The process of making anything can get so frustrating it puts me down for the count for weeks. You’ll get so worked up over something that’s not working out, that’s finding its way painfully and slowly. A painting, for me. I’ll be like Eeyore with a depressed cloud hanging over me if I’m working on a painting and there’s some idea not coming to me. In the shower I think to myself, “it doesn’t matter at all,” and calm down. And in a way that’s true. I can just go on living without finishing anything. What’s the hard work and stress for? It doesn’t matter at all. But I take a beat and then I think, “but in a way, it’s the only thing that matters.” The only thing worth getting stressed up and worked over about is art, probably. Love, too.

Something I think about is that David Lynch and Brian Wilson both had these massive imaginations. Yet when they envisioned the beautiful life, the one just out of their reach, the dream was simple and ordinary. The white picket fence, falling in love, driving your car, going to the beach. All of it made an unattainable fairly tale by life’s cruelty: violence, sickness, hate, evil, trauma.

The normal thing. The pure unadulterated Americana corny thing. Who wants it? You think about the emo kids who feel trapped in suburbia. Burt Lancaster in the Swimmer, whose grasp of the elite version of it slips. The claustrophobia of suburbia, the mundanity of cut grass, ball and chain. Who wants it? Someone who can’t have it. It’s only a rosy fantasy if you can’t have it.

I’m thinking about the artist’s place in creating dreams. The Beach Boys resonate with weirdos for one reason (obviously, if you’re reading this, that’s probably the group you’re in. And as much as the internet wants to hate on Mike Love or their early pop sensations, The Beach Boys weren’t just Pet Sounds and Surf’s Up). And their music resonates with “squares,” normal people and “normies” * for another. I imagine if you’re a guy who surfs, you can put on The Beach Boys and think, “that’s right! Surfing DOES rock! I love my life” and like literally good for you, I’m happy for you, but that’s a totally different experience than I have listening to the same music, which for me is feeling outside of life, looking in — wanting, not having.

* how I’m defining this - I think most people are not normies. Most “normal” people are not normies. It’s not even normal to be a normie. But normies exist in a small, but pervasive, percentage, and their influence on the culture has brought us beige workwear spandex sets and short form video content skits about cheating, so we must contend with them.

I think it’s key that The Beach Boys didn’t actually surf and that Brian Wilson was an odd little boy who felt alone. That’s part of the magic. A world where a confident, in-love gigachad writes about the same material turns the music from hopeful, unfulfilled longing into bragging. I’m not really interested in hearing from someone who’s born into the good life and living out the dream. I think it’s better coming from someone who’s not, someone who’s dreaming. That’s perspective, in a weird way. A shot of the landscape painted with a blurry reference from a distance. The unseen spots filled in with pretending.

I think it’s only really the outsider who can say with unabashed earnestness what we all feel, and make a line like “sometimes I feel very sad, sometimes I feel very sad,” feel the truest, starkest, boldest, most beautiful thing you’d ever heard.

Wilson was able to glorify what he didn’t know by virtue of not knowing. It’s sort of an alternate route, if it’s not handed to you, to make it yourself. It’s one way to live in the splendor and glory you haven’t been welcomed into, because something’s wrong with you. The cardboard box of the castle.

In this process, he created a dream of California, of America, with a spirit greater than the reality of this place. That then in turn became the aspiration, or the thing the real thing modeled itself after. And it wasn’t a surfer guy who illuminated this for us (although they have, with movies like Endless Summer), but Brian Wilson. If you’ll allow for my corni-ness, my greeting card obviousness, artists have a way of showing us the beauty of reality with contorted circus mirror images.

I don’t mean this in a “romanticize your life” kind of way, like finding a cup of coffee or an oil spill pretty and extruding molecule of happiness from your experiences, deep breathing and all that, but in the sense that the process of construction is revealing. The interpretation of life from the outside passed through the brain and hands of an artist into a form intended to reflect it - could never be what it’s reflecting, but something else. And in the process of interpretation, the source material (our feelings toward it) changes.

This is a specific type of desire and wanting… essentially, we don’t find the image desirable because it is precious. The image, the dream, the life, becomes precious because it is desired. Not had.

I guess I didn’t really talk about Lynch, who I mentioned up top, but he’s a part of this too. This is really more about The Beach Boys.

When I first moved to California, I’d take the bus from my small apartment I shared with my checked-out boyfriend to my lousy retail job where I was being bullied by my manager, and listen to Pet Sounds over and over again. Here I was, on the precipice of paradise, around well-educated UCLA students, around more monied people than I’d ever seen in my life, and world class museums and restaurants, in a place where the sun shines every day - the beach, only an hour away. And how often would I go? Not often. And how would I feel when I was there? Like I wasn’t having as much fun as I was supposed to, that I just couldn’t relax the right way.

I felt outside of the things others seemed to grasp easily and naturally. It gave me this this gnawing feeling that nothing was right. I think later I realized that the void, uncertainty and sensitivity I felt was the art thing, that giving it some rope could be more spiritually fulfilling for me than my ambitions for status or my forced sense of chill when I was actually feeling forgotten and trodden upon. That the feeling of being outside normalcy didn’t just have to be a bitterness, it actually gave me the perspective to enshrine what was out of my reach: the absolute ordinary.

I’m not sure I’m actually equipped to do that. But I know Brian Wilson was.