San Diego is for Catholics. Catholics make an art out of reasoning their way through the impossible reconciliation of opposites and, from this tangle of apologisms, draw a single conclusion. San Diego claims one of the healthiest and most attractive populations in the world and yet fosters a culture dependent on dependency, a survival by substance. For awhile, I got down. And when I say I got down, I mean I fucking GOT. DOWN. But somehow, these people, the 24-hour-party-people of the sun have figured out how to keep their looks, their complexions and their checking accounts alive while consuming - everything.
Study #1 | Quality Social | 789 6th Ave, San Diego
Quality Social is a bar that is either built for a different city altogether or is a testament to the fact that in San Diego, there is a push for the tourist and the transplant to bend a knee before the more relevant classes. The tourists push back and populate what are, in design, pro-level retreats with military caps and splash-prints. The lowest common denominator descends, but do they know why?
Perhaps it is so she can serve them, that they might figure their shit out and aim a little higher in general. I don’t even remember her name, but I do remember that she didn’t live here - she only worked here. Of course she wouldn’t. The different roads that people take to reach this city are still a bit beyond my understanding. She, however, came here by choice. I remember that much about her. It might have been for school or it might have been done in order to integrate into the next scene of emerging relevance that I have, once again, stumbled into more than divined. I don’t know which it was, but it clearly wasn’t what was of any relation to what the universe deemed important for me to draw from out meeting.
What struck me was how many bad habits I had acquired since I was last able to make a girl like that fall in love with me. She smelled like snow and reminded me of the hudson valley.
But her area of discipline wouldn’t allow her to tell the difference between evergreens and Christmas trees just as much as mine leaves me unable to tell the difference between Corona bottles and palm trees.
Future wives start as current conveniences.
BUT SERIOUSLY, FOLKS
Study #2 | Club Sabbat | 3780 Park Boulevard, Hillcrest
“Portrait of a rapegaze, two sides to a rapecoin.”
When you don’t own something (the way I don’t quite yet own downtown), you find the nearest barrel of fish and you start blasting. So in the time of the witch, San Diego’s investment bankers, insurance brokers, body piercers and drug dealers retreat from their sunny workdays into Hillcrest. Hillcrest is San Diego’s Gaytown USA and Rob Halford lives there, skullfucking the ever living shit out of everything that breathes (or so I like to imagine). At the heart of Hillcrest’s relevance is a goth scene that holds a death grip on the title of “only reason to go to Hillcrest if you aren’t on the prowl for hot twink ass or chicks that look like Ani Difranco.”
But if you are among those who’ve never wanted to get one of those stupid glow-in-the-dark tattoos, what possible allure could a place like Club Sabbat hold?
The answer is easy; everyone needs relief sometimes. Downtown is oppressive. Every night coming home without a drunk girl on your arm feels like another blow to the abdomen from a city you haven’t earned yet, its engineered that way. And sometimes you don’t want to fight that fight that night. Sometimes you don’t want to look your best. Sometimes you want to feel normal. That’s when you go to Club Sabbat, spend the night dancing next to Master Blaster and go home a little happier about the fact that in the morning you will still be gainfully employed and functional within society.
Sometimes you just want to party with THE HUMONGOUS.
Sometimes you just want to watch a Spaniard flirt with a dead nun.
Sometimes you just want to watch hentai.
Sometimes you’re just fine in the netherworld.
Study #3 | Analog | 801 5th Ave, Gaslamp
That dichotomy I mentioned before, about how there is a class of adopted natives here that can carry excess into practical living, here and there I am beginning to understand how one can successfully not implode from it. I am learning this from the very heart of the problem itself, from the very people that I have blamed for it all along.
Casey and Caitlin took me some time to figure out. This is a unique event as i am often very good at determining exactly what the fuck a bitch’s deal is, especially when they’re from California. These two, in conjunction with my recent grasping of the Steve McQueen aesthetic, have taught me more about the breaths this region draws than is commonly understood even by the blessed-to-be-born-here.
Part of it is where they work. Analog could be the best bar in San Diego, easily. It has the right elements in the right places, the right kind of polish is applied the roughest edges of it’s implied bohemian ties. The problem, I believe, is that it exists in the wrong city and is conceptualized by the blind. Whoever designed the place had vision, had a singular vision of something truly “next level”, but was clearly only temporarily contracted by people who had a lot more money to spend and a lot less thought to invest. Analog has an identity crisis that it may or may not ever resolve. This is nothing new. Downtown is full of places like that. Quality Social is like that. As I write this, some gentrified faggot is in the planning stages of building another bar like that. It doesn’t matter. Some things are so broken that they decay further the more you try to fix them.
The more intuitive among us realize this fact and do the only thing they can do - take advantage of it.
Sometimes all a girl can do is give the world her best “fuck me” eyes in her best “fuck me” outfit and keep the dance going until the lights come up and we realize that she’s no longer anywhere to be found and we’ve spent every last red cent to our names.
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Whatever the case may be, they should be doing something better in someplace more interesting. The west coast runs up to you like a drunk lapdog, ready to lay belly up and give you it’s most immediate of comforts. But dogs only live for about ten or fifteen years and then they die. It is worth it to make note that this is about the same lifespan that an attractive bartender’s looks have before they start to look like they wish they had made other choices in life.
At first I was heartbroken that women such as this would choose lives with expiration dates.
Then I saw them in a different light. In our afterhours conversations at the bar and in further inquiry over meals, I began to see that I might be wrong about everything.
Years ago I woke up in the morning and decided to figure out how to get to heaven without forsaking the earth. I’ve toiled and suffered just to drive myself close enough the sort of mad ecstacy that gives you fletting glimpses of the formula behind the unified theory of everything. I’ve grown old too early because of it, but I’ve finally begun to wrap my head around what I believe is the right idea:
If God is good, and God created reality, then reality must be, at it’s very core, a pure and infinite joy. If I can’t see that in everything, in everyone, in every moment, then I am the one at fault - the mud obscures my vision and my vision alone. There was no need for this, for any of this ether we swim in. It could only have been created out of love. I could only truly be happy.
And so they live lives behind and around the bars and the beaches. I live mine in deserts and decaying cities. The way we execute the meaning of life is different, that much is a natural result of our breedings, but I like to think that our spirits found the same field. I’m jealous they figured it out before me. I’m ashamed I didn’t figure it out sooner. I’m priviledged we can understand it together.
