Christopher J. Morris/Redux

Otherwise, I might think of John Milton when I think of California and the writer’s task. Milton devised that, after the Fall, the temperature in San Diego would remain at 75 degrees, but Adam and Eve’s relationship to a perfect winter day would be changed to one of goose bumps.

The traditional task of the writer in California has been to write about what it means to be human in a place advertised as paradise. Not the Buckeye or the Empire, not the Can-do or the Show-me, California is the Postlapsarian State. Disappointment has always been the theme of California.

For example, my own.

I cannot afford to live here. I mean I do live here—I rent two large rooms, two stories above California Street. My light comes from the south. But if I had to move, I could not afford to live here anymore.

In San Francisco, small Victorians, small rooms, steep stairs, are selling for three or four million and are repainted to resemble Bavarian cuckoo clocks—browns and creams and the mute greens tending to blue. That is my mood. If I owned one of the Victorians, I would no doubt choose another comparison. It is like living on a street of cuckoo clocks—and all the cuckoos are on cell phones—I won’t say striking 13; nevertheless a version of postmodernity I had not anticipated. Only well-to-do futurists and stuffed T-shirts can afford to live in this 19th-century neighborhood.

My complaint with my city is that I am middle-aged.

	page 1	|	13