#apologies to other southern californians please don't dox me

[emcant]

Rambling through the avenues of time

Thanks for the attention, in advance.

Going to SoCal in a few weeks because my hometown best friend's mom is getting married, so Hometown Best Friend, who currently lives in Asia, will be over for a long while. The county fair is on and neither of us have been in a decade or more, and we're planning some smaller cornball stops around LA. Partying like it's the 90s boiiii

I love a train and an excuse to read for hours, so normally I love the trip down there, but this time I'm absolutely dreading it. We grew up in a relatively sizeable suburb that peaked as a 1950s surf town. I didn't really realize how big it was until just this week, when I looked at the route map and saw all the nothing surrounding it. I always felt so isolated out there: the nearest other "cool spots" (read: larger towns than ours) are all a good hour away, and no matter how you travel to them, you get to look at mostly empty fields for the majority of the trip.

When I was a kid, I always imagined all the blank spots along the freeway filled in with a rainforest. I was a deeply introverted baby conservationist and that was the exact flavor of life I wanted to be surrounded by. Now I live in a much larger city with housing almost constantly in my line of sight, and I find that extremely comforting. Signs of life! Friends, maybe! I'll never meet most of the people living here, but I have this exceptional urge to protect them, based on this singular thing we have in common. I've apparently been craving neighbors to ride or die for, sight unseen, this entire time.

And I guess I'm kind of afraid of stepping away from them, even for a little while. In between the infrequent gorgeous ranch that's probably fully dependent on migrant labor, I'm going to see a ton of mid-sized shopping centers that I know are inaccessible without public transit. I don't want to be neighbors with people who would scoff at taking a bus; who consider it shameful to not have a car, house, recent phone, etc, but not shameful to use public storage and outlet malls; who are too paranoid to even occasionally walk to get their necessities. Yes, the farms self-sustain, to a certain degree - but the ability to "disconnect" like that smacks of privilege to me now.

I'm admittedly making a lot of assumptions, but I grew up mostly around the type I just summarized. I don't think I like that part of the world anymore. The land and the glimpses of the ocean can be gorgeous, but they damn sure don't make a place seem welcoming. Cities aren't for anybody until they're for everybody. Seeing CenCal and SoCal from the freeway is like peeping over the fences of an endless chain of gated communities.

So that's the shot, and the chaser is:

All the media I cling to as an adult has something that makes me feel like I'm literally there. I'm not going to shut up about Opal anytime soon because I jump every time I see Claire trying to wriggle out of her mom's grasp. I'll also probably never shut up about BTAS because I grew up with at least one parent with NPD, and that particular Joker doesn't crush it so much as he runs it through a hydraulic press.

When I Make It, I hope I capture the isolation I've been talking about. Boyfriend's been saying "alone in a crowd", but that's not quite it. It's more like getting out into the open world to realize that it's almost completely blank. The Allegory of the Cave, but it's actually a space capsule, and once you escape, you find yourself floating in the void. But with none of that imagery, of course. It'll be white walls and concrete and a constant cool fog that neither touches the ground nor lifts. While everyone you know tells you what a privilege it is to live somewhere warm and colorful and sunny.

My version of hell, crafted with love for the people who see it and say "same".

#this post is brought to you by a shitload of antidepressants #not that you'd know #edgelord shit #we live in a society #apologies to other southern californians please don't dox me #i'll stay here if you stay there