California is also, however, the site of real people's homes. Real people's lives. Real lives begun as dreams and perhaps dribbled into boredom. Or unraveled into nightmares. Or fabulously, miraculously achieved. This schism - between what California represents in popular imagination and what it is, what it means to live there, to be from there - means Californians collide constantly with the rupture of existence.

How to dream the life we are already living.

[...] Paradise is burning at the heart of the largest wildfires in California's long and storied history of fires. The thick smoke, which blankets the entire region for hundreds of miles, contains the particulate remains of Paradise. It occurs to me that in unison, millions of us are inhaling the sofas and ottomans of Paradise, the cars and gas stations of it, the trees and lawns, the clothes and detergent, the wedding pictures and divorce papers, the cadavers. [...]

What a strange world. You're in a beat-up white van with your son, still a child but barely, driving by the place where your father was laid up so many years ago. And now you live near there, getting up at 4 a.m. to push a broom. Dinner for your family is sometimes eggs, or two frozen pizzas for ninety-nine cents a box. What do you have to show for your life? You're raising your kids in government housing. There are things you see in the neighborhood that you can't do anything about. You might as well be a ghost. [....]

[...] he'll ask how I'm doing. I don't ask how he's doing because I know how he's doing. He's doing homeless in Los Angeles for five years. He's doing sleeping in a box. Instead I ask if he needs anything - a blanket, food, money. There's always a pause before he tells me he's fine. I ask if he's sure and he assures me he's sure, and then me and this packaged voice in the dark wish each other goodnight.

And while I haven't always ignored it, I can usually tell what's in my head and what's outside of it, which voice in the dark is imagined and which is real, but why I'm in here and he's out there, I'm not sure I can tell. Why my box is bigger than his.

We know the things we know because they've been taught to us, sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely, legend-by-osmosis. The things we don't know are things we've never heard bout - whatever has been left out of the conversation, struck from the record, or simply never even considered. We sometimes have to unlearn these early teachings, or at least learn that some additional facts inhabit the legends we've been passed down like heirlooms, each as solid as a land mass and casting long shadows, just like the Buttes themselves.

[...] We girls - not one indigenous student among us - received a standing ovation as we gathered at the front of the stage in our costumes, linked arms, and took a grand, ecstatic bow. We were being raised to understand that the world was ours for the taking, because that had long been true, even after the gold dried up, even after the cities burned or failed to be built at all, even after our origin stories were revealed for what they were and we outgrew our costumes and our grandparents and then our parents began to die - heroically or no - even after our memories failed and the stories flew away.

There is a terrible structure of goodness in the United States that is designed to be unattainable for most non-white Americans, most poor Americans, most immigrants, most queer, most disabled bodies. We are taught early to be good, to behave, to be quiet, to not take up space, to be invisible. Maybe this is why we gravitate toward sports - a place where we can be good. Not an equal playing field, as we have seen, but as close to one as we get. It's the gimmick Baldwin was talking about - sport/game - our way up and out from under the thumb or boot of our nation's power structures.