A Dream of California
In a few short days I will be leaving the Southern US, where I was born and raised and have spent all 48 years of my life, moving across the country to San Diego. It’s been a dream to live in Southern California for literally as long as I can remember having a preference. The idea that has driven my imagination about the West has changed and morphed over the years. When I was a kid, I dreamt of living in California because I imagined living amongst movie stars and making famous friends. As I’ve gotten older my thoughts of the West mostly center around the temperate climate, political leanings of the population, and the inspiration the ocean brings to my psyche (with only the occasional thought of befriending a lonely Eddie Vedder wandering the San Diego beaches.) Inspiration at my age is hard to come by; it’s fleeting and fewer and fewer things seem to create it for me these days. I figure I need to take advantage of the things that do inspire me now while I can clearly identify them. Even though I’ve never felt like I’ve belonged in the South, and my political and seemingly therefore my beliefs about life, are at odds with the majority of the population where I currently live, I can’t help but wonder if I’m just trading geography for another set of problems.
Springsteen is perhaps the greatest storyteller of our time. His lyrics are prolific and are constructed in such a way that they conjure vibrant images of real-life society and characters you rarely think about, and they have the uncanny ability to enable you to always come away with a nuanced perspective of some aspect of life that you hadn’t quite considered the same way previously. He recently released a film titled, ‘Western Stars’, a throwback and homage to the days when Americans revered both cowboys and those that sang and acted in movies about them. In the film version of the song, ‘Chasing Wild Horses’ he starts the song by lamenting that ‘You can run away a lot for a little while, but you can’t run away from it all forever, and you certainly can’t outrun yourself.” I wonder if I’m doing that very thing now. My only solace is that even if that’s what I’m doing, at least I’ll have the ocean and seventy degree weather to make me feel better about my choices.
