December 2022: Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground. I don’t love where I live. I don’t hate it, but I might just be saying that to keep it from being real. My wife and I moved to Tulare, California because we’re both teachers, and teachers make what teachers make, and places cost what places cost. We were living and teaching in Hawaii (Kailua, Oahu) when our second child was born, and the last, fluid drops of our pre-child selves that could justify any sacrifice of responsibility or personal comfort in the name of art, curiosity, and/or freedom evaporated. The concrete had cured.

We had one car and one bathroom when our family grew thirty-three percent in the Summer of 2006, but it was more than the increased demands on those modern necessities that tilted the scale. It was that the financial instability of our life was no longer something we had to bear alone—our two children would as well. I had been teaching for six years and knew full well that instability and growth were sworn enemies. There was something about child number two that did it, something that became too loud to ignore. We moved away from Hawaii in November 2006.

My mother-in-law was from Tulare, the hot and dusty Oklahoma center of California nobody thinks about, and tourist guidebooks ignore. These details mean things like housing and groceries are affordable (by California standards), and our California teacher salaries would go much further there than the more exciting, expensive, and climate-reasonable regions to the north and south. My wife, Laurie, had family in Tulare, and it was just three hours from mine in Orange County. It was the responsible move, and through that lens, it’s all been rosy. We’ve been able to afford a comfortable middle-class life, be homeowners, travel a bit, take our kids to Disneyland, and put away for their college education. Remove the tint of responsibility and the movie that is our life becomes a little more Tim Burton-esque.

As the years blur together, I find myself becoming increasingly obsessed with the green grass growing everywhere but where I’m standing. I’m hung up on travelling far away, memories of a 2018 trip to England taunting me as the only significant thing we’ve done since moving to Tulare that was personally enriching and didn’t also have a tax benefit. It was wonderfully indulgent and paid for by cash pulled out of a mortgage refinance, and nothing I do seems to cure the hangover from that intoxicating high. I am constantly dreaming about something that goes counter to the ultra-responsible and dutiful fifty-something father/husband/teacher I’ve become, wanting to spend gobs of cash on something that won’t reduce our children’s college debt, secure our retirement just a little more tightly, or shrink the principle on our mortgage.

Mondays through Fridays aren’t the problem, when my responsibilities keep me busy, and Tulare’s traffic-free roads and lower costs are welcome. It’s on the weekends, where cruising the Tulare Outlet Mall is the only option for a little culture because there’s a movie theater (nothing arthouse, just action, horror, and animated/kid’s films), when the ennui gets so thick it hurts to breathe. Or maybe that’s just the dirt, brown cloud after brown cloud sent aloft as tractors drag dry earth and barreling big rigs whoosh the filthy air across the scorched flatlands of the San Joaquin Valley, covering everything with an impossible to keep up with layer of dust, lungs included.

Working against me is the fact that I’m not from Tulare, and the powerful perfume of nostalgia cannot be sprayed like Febreze to neutralize the stink (metaphorically and literally, as the smell of manure is omnipresent). Tulare is not a place people move to, so we’re surrounded by born and raised locals, and they spray it liberally. I admit I am jealous, their rabid contentment like dirty water from a puddle, splashing all over me every time they drive by in their standard issue pickup truck. To compound things, I am from Southern California, growing up in Orange County before moving to Los Angeles after college, along with a stretch in Hawaii. I know what it can be like on the weekends, with perfect weather, too many options for culture, and all the interesting, open-minded, and creative people those places attract.

By far the coolest place within an hour of where I live is Velouria Records in Visalia, the only record store in Tulare County, and about 20 minutes from where I live. Adam and Tanya, the proprietors of this fine establishment, always provide a good hour’s worth of music and culture related chit chat. Tanya is also from Orange County, so we usually engage in some reminiscing. We point out the current thirty-degree temperature difference between our two homes, and it is never in our favor. Adam, a subscriber to the Rick Rubin house of style and grooming, continually astounds me with the depth of his music knowledge, always opening my mind and ears to delicious new treats. On occasion we put our grandpa slippers on and participate in some good natured “get off my lawn!” fist waving over the beguiling habits of the local youth we both deal with, they as shop owners and I as a high school teacher. Eventually I break away and do some digging, finding another $100 of goods to walk out with until the next time. I have been visiting Velouria for years, but on my last visit Adam slipped a copy of Record Collector News into my bag, a free rag I had seen before but never picked up or read. He’d never done that before.

I got home and started flipping through it. At first, Record Collector News just rubbed it in, the map of advertisers highlighting the cultural wasteland I had decided to call home and raise children in. But then I saw an ad for a store called Cheap Thrills in San Luis Obispo. I had been to SLO several times, most often because one or both of our kids were participating in a swim meet or water polo tournament. It’s an easy two-and-a-half-hour drive for us, and we have grown to love the charming town and surrounding stretch of the Central California Coast. I had been to the captivating Boo Boo Records (one of the nation’s best, according to Rolling Stone), but Cheap Thrills? How did I miss it? Could there be a cooler name for a record store than Cheap Thrills? SLO is not a large city, but it’s easy to miss what you’re not looking for, and even easier if your eyes are closed.

That ad was like a dousing of WD-40, loosening something that had rusted shut. I had never actively searched for a record store, only going to those nearby or that I happened to see because I was in the area. Something about the fact that I had been in a relatively small town on multiple occasions and missed an opportunity to look at records in not one but two record stores, let alone ones named Boo Boo and Cheap Thrills seemed so incredibly wrong. I had gone too far, and I was lost.

It was time to get found, and for some reason, a record store seemed like the right place to do it. It was dawning on me that I was nearing two decades of being a father, two decades of sacrifice, devotion, and a laser-tight focus on the mission. Two decades of deep, deep love, forget yourself love. With one child in college and the other a couple years away, it finally feels like it might be okay to lift my head, and maybe even permissible to glance in the mirror. That’s a lot to lay at the altar of a record store ad placed in a free rag, but at fifty-three I’ve come to accept way crazier shit.

I am a modest collector of vinyl, with a collection of about 400, a collection that I restarted in my 40s, the records of my youth sold off, the victim of too many moves and too little cash. I buy vinyl at Velouria, and Target if I see something I like, or a discount sticker catches my attention. Records are the only items on my birthday and Christmas lists. Amazon is in the mix too, but Record Collector News woke up a part of me that had fallen asleep for decades, the kid that couldn’t wait to dig through my local record store (Music Plus in Westminster, CA) as a middle schooler after my birthday, multiple gift certificates in hand. The kid that spent every penny he had at age eight to buy his first record, a Queen 7”, We Will Rock You, We Are the Champions (purchased at Gemco in Huntington Beach, CA). That kid had no other responsibilities than to play that record again and again and again.

I need to go to Cheap Thrills.