(im)perfect american summer

6:50pm, 20 miles from Malibu, California, high above the water - the scene of the perfect American sunset.

I'm walking up a steep winding cement road with my friend in Topanga Canyon, right around the summit of Tuna Canyon Road. You can see the ocean distantly past the neatly shrubby, deeply sloped mountains, blending seamlessly into the gradient of the setting sky as if it were painted on. It's all faded pink and grey blue, the color pallete of dry California in the late summer, sun setting behind the mountains to cast a general color mute over the remaining landscape. I left my phone behind at our trailer, but the effects of its nagging presence lingered on. The mountains shift to our right side as we continue walking up, the canyon mountains revealing themselves more massive and cavernous around the corner, dipping an even deeper v into the distant ocean below where two slopes converge. All of a sudden, I can't catch my breath well. We're at high elevation, but it shouldn't be anything crazy. I then look down at the palms of my hands, humming with a shifting rainbow trace around the edges like the back side of a CD or the spots in your eyes when you shut them too tightly. I take a second to feel the sudden sensory shift that has taken over my body and remember the bit of psilocybin I had taken just an hour earlier.

“I think I feel the mushrooms now,” I say to my friend, still looking at my hands. I wiggle my fingers in attempt to get my mind off of the momentary panic of a drug comeup.

My friend, no stranger to psychedelics, stares up at the road, walking slightly ahead of me. “Yeah, me too.” She doesn't seem panicked in the slightest, lost in the dream of her head. I always admired her for that, since she could have a million reasons to be anxious about her life and yet remains collected and present. I'm still looking at my hands, opening my palms and subsequently digging half moons into my palms with my fingernails in groups of five, an anxiety trick my therapist taught me years ago whenever I felt that buzzy, lightheaded panic, when she gasps and stops at a fallen tree trunk overlooking the canyon.

“Sasha, look!”

The tree trunk rests between two smaller trees that perfectly frame the deep mountain plunge into the water. It has the aformentioned color palette of a Renoir baked into the remaining light. The buzziness encounters a malfunction – it gets paralyzed in certain strains of beauty. Open landscape is one of them.

I drop to a squat to make sure my head stops spinning, and it does. The canyon seems to hum at me at its own barely discernable frequency. It speaks directly to me.

And with some deep breaths, I settle back into my altered state within my body, not itching to get out or fight it. We became one. My body starts to feel easy, a bit euphoric, melted, soft. I forgot about my phone, or most things, for that matter. My normal noise of repetitive thought is gone, and my head feels strangely peaceful and empty. It felt like I had been pulling on a rope with unbearable tension and then suddenly dropping it to the hundreds of feet of canyon below. I had forgotten what it was like to feel like this.

We go to sit on the trunk and look out. Neither of us speak for five minutes. We just sit and exist, feeling the breeze crawl up our arms, the air sit a little more cooly on our cheeks. Staring immensity in its face, not conflating it with a threat but a grand wonder.

My friend takes a picture on her iPhone. It may be the only public evidence of our time in this moment. To others, it is a passing scroll on Instagram. To us it is a moment of restoration. We don't need to tell anybody to make it more real.

This is what reminds me of purity. And few, but far inbetween, we are always trying to find this state again.

//

There was a time where I was so comfortable being alone with myself. I'm not talking about alone time where you do your chores and watch your secret shitty TV and eat dinner from the counter next to your kitchen sink standing up. I'm talking about being comfortable with existing in one's own body, in the very state its in in the present, with all current thoughts and feelings, reservations and hopes, goals and weaknesses swirling around your existence, dipping in and out of your subconscious at any given time.

It wasn't easy to arrive at that place, but for a good couple months, it actually happened. I could sit and read for hours, write music, take hikes in the mountains with the sun and a good album, a headspace not riddled with my thoughts and anxieties interjecting every couple seconds. I would feel content in my own space independent of what was going on in the world around me or what was out of my control because I had resolved to a point of making peace with it all. I hit a perfect stride for learning new information. My mind felt like a blank, clear slate. Ready to receive. Ready to keep a steady stream of moving forward.

I always rebuild resistance to this state of being after some time. Maybe it's habit, maybe it's the world we live in, maybe it's all of it. I've never been able to be 100% comfortable. Soon as I put rest to one preoccupation, another one crops up from the same crack in the pavement. It feels like I want to escape my own skin. All of a sudden, the person I've become up to this point isn't all she's cracked up to be. I look in the mirror and feel a lack of harmony. I look into the sun and don't feel a dopamine release, but rather, a nuisance. Everything feels opposite – the music, processes, rituals, schedules I have all seem pointless or unfulfilling or disappointing or like they aren't working, but I can't tell if my mind is just playing tricks on me because it doesn't know naturally how to default to feeling good.

This is, of course, a chronic American problem.

We have access to too much information. We are either deeply sensitized or too sensitive. There is no inbetween. And it's feeding my problem like emotional wildfire – covering happiness, fear, horror, excitement, all in one fell swoop. It's just a swipe away from another level of paranoia.

I need to be on my phone to know what everyone is doing, where everyone is going, performing, touring, exploring. I want to know whose record just came out, who got signed with a new agent and who left, who was all performing at that festival last weekend, who had a new performance opportunity, who made a new brand deal, who is promoting a new instrument. And then I suddenly need to know random things. Why is Cote de Voire one of the only countries in the world who has been able to maintain their uncolonized name? How many microplastics am I really ingesting from the water bottle that's been sitting out for most of the day? According to science, what's wrong with my face? What is the oldest tree on earth? Why is etoricoxib banned in the United States?

And then it becomes about things I don't want to find out about.

Someone else has died of cancer under the age of 40. Somebody I spoke to last month.

They moved on.

Their family dearly misses them.

Kids are being bombed and air raided to death again.

Our potential vice president's kids is being bullied on the internet for being neurodivergent.

There might be mold in your floorboards. Here are the ten symptoms.

Studies show the long term effects of Covid may alter your health permanently.

Why do I feel the need to assault myself with information? Stay in the know, but agressively, comparatively, volatilely so? Do we fear that if we don't we are at risk of irrelevance, disappearing – online, in person, through Zoom, through texts, through emotional fervor?

I reach this point where I don't want to post on Instagram anymore. I don't give a fuck about keeping up an online presence because it has the capacity to feed the flame of making me have a depressive or anxious spiral. I've also learned that we all have experienced some version of this – our escape being travel, drugs, blowing off work, sex, any number of vices. I have tried various healthier methods than one of those options. This is when my friend who is in love with California and I decide to spend the end of August in the mountains and at the beach. I step away from the emails, the instrument, I reassess my own toxic patterns and sit with myself. I think about how to find that sweet spot of feeling good again.

Since I'm living in California again, now for the first time as a legal adult, I can revisit places that I went often as a kid. California beaches are marked by a side of staggering coastal cliffs, rough, gravely sand, a white sun, and a feeling of being cold and hot at the same time. The wind picks up around 4pm, giving you goosebumps if you're in a bathing suit. But the water still glimmers the same way as an Island beach, like something out of a movie. Sarah Wilson has cited many resources about anxiety relief from nature working strongest when accompanied by a body of water – especially one that moves on its own accord (unlike most lakes), suggestive of the human and earthly breath. It isn't just anxiety relief at work but also nostalgia. I used to run around naked as a toddler on the beach, total inhibition, total freedom from self consciousness. Those feelings don't really settle in at that age yet. It's a beautiful thing. When I got older, I would spend time at the beach with my brother and his friends, catching sand crabs right in the wake where the water pulls itself up to its highest point before ebbing away, making tunnels and moats and castles with my brother's reckless friends. Eating cinnamon twists from the Taco Bell in Pacifica and trying to look for my dad surfing in the water.

I am sitting at Zumba beach in Malibu, legs tucked in to my chest, as my friend falls asleep face down with her headphones on. Looking out at this glittering water, these picturesque cliffs. I am trying to remember this. I am trying to remember this and breathe deeply into my stomach to counts of four or five. I forgot my Advil at home and my Endometriosis is flaring up again, my stomach expanding at the response to inflammation, exposed with a sheen of sunscreen to the sky.

I am trying to settle into the mind of that little girl. I am breathing into my stomach slowly, out through my mouth. It is the most perfect beach, the most familiar beach. And yet I cannot stop thinking about the pain. I am remembering the wrong things. I am remembering when I nearly drowned in a rip current when I was 16. I am remembering that N fell off of a cliff just like these ones, at a beach just like this one, crying at his funeral while giving a speech months later. I remember when V couldn't make the first day of my recording session for my album I made in high school because he had a concussion at the beach. He had texted me this nonsensical message the day it had happened, a bunch of jibberish and botched syntax. He apologizes the next day and makes it up to me because that's the kind of person he was. He is shot on USC campus months later.

It wasn't fair. I lived all these years without him, cursing my life for not going the way I wanted it to while he didn't even get a chance to think about his life at all.

And I cannot stop thinking about the Etoxicob or the oldest tree in the world or my cat at home alone, looking out the window of my apartment, waiting for me to come back, or the 2025 touring schedule, or my constant inability to stay within myself as it exists today and the spin in my head goes faster and faster, taking my nausea with it. The little girl evades my fingertips. I don't think she exists anymore. I can't ever seem to find her, and neither can anybody else.

The wind starts whipping at my legs. The hair stands up on my arms.

When did it all start to feel so hard?

One, two, three, four, five.

As Sarah says, “we come into this world screaming.”

/

I have to keep trying. I have to keep trying because there is no other choice. I want more moments free of the assault that is modern adulthood, constant loss, competition, the consequences of individualism, inadequacy, and meaninglessness that plague us on a daily basis. I will take as many as I can get.

I have a day off in San Francisco, where I grew up. It is strangely sunny everywhere but the Sutro Tower, who's red prongs emerge from a dense block of fog in the distance. From my neighborhood I spent most of my life in, Potrero Hill, one towers over a great portion of the middle of the city – the mission, downtown, SoMa, looking out on the Bay Bridge and the latest towering Silicon Valley structures. The neighborhood itself is very soft and classic San Francisco, home to quaint pastel Victorian homes, steep hills, abandoned industrial manufacturing warehouses, and cargo shipping piers at the base of the hills to the east. It smelled like yeast from the Anchor Steam Factory and pepper from the Morton & Bassett spice company when I was growing up, the latter of which closed in recent years. My favorite lookout then and now is out where the piers and boat shacks are, watching ferries shuttle slowly along the bay by the haze of the pink, foggy sunset. I never used to be able to investigate that area much as a kid, as Potrero Hill was working class up until the 2000s and the piers were considered dangerous. The twisted fate of gentrification made it not only safe, but a new hotspot for UCSF residents and trendy Google workers. It's not aesthetically my style, and it's certainly unfavorable to the natives who have been displaced financially, but there was something to fulfilling my life long dream of walking by those piers without fearing for my life.

I will make myself walk when I cannot sort out a solution or a salvation. I will walk and listen to music I can get lost in, like Bill Frisell. He is playing Lush Life with the Brussels Philharmonic when I spot an artificial sandy island by China Basin, right across from AT&T Stadium. There are lawn chairs for people to sit and look out at the bay and grass mounds for dogs to run around. This would have never existed when I was growing up – these areas were full of trash, porta potties, and dusty abandoned cement blocks. Families and friends are sitting out, enjoying the sun, small dog on a leash next to them. I wonder if they were here long enough to remember what this area used to look like.

I keep walking down the length of Third Street, back towards UCSF and Dogpatch, following the water. Here we are again - finding water when met with anxiety, remembering how much things are not how they used to be. Bill and the Orchestra are now playing the ever rotating, heartbreaking ballad of his called “Throughout”. I always loved how Bill was a fan of minor chords with b13, a harmonic addition to chords that tends to make them darker than their original quality. This song puts the b13 in the melody, mimicing the same interval created by the distance between the third and the root in a first inversion major triad – also a b13. It casts a dark and contemplative nature over the whole song, and the chords build up and fall back down again every time the melody is played. It plays over and over again, strings adding in slight counter melodies over time, but it never gets redundant. It is just meditative. This is a huge feat for an orchestra – a song that doesn't move to new sections, simply reinventing the same section over every time.

There's a giant park being built by the water that's still under construction, full of more artificial grass mounds, perfectly cut cement stairs, and wood slatted pathways that meander around the mounds. It reminded me of when I first moved to NY at 18 and found the Highline, which has a similar aesthetic style. NYC and San Francisco have taken beautiful qualities of each city – skylines, shops, cafes, water views – and capitalized on them to attract new residents. You can argue if the reinvention is better or worse. In many ways it is both. In many ways the discussion is complicated. In many ways you forget how the old way was, and you may never go back. We are recycling loss, memory, mourning, happiness, reinvention, every single day. You are lucky if you reach a point to rest in it all and find the apex of feeling good, even if it is for just a handful of minutes at the summit of a canyon in Southern California, looking out on the towering mountains.

I can't help but feel entirely separate from my childhood, like it was not my life I was looking at but somebody else's. It's not just about finally walking along the piers that were previously unsafe to me when I was younger, or moving out of NYC, where I thought the rest of my life waited for me. It's not just about visiting beach cliffs like the ones I knew as a source of freedom and innocence as a kid that now bring up the wrong kind of memories. It's about a transformation that happens so long that it starts to feel unrecognizeable.

What I do still recognize is the pain she felt. She appears in my dreams at the venues that I play in real life, convention centers, festivals, things I do routinely and well now, getting picked up by her parents, sobbing on the way to the car because she cannot bear the weight of inadequacy on her shoulders. And then it became about other things. I cannot hold her because I wake up and I cannot even see her anymore. She got lost when I was forced to become stronger, to not disclose my feelings publicly, to not think too hard about the lives of her friends she will never be able to retrieve, to find a way out of the madness of the online world, to move forward in reinvention over and over again.

Sitting on the final artificial beach by the piers before I go home, I'm left with more questions than answers about the state of my life – of all of our lives - in this western world. But it is unhurriedly, unobstructively so. I guess this is what I speak of when I am able to be with myself. Fighting an imaginary urgency we are all fed on every platform, software, medium of life. I hope for a dream in which I can see that little girl again, and I don't find her in agony (and not necessarily in elation, either, although I would smile to think of that), but to find her on a bench, hold her hand, and sit in silence, waiting for nothing at all. She was one of excellence, but not of pipe dreams and false pretenses, all rom a young age. So I will not force it on her. I feel her in that we still share a need for peace and purity, after the piers have changed, after love has been lost and found and lost, a way of resting.

Just like the water, lapping at the shores in every timeline.

Just like the still canyons in the California summer.