Californian dispatch

on a winter's day

As my last note to you indicated, I have been in California this past week! I love coming here and have written about it before. Though, unsurprisingly I find it a difficult subject to treat, if only for the reverence I have for the figures and writers who have so beautifully and thoroughly examined the great state of California — I am a person who particularly buys into the Californian myth à la Babitz, Didion, Morrison, Steinbeck… so I write all of this at a risk of sounding trite and accept that such may be the nature of my musings.

Maybe it is the time zone separating me from my life at home, maybe it is because every iteration of youth culture originates here before getting exported abroad! Maybe it is something of the two. California, and L.A. specifically, is wacky! It’s what I love about it. There is that Joan Didion quote (which I can’t seem to locate nor quote verbatim) that says something about Southern California’s lack of seasons being connected with not sensing the passage of time, and I often think of that in relation to the singularity of it as a place, existing in its own bubble of sorts, trailblazing subcultures of art, music, and fashion all while endlessly exporting forms of storytelling that touch the lives of people around the world.

L.A. is not a place I visited as a child, rather it is a place I discovered as a young adult, through the lens of friends and have little by little made my own, adding traditions and mandatory stops with each visit back. I do not take being on the other side of the world lightly, and with every trip back I feel a renewed sense of gratitude to be here and find new things to love about California. I was supposed to come a year ago, right when the L.A. fires devastated the city, which of course led me to postpone my trip. Now it’s been two years since I’ve been back, and I couldn’t be happier.

Being here means driving down the winding roads of Laurel Canyon, up and down the hills of Echo Park, or watching the billboards on sunset like a carousel from the passenger seat. There’s the greenery! Palm trees but also jacaranda, oaks, sycamore, willows or fig trees. The cool mornings and eating lunch in the sun. Dizzying choices of dietary toppings, add-ons or substations. Kindness; so many kinds of the them; the zany kind, the generous kind, the practical kind, the naïve kind, or the one that seems like a suggestion.

What else? LA means ordering cookies for dessert and bone broth for breakfast, and getting a signed copy of Bret Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park (the third book of his I’ve read, and I don’t even mind that it’s getting a little repetitive — I can’t help but be inherently interested in what he has to say). I fist-bump strangers in my exercise class (I cannot stress how out of character this is) and overhear wild conversations in by the lockers. I marvel at how the intensity or intentionality of these conversations is not in the least bit deterred by the fact that it is seven in the morning. [I’m afraid we have been going to workout classes at seven in the morning — but hear me out, in light of the jet lag, by seven, I’ve already had at least two coffees, two hours to read, write, and watch the sunrise from bed. I hang onto this jet lag until the very end on my trip.] These conversations — which occur everywhere, not just at the workout studio we’ve been frequenting — are puzzling, occasionally disarmingly open and frank, and oh so often tied up in that that American naiveté that I can’t help but be charmed by. I am somehow always surprised, and tell myself I ought to pay as much attention at home. Interesting people must exist there too?

The fifteen minute walk to get breakfast does not deter us, though it does reveal us as foreigners. We are the only ones walking — bar some neighbourhood dog owners. We point out the various local community signs, the ones that encourage you to throw your trash away via a silly cartoon with a matching catchphrase that feels like getting a gold star. There are not that many trashcans, I notice this when I’ve been holding my empty coffee cup for a couple of blocks, again reminding me how no one walks. We come across various types of community signs like these throughout the week, as we explore different neighbourhoods. They foster the same communal sentiment though their font or phrasing, I notice, is more pointed at the flavour of the neighbourhood and its residents. These signs fill me with optimism. Other stuff makes me walk back said optimism, but this is not the time, nor place for that.

I check my phone far less while I’m here because, by the end of the morning, everyone I know has gone to bed. As the days go by, I have become negligent with communication and am somewhat purposely skipping the morning window to answer messages, thinking I’ll just do it tomorrow.

In Malibu, we watched the wind wrinkle the water ahead of a rainy day. A rainy day would come, indeed. It was basically biblical. Alerts went off on our phones and the general idea was to stay indoors. Protect your pets, read the alert. My pet was at home with my mother. Our friends predicted that everyone would lose their minds and drive under the rain like it was their first time driving ever. A week of not-so-great weather prediction turned into one bad morning of rain, during which we had a prolonged breakfast, read in bed and watched “Licorice Pizza.”

At dinner, I recognise Vice President Hal Wylie, from the Netflix show “The Diplomat,” and my boyfriend aptly lists out all the actual politicians I continuously fail to recognise back home. I wonder if I ought to rethink my priorities, but actually prefer it this way. At home, nearly everything goes over my head, but over here, my senses are tuned in.

I get back to my room only to find that the hotel has printed out letter writing paper for me with my name on it. I spend the next morning sitting in the lobby’s velvet sofas writing letters to friends, feeling as though I am a part of something bigger, or like I've infiltrated myself into a slice of history and the letters which my friends will receive stand as proof of that. I suspect the letters will reach them in a fortnight, long after I’ve gone.

Another evening. Sitting at the counter at Honor Bar, having a chicken sandwich, the man sitting to my left tells me that he ordered the fries because ours looked so good. Moments later, he tells me he’s anticipating a call and asks me to keep an eye on his things, pointing to his backpack on the floor. I make a half-attempt joke that I’ll guard his fries, too. He doesn’t laugh, instead shows me the background of his phone. Two or three children? His kids. His intensity catches me off-guard. I smile and my eyebrows softly motion inward and upward, in a way that hopefully conveys that I think they’re cute. He’s been away from them for three weeks, he tells me. I nod understandingly, though I’m not sure what to say. I feel too shy to ask why he hasn’t seen them. Is he on a work trip or does he have a really bad custody arrangement? His call never did come, though I ate my dinner anticipating a certain responsibility. We get the cheque and wish him a nice evening. My boyfriend, sitting at my right, couldn’t hear much. I relay what the man had said and add, perhaps speculatively, that he looked tired and a little bit sad, that I sort of wished I could have said more. But what? I didn’t want to overstep. He shrugs and suggests I could have asked how old the kids were and gone from there. That’s true, I tell him. Something to think about as I reluctantly journey on home.