rationale

being a full-time eccentric always comes with the danger of losing touch with common folk and becoming completely unhinged, which is why every year around the start of december i take a vacation by going to one of the most normal places in the world: southern california. the pretense for these annual trips is assisting my friend/business partner/former minecraft arch-nemesis with his seasonal christmas light installation business, which also has the benefit of paying off the entire trip and then some. but to some extent i also enjoy the work, the way it brings me into intimate contact with various pockets of deep suburbia as though i'm a jungle explorer observing uncontacted tribes, the endless feeling of amusement i get putting up fake icicles in 80 degree heat, and of course the usual stuff about lighting up the night and creating something pretty.

i don't remember how it all started, whether he invited me or i asked to come over, but when i first came over my friend still lived with his parents, at the furthest edge of san diego's furthest suburb. apparently a coyote once leapt the fence and mauled a member of their herd of cats in broad daylight. the area had a kind of small-town feel without the shame or indignity of having to tell people you live in a small town, my friend invariably tells people he's from "san diego" even though it was 40 minutes away at best.

i mostly interacted with his dad, who was around the house all day because he day traded stocks on an insane eight-monitor setup in the garage. but he didn't really have anything to do after the markets closed at 1 pm in our time zone, so usually i saw him taking care of the cats or playing "world of warships" on the xbox while listening to stuff on his laptop, which was either fire-and-brimstone sermons on youtube or play-by-play stock market analysis by these guys who put on the "thinking fast and slow" audiobook whenever they'd go on break. i also heard a steady stream of discord ping noises, and later i found they came from an investing discord server he paid a subscription fee for, which amused me because at the time i still thought discord was just a gamer thing.

unfortunately, a year or two ago my friend's parents moved away to an obscenely large house in the furthest suburb of dallas, due to taxes and politics. my friend ended up moving in with his grandparents, where the accommodations were significantly less accommodating to guests, due to the house not only being smaller but also stuffed chock-full of decades of accumulated boomer detritus (tchotchkes, knick-knacks, every receipt that had ever been printed for them, etc.) we tried looking for an airbnb, of which there were plenty of nice ones available at a discount due to being in the off-season and last-minute, and we decided to try and shoot for one with a jacuzzi or hot tub. but, apparently airbnb decided to become the fun police and ban parties entirely recently, which they mostly do algorithmically by denying High Risk bookings (last-minute and of large houses with things like jacuzzis) by High Risk individuals (young people who live nearby, blatant ageism once again). so, naturally we got caught in the crossfire and were basically banned from booking anything, even though our motives were entirely pure. all we wanted to do was chill out in a jacuzzi on the cheap after a long day of hanging christmas lights, and of course for me to not have to sleep on an air mattress in my friends room, which could barely even fit it. tell your friends: airbnb is literally making psycho-pass real.

airport

the approach to san diego international airport offers several dramatic sights: sweeping views of the modest (though expansive) san diego skyline to the left, and then passing just over several buildings and the venerable west coast artery interstate 5 to touch down on the tarmac. it's probably the closest you can get in america to recreating the legendary landing experience at hong kong's old kai tak airport, flying low over the highrises and highways of kowloon city. also like kai tak, san diego airport has only a single runway, and in fact it is supposedly the world's busiest single-runway airport. having only one option makes the flight path over the city for every plane almost identical, which sometimes has the effect of making it seem as if there's an invisible road in the sky. at one point we worked on on a house directly under the flight path for planes taking off, and during peak hours a plane would pass by every five minutes, all going the exact same direction.

driving

residents of every large metropolitan area always insist that their city has the most ferocious drivers, almost as if they're bragging. in the interest of impartiality i will refrain from making any superlative judgements and instead present my objective observations from one particular case study and let you be the judge. the subject is friend/business partner/former minecraft arch-nemesis, forged in the crucible of san diego's concrete rivers from a young age since he commuted into the city for high school. he is probably as close as you can get to a native creature of san diego area freeways.

every traffic light or stop sign was a chance to play the "how close can i get to the back of the car in front of me before stopping" game, of which he was such a skilled player that the scores were always measured in inches, if not fractions of an inch. a similar game was played on the highway with following distances, of which any car in the fast lane not going at least 20 miles over the speed limit found itself an unwitting participant. if the car in front of him happened to brake very suddenly, he would have to deploy one of his signature moves to avoid an accident: diving into the shoulder on the left while braking hard (out of five near-accidents i counted during the week i was there, this move was involved in two). another signature move was taking an exit way too late by veering across several lanes of traffic and going through the triangular no-man's-land outside the lines to make it down the ramp.

one striking thing for me, someone who often optimizes outings in order to reduce driving time/distance, is that he seems to consider driving a "free" action. he was telling me about a real quick 1 hour job they did that paid extremely well, but wouldn't listen to me when i tried to explain that it was really a three hour job if you count the fact that it took an hour to get there and back. one of my tasks was to calculate his mileage for reimbursement, and i was astonished to discover that he had apparently driven 847 miles in nine days, all without ever leaving the greater san diego area. that was also only counting miles driven for work, the total miles he drove during that time almost certainly cracks a thousand. after just a year or two of ownership, his truck has 33,000 miles on the odometer.

he played a lot of christmas music in the car as usual, but also mixed in some modern country music, which was interesting to me because it's one of those genres i almost never hear. from my impression, most of the lyrics are almost insultingly straighforward, with absolutely no ambiguity. all of them seem to draw upon the same handful of painfully cliche themes: trucks, guns, drinking, and domestic quarrels (usually resulting from some combination of the former). even though i've never lived in the "country", i feel like if you gave me 20 minutes i could write the lyrics for a new hit country song. despite this, they're somehow so generic yet so earnest (and sometimes playful) that i think they would be very difficult to parody, since to some extent they are already autoparodies (this is also what makes parodying trump effectively so difficult, he always manages to outdo the parodies).

geography

san diego county is the bottom left corner of california, bordered by the pacific ocean to the west and mexico to the south. it is home to about 3.2 million people, the fifth-most populous county in the US. while looking that fact up i also discovered that somehow the kalaupapa peninsula on molokai, which i gazed at from afar only a couple months ago, is not only its own county, but it's also the second-least populous in the country. although san diego county is quite large, inland it's mostly desert or scrubby mountains, so the vast majority of the population lives near the coast where the climate and elevations are milder, and the landscape is dominated by a kind of dry shrubby vegetation known as chaparral. chaparral certainly has its charms but you don't feel too guilty bulldozing it for a new development.

probably the most interesting thing about san diego geography, however, is the verticality. many large metro areas tend to be relentlessly, oppressively flat, which tends to intensify sensations of sprawliness. the san diego metro area, on the other hand, is spread out over a landscape of valleys, plateaus, gullys, and rolling hills. it forces developers and city planners to get a little creative, since they can't just put down a massive grid and call it good. growth is forced to look less machinic and more organic, many roads end up with gentle curves from following hills and ridges. physical barriers like steep plateau walls create natural neighborhoods, accessible only by a handful of roads that make use of eroded creekbeds as access points. at the bottom of canyons, ancient riverbeds are repurposed as roadbeds, convenient secluded routes for busy roads like freeways and boulevards. one highway going from plateau to plateau hops over an entire valley, the entire width spanned by one long viaduct.

⊕if you head far enough east on any of the major highways, twisting and turning through valleys and hills, eventually you find yourself in a huge, magnificent box-shaped valley, surrounded by rolling hills on all sides. this is one of san diego's furthest suburbs, el cajon, which means "the box" in spanish. what really fascinates me about el cajon, though, is the enormous brown government office building that seems to be placed almost at the exact geographic center of the valley, which i have dubbed the "el cajon donjon". it stands out especially because it is also by far the tallest and most massive building in the entire valley, ominously looming over everything like a symbol of omnipresent government oversight. if it was used in a movie as the headquarters of an evil authoritarian government, people would probably say the set design is a little heavy-handed. but the el cajon donjon is an actual legitimate government building that officials at some point in (i assume) the sixties or seventies thought would be appropriate to build. i wonder if they intended it as a hulking symbol of government domination, or if they merely wanted it to blend in to a future el cajon skyline of larger buildings that never ended up being built, leaving the el cajon donjon not a monarch, but an orphan.

in-n-out burger

⊕a yellow arrow at a dramatic acute angle marks each location of these alabaster temples to californiana, seemingly frozen sometime in the sixties: palm trees, classic cars, sunsets, neon, checkboard tiles, paper hats. the menu contains only the essentials and rarely changes, but each item is executed to perfection and at rock-bottom prices. for real devotees, there is also the officially-sanctioned secret menu, and all the allure of the hidden and the exclusive that comes with it. with the possible exception of chick-fil-a, i do not think there is a fast food chain in the country that inspires a more fanatical following.

in-n-out is not without its downsides, of course. to some extent it's a victim of its own success and frequently enormously busy. in the past couple of days headlines were made when they opened the first one in idaho and people waited for six hours to get some. you'd think the waits wouldn't be so bad in california where it originated, but even there it's usually very busy, and in fact some of the longest waits i've had were in california. especially bad is the infamous late night rush, since in-n-out is open until 2 am and almost always the best and cheapest place open at that time, which means that everyone goes there. every time i've gone to in-n-out after 11 pm, it's been at least a 40 minute wait.

also, i know i said earlier in the overture that every item on the menu is executed to perfection, but actually in-n-out probably has the worst fries in the industry. they are limp, flaccid, and eminently unsatisfying to consume, and even ordering them "well done" (a secret menu passphrase) can't save them. basically the only thing you can do to salvage them is getting them animal style, which means that they dump a massive amount of signature sauce, grilled onions, and melted cheese on them and basically turn them into a sort of poutine. it's good but fairly heavy and almost certainly quite unhealthy, one of those dishes that has you sweating and breathing hard like you just went for a run.

midway

san diego bay is one of the best natural harbors on the west coast, so ever since spanish colonial times it's been a big naval town. probably one of the reasons san diego airport only has one runway is because the military takes up so much land, with its bases and its own airfields. on my flights to san diego i often see young guys in buzzcuts who are on their way to basic training or something, and in town you'll occasionally see people in uniform and plenty of signs talking about military discounts or honoring the troops. but of most interest to me is that san diego is one of the few places in the world where you can tour a decommissioned aircraft carrier, the venerable USS midway. i have always been curious what the inside of one of those things looked like, and the answer is, quite cramped for the most part, with the sole exception of the enormous interior hangar that spans the entire length of the ship around the middle. in the other parts, you feel like you're scurrying around an enormous and hopelessly complex, totally incomprehensible machine, real SSR vibes. the corridors are labyrinthine, there are meticulously-labelled pipes and wires running literally everywhere, and the wall is plastered with an overwhelming assortment of warning signs, instructions, labels, all of it steadily accreted over the ship's four decade service history⊕. it was pretty astounding how the midway was still in service as late as the gulf war during the nineties, with outdated technology giant steam boiler and analog instruments (the radio room had an impressive array of knobs and dials). vital information was displayed and kept updated in the war room and the command room using special transparent whiteboards, so that guys could stand on the other side of them and write without blocking anything (since they were on the opposite side, they had to write backwards).

it was also a window into another way of life, a life confined not just by the cramped corridors of the ship, but by a strict hierarchy, stringent regulations, and regimented behavior. it seems stifling, however in some ways it can also be safe and comforting, like a swaddling blanket. it's a simplified microcosm of the world, with clear goals and advancement, like a video game. your commanding officer issues you orders (quests), you complete them and earn experience, and if you do well you eventually get promoted, which comes with concrete benefits. the biggest divide was between the enlisted men and the officers, who had their own quarters, an exclusive dining room with better food, and even their own dedicated lounge. but i couldn't help thinking that even the captain's quarters, which were naturally the largest and best-equipped on the ship, weren't that much compared to what you'd have on land or even on a cheap cruise ship. i suppose it's all relative.

the midway wasn't decommissioned that long ago, so there are still plenty of people around who served on her. some of them come in and volunteer in the museum, talking to visitors about their experiences on the ship. one old guy took a small group of us around the main kitchen, explaining to us how much it used to suck working in the kitchen because it was always extremely hot and noisy. nowadays it stands sterile and mostly quiet, save for the faint shuffle of visitor footsteps and the mild hum of the air conditioning. i wonder what it must be like, coming back decades later to your former workplace (where the ultimate product was, of all things, war) preserved as a museum.

field notes: suburban comatose

⊕i doubt this is in california but it's for Symbolismsouth california suburbs: a place of unspeakable decadence built in the barren desert, to many the peak of human civilization, to some, the depths. it's difficult to believe that only a few miles away over an arbitrary line in the desert, many are living in third-world squalor. it might as well be the border between north korea and south korea.

deep suburban developments are approached through a type of wide, well-landscaped four-lane road often referred to as a "parkway". they almost always feel far larger than they need to be for the amount of traffic they get, although maybe that's just the impression i get having never seen them at peak rush hour. the labyrinthine road networks within each subdivision seem to me a kind of defense mechanism, akin to the complex tunnel networks of rabbit warrens or termite nests, or the dense rambling randomness of the slums that lets the intrepid local evade capture. in the case of the suburbs, the goal is not just survival but seclusion, the enemy being noise, the world, everyone else.

although the suburbs are generally quiet, they are not entirely dead. throughout the day they buzz with activity from various support workers: package deliverers (not just the big three of USPS, UPS, and FedEx anymore, amazon seems to have added their own private army to the fray as well), garbage trucks, food/grocery delivery, pest control, landscapers, leaf blowers, maids and housekeepers, and of course our own crew of christmas light installers.

every suburb is equipped with meticulously-maintained sidewalks, but they cannot really be used to actually go anywhere since the sidewalks in each neighborhood are closed networks, dead-ending once they reach the main road. this is because their true purpose is not transport, they are there only to facilitate certain common suburban pursuits like dog walking and jogging, all within the safe confines of the neighborhood.

each house seems to have at minimum three cars parked outside (usually the garage, the most adaptable and accessible room of the house, is given over to storage of sporting equipment, a workshop, a home gym, a home arcade, etc.) many of the cars enormous, minivans or suvs or trucks, land tanks designed to make it unscathed through socal's highway battlefields. every car looks shiny, brand new, as if it just rolled off the assembly line. the car is of such importance to the suburbanite that they are lovingly kept in such a condition through a complex support system of car washes and other services such as "auto detailing", something which i'd heard of before but didn't really know what it was. turns out it's a guy you pay to clean the inside of your car with a little vacuum and stuff. a large proportion of the cars are genuinely new as well. i wonder if they are on some kind of "car plan" like a cell phone plan, where each year they get an upgrade to the new model.

the middle class is defined by its status anxiety, eager for opportunities to rise up to the ranks of the upper but anxious to avoid slipping down to the lower. in comparison to the lower class they have a lot to lose, but unlike the upper class, they cannot afford to lose much. recently, there's been one particular product that's rapidly become almost ubiquitious in the suburbs due to the way it plays perfectly upon those middle class insecurities: the ring doorbell/home security system. what's really being sold is peace of mind, the ability to quickly check in from anywhere and verify that yes, nothing is going on. even if a burglar was caught on camera (already a highly unlikely occurrence considering the crime rates in most suburbs), what could you realistically do? by the time anyone gets there, it's probably already too late. security professionals know that in these cases, the best you can do is usually just deterrence, which can be done by mounting some fake cameras and stealing one of those security system signs from someone else's yard, and putting it in yours.

something i notice when suburbs are depicted in the media: everyone wants to expose their dark side, be it hidden perversions, drugs, murders, cults etc. i think that people want to believe that there's something more to suburbs, a deeper layer, anything to avoid confronting the true horror of total banality.