Why Mentone Special?

It’s a name that immediately confuses outsiders. I tell them it’s a Redlands joke. But most of the university thinks it’s a Johnston joke, and who knows what Johnston thinks. On some days, I don’t even know what I think. It’s a nice name—five syllables, three words, with a slightly crooked balance of long and short vowels with hard and soft consonants. It’s easy to say. But it doesn’t sound like it has any business being published by a group of students who don’t live in Mentone.

There is a reason, and I’m sorry it wasn’t made clear from the beginning.

A few week before the end of spring semester 2012, I was in Anthony Sgro’s room on third floor Holt with him and Victoria Beckley. I’d just told them about this idea for publishing a newsletter during May Term, and I asked if they’d be interested in writing. They said yes, and Anthony also offered to design the cover (actually “front page” since at that point it wasn’t a magazine). We had no idea what we were getting into.

We tried to come up with a name without using words like “Redlands” or “Johnston” because we didn’t think anyone would want to read that, and instead decided to name it after someplace else. I’m 90% sure it was Victoria who suggested “Mentone Beach Special,” which was not only not Redlands, but also not anywhere. There is no Mentone Beach. And that’s not even our joke.

The words are painted on a water tower off of Lugonia. Or is it Mill Creek? (See? I’m terrible at this). Either way, it exists. That’s not the joke. The beach doesn’t. So what gives?

At the risk of giving you more questions than answers, I did a little research and found an LA Times article published in 2006. They asked a few locals for their thoughts on their lack of beach, which yielded a startling wisdom:

“People at the beach think they’re hot stuff and wouldn’t know where the heck Mentone is.” – Dave Hess

“The ocean has too much pull, too much people—you can’t trust it enough.” – Rennee Lowell

“You can’t take things in life too seriously, even the beach.” – Kim Grooms

I like these quotes because they skip a few procedural steps and get straight to the insight. And … well, I could say the same about the Mentone Special.

But what happened to the “Beach”? I could claim that since it was already imaginary, the new name freed you to imagine the beach in yourself. But the truth is that Anthony took it out so it would fit into the airplane wings on the first cover design. I’m not sure if he did this intentionally or not, but I didn’t say anything because the vowels gave it a better rhythm anyway, even if it made a little less sense. After all, these things are all about compromise.

Published in the 4th volume of The Mentone Special, an independent student publication from the University of Redlands. Digital volume forthcoming.

Alive, well, and still writing

So obviously I’m still getting the hang of this whole blogging concept. The past few weeks have been busy, what with flying down to California and back for Thanksgiving (that blurry photo is LA from the plane–nice and hazy like I remember), and refocusing my job-hunting strategy (maybe a whole different post). Also it’s been really cold in Seattle. Is that a valid reason? Probably not, but the lack of snow has been disappointing to me personally.

But despite what you may think, I have not given up. Far from it. I hope my few readers out there are okay with a more infrequent style. I would like to get to a point where there’s something new every week (or two), but I can’t make promises because that stresses me out and the whole point of this is to be fun. My goal is not to drown the internet in thoughts, but to create a space that feels worth your time.

I was recently published in the 4th volume of the Mentone Special, which shouldn’t be a huge surprise since I founded the magazine. But let it be known that I submitted my piece for revision and was accepted by the current editors.

The 4th volume went into print this week, but the digital version is not yet available. I haven’t even seen the magazine yet, but there is very little in the world that has ever made me this excited. Here’s a picture of the cover that was sent to me:

Anyway, I’m going to post my article here, and eventually I’ll link it to the digital version so you can see the whole thing. If you’re thinking “What the heck is the Mentone Special?” then may I direct you to the official website. It’s my baby.

I’m also working on some new stuff, a review/meditation on Geoff Dyer’s excellent Zona and the Tarkovsky film Stalker that it’s based on, and then two tech articles. I’m worried that when I start writing about technology I’m going to instantly lose my readership to boredom, but I think maybe that’s just some embedded insecurity about being a nerd, and it’s already too late for that.

I’m working on two tech pieces, one reflecting on my lifelong obsession with two companies, Apple and Nintendo, and what following them has taught me about innovation and the future. The other is another kind of review/meditation (a style I seem to be fond of) on the most recent Zelda title, The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, and some thoughts on the series as a whole–where it’s been, where it might be headed, and what that means for interactive narrative.

If I just lost you, let me know in the comments and I’ll try to win you back!

Life Changes Fast

After I finished reading Joan Didion’s A Year of Magical Thinking—a memoir of sorts chronicling the period following the sudden cardiac arrest and resulting death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne—I went back and reread the first chapter. With the final words of the book still hanging in my mind, I was struck by how little Didion gives you in the beginning, how she recreates the frantic and confusing scene of the initial trauma, isolating the central information in a vacuum by way of narrative control.

If you picked up the book without knowing anything about it, you wouldn’t know about the death of her husband until you were a few pages in. I can’t imagine many people coming to the book that way, but even still, without the essential facts, Didion is able to create incredible suspense in those three or four pages around the “ordinary instant.”

“It was just an ordinary beautiful September day,” people still say when asked to describe the morning in New York when American Airlines 11 and United Airlines 175 got flown into the World Trade towers. Even the report of the 9/11 Commission opened on this insistently premonitory and yet still dumbstruck narrative note: “Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.”

“And then—gone.” In the midst of life we are in death, Episcopalians say at the gravesite. (4-5)

Vivid descriptions of exterior details pointing to an internal reality in crisis. And then, five pages in, she calmly lays out an outline, in the most emotionally present moment that you really get for the next two hundred pages.

Not that it’s not insightful, or not beautiful. But what you don’t get is impenetrable prose in the cool, journalistic style of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, the style she made famous.

What you do get is Didion, in precise and exacting terms, giving you the coordinates of her position line by line.

I finished this book a few days ago. It took me almost seventeen months. I started last summer, quit for a year while finishing school, started again in Seattle, then stopped again, and then started again and finished without any issues. It has been a strange companion in a time of my life that has occasionally brought its own echoes of “magical thinking”—partial madness. Loss of control.

In the last six (maybe seven or eight) months, I have been away from myself, out of the office. In the midst of leaving school, moving away from home, I subverted my own emotional reality to cope with the tectonic changes in my day to day.

This is not to trivialize the trauma that Didion experienced with the death of her husband and hospitalization of her daughter. Rather, it illustrates the greatest accomplishment of this book: making the unfathomable experience of grief and bereavement relatable to the common experience of sudden change.

For example, Didion quotes a letter she received from a friend after the death of her mother:

“We might, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean’s bed, aware of the depth charges, now near and now far, buffeting us with recollections.” (27)

I was able to relate to this metaphor not because I have mourned the death of a parent (they’re both alive and well), but because it mirrors an experience I’ve had with my writing in a time of great creative change. Writing is the clearest indicator that I have of the invisible currents of my subconscious, currents that are expressed in the creative life. After graduating from the relative pastoral freedom of college to the new reality of working to make someone else happy, I knew I was hibernating in the comfort of memory, and my new work, which required some steering but lacked the weight to pull me to the surface, was functioning merely as a line from a buoy that checked occasionally on my pulse. Although without it I may have been totally adrift.

The fact that I’m able to write this at all indicates to me that the worst of that period has passed.

As a companion in the depths, this book challenged me to contemplate my own fragile nature. Didion investigates the clues that could have potentially alerted her to John’s condition–the casual remark, the medical history–and so I found myself wondering if the random aches and pains that surfaced from time to time in my body were pretenses for my imminent demise.

At times I even became frustrated with Didion, how she gets hung up on these clues, stuck in a loop around a pattern, unable to cut straight to the heart of the matter, as I had known her to be so good at.

I admit, my only previous contact with her work was Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Going to school in the shadow of the San Bernardino mountain range, the first essay of that collection, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” was required reading in my writing classes. There’s no getting around it, the essay fundamentally altered the way I thought about Southern California, beginning with the first paragraph:

This is a story about love and death in the golden land, and begins with the country. The San Bernardino Valley lies only an hour east of Los Angeles by the San Bernardino Freeway but is in certain ways an alien place: not the coastal California of the subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies off the Pacific but a harsher California, haunted by the Mojave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves. October is the bad month for the wind, the month when breathing is difficult and the hills blaze up spontaneously. There has been no rain since April. Every voice seems a scream. It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows.

I bought the collection and read it in a couple weeks, cramped in a hot apartment I shared with my girlfriend in Boulder, Colorado during the summer months of 2012, a time that was plagued by horrific violence and devastating wildfires. The book spoke to a part of my native Californian soul that was full of terror. And I think it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. The calm, “steely” voice that you get in Bethlehem is mesmerizing in its absolute control. It’s totally impenetrable. Didion rarely allows you to wander, to deviate from the meditation of her narrative. It is her narrative.

And so is A Year of Magical Thinking. But in this book, Didion’s self-reflection invites us to question her, and she may, as a result, feel a little less steely. She is not “the cool customer.” Nor would we expect her to be. But it is mesmerizing nonetheless to witness Didion’s investigative mind set to work at solving the irrational problems of grief.

She remarks near the beginning of the book:

The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself. (7-8)

Caught in an emotional vortex—her word—Didion grabs at moments from the turbulent chronology of events, moments that illuminate exactly what she was thinking in mid-whiplash, and the effect is an almost surgical impression of the entire movement.

Displaced Caribou and the Loneliness of Believing

I was in the middle of my political awakening, pissed about the wars and worried about the fate of the planet, when I started writing letters to my congressman, representative Howard “Buck” McKeon, the ten-term Republican who has represented the 25th district of California since it was created. I wasn’t old enough to vote, and a lot of important issues weren’t even on my radar, but as far as I was concerned, I was an informed American and I was ready to prove it.

My first letter was worded politely, expressing my concern with military spending and the rising debt. I believed that political figures were inherently reasonable and would listen to an argument from their constituents if it was made well enough. I believed—at the very least—that Buck would offer a defense of his votes. I was sixteen.

At dinner, my dad would try to convince me that global warming was no different from star-bound Mayan prophecies—less credible, even—and I would passionately defend my opinions, believing I could convince him that they came from empathy, a broader perspective, and not a trendy conceit, as members of my generation have been broadly accused. This at a point when I still cared enough to bother. I remember how proud he seemed when I told him I would probably register independent.

Buck responded to my letter by blaming the Democrats, who had retaken the House about 6 months earlier, and even as a 16-year old still trying to figure things out, I found this to be depressingly lame. I was so displeased with this response that I decided to write him again—this time about the environment—and I decided to have some fun with it.

Ever since I’d realized that we were stuck together on this crumbling heap of rock, I’d internalized an existential dread about the future of human society. I think that’s happening to people younger and younger. I was probably about seven when I saw an aerial photo of clearcut rainforest in Brazil, extending endlessly into the horizon. Even still, I made it to my fourteenth birthday harboring a demonized perception of Al Gore from the way my dad talked about him. That phantom vanished with reading the news, and a keystone of my flimsy worldview was removed.

At seventeen, my foundation crumbling, I wrote to Buck, like a vindictive ex-lover, to mock his support for drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge:

Dear Mr. McKeon,

I am alarmed by the recent trend towards environmental concern in the American public. Europe, our socialist neighbor, has long been environmentally proactive … and I fear that the recent trends in America represent an age-old plight, that our country is gradually transforming into a socialist welfare state.

Yeah, I went for the irony. The best part comes in the last paragraph:

These environmentalists may claim that a certain caribou herd could be damaged by drilling operations. This has stalled Congress, but I say that it presents an excellent opportunity for compromise! Drill the region to decrease our reliance on foreign oil, and then—this will even win over the environmentalists—use the affected caribou as new sources of biofuel. We then get the best of both worlds, using the harvested oil to sustain our current economy, while gradually transitioning to a biofuel-centered infrastructure.

Again, thank you for your devotion to the true cause, and standing as a lighthouse in a sea of Californian liberal mutiny.

I’d really taken Jonathan Swift to heart.

I don’t know why this far away issue had struck a chord with me. Buck was also a champion of permitting CEMEX, a Mexican corporation with a dubious environmental record, to mine sand and gravel in our district, a proposal that was fairly unpopular but appeased Buck’s corporate sponsors. Probably I just didn’t know very much about that issue.

When my dad read the letter I’d written, he was furious. It was as if I’d betrayed him. This was no way to address an authority figure, he said. The government could come after you. He forced me to write a different letter, and I can’t remember ever being more angry with him. I wrote a new version, but sent this one anyway.

Presumably it arrived at Buck’s congressional office, where an intern or a piece of software scanned the lines for common phrases and sorted it by category and stance in order to direct the proper response. This same intern or piece of software also presumably noted the opinion in some kind of internal polling system. As goes a political rule of thumb: for every person who cares enough to write a letter, there are ten who felt the same way but couldn’t be bothered.

Like clockwork, a letter arrived at my house addressed from Buck’s office. Inside, a short statement thanking me for my support of his policies.

Ten points for drilling in Alaska.

I turned eighteen three weeks after the 2008 election, and while I couldn’t vote, I had been swept up by the hope and promise of Barack Obama. My dad voted for McCain (“somebody has to,” he said). He tried to argue with me about the ethics of stimulus spending; tried to convince me that Obama’s roots in Chicago politics would undo his plans for bipartisanship. But the economic collapse had taken the wind out of my dad, and my heart just wasn’t in arguing. I’d already said my piece, and he’d just have to deal with the person I’d turned out to be.

In the suburbs, I felt increasingly isolated, from my neighbors and their children who I went to school with, from my teachers, from Scout leaders and church leaders, and from my family. On some level, I knew that I was naive in my political expectations. I knew that expecting anything from Buck was setting myself up for disappointment. But this knowledge was overwhelmed by my want to believe in politics. I needed to weather life in the lonely confines of the suburban desert, and without belief, such life was impossible.

In 2009, Buck cooperated with Senator Barbara Boxer to create a new wilderness area in the San Gabriel mountains. Here was an example of reasonable governance, I thought. This was the moderate I knew had to exist. So I wrote him again. I told him I was proud, I actually thanked him, despite my disagreement with his view on climate change.

And the bastard wrote me back explaining why he was right on climate change, ignoring my thank you and claiming a hotter planet could be a good time for everybody.

And here I thought that I’d moved on from this abusive relationship.

At twenty two, my girlfriend and I worried through three weeks of government shutdown and uncertainty about making the rent without her paycheck.

I no longer lived in the 25th district of California.

But I logged onto Buck’s website anyway, for old time’s sake, and read through some of the spin. It was still pretty lame. In 2012, he appeared in a list of legislators receiving special interest rates from Countrywide Financial. He denied knowledge of the deal. In 2012 he also faced his toughest re-election yet, against Lee Rogers, a Democrat and foot doctor who accused Buck of “becoming symptomatic of the problems in Washington.” Buck had also just turned 75. I almost felt bad for him.

After the Republicans took the House, he was named chairman of the Committee on Armed Services. It was a good fit, since his main campaign contributors were already defense contractors. In 2010, he said something like “a defense budget in decline portends an America in decline.” Our largest spending aside, decreasing spending is now his largest priority.

And in October of 2013, I don’t know what I was expecting, but Buck voted with the majority of House Republicans against a “clean” CR bill, thereby guaranteeing a government shutdown.

So I wrote him again, just a few words this time, asking for his resignation.