As a result of everything we have going for us out here, the criticism we get is pretty thin gruel. My favorite one is the horror and disgust about the "lack of seasons" we have to suffer through out here. Palm trees are terrible and useless, yes, that's objectively true, so I can see why a reasonable person would develop a preference for the leafy type of trees with the changing leaves that drop away gently into pleasant earth-tone piles instead of throwing 40-pound saw blades at passers by from a hundred feet. But I'm less than convinced that cloudless 75 degrees in the middle of December is something people in most places of this country would anxiously turn their noses up at. Well, I guess unless it was out of pure spite. Now that I think about it, there's a lot we'll do to ourselves just to make a stupid fucking point. I think I talked myself out of that premise.
So there's no crisp autumn chill in the air. It's going to be around 90 out here through the beginning of October at least, which is normal. So how is the Californian adapted to the chronobiological cycle of each trip around the sun and the intervening equinoxes and solstices? The cues we take are environmental, but more specifically related to the core components of social existence around here. We know it's fall when the Halloween costume pop-up stores appear in otherwise dead storefronts, when the artsy Oscar-type movies rear their heads during the Toronto International Film Festival and when the new season of network television programming begins. None of these things can occur until all the sun's rays are hitting us perpindicularly and the days are once again short enough that we have less safe daylight hours away from gang initiation headlight-flash hunting season.
I've already seen one small artsy movie but I really don't start binge-theater-going until November. Right now I'm killing myself trying to keep up with some of the new TV I've DVR-ed as I try some stuff out. Being the dad of three teen and near-teen boys, their ages are dovetailing with the cresting tide of comic-book-inspired entertainment, so there's Gotham and The Flash. Plus my oldest is an enormous fan of both Britishness and public humiliation by bullying, so we watch a couple of Gordon Ramsay shows. Plus there's our old slate of Modern Family and Agents of SHIELD and Chopped and Top Gear (US and British) and I got them into Comedy Bang! Bang!, plus football and baseball with hockey and basketball to come...
I don't know if I can do much more. I know I have to make some effort. Cultural currency is a series of exhausting, active choices, but I live in fear of being the guy who's outside the pop culture conversation and is thus forced to expend a lot of energy trying to explain some context into my All in the Family references.
I passed the first crisis with music. In the late '90s and early 2000s, when I was in my mid/late 20s, I had to decide if the kids and their rock music had simply gotten away from me as I transitioned to curmudgeonhood. Luckily this was the period of Nickelback and Limp Bizkit and fucking Creed, so it turned out that those were objectively awful and it wasn't just me. There are loads of modern bands that I like.*
Television and movies I'm scrambling with, but I'm doing my best. I still haven't watched The Wire. I'll get to it. Eventually. I did Battlestar Galactica and Breaking Bad, so I feel like I'm doing OK. The Walking Dead isn't going to happen, let me just put that right out there on Front Street, but Mad Men will probably have to be a thing, I'm told. I can do it. It's that or settle into the spiral of comfortable, unplugged irrelevance down toward the plughole of human death. This is the fight I've chosen to take up to stave off the specter of mortality. It's way easier than diet and exercise.
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*The Eagles are still terrible though, that's something we can agree on across generations I hope.
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