Fake Fall, Real Fall, and Something Shameful
Hi again!
October is the worst month to live in LA. It’s common knowledge that Southern California is season-less, but October likes to emphasize the point by hitting the high 90’s half a dozen times before Halloween. The heat is especially hellish for all of us Northern transplants; our biological clocks scream AUTUMN IS A STATE OF MIND and plunge us into a deep state of denial re: our proximity to sweater weather. We schlepp out to dirt patches scattered with imported pumpkins, risking heat stroke for a photo in our jean jackets. We light more Trader Joe’s cider-maple-rain scented candles than is arguably safe during fire season (oh yeah, we do have that one season: FIRE). It’s like we’re the old couple in Titanic, except the rising water is Dunkin’ Pumpkin Cold Brew and the orchestra is playing “Red” by Taylor Swift. If you close your eyes while driving on the freeway, the sound of cars colliding into you is just like the sound of a hayride accident on a farm in Vermont.
I was fortunate enough to escape the worst of Fake Fall this year. I’m back in LA now, but I spent the last three weeks in the Pacific Northwest with Kyle and his parents -- first in a tiny beach town on the Oregon coast and then in Kyle’s childhood house in a suburb of Seattle. It was less of a vacation than it was living through COVID somewhere else, but I did see a tree with foliage so yellow that I started crying, and for that and many similar moments I am immensely grateful.
When I was a kid, I thought that Washington D.C. and Washington state were the same thing. Educational programs like Grey’s Anatomy and iCarly eventually set me straight, but I still arrived in the Evergreen State earlier this month with very little knowledge of its history, culture, and general vibe. Some things I learned: no one in Washington knows that iCarly took place in Seattle. You can park your car facing either direction on the street. People pronounce bagel “beggel.” You will be mocked if you order a chowder at Ivar’s other than the salmon chowder. You will be mocked if you go “oh I didn’t realize we were driving onto the ferry!” Everyone stans Alaska Airlines and has an Alaska Airlines travel rewards credit card. The exterior of Meredith Grey’s house is even more beautiful than it looks on TV. Washington is maybe just Massachusetts copied and pasted further left.
Something I’d previously heard about from Kyle and his friends and have now witnessed with my own two eyes is the phenomenon of coffee huts throughout Washington staffed by bikini baristas. Please take a moment to read up on what a bikini barista is.
The highlight of the trip wasn’t when I spotted a hot air balloon soaring over a meadow of horses, or when I made a wish on a coin that I tossed into a whale statue’s blowhole that I realized hours later was a WISHING WHALE HAHA. It wasn’t anything I saw or did -- it was simply knowing that I was a four hour drive away from Forks, Washington, the legendary and iconic setting of the Twilight Saga. Those books were my absolute shiiiiiit in 7th and 8th grade. When I wasn’t rereading the series for the umpteenth time, I was religiously visiting the website RealMenReadTwilight.com. The site sadly doesn’t seem to exist anymore, but wow, what a gorgeous forum for insecure future gay boys and men! It lives on in my heart.
Breaking Dawn came out while I was away at Boy Scout camp, which put me in a sticky situation. Obviously I understood that Real Men Read Twilight, but I wasn’t so sure that my friends were on the same page. Waiting an additional couple of days to read the thrilling series conclusion was going to be torture, so I asked my dad before I left to please please buy me a copy and make sure he had it in his car when he picked me up in two weeks. It’s worth noting that a bus picked us up at camp and dropped us off at the town pool parking lot, so my dad was only getting the book to me like eight minutes before I was home -- still, he agreed to the plan. Understanding the delicacy of the situation, he even went a step further and graciously wrapped the book in brown paper to disguise the cover. What an ally.
I was never as passionate about the movie franchise, but I'd love to see a Ryan Murphy series about the paparazzo who broke the Kristen-Stewart-cheating-on-Robert-Pattinson-with-a-married-director story.
There is a moment in New Moon that is burned into my memory so vividly that I have to assume it’s burned into yours, too. Say it with me: the part where Edward leaves Bella and she gets so depressed that four pages of the book are left blank and just say OCTOBER NOVEMBER DECEMBER JANUARY because she has spiraled so hard that life is a blur and time is meaningless and how could Edward do that to her???? The movie version captures this perfectly as well, proving yet again that the Oscars wouldn’t know what to award if it bit them on the neck.
THIS is storytelling, and more than that, it’s an amazing representation of the transition into and out of fall. Right now it’s 99 degrees in North Hollywood, but I have chills.
I said on the record in my last newsletter that I would be more diligent about writing a new one every two weeks, which I immediately failed to do. I also said that anyone could personally reach out and yell at me if I missed the deadline; only my mom did this, but I know she spoke for thousands.
I promised I would do something, and I didn’t do it. I must be held accountable. As punishment for my abject failure, I’m going to humiliate myself and share an unedited, unredacted excerpt from one of the worst things I’ve ever written. I won’t even give context for the piece that might soften the blow; this is supposed to sting, and it will.
Without further ado, here is an excerpt from a short story I submitted to my freshman year Creative Writing: Fiction class, to be workshopped, as a graded assignment, sincerely, that was about two people meeting in the Boston Common and falling in love over a shared interest in Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.
Page 4 of 6:
And that Maybe came true, in a way. Because three weeks later I saw her again, and this time I actually talked to her about more than her dog and the weather. She was sitting on a bench reading from a large blue book I could recognize even from a distance. My heart fluttered as I got closer to her and could make out the title on the spine, confirming for me that this was someone I wanted to know.
“Hey, is that Infinite Jest?” I asked as I got to her bench, even though I knew the answer already.
Startled, she looked up from the book. She squinted at me until something clicked for her and she remembered why I must have looked familiar. “Hey! Yeah, it is. Have you read it?”
“It’s my favorite book!”
“That’s a pretty pretentious book to have as your favorite book,” she said, smirking.
She was right, of course. Infinite Jest is over 1,100 pages, with close to 100 of those pages consisting of small-print footnotes. It’s a challenge, and while I definitely enjoyed the writing, part of why I always name it as my favorite is that I’m proud I actually managed to finish it.
“Okay, yeah. But I bet you’ll say the same thing when you’re done with it. How far are you?”
She turned her attention back to the book and leafed to the page she had been on. “140. I’m really starting to get into it now.”
[Originally published on TinyLetter]