About The Author
Because the author was born in California, he associates west with toward the ocean. Even today, in midlife, he sometimes finds himself on the Massachusetts Turnpike dressed for the beach and heading for the Dakotas. His youth was conventional for the time—a Texas Instruments computer in the alcove, a tank full of catfish in the den. He fondly remembers the foamy smell of nerf balls and the metallic taste of screen doors. His father flew regularly for work, as was the custom. Thirty minutes before departure, he would tear the top ticket off a booklet on his desk, drive to the airport, and walk through security with a peace sign and a smile: can you imagine? The house was strewn with poorly-functioning scissors he later learned were hemostats. No, he does not know how to surf. When he was in middle school, he exhausted the available reading material so regularly that his mother, in desperation, solicited guidance from the staff at the local Waldenbooks. They recommended L. Ron Hubbard’s Mission Earth series, on the ground that it was ten books long and would last a while. Those volumes provided a rudimentary if theoretical education in the use of recreational drugs. To sell him on attending Oberlin College his father waxed poetic about the boredom of Ohio winters, during which he and his crew would breed Chinese fighting fish and then stage wild watery battles. But the wheel of time is always turning, and the author found that Oberlin was no longer full of football-playing pre-med students; it now favored vegan activists who protested animal experimentation in the neuroscience department, and kept their pet fish alive. One dorm was clothing-optional, but the voice majors always wore scarves around their necks. The farther east he moved, the more technical the subjects he studied became, eventually climaxing, during graduate school in New York City, in a side-focus on the philosophy of general relativity. But everything once deformed returns when freed to its natural shape, and now he writes mostly about aesthetics.
See also: Pain is Underrated.
Evocative bit of writing. Autobiography, especially about childhood, can be captivating. I remember Douglas Murray once commenting that our opinions are among the least interesting things about us yet still we insist on telling others about our opinions to the nth degree rather than telling them what we did when we were eight years old.
I sometimes fear that we are all converging on a universally uniform lifestyle so it's nice to know that there is, or at least was, still a lot of local quirkiness and low-level boyish violence (to fish) around.
When we were younger, it seemed like Dan’s first job would be in California. I said: “How can we live there? The ocean is on the wrong side!” Happily, he was offered at job at Yale instead, and we can visit the ocean by driving east.