Last Friday afternoon, peak summer, clear and sunny, 65-degree water with a south swell in it — everything right about California wrapped into a single perfect day just like the ones before and after it — I drove to Malibu, to Dillon’s house.

It was the best possible moment not to do that. Every car owner south of Portland decided idling on Highway 1 could be a real fucking gas right then and let’s all go try it, so there we were, sitting in traffic while this awesome day melted off into evening. It gave me time to look around and be reminded why California is still California and still the tits of North America, maybe all the world.

Malibu is especially nice. Dillon’s house is a sweet modern two-story on the sand at a pointbreak you don’t see from the road, or to put it another way, the fantasy of every person in greater LA who sweats here and sits on the 1 and believes it’s possible to someday have what Dillon has, which they will not.

But Dillon just wants to get out of here and go do stuff. He’s seen perfect waves, he’s lived in a beach house, he knows what a boat trip’s like. Dillon is 22. He left for Virginia the next morning and was actually excited about that and said, “I’d rather go to Virginia than Indonesia,” because Virginia might be different or interesting. He wants to go to New York because he’s never been and just walk around by himself lost in the city. He wants to go to Nashville and Seattle. We’re making plans to go do all that but fuck, I just want to hang at Dillon’s house.