where such amazing things continue to happen, that “it's enough to make a Republican take up yoga.”
June 21
Sunny in Menlo Park, gorgeous day. Morning walk, it's like the best of Pasadena with sequoias instead of palm trees. Beautiful old buildings and homes interspersed with new BUT TASTEFUL buildings. True to America, though, you drive five minutes down the street and you hit seedy rundown stretches with cracked, sunbleached asphalt parking lots. Hidden cozy thriftstore, small but well-stocked. With lots of VHSs and old cassettes, like Michael Bolton's Timeless. Hate to say it, affectionate adopted son of SoCal that I am, but I think the Bay Area is considerably more beautiful than SoCal. It's got such an old town feel to it. Put it this way: of the beautiful, old town parts, I might prefer the Bay; but for rural parts and seedy atmosphere, there's more romance to SoCal than the Bay.
July 8
Another trip, this one via Amtrak to meet a friend for a weekend in San Luis Obispo…
Writing from seat 63 of Pacific Surfliner 777, at c. 6pm, just pulling into Santa Barbara, on my way north to San Luis Obispo. It's foggy and a little cold along the water's edge; ghostly tufts of seaweed gather like corpses sometimes off the cliffs we cruise along. But now we're in SB: the SB Beach Hostel to my left, desiccate grass flanked by orange flower bushes, dominated by a palm tree, behind, and all around, the jumble of old Mission style, hacienda looking structures and more recent, sometimes classy, sometimes grimly functional, buildings, either houses or storefronts. We round a corner now, near what I think is Mission street and my brother’s haunt, en route to Goleta, and there's the sun breaking through the fog, now hazily, now edging discrete swabs of cloud with a summer evening gild.
Same, a bit later, post-Lompoc. New seat, 39, after visit to café car. Now sipping a highball and listening to noir jazz and feeling like a million bucks. The Pacific is back under cloud cover. Same sandy cliffs and tufted seaweed half-submerged in the gray-blue-green water. This is a vibe. Give me trains over planes any old day. This is great. Slower, sure, but great. The waves break early on these sands and foam for the whole length of the beach, the Pacific weaving bridal veils of salty lace with every broken wave — and, like some primal Penelope, tearing each to pieces as soon as the weaving is done and the fragments melt back into the colossal, anonymous sea. I look at the ocean and think of how apt was Lem's idea for Solaris. Its roiling surface looks alive, but alien.
Same. Somewhere along the way, we left the ocean far behind us. Now, having just left Guadalupe, we're still plowing through stagnant fog flanked by what look like strawberry fields, but can't be, I guess, since strawberry season peaks in April or May.2 Fields in perfect rows, to either side. Just like that, we shift distinctive California sceneries, exchanging the moody sunset coast with its sandy, striated outcroppings and lacy ocean surf for bleak, functionary farmland flecked with the occasional clump of live oaks and linked by veins and arteries of powdery tan dirt. Houses, streetlights, jets of irrigation water: they all look ghostly in the fog. To what kind of place have I come, and among what kind of people? (À la Jonathan Harker.) And yet, in c. 40 minutes, I'll be in SLO, among a most predictable, though no less dangerous, kind of people, the monied denizens of the central coast.
Now we're moving slowly through a foggy forest of tall, narrow trees, some of them sycamore adjacent. Entering SLO, clear skies, a crescent moon shining bright and sharp over a perfectly banded, post-sunset sky that was all link along the bottom, with here and there bands of snaky fog reminding me that the coast is near.
Not much, but enough to fill a post!
Some Housekeeping
I plan to get back to publishing regular articles. I should note, however, that the A-track essays will become less frequent: they’re impossible — at least for me — to write at a consistent pace. My mind is like a crockpot: my speculative ideas need time to stew. I can certainly open it to peek at the boiling stock or sniff its half-cooked bouquet, but those moments don’t make for great essays. (And sometimes they spoil the flavor!) So, going forward, everything will fall into the B-track category unless otherwise noted — which allows me to drop the neurotic habit of neurotically appending letters and numbers to every post.
It’s good to be back. I’ll get something more substantial to you soon — I already have an essay brewing on Chekhov and the relation of authors’ lives to their stories. Until then, cheers!
Considering that Johnson was traveling to Scotland less than forty years after the tartan was suppressed and the still fairly barbaric country realized it had to match pace with its annexation-happy neighbor to the south, and that Humboldt
Ahem, I realize now that they could still have been strawberry fields, just not in use. Remember the aforementioned highballs, and have mercy.
Very nice descriptions. Don't hesitate to do more of that. Btw, your footnote #1 was cut off before we learned about Humboldt.