Posted on Saturday, 03/15/25.

I got back from the Bay Area on Tuesday——a direct flight, made easier by that the family friend I’d been staying with drove me to the airport, even. This was soured a little by us sitting on the plane for two hours before takeoff: something vague relating to ‘counting checked bags.’ By some mechanism, after an hour or so, everyone seemed to realize at once that the periodic assurances we would push back soon were basically bullshit and so started to move about. People went to the bathroom, opened and closed overhead bins, crinkled packages of snacks, and tried to ignore the three or so young children who, perhaps by some hidden sympathetic organ, had begun to uncontrollably cry-scream. I wondered about whether the people who’d taken their usual preflight Xanax were out yet. The attendants mostly looked defeated, keeping station in each octant of the plane. The younger man next to me (who would later say it was his first trip to Japan) attempted to win favor by telling me that parents with young children should have to pay an additional fee to board a plane, which I must have responded to with the wrong face because he didn’t ask me small-talk questions afterwards.

I’ve been letting myself sleep early and wake up near five or six, aware that the jet-lag wont stick. Unpacking was simple and my clothes, smelling strongly of American detergent from my family friends’ house, went directly into the closet. The space made by the gifts I distributed to various people on my trip was filled with used books from stores around Berkeley and a variety of snacks from Trader Joe’s and CVS-type stores. I picked up a Cerave SPF-moisturizer they don’t sell here, and some retinol. I’ve been doling myself a small amount of Starburst jelly-beans per day, like I am an addict.

I hadn’t been back to Walnut Creek since maybe 2013; I said this to a lot of people while I was there, because it is a curious fact. Living somewhere for thirteen years, leaving for nearly the same amount of time, and then returning is a unique, and I’ve learned uniformly abyssal experience. Like that I guess I know a little of why Odysseus was so sad. The parts that are the same as when I left (as when I was a child) seemed small and dated——the plastic play structures at Civic Park are the same. The downtown has been built into a shopping cluster. There is a McLaren dealership now, next to a Tesla dealership, next to the feldspar-clad Tiffany & co (which, to be fair, was there when I was a child). There is, apparently, the largest Anthropologie in the United States. The Barnes & Noble moved (its cavernous old space now filled by the Anthropologie). I walked to my old street and my house on the Iron Horse Trail——saw that it had its yard re-landscaped and various trees cut down. The willow tree we brought in the back of a pick-up truck, about a thumb’s-width then, is now nearly a foot across and twice as tall as the one-story ranch-style. I see the two lemon trees we planted, one much larger now, as though by some twin-transfusion syndrome. I searched for remnants of the huge bed of ferns my dad had been so proud of and saw, after a while, a couple remaining tendrils poking up, implying to me that some huge root system must persist. Plenty is left. I don’t know how I feel about this. Or, that I felt only very underwater about it all. Most people we knew on the street (the family friends I stayed with were our direct neighbors for years, though moved across town just before we left) have gone. The street is, in memory, sort of a mess of tragedies: people and animals killed by cars, a stalker, multiple illnesses, plenty of drug use, and all of this in, at their zenith, near million-dollar homes with pools and yards in perpetual bloom.

The family friend has a child in her sophomore year of high-school, and who was something like four or five the last time I saw her. There are also older children (two years and four years younger than me) who have since graduated college and are in Chicago and NYC earning a lot of money. I had seen subsets of each of them in the intervening years, but hadn’t been to their old house. The faucet in their kitchen is the same, but now sticks and exhibits small bits of true corrosion under its antiqued brass. For the week I was basically part of their school-night routine, which was almost impossible to believe had been going on all this time. I hitched a ride to the BART station in the morning and got myself back in the evening. The child had to be convinced to do homework, seemed to be wrestling with the densest, most dire part of adolescence. The child had recently come out as trans though had been gender non-conforming for a while, which I talked to the mother about. Most of my time was spent talking to the mom, in truth, whose work is based at home (the father does something high-powered in finance, though is kind), and who speaks more than just about anyone I’ve met, though engagingly and generously. The mother is convinced that the US is set to imminently collapse, and has been making plans to protect her children if that comes to pass, possibly including securing residence in another country——such conversations might be imagined as delusional or overblown, though I expect the collapse of basic norms of one’s government is hard to anticipate, and I had no real reassurances, exploring with her the hypothetical logistics of trying to secure stability outside the locus of US policy. We went to buy expensive English muffins from a local branch of a famous bakery one morning. We discussed the problem of school choice (their kids went to private high-schools while we went to the public one). They own a ‘goldendoodle’ who parcels out love freely. The product of most of our conversations was anxiety but also small agreements and stabilities——I felt welcomed in the house, and felt how sparse my social network had become, had always been, re people who would let you crash indefinitely with them, or would hide you from the police in crisis. I felt a little something like the enormity of the world’s network of information sharing systems, and how different the experience of people through them versus in-person is.

Besides these long conversations——this glimpse into settled Bay Area well-off suburban family life——I spent my time like a tourist. I walked around the downtown without buying anything. I picked through the library bookstore and found a small café I’d passed by in childhood but never gone to. I rode the BART back and forth to Berkeley. I drank expensive coffees and felt bad about things in passing. I tried to remember what my hometown had looked like, and was two ages at once, which split my mind and felt very uncomfortable. The plants along the trail are the same species——direct descendants of the weeds that had been there before, not by some act of preservation but mostly apathy. The curbs are the same slope of paint-flecked concrete. I realized that many of my memories of the shape and atmosphere of Contra Costa Country are rooted in zoning decisions, and that at that time I probably thought most of the US looked the same way in its basic infrastructure choices.

I should have tried to write more of this while there, but I’ve gotten bad at simultaneously processing a lot of input and producing a lot of output——this tendency towards single-threading is probably helpful in other ways, like some sieve to isolate the beautiful or affecting, but it lets my mind drift, and probably allows people to think that I’ve stopped thinking about them when I haven’t.