Vive Californication

One day in the spring of 2019, I put on the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ album Californication and went to take a walk. I’d recently returned from two years of living in Egypt, and now I was back in my hometown of San Diego, crashing at a friend’s apartment in a neighborhood called Normal Heights. I had no money, no job, and no idea what I was going to do next. But it was a balmy 67 degrees out, perfect T-shirt weather. Silhouettes of skinny palm trees swayed gently in the early evening breeze. A handful of cars on the street cruised by at moderate speed. This seemed like a nice place to cool my heels for a while.