Go Forth and Seek Your Fortune!

“We’ve been on the run, driving in the sun looking out for number one…..California, here we come!” These words and the accompanying melody have meant more to me than I could have ever thought the first time I heard them through the speakers of my laptop, in my room, as I watched the pilot episode of the O.C. I had pirated from the internet. The first few bars of the song by Phantom Planet evoke a stronger physical reaction and more vivid memories than any other seminal moment of my life. The upwelling of emotion is enveloping and unexplainable.
It was my curiosity and my lack of material that led me to that moment. I had been making fun of the show, which had just started becoming popular, relentlessly, sight unseen, and I felt I could no longer lambaste it without, at least, seeing a single episode. Or perhaps it was that I needed new material to further mock a show about a place not far from where I was born, that I secretly longed for, having moved away so young as to be a hometown in name only. But whatever led me to that crossroads, I had stumbled upon something profound. Something I believe to be a real truth.
I have been lucky enough to share not only the show but the song with many people in my life. Some have ebbed from my circle of friends and some have plainly fallen out of favor, but during those three minutes and fourteen seconds I remember each of them, and my friends Seth, Ryan, Summer, Marissa and Sandy, at their best, for all the joy they brought into my life. The way we hope to remember those who have died tragically and too young.
Whitney and Joney were college buddies. We would grow to be quite close, but at the moment I sat alone in the cluttered room of my apartment, laptop on my thighs, watching the opening credits, we were barely more than acquaintances. After divulging how much I actually liked the very thing I had been campaigning against and making them both watch it on a night they had come over to drink beers and wax masculine about girls and sports we found ourselves in a peculiar situation. Here were three very heterosexual college athletes suddenly compelled to watch a drama on Fox intended for teenage girls. The embarrassment of our desires, and the inability to quell them banded us together. For the next two years we watched the show, in secret, religiously, and even became roommates. Two years after that, we came out of the closet and watched it with our girlfriends and friends that were girls. Even though it smacked of girl’s night, it was this show, this teenage soap opera that forged a bond that has flourished into a friendship among men.
The summer after my sophomore year at The University of North Carolina, against all adult advice, I decided to take a road trip with two high school buddies. Six weeks, 10,000 miles. Lots of couches and no concrete plan. It was single-handedly the best thing I have ever done in my entire life. We departed from the nation’s Capital and made our way west in my parent’s old Toyota Previa minivan which we were allowed to take due to my father’s firm belief that it would never make it back and would save his having to dispose of it. I will never forget the afternoon the three of us crossed the threshold of the California/Nevada state line, barreling leftward across the map, shirtless, with the windows down and California exploding out of the speakers. We were pilgrims and this was our anthem. We had plowed through a dozen states, crawled over the Rockies and burned through the desert to be there in that moment, in that second where Nevada and Utah and Colorado, and Montana and Kansas and all of the rest of the world was at our backs and California, the garden of Eden, was in our grasp. It is not actually true that I will never forget that afternoon; I have already forgotten the hours through the desert before our crossing and the truck stop where we fueled both ourselves and the van, but I remember every leaf on every tree and all the tastes of the air and the sensation of being so present in the moment, in that moment, that it becomes eternal, no longer a fleeting piece of time, but a place that I can visit anytime I hear the magic words….California, here we come.
“I’m 47 years old, I’m a grown ass man.” Ira Glass, of This American Life fame, said this about he and his wife’s weekly ritual of belting out California over the opening of The O.C. He even admits to lamenting the show’s cancellation to the point of tears. The man hosts a show dedicated to human interest and, despite my avid listenership, I connected with him more than ever when, talking about a drama on Fox about rich high schoolers in southern California, he said, “Every single week it makes me love my wife and love T.V. and love everything in the world, all at once, and last week when the show went off the air I cried and I’m not ashamed to admit it.”
What it is about this show and this song that have stirred me so deeply, so personally and connected me to others in a similar way I am not entirely sure. I know the California of my birth is far from the Eden I have built it up to be, but if you see a silver minivan, laying wake to the interstate towards the state line with the windows down and the radio up, just know I might be going home. “Right back where we started from.”