i keep confusing love and nostalgia

A week in Los Angeles and an Allison Crutchfield song

Darling, you're too mid-Atlantic

The bright red doors

You're firmly planted 

In the archway of your make-believe world

As a born-and-raised New Yorker, I always regarded Los Angeles as a sort of mirror dimension; the two cities as America’s larger-than-life bookends, straining against its watery borders and making audacious, grandiose gestures in an attempt to set themselves apart from the country between them like two rebellious children each finding their own way to disobey the same parent. I’m drawn to cities that take up so much space in the public imagination that anyone who isn’t from one of them (or at least anyone who hasn’t lived in one of them for an extended period of time) has trouble wrapping their mind around the idea of them as places where everyday life happens. 

I always thought I was too East Coast for LA, which could encapsulate any number of toos: too high strung, too neurotic, too cranky, too cynical; when I wanted to flatter myself, too intellectual, too literary, too real. 

I’ve retreated into all those same descriptors during the times where I’ve felt out of place in my current home of Wilmington, North Carolina. I moved for grad school and it’s been three years and although I’ve grown to love it there, I still don’t usually feel like I belong. All the paranoia and anxiety and sharp, hard edges carved into me by my New York City upbringing always give me away.

“It’s embarrassing if you love LA,” Eve Babitz wrote. She probably loved LA more than anyone. I’m rereading Slow Days, Fast Company while I’m in LA for a writers’ conference and I’m thinking about how I love LA and how loving LA is especially embarrassing if you’re a native New Yorker. I’m aware that it’s clichéd to be a 20something female writer in LA reading Eve Babitz, but it’s also clichéd to get turned away from the bar at Chateau Marmont on a Wednesday evening because you don’t have a reservation so you and the friends that you dragged there go get dollar wings at a dive on West Sunset instead. It’s perhaps even more clichéd to listen to Norman Fucking Rockwell! while drinking cheap white wine in the hot tub on the roof of the DTLA apartment building where you’re Airbnb-ing, only to get busted by the building’s security guard for using the pool area after-hours. My clichés are mine and I’ve chosen them very carefully. If I’m gonna live an unoriginal life, I’m gonna have a good time with it. I’m gonna write, “Rock on, gold dust woman” as an affirmation while I do my morning pages on the stiff, pilling mattress of the pullout couch I’ve been sleeping on, because doing so feels like believing the friend who tells me that he thinks I’m about to have “a big year,” or like catching glimpses of who I want to be while I move through this surreal and beautiful place. 

It’s impossible for me to spend any time in California without obsessively listening to and thinking about the usual suspects—Stevie, Joni, Joanna, Lana. During this particular trip, I’ve had Allison Crutchfield’s song “I Don’t Ever Wanna Leave California” in heavy rotation. It’s one that feels almost too on-the-nose, like Allison’s narrating my travels as an untethered East Coaster indulging in Californian escapist fantasies. Loving LA doesn’t just feel embarrassing, it feels dangerous.

I keep confusing love and nostalgia

I don't ever wanna leave California

A few days before I left for LA, I turned in my MFA thesis, which is an essay collection largely about love and even more about nostalgia and all the ways it’s constantly saving and ruining my life. 

“If somebody says nostalgia’s a trap, they need to get caught. Nostalgia’s a great thing,” says Wrecks Bell in an interview for Meaghan Garvey’s newsletter SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE. (I assume that most of the people who read my newsletter read hers too, and if you don’t, what are you even doing??)

I often find myself nostalgic for things that never happened or things that are still happening. I have a hard time experiencing a fun or beautiful thing without imagining what it’ll be like to remember and miss it. I dress up in future wistfulness like it’s a hand-me-down I’ve yet to grow into. 

I also have a habit of thinking, “Maybe I should move here” about any city that turns out to be slightly more walkable or public-transit-accessible than I expected. A few days ago I walked all the way from Mid City to Beverly Hills just for the hell of it. I tell myself and my skeptical friends that every city is a walkable city when I’m in it.

I came to LA for a writers’ conference. When I was at the same conference in a different city two years ago, my mentor/best friend’s mother asked if I minded her introducing me to someone as a “young writer.” I said please do, I don’t know how much longer I can still be considered a young writer and I want to milk any remaining precociousness I have left (You can’t be precocious as an adult. Well, maybe you can, but not without being thoroughly insufferable as well). Anyway, I’m not sure if I’m still a “young writer,” and I fear that with every passing year my work and I will become less and less relevant and less and less impressive.

I won’t go into the day-to-day details of this writers’ conference because no one wants to read a writer writing about being a writer. That’s boring and self-indulgent, and in this newsletter I’m only allowed to be one of those things. I will mention though, that during said conference I bought a copy of Geoff Rickly’s novel Someone Who Isn’t Me, which I’ve been meaning to read since last summer. He signed it with a line from his song “Understanding In A Car Crash”—I don’t want to feel this way forever

Thanks Geoff!

Coincidentally, this particular Thursday song is one that I’ve thought about a lot these past few months. The day before New Year’s Eve, my parents were in a car accident that left my dad knocked unconscious with multiple broken vertebrae and my mom with the memory of the two of them almost dying. They’re both through the worst of it now, but still recovering physically and emotionally. Barely a month later, my boyfriend and I nearly got T-boned by two college kids while driving home on the night of our anniversary. No one was hurt, thankfully, but when the memory is still fresh in your mind of getting the call that your father had a seizure at the wheel and crashed into the side of a house with your mother and family dog at his side, a second car accident isn’t exactly the best thing for your already-fragile psyche. I’d had lingering guilt about going back to school in a different state and leaving my mom and sister alone to care for my dad (even though they’d insisted that I finish up grad school on the timeline I’d originally planned). When the second crash happened, it was hard for me not to view it as cosmic punishment for what a part of me saw as an act of betrayal and a failure to be a good, supportive daughter.

On the avenue of the giants, the sun really cuts through

Unless you force your way in, I don't think about you

You always have your cake and eat it too

Have your cake and eat it too

I often convince myself that whenever I feel bad it’ll last forever and whenever I feel good it’ll never happen again. It’s a habit I’ve spent my whole life trying to grow out of. I also need to grow out of treating each passing good feeling as nothing more than nostalgia fodder, a security blanket to hold onto when things inevitably go downhill. In this mindset, there are no good experiences, only good memories.

The last time I visited California I was fresh off a painful but ultimately necessary creative breakdown. Now, almost a year later, I’m back here with a collection of essays, an almost-complete masters degree, and a desperate need to figure out where I’m going to be living and working a few months from now. It’s a precarious and at times downright terrifying phase to be in but I’m familiar enough with the background noise of my own anxiety to know that even if I had the next chapter of my life planned out I’d still find something to worry about. 

This time around, I feel able to lean into the uncertainty, which probably has to do with the things I’ve accomplished in my work, education, and personal life since then that I’m genuinely proud of. I don’t know if this newfound momentary confidence has enabled me to indulge in daydreams about things going right or if those are just a way to temporarily stave off my fears about the future. 

By the time you read this I’ll be headed back to the East Coast, or maybe already there—back in my real life, still wondering if trying to turn the daydream into reality might drain out all its magic, still stockpiling moments to miss.

I aspire to live in the present

But I look at bungalows and I calculate the rent

You stay angry, you tread water

'Cause you are only grown in stature

---

Some self-promo/announcements:

I published my first Pitchfork piece earlier this month, something I’d been wanting to do for a while. I was lucky enough that it was a review of Star 99’s fantastic new album Gaman. Read, listen, and give Star 99 some love because they rock.

Issue 2 of Portable Model, a zine designed and edited by friend of the blog Miranda Reinert is available to order now! I’ve got a piece in it, and so do many music writers that I admire. Order your copy to support some great independent writing and publishing, and to figure out what the hell I’m talking about here:

I have some other work coming out soon, both online and in print, so please keep an eye out! As always, thanks for reading.