Earlier this winter, I went to California. I grew up in California, but even when I was growing up there it felt something like a foreign land. Perhaps because I was formed by a slew of children’s books set in England, the land of constant precipitation, I craved rain and lush forests and snow and little stone cottages and, only because I hadn’t tried it yet, Yorkshire pudding.
I resented the beach. I resented the highways. I resented the sunny, perfect days, especially in my teen years when they were so rarely consonant with my ethereal or miserable moods. I became deeply, hungrily aware of the micro-changes in seasons, shifts in the smell and feel of the air. That meant that the changes of the seasons in Michigan burned themselves into my memory when I first moved there in 2013, the year of the arctic vortex.
California invites a certain ironic distance, which perhaps explains the fact that though I have technically spent most of my life there it doesn’t feel like home. There are parts of it that feel like real places—what the locals call “old town California,” evocative of Spanish occupation and the Gold Rush. In small Southern California towns like the one where my grandparents have lived for my entire life, you can still see orange groves and classic cars and hear stories about Walt Disney watching his kingdom from the roof of a 2/3 scale downtown building.
But California’s nationwide fame resides in its artificiality. In December, I went on a tour of Universal Studios’ back lots where they make movies. We drove through a set of an old Spanish-style town with a flood that can be turned on and off at will, rushing destructively down what looked like an ordinary road a moment before. (Now, amid real flooding, clips of that tour are trending.)
The old town set is emblematic of what California is like overall. To be a Californian is to be caught between the smell of the smudge pots in an orange grove when you drive to school on a frosty morning, and the fact that you’ll have classes that morning with a famous actor’s kids. It’s real and yet artificial—or rather its artificiality is all of America’s stand-in for reality. This makes California a very strange place.
When I was growing up in California, it was also the era of CD-ROMs. My parents’ conscientious parenting meant that we could only “do a CD” for thirty minutes at a time, but I remember those thirty-minute sessions as what they were at the time, dives into other worlds that are still burned into my memory: little round beetles that would eat jewels as we solved math problems, Lego characters fighting one another when one piece took another in Lego chess, strange jungles and spaceships usually full of word and object puzzles.
If you can’t tell from the above examples, another parameter on our CD-ROM playing was that the content had to be educational. Chocolatier (Build Your Very Own Chocolate Empire!) got past the rules and regulations by educating us in geography as we whizzed around the world playing a candy-making tycoon game.
But we did have one game that wasn’t educational, so I spent breathless hours playing it without the resistance of having to learn much at all. This was my horse game.
I’m not even sure how we got the horse game—part of me wonders whether we got it in a cereal box?—and I have no idea what it was called. It was a classic game for horse girls, involving taking care of your own horse, learning to jump over obstacles in the countryside and the indoor arenas, and participating in dressage competitions.
I loved that game, but the one thing about it was that it didn’t really work. The longer you played the game the more corrupted the CD seemed to become until finally your horse dissolved into pixelated particles, leaving ghost outlines of itself as it ran across the screen—and then the game crashed.
The horse game was one of my favorite games. This wasn’t because it crashed, exactly—though that probably lent to the mystique, just like the 30-minute time limit. But as I think back on CD-ROMs, I think they had something of the quality that all of California has to me. I’ve always been obsessed with places that are trying to be somewhere else—indoor places that are pretending to be outdoor places, new places that are pretending to be old places, places on land that are pretending to be at sea, places on earth that are pretending to be in space.
California, most of the time and in most of the place, is pretending to be somewhere else. Built on top of rough-and-ready mining towns and on the brink of wildfires and earthquakes and mudslides, it is pretending to be pristine, put-together, impermeable. It is the land of themed restaurants like Ruby’s Diner, where you can pretend you are in the 1950s, and The Old Spaghetti Factory, where you can pretend you are in America’s fantasy of Italy. In California, you can pretend to be in California. You can pretend to be a Californian. And I, like many Californians, love to pretend.
Walking through the polished streets of San Clemente in the evening, surrounded by street lights of the perfect color temperature and air of the perfect temperature, going from one restaurant full of well-heeled millennials to another, I found my eye drawn constantly to the imperfections—to the down-and-out Thai massage parlor with the entrance on the side, to the occasional rusty car or piece of sidewalk trash. Somehow, in San Clemente, I loved those imperfections. My eye was drawn to them as the one thing they could focus on in the dazzling landscape—they made San Clemente feel real, set off all the sparkle around me. The ugliness in San Clemente felt like it belonged. Just as I, deeply aware of the women who walked by in falsies and coordinated designer sweatsuits tapping away at new phones with perfect manicures, also felt like I belonged that night. Maybe it was the lighting.
In California, even ugliness is beautiful. The imperfections that stick out at the edges, never quite subordinated to the overarching order, feel real like the water rushing down the street at Universal Studios or the ice cream you get at Disneyland on a hot day—touchpoints for reality that make all the artificiality feel like it truly exists.
Come back next week*: for a patron-only post on why cats are like archery lessons.
If you’ve always wondered: why there are so many chicken bones on the street, have I got a podcast for you.
If you wish you had watched the Grammys: here’s some perceptive Taylor coverage from a fellow Substacker. (Dubious Taylor Swift analogy coming soon, for you to anticipate or dread.)
*I do mean really next week. I will save my tale of January woes for adding color to future stacks, but there will be a post every week in February.
Yes-it was free from a cereal box🙂 Though it now appears to have been educational after all…