A Surly Girl's Guide to Life

A few weeks back, The Poor Bastard and I settled in to watch the Charlie Sheen documentary. Charlie and I were friendly in high school, although I doubt he remembers me. Early in the film, they showed old footage of kids skateboarding down a familiar road in Malibu, and I suddenly felt nostalgic for the Malibu I once knew. 50 years ago, it wasn’t all movie stars, billionaires, and ridiculously priced real estate all decorated in coastal beige. It was a rural, largely middle-class seaside town. You don’t see that past today, in part because most people who grew up in my Malibu can no longer afford to live there, and large swaths of the city that it once was have burned to the ground or been razed in favor of progress.

While I was feeling nostalgic, I dug out a box of old photos and mementos. I found group photos from our 9th-grade graduation from Malibu Park, strips of photobooth photos, and, for some reason, a handful of other people’s ID cards and bus passes. A little pre-internet identity theft I guess. They brought back memories of the times before the world got weird, when we were free-range children on the weekends and in the summers. We owned the beaches. The malls. The world.

While I was on this trip down memory lane, I got a text from a childhood friend, Julie, with a photo of the two of us from the 80s. Proof that decades on, the kids from my town are metaphysically still out there somewhere in that zeitgeist.

The fires in recent years have destroyed countless treasures and memories of the past. Kids today won’t know what it was like to spend your Saturday playing Centipede at Straw Hat Pizza until you ran out of quarters, or running in packs, essentially feral, through the canyons or along the beaches until sunset required you to head home for dinner. They will never be able to go on a nostalgic trip to the past with their parents, showing them the monuments that make up their history.

With both of our childhood homes destroyed in some way by fire, Julie and I chatted about how, with so much of our history now lacking documentation, it’s incumbent upon us to be the memorykeepers. With the world so rapidly changing, and so obviously not for the better, I posited to her that we are charged with being the guardians of what once was. To wit, she replied, “I feel that deep in my bones – but am at a loss as to what to do about it. Is this just what aging feels like?”

Yes, I think it is.