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Some people would be annoyed if their roommate kept blasting “California,” The OC’s theme song, out of computer speakers at a volume loud enough to shake all walls of the apartment and drown out the little screaming Indian children downstairs, but Dods just whistles along with the piano line. Dods understands that I’m not playing the song over and over because I really like it. He knows I’m trying to brainwash him, and he’s fine with that.
I kind of want us to move to California.
There’s something dangerously seductive about the state. It’s like Odysseus’s sirens. I think of California as a hot woman with a beautiful voice who keeps trying to draw me to the land of sunshine, surfing, and deadly tectonic plate shifts.
I’ve been to California, seen it up close, liked some parts (actually, all of it besides L.A.), but somehow, every time I leave, I forget what it’s really like and convince myself that it’s one big movie set, like a big Paradise City where the grass is green and the girls are pretty. And really, if you look at Southern California, that description doesn’t deviate too far from the truth. Since everyone really is an aspiring actor (or agent or producer or grip), greater Los Angeles feels like an extended Warner Brothers set with extras, golf carts, palm trees, and homeless people who think they’re former producers or golf carts.
The Caly conversation started when Dods and I were discussing his academic future. He was contemplating enrollment in a Boston institution when I said, “Hey, why do you have to go to school in Boston?”
And he said, “I guess I don’t.”
“You could go to the University of California Santa Barbara and we could live there.”
He laughed, and I laughed, but then we went to their website and it looked pretty awesome.
Since then, that seed of a thought has grown into the biggest red wood in my fantasy forest. I’ve developed a montage of Dods and I driving to California in my new 2003 Saab 9-3, towing our IKEA furniture in a U-Haul, and high-fiving pretty much the entire way, like a straight male version of Thelma and Louise. And then when we get to the border of California, Dods will say, “Let’s take the top down!” and I’ll say, “Yeah!” but then we’ll realize that I didn’t buy a convertible, so we’ll be momentarily disappointed, but then Dods will pull out a chainsaw and we will make the Saab a convertible. That’s when The OC’s theme song will fire up.
What we’ll do when we get to California seems irrelevant. From what I’ve gleaned from The Hills and The OC, nobody really does much besides date, gossip, briefly become a lesbian or a drug addict, and get run off the road and die inexplicably at the end of the third season. The OC kids supposedly attended high school, then college, but I rarely saw them in class, and the girls on The Hills allegedly have internships, but I’m not sure they do anything in the office other than analyze girl fights and chat about boy crushes. Apparently in California, you just have to be present. Attendance counts, but participation and performance are unnecessary.
But I’m not stupid, shallow, or naïve enough to form an impression of an entire state just through television shows and movies (put it this way – if everything you learned about South Boston was from Boondock Saints, The Departed, or Good Will Hunting, you would think that everyone in this town was an Irish cop, Irish criminal, or Irish genius janitor, but I am 62.5% Jewish and don’t arrest people, get arrested, do math, or clean toilets).
Here’s what I’ve learned about California from personal experience:
I used to think this was a deal-breaker. I could never live in a city where the traffic was worse than Boston’s, where there was gridlock on the freeway at five a.m. on a Sunday morning. I don’t lose my cool very often, but whenever I sit in traffic, or have to wait at a traffic light, I try to rip off the steering wheel and eat it like a dog chewing on a Frisbee. So the traffic was an unavoidable roadblock in any attempt to move to California. But then I saw the episode of Entourage where they were stuck in traffic in The Valley but then they ended up going to a kickass high school party, so now I’m okay with the traffic. In California, parties can break out anytime, anywhere, and you’re never too old to hang out with high school kids because they’re older than you are:
http://imdb.com/name/nm1360270/
A friend in L.A. told me about a rule of three. Here’s the rule: however long you think something should take to happen, multiply that expectation by three and that’s how long it will take in L.A. I guess that comes from the hippie and skater influence and the proximity to really good British Columbian marijuana. I don’t really mind hippies – they’re pacifists like me – but I don’t understand skaters. Literally, I don’t understand them. There are too many “brahs” and “gnarlys” in their dialect. But I could avoid the skaters, hang out with the hippies, and teach myself to move at a slower pace. Buying a long bong and some B.C. bud would help, I’m sure.
3. How can I lump these two, seemingly disparate observations, under one heading? Easily. They’re both so true that they don’t require any additional commentary.
Or perhaps the thing about my parents does require some extra analysis. Maybe I’m drawn to California like the alewives that return to the Damariscotta Mills every year to mate, and maybe that reference would only make sense if you grew up in my hometown in Maine and knew that these fish, these stupid little fish, swim upstream, then up a frickin’ waterfall to arrive at the place they like to mate. These fish are idiots, but they’re genetically programmed to be idiots. They’re like robots that break into your living room and have sex on your couch because your crazy scientist neighbor thought it would be funny to design robots that had to have sex, but only on your couch.
Maybe I’m like one of those robots, and California is like your couch. Every Monday when I watch The Hills, I see Lauren falling for this cheesy loser, Brody, and it makes me want to vomit all over myself, then shower. I haven’t decided how intelligent she is, but she’s very pretty, and remember: in California, attendance is more important than participation or performance. So she might be the SoCal version of perfect, and since The Hills is ostensibly a reality show, it makes sense to assume that there are thousands of other perfect girls roaming through the valley. I think I’m supposed to find Lauren, or someone like her, and make like fish in a waterfall, or robots on a couch.
I don’t know. Maybe I’ll never go to California. Like I said, it’s just a red wood, albeit a big one, in my fantasy forest. But if I keep playing The OC theme song at high volume, maybe I’ll succeed in brainwashing Dods and then he can make the decision for me. Actually, I think he’s coming around. The other day he said, “You know I’ve been thinking about California a lot, and I realized something – we’re adults now. We can go wherever we want.”
True.
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