Califor-ni-a

Growing up in an east coast suburb, it seemed like there was this unspoken perception that, whatever "normal" life was, this was it. Ours was the archetype. We had houses with picket fences. We raked leaves in the fall and shoveled snow in the winter. December was hockey, May was baseball. George Washington had passed through our town (some say), and the pilgrims had had the first Thanksgiving nearby. Everyone was either a Democrat or a Republican. Half the fathers in town commuted into New York, which is probably the most archetypal city of all. This was the normal perception of life.

The perception was bullshit, of course, and you probably feel it no matter where you grow up. But I find myself thinking about it after transplanting to the Bay Area, which, more than anywhere else I've been, feels like a place where all bets are off. I've been living here for almost half a year now, and northern California has yet to become "normalized" for me. Which is not to say I don't like it, but simply that even after 4 months, passing over the same ground every day still feels like a bizarre act of discovery.

I offer, then, for anyone unfamiliar with the area, a relative newcomer's guide to life around the bay, compromised of three points to keep an eye out for.

1) The random stranger factor

If you come here, you will be accosted by random strangers more in the bay area than probably any place else you've been. Not just strangers, strange strangers: congenially odd people who will approach you and begin a conversation with something like:

"I'm doing a survey. What do you want in life?"

or

"A guy might come by, and I'm going to have to beat him up. While that happens, can you watch this painting and make sure no one steals it?"

And then they're gone, and you'll wonder which one of you was the real random stranger.

2) The roads

I have a theory that the roads and highways in the bay area were designed by a man who didn't have an eraser and wasn't allowed to start over. Everything is a tangle of bizarre intersections, knotted highways, and lanes that appear, disappear, and merge without warning or reason. Practice driving accordingly.

Also, the area becomes more or less impossible to travel by car on every weekday between 4 and 7. If you want to get from the south bay to the east bay on a Wednesday afternoon, you'll have to take backroads, and even then it'll be like a salmon swimming upstream. I asked some longtime residents about this regular immobility, and it seems that everyone has just kind of accepted it as part of life. (They say they're mostly happy it's not L.A.)

3) The weather exists outside of time.

The seasons seem like they shift and blend and swap places. In the summer, it can be literally 100 degrees in the east bay and literally 60 degrees in San Francisco itself. Even the clouds look somehow different, and the nearby mountains have proverbial shrouds of fog at odd hours of the day.

***

There's a place here in Palo Alto called Lytton Plaza. Currently, it's an open space with benches, a fountain, and live music as often as not. And when no live musician is there, easy listening music is pumped in at a pleasurable volume from discretely placed speakers, which is unsettling and relaxing at the same time. On the northern side, there's a pizza parlor called Pizza My Heart. I'm told that the plaza used to have hedges and be the shady place where stoners met, until they took the hedges down, added the music, and tried to make it family-friendlier. The internet also tells me that back in the 1970s, a group of Maoist revolutionaries dubbed it "the People's Plaza" and used it as a meeting place. According to the city's website, it's one of Palo Alto's "designated free speech areas."

I mention this because the other day, a man had set up a booth there with a big banner that said: "9/11 Truth and Cookies." It's a synergistic combination, and its at least a sign that conspiracy theorists are willing to meet us halfway. About a week before that, a man was standing outside the Häagen-Dazs waving a Bible and warning about the road to Communism. (I should say that there are far more fundamentalists and conservatives in California than the stereotype would expect you to believe.)

Down the street from Lytton Plaza yesterday, someone had parked the most bizarre car I've ever seen. It was bolted together, apparently from scrap metal, and looked like how people imagined 2010 back in 1960. It was something out of the Jetsons, by way of someone's garage. People were taking photos.

In the public discourse, "California" is talked about almost as if it isn't part of America—like it's as much a fringe of thought as it is a fringe of geography. I respectfully disagree. I think California is, in an odd way, very representative of America. It's a fragmented heap of people and ideas. It's a place where arrivals from everywhere else drop roots and grow out at odd angles—where the big winners, losers, and consolation prize recipients of American capitalism all have to share space on the highway. If you compressed America into a California-sized area, it may very well be California. I haven't gotten used to it and I'm not sure I'll stay, but for now: welcome.