To my fellow San Diego lovers, artists and especially writers :

My friends, we are not well.

We have a bad reputation. They call us a Navy Town. Just a Tourist Town. Just a playpen for wealthy LAistas, a Party Town. We don’t even have a real downtown, we have Disneyland-South, with bums and parking issues. We’re commodity - Sea World, The Zoo, Pacific Beach, Mission Bay, a sunny day and a speedbump on the way to Baja. Even our baseball team sucks.

I take trips. “Oh, you’re from San Diego?” someone in Seattle, or Boston, or Bangkok will say to me. “Yeah, that’s a nice place. I spent some time there back in the (choose your decade)s… great weather. Loved the beaches. What’s the name of that big park again?” Sometimes it feels like half the country’s done some time here, pissed away a part of their twenties hanging at the beach, left with pleasant memories tinged with the odor of cling wrap. Everybody knows San Diego… the way everybody knows George Clooney, or Cate Blanchett. You start talking about Hillcrest, North Park, Golden Hill, Clairemont, they look at you like you’re talking about the moon.

I hang in our cafes, our bars. Hear the same crap ad nauseum - “Yeah but if this was New York…”, “It’s so much better in Chicago”, “Like, in LA, this place would be…” All these unwinnable comparisons, like we’re a small town in provincial France and since nothing’s Paris then nothing’s nothing. “Des Moines with a beach” - you heard that one? “Orange County South.”

And I’m not going to slip us off the hook - We deserve some blame. Let’s be honest - All in all, we do a lousy job of telling our story. I mean us, not the government. Those bureaucrats do a fantastic job of marketing - marketing by way of Don’t Rock The Boat. You know, America’s Finest City and all that. It’s hard to blame them. It’s what they’re elected to do - maintain status quo, make Ma and Pa from Kansas comfy during their stay. It’s our fault. We’re the artists here. We ought to be adding to the story. But we’re not.

Don’t mistake this for a blanket indictment. I see and hear and read wonderful things being produced in our city. And in music and the visual arts there’s some fine adoration for San Diego going on. But where are the words?

Few and far between. As far as I can tell, they’re either a) not being written or b) not being marketed well. The latter may as well be the former

Actually, there’s a c), isn’t there? Maybe the idea of writing about San Diego isn’t being marketed well…

I think that we think that we can’t sustain ourselves. We’re dreaming so far, so wide. We’re lusting over the screenplay we’ll sell in Hollywood, over penning the Great American Novel in a New York City penthouse, over being on Oprah and getting rich by writing Barbara Kingsolver with an attitude or Candace Bushnell with a SoCal angle or Hemingway meets Thomas Pynchon meets Holden Caulfield. Everyone wants to build a hardware store to compete with Home Depot, and five years later, when they realize they’ll never be able to compete at that scale, they drift away. There’s little to no notion of writing local, for a local audience -

Yeah, we’ve got a rep. Yeah, people come here to party and play, to spend their twenties messing around before moving back home, or up to San Francisco where VC firms dole out millions to every turkey who can figure out how to install Wordpress and get Join Our Alpha List! between a pair of h1 braces. But you know what? There’s a million people here. This is A City. I feel like we have to continually remind ourselves of it… As I write this I’m on my way to Port Orchard, WA for a week’s vacation. Population 7,600. Too small to support a literary journal. But San Diego? There’s a million of us! You sell a million copies of your next book, would you consider that a success? If not, why not? How many readers do you need?

What if there were ten thousand really really interested people who wanted to buy your next book? And you made five dollars a book. And you wrote one book a year. And those ten thousand people loved your book so much that they convinced ten thousand more people to buy your book, because your book is about them, and their city, and heck they’re just about in the darn thing!

The soil is so rich. Come take a walk with me…

Meet me in North Park. Go into Caffe Calabria on 30th and get a macchiato that’s as good as anything you’ll get in Seattle, let alone SF. Go down a few blocks to the Linkery and talk to Jay Porter about eating local and being a good citizen. On the way you’ll notice one of the most interesting phenomena in our city - the exact place where the eastbound wave of development money broke and has even started to subside a bit. After you fatten and drink to your fill at The Link, walk down to Hamilton’s and throw a few more beers in you. Between the two you won’t find a better beer selection, not even in San Francisco’s best. Sit at the bar, talk to your fellow man and woman. You never know who you might meet - maybe a writer, maybe a lover, maybe someone to go singing in the streets with, shouting about politics or philosophy or Rimbaud. Think of it as your civic duty! Who knows - enough intelligent shouting at 3AM and we might even get a reputation as an Intellectual Town… wouldn’t that be a nice change?

But it’s not just Uptown that needs your love. Walk around Mission Valley sometime - I mean park your ride and walk. Stroll around condotown down there. There’s real people there. It’s not just the SUV / cube farm set. I saw a girl just the other day in one of those condos. She was working on a big canvas in the light of her second story window. Painting our city - a part of our city. Her part.

Or go up to Serra Mesa, drive into the old burbs and dig the neighbors being neighbors, the big boats parked on cracked driveways, the crusty husbands mowing the lawns in their garish yellow early 80s T Gwynn jerseys. Yeah, that’s San Diego too. Then go down Convoy St. and eat at the diviest Vietnamese joint you can find. That’s our city too!

I’m not a doctor, I don’t even play one on TV. I’m a writer, a cobbler of words. I don’t give medicines for illnesses, I don’t write prescriptions, I’m not in cahoots with Big Pharma or Big Lit. I’m also not a rant-writer. There’s enough of those out there. Easiest thing in the world - to tear a thing down. I’m a builder. My tools are love, are rough shoves and hard elbows. As well as warm hugs and well-intentioned kisses.

So this is a kiss, San Diego. To make you feel better, cause you’re looking a little blue. I hope you like slobbery, and don’t mind a little tongue.

There’s much more to come - from Abbie, from myself, from the other writers who are getting involved in this project. I hope you will too.

Come on, she’s cuter than you think. Put your arm around her, throw her head back and slip her some tongue…

- Johnny O

Jon Oropeza is a local writer, an enthusiast of San Diego fiction and a contributor to the Creative Cusp project.