What I Know vs. What I Hope

The sad, strange, and enduring push-pull of California

I have an inconvenient habit of getting depressed on Saturdays. I think it’s because, in the chaos of the week — which for months has had me saying, “I can’t believe it’s only Tuesday” in a state of fresh near-shock every time — I self-soothe with, “Don’t worry, come Saturday you’ll have hours of unscheduled time to catch up on everything you need to catch up on, and all your problems will be solved.”

I already know that the issue here is the notion that any one thing can solve all problems. (I blame Hollywood’s tie-up-all-loose-ends conditioning and toxic positivity in American culture.) Enough has followed me around through multiple cross-country moves that I understand — rationally, at least — that some problems are just there. But concrete day-to-day problems do spring up from our current existence independently of internal complexity. I’m behind on grading, for example, a stressor that only applies to contexts in which one gives grades.

(“Shouldn’t you be grading right now? If you’re behind on grading and the looming guilt is feeding a weekly rise in depression, why are you writing a Substack?” Shut up.)

I won’t be attending AWP this year, but not, I’m relieved to say, because of any defensiveness or refusal on the part of the Committee with regards to issues I raised in my previous essay. They heard my concerns and addressed them, but the financial demands are simply at too large a scale for me to meet right now, for a multitude of reasons. Most of those reasons are practical, but one is psychological and weird.

I have two conflicting relationships to Los Angeles, where the Conference takes place this year. One is based in friction: I’m generally too loud for the comfort of West Coasters and I’ll take aggression over passive-aggression any day. I don’t do well in places where it’s not considered acceptable to show your anger (or your frustration or your eagerness), and this has a lot to do with why leaving San Francisco even for the rural South long seemed, under the circumstances, to be a damn fine idea.

But I have another relationship to California and, in particular, to LA: it exists almost entirely in my head, but I’ve had just enough experiences solidify it for me to confuse the dream with the reality more than once. A lot of the books that initially made me want to write books are LA stories by LA authors, and I’m enamored enough with the Pacific Ocean that a long stretch away from it — like the one currently in progress — has me thinking of California with that glossed-over longing that can only take place when the stressors of a former life have been entirely replaced with stressors of a different one.

The LA in my head, which is the one the Red Hot Chili Peppers evoke and the one where all the books and shimmering movies take place and the one seamlessly entwined with several dream-like moments during real-life stints in LA — is the one that will solve all my problems if I go there. Certainly none of my issues with California have anything in common with those of rural Georgia so, on its face, this isn’t the most out-of-bounds assumption. But my problems aren’t Blue State vs. Red State problems. I have a few of those, but I weather them: they don’t depress me on Saturdays.

When I say “solve problems,” I’m talking about delusions. I’m talking about a back-of-my-head notion that if I walk down Hollywood Boulevard, my dad won’t have died in 2006. I’m talking about the idea that if I can see the beach from my hotel and I feel glamorous and appreciated enough in what I’m wearing, there will have been no trauma in my childhood. I’m talking about a notion that if I host a panel with some of my favorite authors — which I was initially scheduled to do but will now be done most capably by a different moderator — I will never know loneliness again. I’m talking about looking up into the face of one of the most beautiful people you’ve ever seen and thinking, “In a world where someone like you exists, pain is an illusion.”

Not healthy. Obviously. And yet, I’d consider risking the inevitable comedown if I had money to burn. But I don’t, so the decision of whether I should make an investment that I can’t wholly afford forced me to weigh the realities of what I was actually investing in. On paper? My career. In reality, though, what I was really hoping I could do was bring my father back to life and wake up in an entirely different timeline.

I didn’t harbor any of these conscious or unconscious hopes last year when AWP took place in Kansas City (and I made no effort to attend). Kansas City does not make LA’s promises. If it tried, I wouldn’t fall for them. But I fall for California. I have fallen for California many times, and no more powerfully so than when I’m not there and the realities of its social expectations can’t actively annoy the shit out of me. Since the 1920’s, LA has manufactured fantasies that have been glommed onto by traumatized people all over the world, hoping to change their pasts with glamorous and fulfilling images (that’s my theory, anyway, on why the Hollywood machine has never failed), and I’m in their target audience. It can be easy to assume that everyone is, but Ian isn’t, which is how I’ve been able to pinpoint my own associations with California, the ones that he — having actually gone to high school and college there — doesn’t share. He is, in fact, impatient with any notions from, to use his term, “idea world,” that I carry about California. (He’s earned this impatience many times over, having been the only person to live with me throughout my actual frustrations with it.)

The one time in my life that I was intimately close to someone who was born and raised in LA, it was clear that we both sought to obliterate each other’s traumas by virtue of our connection. Going by emotion, it seemed possible, it felt possible, and if you’d asked me then, I’d have said it was possible. The same sliver of my consciousness that considered further burdening my credit card for the trip to AWP still believes we could’ve done it, given just a bit more time. Painful as our separation remains, it’s nothing compared to the undue resentment that might have killed us both upon the realization that no one person possesses the power we imagined the other had. For over a century, LA has been synonymous with the assurance that a larger-than-life image possesses larger-than-life power, the power to alter anything if you look at it long enough. And it will always give you something worth looking at, along with beautiful people who don’t mind if you stare, who will likely even court your gaze.

Predators like Harvey Weinstein prey on this disconnect between reality and fantasy to subject actresses to abuse, promising the world and seeming to provide it while simultaneously ripping it out from under them. But this insistence on smashing reality and fantasy together into one unnameable force also breeds fierce ecstasy, the feeling that by being in love, you can change anything: the past, the world. Sacrificing clear-eyed reason to an alter of sparkling haze can feel dangerously worth it, especially when you’ve forgotten what you needed all that damn reason for.

I’ve been reminded far too many times now to have an excuse to forget. But behind all this remembering is that nagging question: “Are you sure? Maybe this time maybe this time maybe this time maybe this time maybe this time maybe this time…” and I don’t even know how to end that hypothetical, what exactly the hope is. All I know is that whatever I’m after, it doesn’t have its answer in this one event, just as it’s never had its answer in any one event, one life-decision, one move, one MFA program, one publication, one social exchange. But what if…

I don’t know if any high beats that of collassal expectations and the imagined montages and soundtracks that come with them. But if I’m going to learn the value of reason the hard way one more time, it shouldn’t come with financial consequences. Thankfully, I can shout-sing to this California anthem of conflicted emotions and apocalypse-rife fantasy for free, in the same way, but with evolving motivations, that I’ve been doing for years: