Goodbye, California

So tomorrow I’m leaving here (California) for there (Michigan) and for eleven days I’ll be gone from my work as we make our way home via automobile. I’m gonna take pictures and write words about it while I’m gone and then publish them here when I get back.

I used to keep a blog where I just wrote things down and people read them. That blog contains several books worth of writing but not a single “complete essay” suitable for publication. I don’t really know how I’d categorize that body of work, but whatever it is: this is gonna be like that. Me typing sentences. 

In some ways, the plot to leave started before I even got here — in October 2010, between the six years I spent in New York and the five years I ended up staying in California, I stopped in Michigan to spend a few days with my Mom and a few days upstate for my high school reunion. I went to a boarding school for the arts in Interlochen, a town near Traverse City, a popular tourist destination with a mall we’d visit on weekends to get haircuts and go shopping with our gay best friends. I drove up with one of my best friends from school who’d lived in New York when I first got there but lives in Chicago now, and we picked up where we’d left off.

A day into the weekend, somebody said, You know I’m supposed to say “look how much we’ve all changed” but we haven’t, really. At Interlochen, I’d been a teenager dreaming of the cities I’d live in one day and now I was back and it turns out that chasing those dreams hadn’t changed a thing. There were my bones in the trees and everything I’d ever wanted was right there at the edge of the dock where J and I got in that big fight and he threw my favorite water bottle into the lake and we almost broke up but then we didn’t. I think that happened on Wok Night, when the teachers made stir-fry and everybody smelled like sesame oil.

Four of us spent the last day of the reunion at our writing teacher’s house by the river in the woods, mostly talking about how none of us were doing the right thing with our lives because none of us were living in Northern Michigan. Our writing teacher said, the craziest thing is that you all look exactly the same. We didn’t, of course, but maybe that landscape brought out something familiar in our eyes.

Let’s all buy a house together in Northern Michigan and write poetry, I said, or maybe somebody else said. The whole drive back we fantasized about inexpensive real estate and having a river in our backyards, and then I got on a plane and flew to California and it turned out to be just exactly what I needed.

I’m not moving to Northern Michigan, so I’m still not doing life exactly as I ought to. But I am moving back to Michigan, where I grew up, within driving distance of Interlochen.

This place — California, the Bay Area — has never felt like mine, really, except for when Berkeley reminded me of Ann Arbor. It’s been beautiful, though, and fun, and at first the space and the flush of a new relationship and my growing business in “cyberspace” (we make fun of that word but it really does feel like a thing happening in “space”) and the weather alone was enough to make me feel a kind of peace I never thought possible anywhere else. I felt, briefly, wildly happy, although suspiciously so, because that happiness relied on a very limited set of temporary circumstances. I had a hard time making new friends, you could say.

A few months into living here, my then-girlfriend M — she was from Canada, we’d met in New York, she moved to Oakland, then I did, and then we got together — got a carshare and we drove into the Berkeley Hills. There was a place we could sit and see everything, right next to the big white modern building where she had orchestra practice. We sat in the dry grass and smoked a joint and we could see all of Berkeley and Oakland and then the ocean and the bridges crossing it like ribbons towards a city of tall buildings smothered in twilight-tinted fog. (The views out here, I’m telling you.) I felt struck suddenly by the arbitrariness of either of us being there at all.

I said to her, We’re like a little spaceship or something, I feel. Like we just plopped down here from different planets, so far from home.
And she said, We’re just a little pod.

We started calling ourselves a “pop-up pod.” Like, “look where our little pop-up pod has popped up now!” On a boat! Having brunch in Portland! Waiting in line for toast! At a concert! At Half Moon Bay!

I think at some point she found some ground to dig into but I never quite did. Eventually I was just my own pod. Pop. Pop.

*

We’d had a plan, all of us, hatched in the spring of 2010: a house in Berkeley for all our friends — there were maybe seven or eight of us in on the plan. We started a tumblr called berkeleystraddle. The topic was how much better things would be in this imaginary house in this imaginary town we pretended was a real town.

in berkeley, it’s not a nerve or a tendon — it’s just healed

in berkeley, we will have a dishwasher and a washer/dryer

in berkeley, they’ll violate our rights only to make us eat more vegetables

But life is what happens when you’re making other tumblrs. Eventually, only a few of us moved to the bay, and not to live in the same house. M came first, followed by T and K, who’s apartment in Temescal I crashed at when I arrived until I moved into my own place on November 9th, 2010. T and K broke up and T moved to Portland. Last summer, K left for a job in Los Angeles. Now it’s my turn to leave. It’s weird that I’m the last one here, M said to me the other night.

Sometimes I feel like it was weird that I was here at all.

The Bay Area started changing right around when I got here. You’ve heard, I imagine (or not, maybe nobody cares but the people in it), but there is a technology “boom” happening in which tech and new media corporations hire people to work in Silicon Valley and pay them a lot and then those people want a place to live and so they move into places where poorer people used to live.

It’s gotten very expensive around here.

I say this as somebody who happily spent six years in New York overpaying for everything, including monthly rents of $700-$1,000 for tiny imitations of bedrooms in various mediocre neighborhoods. I’ve paid similar rents here, but for much larger spaces, so it’s been okay. Inexpensive New York apartments aren’t even real apartments, I’m sure aliens are laughing at them. But now the prices here are just spiraling wildly out of control, and because I work in cyberspace, it feels increasingly foolish to sacrifice so much income for space in a specific physical location. Especially now that I have Abby, but I’ll talk more about her a little later. For now, this: when she thinks about “home” she thinks about places that look like the places I call home.

Math and numbers feel weird to talk about when I’m talking about how a place feels but I need to give you some:

The median monthly rent in San Francisco is $4,225

Real estate in Oakland is up 21.6% from last year

Berkeley is up 32.4%

Bay Area rents have been rising an average of 44 percent since 2010

Rents in the San Francisco Metropolitan area are rising faster than any other major city in this country

In September 2012, I moved out of a studio in Oakland into the $1,700/month, 850 square foot two-bedroom apartment where I currently live. M and I went to the open house and applied on the spot. It was easily the best deal we’d seen in our month of stupefied, unhappy apartment-hunting, which so far had turned out to be as competitive and stressful as apartment-hunting in New York. The landscape had changed so much even from when we first got here in 2010. So my rent’s been around $850 for three years because of rent control.

The next tenants of this apartment will be paying $2,995.

In “Where I Was From,” Joan Didion writes: A good deal about California does not, on its own preferred terms, add up.

A year and a month or so ago I was hysterically sobbing in bed, or maybe on the couch, (one of those two soft places), saying that if M was positive our relationship was over then what was I even doing here, why don’t I just move to Michigan. I threaten to move to Michigan a lot. What will you do there? The subject of my threat will ask. Live with my Mom, I guess, I’ll say. Cry. I’m really fun, you guys. I also send really compelling, reasonable e-mails.

M suggested Los Angeles, where I’d been pressing her to move with me for the last year or so because I felt lonely and all my friends live there, but the idea of moving to a city I didn’t like by myself — especially when most of my friends there are couples — felt stupid. I didn’t want to start over like that.

I ended up not leaving at all, not then.

The threat to move to Michigan was always made in a specific context: some element of my life fell apart and I didn’t know how to fix it or myself.

I’m finally moving to Michigan under an entirely different context: one thing ended and another, very different thing, began. After I finished crying about the end of my 3.5 year relationship, I took the plunge and put a down payment on a car — my first time owning one in over ten years — which changed my relationship to this landscape immediately. I felt like a bird who could fly anywhere, so I did.

First, I drove to see about a girl. Abby was from Indiana but was working at an orchard in Oregon that summer. The first six months of 2014 had been pretty horrible, I’d been monumentally depressed (I was lying in this post when I said I wasn’t). So the drive through miles and miles of postcard-ready scenery felt like laughing so hard you fall down a hill into a pile of puppies.

Then we fell in love! We rode a ferris wheel in Sacramento laughing so hard our faces fell off and we picked them back up and laughed at ourselves and I knew it right then. I was ready to leave the state but decided to stay a bit longer, there was cool stuff happening with farming for Abby to check out. So she got a job here and we tried to find our own place but nothing was affordable, so I kept this one. M also started seeing somebody seriously and ended up getting a place in Oakland.

Abby loves the midwest and believes in its inherent goodness with a ferocity rivaled only by that writing teacher I mentioned and the more she missed it the more I considered missing it, too. Being here felt fun but never “sustainable,” especially because California’s about to fall into the ocean.

You know that iconic “commencement speech” that says:

 Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft. Travel.

I think about that a lot.

Abby wants to go to coding school so we looked for a good one near a friend or family member who might let us crash for a bit while we get sorted. We settled on Detroit, where my Mom lives. We’d be close to my family in Ohio, too, and Abby’s family in Indiana. Exciting things are happening in Detroit right now, like opportunities.

So now we’re leaving and I’m excited. I’m excited to be someplace new and figure out who I can be in a space that feels familiar but is being reborn and maybe I can find a place there. But I’ll miss some things, too.

The Escapist Comic Bookstore, Berkeley

I’ll miss the women’s only gym at the YMCA, because I see no reason to spend my precious 30-40 minutes of tranquil daily exercise with anybody besides hippie ladies in their fifties and sixties. It’s almost like being invisible. Everybody minds their own business.

I’ll miss Berkeley Bowl, and the abundance of fresh affordable produce in general. All the bookstores, too, like Moe’s three stories of books on Telegraph, Pegasus’s winding stacks and racks of ‘zines, the legendary City Lights with its entire floor of poetry. Mrs. Dalloway’s on College, which is like a gardening store that’s also a bookstore that’s also just really fucking cute. We found this comic book store, The Escapist Comic Bookstore, a few months ago I wish I’d found a few years ago because it has literally everything and when you think you’ve found everything you’ll find even more things behind it.

The Lawrence Hall of Science, in the Berkeley Hills, where Abby and I used to go all the time when we didn’t have a home to sit in. Georgina told us stories about hanging out up there in high school while the teenagers she used to be laughed nearby, smoking joints, drinking beer, whatever.

I’ll miss my friends here, who I don’t see as often as I should but when I do, I always think we should see each other more often than we should.

I’ll miss driving to A-Camp in San Bernardino. I bring a lot of shit to camp. Like I just bring whatever. You know how many magazines I bring to A-Camp for a three-hour ‘zine-making workshop? Like three hundred. I am not messing around with that shit. I bring full bottles of shampoo, Costco-sized whiskey, a giant whiteboard, sheets and pillows and towels, boots and shoes, boxes of crackers, truckloads of string cheese. I’m actually not sure how on earth I could ever fly to camp, which’s why I’m beginning my ten month campaign entitled “Abby, Let’s Drive To A-Camp,” starting now.

Speaking of Southern California, I’ve got hoes in one primary area code: Los Angeles. Even when I was still in New York, I went to LA a few times a year for one reason or another and since moving here, I’ve gone what feels like six or so times a year. For camp planning, “just to visit,” for a meeting, for an event. I usually see Alex multiple times a year, for example — her coming here, or me going there — and I’m gonna miss that a lot. However, I’m not gonna miss driving up and down the 5 with my woes.

I’ll miss everyone on Pacific Standard Time.

I’ve probably spent more time exploring California in general than I have exploring San Francisco itself and I’ll miss that, too, miles and miles and miles of it. There’s just so much to see out here and a lot of it is free ’cause it’s outside. I’ve seen the aquarium in Monterrey, the lighthouse at Point Reyes, the California State Fair in Sacramento, every bookstore in the Bay Area and the fainting goats of Calistoga. I’ve gone canoeing down a wide river in Mendicino, white-water rafting in the Lower Kern, camping at Lake Tahoe, driving down the Pacific Coast Highway and whale watching in Santa Cruz. That was rad.

But there is that city, too, and it is still quite something sometimes, even if it’s not the place I dreamed it’d be.

I love The Sutro Baths, for example. I love Twin Peaks. I’ve loved some Prides in Dolores Park.

My second night in the Bay, I went to Twin Peaks for the first time. It’s just two hills but from the top you can see the whole beautiful city with its teeny-tiny people and that big Rainbow flag in the Castro. The views out here!!! That night I went with M it was too foggy and dark and raining to really see anything, but I think that’s just the reality of my life: I only seem to make it up there when the weather is mediocre or even terrifying. The first time I went with Abby I thought we were gonna blow right off (like the joint that literally blew out of my pocket), tumbling down onto a winding car-commerical-ready road and then crushed by the city. Then Abby and I took two of our friends up there and then somebody stole our credit cards while we were petting puppies.

I’m going to miss the weed. That’s for damn sure.

*

in berkeley, there’s totally always tomorrow

in berkeley, no one needs a microphone.

*

I’ll miss the spot off the highway where Abby got down on one knee and waited for me to notice I’d walked so far ahead of her, turn around, and say yes.

*

From that first trip I took to The Lex with Crystal and Alex when we visited San Francisco in the spring of 2010, I’ve never felt quite as cool as everybody else here, which is hard to explain without sounding like a fossil. Also, for my work, I’ve started to feel disconnected from what it’s like to be queer anywhere but here, and sometimes I feel useless in a community sense.

Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft

It has been beautiful to the point of not always feeling real and I liked it but I’m leaving before it makes me soft.

*

I told Abby the only thing I’m scared of for Michigan are those rainy strip-mall days, when everything is cold and grey and it gets dark real early and you’re like, going from TJ Maxx to Kroger’s and stopping at the bank and it’s just dim. It’s easy to just give up and die sometimes. So there: I named my fear. Now I’m gonna face it.

My first year in California I was very happy. My second year I was happy. The next year and a half or so were good sometimes but often very sad. This past year has been almost entirely heart-explodingly fantastic.

When I think about the moment I get in my car and go — a moment that is mere hours away at this point — I still get that stab in the gut, that heart-achey cavern that isn’t missing something so much as it is the fear of missing something. Despite feeling always a bit disconnected from this place, I have also lived some of the absolute happiest moments of my life while living on this coast, and those moments have been because of the people but also because of the land. I will keep them in my gut, between the birds, underwater, shelved between something solid and something soft. I will keep them when I go.

berkeleystraddle was never really about Berkeley, anyway. It was about an imaginary town that shared a name with many real towns. It was about the idea of a place where there was always room. Room means space we can afford and space that can afford us, room means the chance to build. I’m heading East tomorrow in search of it.

I’m supposed to say look how we’ve all changed

in berkeley, there’s totally always tomorrow.