Rejected essay from the LA Times

A few months ago, my publisher asked me if I was interested in potentially writing something for the LA Times to promote my book. Generally speaking, I find the whole “write an essay to promote the book you wrote” thing offensive. Like, I wrote a book? Why do I need to write an essay now? Why are you making me generate my own press? Just one of the many depressing things about publishing in 2024.

But it sounded fun to write about California. I pitched some ideas and they liked some of them and then I accidentally did something obnoxious, which was write about a 10-year-old Saturday Night Live skit instead.

Also I struggled with the word count. I don’t know how to write a good 800-word essay.

Understandably, it was rejected.

I also realized that I was more interested in attracting Kyle Mooney’s attention than I was interested in writing an essay about California.

Kyle Mooney, if you read this, I think you are very funny. Your brother is friends with my bff and therefore you should be my friend.

Here is the rejected essay. I left the word “gay” in there, used as a pejorative. My publisher had advised me to leave it out.

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My husband Scott and I are at the San Diego airport, a red-eye back home, when I hear it.

            “Oh my god,” I whisper to Scott. “It’s giving me a PTSD response.” I am half-joking, half-serious.

            Behind us, there are two surfer guys, speaking in surfer guy dialect. It is the soundtrack of my high school, and, in high school, I was mentally ill and suicidal. It is a way of speaking that feels oppressive. I mash in my earbuds to drown it out.

            The dialect is not Bill and Ted, or Jeff Spicoli, with voices deep and words drawn out, digging into consonants like gravel. It’s related, and some of the vocabulary is the same– dude, gnarly – but this dialect is its own thing. Some syllables are high-pitched and nasal, almost feminine. Words are clipped. There is a sing-song quality, which seems related to the Tijuana accent. Mumbling, with words sliding into each other, is a distinctive feature.

            The only place I’ve seen it replicated correctly is in Kyle Mooney’s “Inside So-Cal” segments on SNL, which makes sense because Mooney is my age, grew up in a San Diego town a few miles from my own. The videos are presented as a cable access show where a bunch of surfer guys report on the mundanity of their lives: Sean and I got paid for doing landscaping for my dad. There’s a ton of fresh powder in Mammoth. We’re going to start our own clothing line. The skits feel plucked from my own memory. It is shocking to see that micro-specific dialect on NBC, dribbling from the mouths of Jonah Hill and Pete Davidson.

            And here it is again, in the airport, twenty-five years in the future.

            I look over my shoulder to scope them out. Late twenties, dressed exactly the same as they did in the ‘90s: baggy shorts, surf t-shirt, skate shoes, socks pulled up. Their skin is uniformly brown, except for a pale patch on the nose, the result of being sunburnt repeatedly and then peeling. Hair is sun-bleached, chin-length, tamed under a ball cap, which can be worn either frontward or backward, as long as the brim is kept flat (another perfect detail from “Inside So Cal”).  

            In Del Mar, where I was a teen in the ‘90s, their culture involved pot, beer, classic rock, burritos (not tacos, just burritos), and not much else. It was devoid of emotion, aggressively anti-intellectual and inarticulate. All cultures are exclusionary, but this type of surf culture was so narrow, it held almost nothing. The worst offense was to not be chill, to instead be aggro, which made you a kook, and kooks were gay. As my mental problems got more and more acute, I became less and less chill, eventually ostracized by the surfers who had once been my friends.

            The Del Mar I grew up in was upscale—many of our classmates came from wealth—but it was a shabby beach town, too, salt-worn stucco, plastic chairs, and peeling paint. We had parties on the beach, ate acid in the nature reserve, and nobody bothered us. At lunch, we drove to the strip mall, got cheap sandwiches filled with sprouts from the health food store.

            Now, each time I go back to visit my family, Del Mar has become more alien. The bookstore where I worked was demolished. In its place, there is a multi-story food court, where you can get overpriced ramen or an overpriced IPA. The health food store with the cheap sandwiches moved to a bigger footprint, with prices that now make Whole Foods seem like Trader Joe’s in comparison. Across the street, there was an empty lot, where my friends and I threw keggers. Now, it is another shopping center, with a Lululemon and a parking garage full of Tesla chargers. It is disorienting, trying to remember what used to be where, when everything looks so different, yet some of the markers are the same—the Ralphs is still the Ralphs, the Starbucks is still the Starbucks.

            One visit, I try to take my husband to the spot in the canyon where I ate acid and listened to Led Zeppelin. Most of the bungalows that dotted the neighborhood have been replaced by monstrous imitation Italian villas. The path to the spot is at the top of the hill, accessible through a blank space between two houses. But now we walk right past it. The blank space is gone. In its place, another imitation Italian villa.

            We like to walk down to the beach in the evenings. There are two ways to get there—through the parking lot and the main entrance, or under the bridge and across the train tracks. Now, we have to go under the bridge whether we want to or not; the main entrance is frequently inaccessible because the sea level has risen so high. During one visit, the waves spit thousands of rocks all over the entrance, a rejection of human presence—the ocean has had enough of us. We used to walk on the sandstone bluffs, along the train tracks, but now they’re closed off to walkers because they frequently collapse.

            The cliches are true. Del Mar has twisted into something I no longer understand, the beachiness scrubbed off, now a symbol of society’s sickness: a capitalist dystopia, a refusal to acquiesce to mother nature’s demands in the face of climate change.

And those voices in the airport. They bring me back to the miserable days of high school, my inability to be chill, a culture that nearly killed me. But also. I take my earbuds out, to listen. Those voices sound like a home that doesn’t exist anymore. As Led Zeppelin said, the song remains the same.