The Tin Man » Greetings from San Diego

<< Marriage Jurisdiction | Main | I’m Back >>

Sunday, May 9, 2004

Hi! This is Matt posting for Jeff since he is stuck using slow dialup while in California…

Greetings from San Diego!

My god, the United States is so fucking huge. I’d forgotten. I haven’t been to California in a long time.

Saturday morning I woke up in Jersey City, pretty close to the Hudson River, which flows into the Atlantic Ocean, and I went to Newark Airport. Then I got on an airplane, and over the next several hours, I traversed the entire country until finally, as the plane descended, I could see the Pacific Ocean. During those several hours in the air, the entire history of our country’s engagement with its manifest destiny passed before (well, below) my eyes. I saw northeastern suburbs, home sweet home. Then more suburbs, and then the population thinned out, and then the Delaware River, and then eventually the mountains of West Virginia. Then everything was flat and the ground was covered with perfect checkerboard squares. Agriculture, Bush country. And then the Mississippi River. Huck Finn! Then I closed my eyes and when I opened them again I saw the amazingly huge Rocky Mountains, and then snow-capped peaks, and then vast empty expanses of untamed nature right inside the very borders of our country, and then I saw deserts, and then ~~Lake Tahoe~~ the Salton Sea, and then finally southern California and palm trees and the Pacific.

I tend to think of travelling in terms of going overseas. I lived in Japan for three years, and I’ve been to a bunch of different parts of the world, so I associate travel with exotic locations and cultures. While I’ve also travelled widely inside the U.S., I’d forgotten that it can be just as exotic. I’ve never been able to wrap my mind around the vastness of this country.

I don’t know if I can quite explain how I feel. I guess you’d have to have lived my life, to have been where I’ve been, and to have my overthinking, romantic-waxing brain inside your head in order to understand this. I feel simultaneously that I haven’t travelled far at all and that I’ve travelled to the other side of the planet. I sort of feel like I’m in a foreign country. And yet how can that be? People here still speak English and use U.S. dollars and watch the same TV shows and use the same products and drive the same cars as everyone else. In fact, is there any place more American than southern California? It’s uber-America. Los Angeles, the heart of our culture, is just two hours north, where TV programs and movies are filmed and then beamed out and consumed in Peoria and St. Louis and Boston and Austin and Seattle and Biloxi and Tampa and New York. And Valley-Girl-speak and American high school culture come from the California suburbs. Today I was driving around, seeing the convertibles and the palm trees, and somehow I started thinking about “Buffy” and “Saved By the Bell,” two southern-California-based shows. I felt like Sunnydale could be really close to me — this town that was filled with evil things and dark spirits precisely because it was so all-American.

Back in college I desperately wanted someday to take a big chunk of time and drive all over the country. I read Steinbeck’s “Travels With Charley” and Douglas Brinkley’s “The Majic Bus” (the former was sort of boring, but I absolutely loved the latter). After college I took three and a half days and drove out to Colorado. But that trip didn’t include California. Driving across the country without going all the way to California is like — well, like coitus interruptus, sort of. Being here has reignited that dream — someday I want to just drive all over the nation, see everything everywhere.

My seminar doesn’t start until tomorrow, so today I went to the Hotel Del Coronado, where much of “Some Like It Hot” was filmed. It’s beautiful and old and huge, very turn-of-the-century with lots of wood paneling all over the place. It’s a National Historic Landmark, and it’s also where the novel that was the basis for the Christopher Reeve movie “Somewhere in Time” took place.

I’ll probably write more as the week goes on, although I’m dealing with an ancient laptop and connecting to the Internet via dial-up, which combine to create an incredibly slow and very annoying experience. In fact, Matt is posting this for me, because for some reason I can’t access my MT account from this computer.

More later. For now, this is Tin Man in southern California, signing off.

11:11 PM |

1 drop of oil

[…] continued singing in my chorus and seeing shows. Tons of shows. I got a TiVo. I went to San Diego for a weeklong conference; I went to upstate New York for my chor […]

Donated by The Tin Man » Two Thousand and Four
12/31/04 @ 9:20 PM