It’s like when his English teacher at Cal State Fullerton told the class to go out and write a poem about autumn. Great, Jim thought at the time. First of all, we live in Orange County—what is autumn to us? Football season. Wetsuits for surfing. Like that. He’s read that Brahms’s Third Symphony is autumnal, he’s read that the rhythms of the Book of Psalms are autumnal—okay, so what’s autumn? Brahms’s Third Symphony! The Book of Psalms! That’s the kind of circles you run in, when the natural world is gone. Okay, take those fragments and try to make something of it.

I listen to Brahms

And watch the Rams

I read from Psalms

We are only lambs

Putting on our wetsuits

To surf the autumn waves.

Hey, pretty good! But then the professor gets out “To Autumn” by John Keats, and reads it aloud. Oh. Well. Take your poem and eat it. In fact scratch that topic entirely, it’s been done before to perfection. Well fine! Ain’t no such topic in OC anyway!

The trouble is that if you start that process you quickly find that every topic in the world goes out the window the same way. It’s either been covered to the max by the great writers of the past, or else it doesn’t exist in OC. Usually both.

Be a witness to what you see. Be a witness to the life you live. To the lives we live.

And why, why, why? How did it get this way?

Back to that again. All right. Make that the orientation point, Jim thinks, the organizing principle, the Newport Freeway of your writing method. He thinks of In the American Grain, by William Carlos Williams. Williams’s book is a collection of prose meditations on various figures of American history, explaining it all with that fine poet’s eye and tongue. Of course Jim can’t duplicate that book: he doesn’t have any more writing ability than Williams had in his little fingernail. Every time WCW cut his fingernails, Jim thinks, he lopped off ten times more talent than I will ever have, and wrapped it in newspaper and tossed it in the wastebasket. He giggles at the thought. Somehow it makes him feel freer.

Duplication isn’t the problem, anyway. It’s OC Jim is concerned with, Orange County, the ultimate expression of the American Dream. And there aren’t any great individuals in OC’s history, that’s part of what OC means, what it is. So he couldn’t follow Williams’s program even if he wanted to.

But it gives him a clue. Collectively they made this place. And so it has a history. And tracing this history might help to explain it, which is more important to Jim, now, than just witnessing. How it got to its present state: “The Sleepwalkers and How We Came to Be.” He laughs again.