Daily Californian Archive

They say there are two sides to every story. I say there are two sides to every city.

My first visit to New York was in May 2016 — a tourist's pilgrimage, safely contained within the usual checkpoints: Times Square, the High Line, a slice of pizza I was told was the best I'd ever have. The photos hadn't lied, exactly. They just hadn't told the whole truth.

Five years later, I found myself moving there in the middle of a pandemic, trailing a couple of family deaths and some self-realization I hadn't finished processing. The New York I arrived to in January 2021 was not the New York I had imagined from the brochures.

I read Dante's Inferno on the plane. Finishing it somewhere over the Midwest, I looked out the window at the dark and thought: yes, this tracks.

I had a Fujifilm disposable camera and nowhere to be. What follows is what I found.

Back in Bushwick that night, I watched the M train pass from my window, the tracks loud and tired. I climbed to the roof and lay on the concrete and looked for stars through the light pollution. Found a few.

The point of this project was never to make New York look bad. The city doesn't need my help. The point was to look at it straight — past the version I'd constructed from photographs and movies and other people's nostalgia. To meet it in its actual form.

I've done that now. I don't have a clean conclusion. The sun came up eventually, indifferent as ever — rising on the condemned and the redeemed alike, on the city's sins and its graces, on everything that happened here and everything that will. That was enough.

Every four years come November, the dreaded election morning twilight hits and the voters arise from their suburban graves to feast.

Following the nationwide trend, my hometown became a small republic at war with itself — the "Civil War of Blacksburg High School," I call it — all of us possessed by something larger than we understood.

Oh, you're a Trump supporter? We can't be friends. Simple as that.

I lived by that philosophy. The instinct still remains within me. But it was less moral clarity than political reflex.

What none of us understood was that almost every one of us lived inside the same class kingdom. Some had newer cars, nicer houses, parents with cleaner jobs. But to the world beyond Blacksburg, we were all marked by the same geography. We were Appalachians. And still, we turned against one another over a man who would find no value in our home other than our luscious golf courses and coal reserves.

Politics are divisive by design. They feed us the doctrine of separation as if its absence implies the betrayal of identity. We're cut from the same cloth, and still we allow ourselves to tear our neighbors apart because two wealthy men depend on our aggression for business.

That is precisely the humiliation of election season. Not that people care too much, but that so much of what they care about is a business deal.

Politicians love the theatre of intimacy. They speak the language of recognition while living an alternate reality. To them, you are a demographic, a margin, a number worth moving three points in either direction. To you, they are the architects of decline.

It is uncomfortable to admit, but necessary: we are easier to herd than we want to believe.

I try to resist that instinct. Most of us do. But consciousness does not grant immunity. We need belonging before we need argument, and every four years the country offers us a ritual through which to name our enemies. Politicians understand this. Their careers depend on it. Exploiting a broken system for personal gain, they convince us the wound is partisan when the prognosis is institutional.

That was what frustrated me in 2016 Blacksburg — not just what my neighbors believed, but how quickly they adopted the fashion of belief. I looked at my Trump-supporting peers and saw cruelty, but unbeknownst to me at the time there was also confusion, resentment, and manipulation. That does not excuse the politics. It does explain how the politics spread. The same problem existed on my side. It is easier to condemn than it is to understand.

Until we acknowledge the temptation to place the blame on one side or another, we will continue to fall for the guise of a war worth fighting because we envision no alternative.

But this begs the question: does it make sense to fight a war with a predetermined winner?

If we elect to see no alternative to the partisan system, we're effectively forfeiting our identity. Government is not divine. We give it power the way we give gold value. Strip away the ceremony and you find a fragile skeleton of broken law, buried violence, and inherited myth. Still, we allow that skeleton to turn neighbor against neighbor until we forget to dream.

The American people were never the architects of the machine. We are its fuel, its alibi — conditioned to hate one another so pathologically that we never think to ask who benefits.

Fourteen-year-old me would log onto my dusty MacBook Pro and find my way to the darkest corners of the internet.

"Don't talk to strangers online" was my mother's catchphrase.

Naturally, I ignored her.

The internet was the perfect escape from my social anxiety. Omegle, an anonymous chatroom for meeting strangers, was my stomping ground. Growing up awkward and antisocial, I found comfort in a place where nobody knew me. Online, I could become whoever I wanted. I could age four years in a matter of seconds. I could live in a castle in the mountains of Germany. Nobody would question it.

I could connect to anyone, anywhere.

Of course, this came with consequences.

Over time, I witnessed things a person my age definitely should not have witnessed. Still, I soldiered on. One day, I stumbled upon a black screen.

"Please don't skip me," they said.

I listened. They asked if I wanted to play a game. I said sure. They asked if they could guess where I lived. I laughed — I lived in the middle of nowhere in Southwest Virginia. There was no possible way.

They guessed correctly. My exact address.

I slammed my laptop shut, locked every door in the house, and swore I would never go back.

About a week later, I went back.

I set my tag to #top — short for Twenty One Pilots — hoping for something slightly less terrifying than whatever I had stumbled into before. Among the many strange conversations I had that night, one person would end up mattering more than I expected: Margaret.

Her camera was off, but something kept me from hanging up. I could tell she was a poser when she told me her favorite Twenty One Pilots song was "Stressed Out" — the go-to answer for someone who had never actually listened to the album. We added each other on Snapchat. I didn't think much of it at the time.

Three years later, I moved to San Francisco. Margaret was visiting at the same time. When we met in person at Forest Hill Station, I kept a friend on standby over FaceTime, just in case "Margaret" turned out to be something other than what she claimed.

She wasn't. We spent the day jumping around the city — Ocean Beach, an excessive amount of McDonald's on Montgomery Street, the Ferry Building. I could not have asked for a better introduction to San Francisco.

A year later, when I started at UC Berkeley, Margaret moved into an apartment in the Excelsior District. The rest of that year was filled with late-night picnics, sideshows, and her cat, Harold. Then COVID hit, and she moved in with me in my tiny Berkeley apartment for the rest of quarantine. For a while, we were inseparable in the particular way that people who met online sometimes become — forged in the anonymous dark, tested in person, and somehow still standing.

People change. Lives diverge. Some friendships are built to last a lifetime and some are built to last exactly as long as they need to, which is its own kind of value. What I know is that having Margaret in my life during those years made me less afraid of the unknown — of new cities, new versions of myself, new situations I had no map for.

The internet is a terrifying place. It always was. But it is also where I found some of the things that gave my life shape when I didn't yet know what shape I was looking for.

So thank you, Omegle, for that much at least. Talk about an opportunity cost.

One of my favorite things to do growing up was visit my grandfather's farm.

You turned off the backroad onto gravel and the house appeared immediately — no curve, no buildup, just the full picture at once. A wide teal farmhouse with a wraparound porch, built in 1900 at the very end of the Victorian era, sitting at the base of a hill with the Blue Ridge Mountains rolling gracefully in the distance. American Four Square, they call the style — practical bones, generous proportions, a work of craftsmanship that was built to last and knew it. To the left was flat green land going nowhere in particular. To the right was a dense wall of trees, and somewhere behind them, water — though you couldn't tell until you got closer and the tree line thinned enough to show the creek running alongside the whole driveway, rocky and fast and cold even in summer.

Somewhere near the entrance, a motion sensor sent a chime through the house. By the time you reached the door, he was already outside. He lived alone out there, a simple life built around sports and land and the particular contentment of a man who had decided what he wanted and built it. He was always standing out front when we pulled in. Always.

As I slid open the van door, our Labrador Retriever, Kaleah, would push her way out onto the gravel before anyone else had a chance to move — her untrimmed nails clinking against the stones, already angling toward the tree line. She knew the creek was back there, and she set out on a mission.

Ten feet from the house you could hear it. That rushing sound that meant cold water over rocks, which meant wading in up to your shins on a July afternoon, which meant everything slowing down in the specific way that only happens when you are young and outside and have nowhere to be. I spent whole summers in that creek. There was a spot upstream deep enough to swim, and we'd wade up to it in the heat, the water getting colder as it got deeper, the rocks mossy and uncertain underfoot.

Once, wading near the bank, a water snake cut across the surface directly in front of me. I have been afraid of snakes my entire life, but that was the first time fear made me completely still — not running, not yelling, just frozen, watching it move past. I stayed out of the water after that. Mostly.

The house revealed itself in layers. The wraparound porch stretched from the back around to the front, where his dog slept in the afternoons. Inside, heart pine floors ran through every room, warm and amber-toned in the afternoon light — the same floors that had been walked on for over a hundred years. There was a grand wooden staircase in the main entrance hall, a library that doubled as his office with built-in shelves floor to ceiling, a stone fireplace in the den, a kitchen big enough to hold everyone at once. Out back, a hunting cabin that smelled like old wood. And up in the attic — no air conditioning, always stuffy, always inexplicably hot even when the rest of the house was cool — an entire room converted into a toy room. Shelves packed so densely that I would discover something new every single visit. I don't know where all of it came from. I never thought to ask.

He hunted quail on that land. I remember eating it and thinking I had never tasted anything so particular to a place. The kind of taste that could evoke a lost memory.

When I was around eight, my mother got married. The wedding was at my grandfather's house — about two hundred people in that yard, the mountain behind them, the creek somewhere just out of sight catching the late afternoon light. That is how much space that place held, and along with that space, loads of memories.

When I was twelve, he was diagnosed with dementia. A few years later, he had lost almost all of his memories, including those of me, my mother, and of the farm. He fought back. It didn't matter.

Then I moved to San Francisco, and the visits stopped. I left him behind, along with my pets, parents, sisters, and everything else I had known.

One day during my senior year of high school, I was walking into fourth period when my phone started vibrating. My mother was calling. She had news I had long been anticipating: Kaleah was dying. She had been suffering from tracheal paralysis, and at seven that evening, the veterinarians would come to put her down.

Even knowing it was coming, the news hit me like a trainwreck. My mom offered to FaceTime me while it happened. I said no. If I couldn't be there in person, I didn't want to watch through a screen.

Later that day, I was at work filing papers. I watched the clock hit 7 p.m. I held myself together. All I could think about was that it was happening right now, 3,000 miles away, and there was nothing I could do about it.

She was gone.

Later that night, I walked up to Twin Peaks and let the emotions out. I needed a moment alone. I wanted to be with my family, and I wasn't.

A few weeks later, my phone vibrated again. FaceTime. My mother. When I picked up, she told me my grandfather was nearing the end of his battle with dementia. She had called so I could say goodbye.

"You haven't seen him in a long time, so this might be a bit shocking," she warned.

As she turned the camera toward him, I was met with an image that has stuck with me since. He looked emaciated, almost unrecognizable.

I searched for the right words. I couldn't find them.

I said goodbye, hung up, and cried.

A couple of days later, I boarded a flight back to Virginia. The distance was making everything harder, so I broke it. I just wanted to be with my family.

Physical separation makes grief stranger. When you are conscious of someone's final moments, distance becomes suffocating. Then comes the guilt. Should I be there? Am I too late? Do they know I love them? Why didn't I show it more when I had the chance?

Needless to say, my family and I needed closure. Paying the farm one last visit would bring us full circle. We sat next to the creek where Kaleah used to run ahead of us and brought painted rocks to toss into the water with our final goodbyes.

Ten years earlier, I had stood on the same soil for my mother's wedding, watching two hundred people fill the yard my grandfather had built his life around. Ten years earlier, he remembered my name. Ten years earlier, this was home.

It is a strange feeling to stand on ground that was once yours and now belongs to someone else. The farm was once family to me. Now it felt like reconnecting with an estranged relative.

I tossed my dark green rock into the clear water, finally landing on the words I hadn't been able to find in his last moments:

Papa, I miss you. Thank you for caring about me.

Nobody asks follow-up questions when you say you're from Virginia.

New York gets a reaction. California gets a reaction. Even Florida, lately, gets a reaction. Virginia gets a nod and a subject change — a polite filing-away, as if the information is neither interesting nor worth pursuing. As if where you're from is a credential, and mine lacks a certain pedigree.

The strange part is that unremarkable feels worse than pity. Pity at least implies existence.

I have lived all across the world, and still, nothing has ever quite matched the specific euphoria of standing outside a Walmart in the middle of nowhere Southwest Virginia — smoking a cigarette in a wifebeater, cargo shorts, and flip flops with absolutely nowhere to be. There is a freedom in that particular moment that I have not found anywhere else. No city has it. No amount of sophistication will get you there.

I grew up in Appalachia, a few miles from the West Virginia border. Farmland galore. Dollar stores on two-lane roads. Summer nights that felt infinite and winters that felt intimate. People who waved at strangers not because they were performing friendliness but because it simply did not occur to them not to.

The South that I know is not the South that shows up in online discourse. It is nothing but a caricature. A convenient receptacle for the country's failures. A place to locate what is wrong so that everywhere else can feel right by comparison. After the 2020 election, social media filled with posts wishing natural disasters on the South and the rural interior for voting the wrong way. Most were framed as jokes. The impulse underneath was not.

Here is something people in cities rarely acknowledge: the political reputation of places like Florida and parts of the South has been substantially shaped by people who moved there from somewhere else. Snowbirds. Transplants. People fleeing the cost of living in New York or California, bringing their capital and, sometimes, their reactionary politics with them. San Franciscans were so hostile to Midwestern tech transplants in the 2010s that they physically blocked Google's private shuttle buses in protest. Angelenos have entire social media ecosystems dedicated to resenting Texans and Midwesterners moving in. New Yorkers have a word for everyone who arrives from somewhere less significant, which is everywhere.

And yet I have never once heard a Southerner complain about transplants with that same internalized conviction — that sense that outsiders are corrupting something pure. Real Southerners, in my experience, tend to let people be. The hostility runs the other direction.

The people I grew up around were less ideologically fervent than the image suggests. They were not victims of the system so much as people who had made a kind of peace with it — working the same jobs their parents worked, living in the same towns, finding satisfaction in activities that don't translate well to white collar work. There is a stability in that which coastal ambition tends to misread as resignation. It is not resignation. It is a different set of priorities, one that is arguably healthier than maintaining your LinkedIn profile.

The political volatility gets imported. Tucker Carlson is on in the background, Facebook is full of outrage, and eventually the noise becomes a kind of social consensus — not because people are stupid, but because every media environment shapes the people inside it. Cities are not immune to this. They're ignorant and misinformed in their own fashion.

The condescension directed at the South is classist in a way that goes unexamined precisely because the people expressing it consider themselves above bigotry. It is easier to write off a region than to reckon with the decades of disinvestment, corporate extraction, and political abandonment that shaped it. The image of rural America as a wasteland says more about the observer than the observed.

My home in Southwest Virginia is beautiful. The early morning fog creeping over the rolling Blue Ridge Mountains. The New River flowing slow and green in July. Fireflies. The old oak tree on my grandfather's farm wearing a new dress every season.

I grew up between worlds: Southwest Virginia by chance, and the wider world by choice. That position gives me a particular view of both, and what I see from it is that the moral geography people carry in their heads — the enlightened cities on one side, the backward countryside on the other — is a fallacy. A weak cop-out from the hard truth.

I'm proud to be from where I'm from. Not despite its misunderstandings, but because of them.

Prove your worth to a room that has already decided you don't have any. That is an education with real pedigree.

Just as life imitates art, politics imitates life. It's ritualistic.

The yard signs go up. The cable news chyrons turn red and blue. Your phone fills with text messages from numbers you don't recognize, urging you — pleading with you — to perform the one act that will finally fix everything. And then, on the appointed day, you drive to a gymnasium or a church basement and fill in a bubble with a number two pencil, and the fate of the republic rests momentarily in your hands.

It is a beautiful story. I understand why people believe it, but I don't buy the narrative.

After the week we have had — the maps, the margins, the night of watching counties flip like coins — it is easier than usual to understand why people treat voting as sacred. Close elections make civic participation feel suddenly tangible. A few thousand votes in the right county can appear to hold the weight of history, and sometimes they do.

That said, I disagree with the notion that voting is a civic responsibility in the simple, moralizing way it is so often presented.

Voting is a tool. Like any tool, its usefulness depends entirely on the conditions under which it operates. A hammer is useless if the nail has already been driven through the other side of the wall. A government that asks you to participate while systematically shaping who can participate, which districts are fairly drawn, and whose votes carry equivalent weight is not offering you democracy. It is offering you a play, and theatre — however entertaining it may be — is theatre.

It is here that the conversation becomes uncomfortable: the system is not fair. It has never been fair. And while progress has been made over generations of struggle, pretending that casting a ballot constitutes resistance — that it is enough, that it closes the loop — obscures how much work remains in the space between elections, where most of the actual machinery of power operates without anyone watching.

Voting can produce marginally better representatives. Those representatives operate within institutions that have their own gravity, their own inertia, their own accumulated interests. The problems that most affect ordinary people do not reliably respond to election cycles the way the civics textbook suggests. They respond to sustained pressure, organized action, and a public willing to demand more than it is periodically offered and then asked to be patient.

Two-party dynamics compound all of this. The binary choice presented every two years is not the natural shape of political life. It is a structural feature, maintained partly by habit and partly by the incentives of those who benefit from limiting the available options. Ranked choice voting, for example, would allow voters to express genuine preference without the fear of wasting a vote on principle. It would give alternative perspectives a foothold in the conversation. It would produce outcomes that more accurately reflect what people actually desire rather than what they're willing to settle for.

Under the current system, a vote is a blunt instrument aimed at a multifaceted problem. It can move things. It cannot move everything. And when we tell people that it can, when we dress civic participation in the language of moral duty and imply that failure to vote is the reason things are broken, we are placing the responsibility for a structural failure onto individual shoulders, which is a convenient story for the people who reap the benefits of the incumbent framework.

I understand the comfort in believing otherwise. There is reassurance in having something actionable: a box to check, a bumper sticker to slap on your rear window, a feeling of having done your part; that feeling is not nothing. But it should not be mistaken for change bound for a history book.

Organize. Get involved locally, where decisions get made that affect daily life in ways federal elections rarely touch. Identify the pressure points. Question the institutions you live under and try to understand who benefits from the way they are currently arranged.

America's Achilles' heel is its electoral system — a system in which the lesser of two evils is still evil, and an electoral minority can become a governing majority. Every election cycle, the arrow inches closer to the heel.

The difference between myth and history is that myths tell you the arrow never lands.