It's time to talk about A Story About San Diego. This was a novel that I wrote in the 2000s. And San Diego, ever misunderstood, ever treated poorly by 20-somethings, was a main character.

How A Story About San Diego came about: I was in my 20s, living in San Diego, and being strongly nudged towards the straight and narrow by several forces, including (a) this wonderful woman who's become my wife (b) the most influential mentor I've ever had (c) being able to earn decent money as a professional, save for retirement etc. And 80 percent of me was confident in this path. But there was this 20 percent of me who was being tugged by my own Imp of the Perverse, an inner demon I was conjuring through weekends going to shows and staying up late reading Henry Miller and the Beats, as well as this general rage for agency and adventure I had discovered while backpack around Europe and was still festering inside me. That 20% of me needed an outlet, and so I wrote this novel.

The novel - A Story About San Diego - centers around this first-person character Jake who is leading a "normal" life working a boring white collar job, measuring out his life with PowerPoints, and one day he just walks away. And then his "story" is told through a series of personal relationships he has with his male friends, with women, and even a cat a long weeklong ramble around the alleyways off the city with. Each chapter centers around Jake's relationship with one of the characters. And then the penultimate scene is this midnight trip to Tijuana with several of the characters that ends becoming a three day bender through the best and worst of everything South of the Border has to offer, finally ending in a tent in Bahía de los Ángeles.

A lot of the things in the book really happened to me or to friends, just not in the same way or to the same extent that they happen to Jake. That three day bender was based on a trip I took to Ensenada, where a group and I came across some elicit drugs that we thought were one thing but turned out to be mostly another. A drug that once you get going on it, you don't sleep. And we really did have one long night where we met with all walks of Baja life, from gangsters to movie stars to bums. It was one night and one morning rather than three days, and when we came back across the border we were tired but still us, and the chapter I ended up writing - like a lot of the book - was a what if this had gone on for three days instead of one, and what if we had accepted all invitations...

Jake wakes up in that tent in Bahía - which in real life I had been to a decade before over Spring Break - and realizes that he's finally exhausted the path of recklessness. And that was me, 30 years old at the time, coming to terms with the trail I would actually walk in this life, which is close - but not exactly - the straight and narrow.

At the end of A Story About San Diego, Jake meets this girl who is suspiciously similar to my wife, and she represents this middle path that Jake and Real-Life Me settled on. It's left undetermined what that actually will entail, but it's suggested that it will be a happily ever after.

There are a few reasons I don't talk about it much or even hare physical copies today:

• Concluding pibot notwithstanding, Jake represents someone I never was, and It's somewhat embarrassing to have considered becoming that person
• Kerouac and Miller - along with other authors I was reading at the time - have their issues, one of them being a misogynistic bent, and I picked that up in my writing, in some cases the worst of it, and I'm embarrassed of that now as well
• The structure represents a way of using people that I never really thought about then, and definitely don't agree with now. The dozenish relationships that Jake has follow a structure of a maze, where the walls and obstacles in the form of other people are fixed, and only the hero learns or changes. A very juvenile way of storytelling.
• It's frankly not a very good novel. It shines in moments, wonderfully so, in ways that make me grin ear to ear reading them now. Occasional electric prose that only a 20-something could be capable of crafting. But the structure is flawed as I just called out, the narrative is disjointed with obvious contradictions and sudden shifts in tone, and there are big scenes that I was unwilling or unable to cut that bog down the story. It's obviously written by someone whose context window - to use a modern term - was occupied by the software system he was creating during his day job that often extended into the weekends, leaving him sometimes an hour or less each week of creative time that he was willing to spend on the book.
• I remember at the time being fascinated with this phrase that Miller uses, I think it's in Tropic of Cancer but might be in Black Spring, about how he's going to "bury himself" in the novel he's writing. Well, I did that - but it wasn't me I buried, it was my Imp of the Perverse. In other words, writing the book served its purpose. As Alan Watts advised about psychedelics: "If you get the message, hang up the phone..."

And then I spent nearly two decades not writing novels at all. Will I interrupt that pattern in the late 2020s? As I push solidly into middle age, I suspect so. But this time, I'm going to try really hard to write something that Me In Twenty Years will be proud of having made.