I was a teenager when I moved to the desert of Southern California and as I approach year 40 of my life I can’t shake the feeling of the place where I began my adult life. The song “Crazy For This Girl” by Evan and Jaron popped into my head tonight, I had it on a Now That’s What I Call Music CD that I would play in my ’92 Honda Accord that I drove to college in which was 90 minutes away in Riverside from the military base I lived on. It was part of my soundtrack of the time, part of the landscape. The Coachella music festival was brand new then and had not yet transformed the area. Everything out there was barren, there was nothing to do except the Joshua Tree National Park. This represents to me now the blank slate of possibility: for myself, the era I was living in and the geography of the time.

I pulled up Evan and Jaron’s music video tonight. It ironically was shot on a famous film set outside Lancaster, CA which is another Southern California military desert town. There is nothing remarkable about the song or the video except it’s quaintness: a camera that shoots film, a venue where back when the video was shot definitely didn’t have cell service. Cell phones were a novelty in the late 90s and early 2000s but even if you had one back then (moneybags) you can guarantee once you got to the desert there would be no signal. Maybe that’s what I’m craving nearing year 40: the simplicity of a different, less connected era. The blank slate of having a do-over where I can make better decisions armed with what I know now. Or maybe it’s the thing I carry in my heart, the experience of being young in the desert of Southern California during that time, my life being shaped just like how the sands wear away and shape everything bit by bit with the blowing Santa Ana winds.

(“Crazy For This Girl” filming location near Lancaster, CA which is north of LA)