When I very-first came to L.A., when I was still on the bottom deck of teenagerhood (bad hair, still a shy little midget, albeit with hash-oil hands and hand-me-down orgasm opinions), I was driven into Venice. Right as we cruised by Venice High School, which is famous if you are in the deep end of LA cultural lore, the song “Doin’ Time” by Sublime came on the radio. I’d never heard it before. After that “Jane Says” played. I’d heard it many times before. Both are entirely Californian; neither band is Venicey in reality but both bands are, of course, on the L.A. gorgeous-filth continuum. In those few minutes I was silently and forever transformed, and understood magic, and from then on those two songs were crucially a part of me.

(A year later I watched my crush’s band cover “Doin’ Time” and on that line “I’d like to hold her… head underwater,” he sort of smiled and jokingly did that head-push hand gesture which now would get an eye-roll but then had my eyes rolling back into my head.) (Seven years later I heard “Jane Says,” and all of its Californian everything, and that steel drum, while I was writing an essay that I hated for school that I hated in my attic bedroom in a shared house in the Annex that I fucking hated and it was without question one of the five darkest moments in my life.) (Another of those was sitting in my parked car, with my dog and my then-boyfriend in the backseat, crying so hard that I broke some blood vessels around my eyes. I think my memories of some years of my twenties are so few because for a while there it was too, too, too dark.)

I don’t tend to like melodrama, or moments-in-time-as-meaning. I focus in on the “Yeah but” and the “Anywaaaaay” far more than the “It was like this.” But really, really. It was like that. 

Yesterday I was driving to Venice, in my rental car on a perfect afternoon, wearing the right sunglasses for my face and the right SPF for my skin, and “Today” by the Smashing Pumpkins came on the radio, and I put the windows up so I could scream-sing along. Have I been happier this year? In months? Nope. Then, THEN, as I was driving into Venice-proper, approaching the high school, “Doin’ Time” came on the radio. Just, like that. I was late to meet my friend for lunch (mahi mahi tacos; two Diet Cokes in small glass bottles; skateboard-wheel soundtrack) so I stopped myself from crying as much as I wanted to and didn’t need to and just listened to this song, and I willed my kid-self to know somehow that I grew up into a woman who, just like that, drives herself to lunch in Venice in a car she paid for on a trip she made from a life she has and wants.