I do not know which to prefer
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”

Santa Barbara is everything you think of when you think of the California myth: mountains, beaches, lattes, and beautiful people everywhere. I had passed through it several times on my various trips up and down the PCH, but I had never lingered there until I drove over for a job interview in September. While my interview was just a few hours in the middle of the day, I took the opportunity to explore the city a bit and drove over the night before. It was beautiful. Tree lined streets downtown framed chic stores, coffee shops, and theaters. Quaint bungalows and ranch houses dotted the slopes of the mountains above, and the town came right to the ocean where there was a gorgeous park. About eighty-thousand souls populate the town, which has elements of idyllic village life while also being only an hour or so from Los Angeles. North of Santa Barbara begins the scenic portion of the PCH. It is really a perfect town: progressive, beautiful, serene, and alive, all at the same time.

Earlier this week I was invited back for a second interview. I thought I would be. I’m not being egotistical; I just know higher education very well, and I knew I was perfect for this position. That doesn’t mean I will get the job because getting the offer isn’t about being the ideal candidate; it’s about the accumulated balance between your being threatening and being promising for each member of the search committee and for the administration. Be too amazing, and you’ll certainly not get the job because someone there will see you as supplanting them as the amazing person. Be less than amazing, and you will certainly not get the job because many people there will see you as not being cool enough to hang out with them and therefore diminishing the reputation of the university (read: diminishing their own reputation). It’s a difficult and ultimately impossible line to tow, and often the best people do not get the job because of these issues.

The real talent is being able to be amazing to the people who want you to be amazing and being humble and accommodating to the people who see you as a potential threat. It’s taken me a long time to figure that out, but I can do it now with my eyes closed. For example, the person currently in the position is retiring, a genial and gracious man who just wants to write and think. He became a teacher because he loves ideas but he has spent the last years of his job immersed in administrivia. He is worn down, defeated, sad, and lonely. He offered to take me to lunch, so I ask him about his plans for retirement. Three hours later, I have heard them all and more. He was in desperate need of someone to talk to, and I provided that for him. Another example: two women in my presentation sit perched in their chairs squinting their eyes at me the entire time. They are sizing me up. They want me to say something to affirm them. During the question and answer session, the younger of them asks me a question about writing standards while the older woman nods her head without realizing she is doing so. This is clearly their issue. They have talked about it at length, complained about it to the man in the position now and perhaps others above him, and see this issue as definitive for their jobs, mine, and the university. I answer with the standard speech about the importance of writing, my experience as a director of writing at another university, and some writing stories from my classes. I am careful to pepper my remarks with references to stylistic conventions (periods and commas go inside quotation marks, colons and semicolons go outside), which is what they really want to hear. They want to know that I am in their club. That I will wage war on comma splices and pronoun-verb disagreements and the students who propagate them. That I will bewail the decline of grammar with them and see it as a sign of the apocalypse that only we, the true believers, can avert with our copies of Strunk and White and the MLA Handbook as our crests. At the end of my answer, they look at each other knowingly and nod slightly. I am in.

I did not mean to learn all this, and I am a bit embarrassed to share it with you here. It seems disingenuous, and I guess it is, but every job interview is disingenuous. At least I told them in the presentation that the person I am on Facebook is not the person who is in front of them at that moment, and I meant it truly. But even that remark will be interpreted as being either too provocative and playful or wonderfully provocative and playful, depending on my threat level. I mentioned blogging as a genre in my lunch meeting, and the gentleman who has the position now even asked if he could read this blog. I told him no. They don’t get to see Aristaeus; only a few people do.

It was during that three-hour lunch that I decided I will not take this job. It will probably be offered to me. The job is nearly an ideal fit on paper, and Santa Barbara is almost too perfect. Nearly. Almost. Here’s the thing: I do not want to work anymore. I am on leave this semester, and I find it so freeing that I do not think I can go back to renting my talents and thoughts to an institution that is simply going to use them as fuel for the machine, and all institutions are going to do that in some way. There are sacred moments in the classroom, the community, and even in administration. It can happen. But the cost is too great. The cost is my very soul. The kind gentleman who regaled me with stories of his life and work for three hours did so because he found someone he could talk to—finally. A perfect stranger with whom he felt an opening to convey his cherished memories and dreams, a stranger because there was no one and (more importantly) no place at his institution for this conversation. He planned to write a book about a certain aspect of religion and wanted to know if I knew of any texts he should consult. I gave him some, but when I asked him why he wanted to write such a book, he said “To leave something behind.” Sadness washed over me in waves, and I tried not to let him see. He was seventy, and he had spent his life—literally spent it—in an institution. He was out of time and energy, empty, waiting to begin living at seventy. And even then what he wanted was for someone to recognize his work, “to leave something behind,” which was in his case a book on religion that maybe three people in the world would read, then dismiss in favor of their own theory of whatever. He later wrote me to apologize for unloading all his hopes and dreams (and regrets) on me, an interloper who was there to take his job. I am not criticizing him as much as lamenting him. Most people do it his way: work then live. The old saw about living to work versus working to live is, like all clichés. true in some sense. He is a good man, living a good life, doing good work, and I refuse to be him.

I stayed that evening as well and looked forward to wandering the streets of Santa Barbara. Initially, I had thought of staying to see if it is a city that I want to be my home. Now, it is just another city I will explore for a time, then move on. This is good. It takes the weight of expectations off the city and off of me. I am free to explore. First stop is the Palace Grill for dinner. Cajun food in California. I am excited because Cajun food is heavenly, and the restaurant has great reviews. I am seated and order a Syrah. While I sip, I read the menu like a novel. There is so much goodness here I don’t know where to start or to end. I know that I will have the bread pudding because that is New Orleans’ greatest gift to the world. I settle on the crawfish étouffée, despite the gentleman next to me suggesting the steak stuffed with crawfish. It is a wise choice and a beautiful thing in this world. It also works well with the Syrah, and I am extremely happy. I text Vivien, Mary, Celeste, and Kassie to tell them I am having crawfish étouffée. They don’t care. I look around at people enjoying their food and their lives because this food is making their lives quite fine at the moment, as it is mine. The bread pudding is sublime, true New Orleans with whiskey sauce. Life is indeed sweet. I need some music and conversation.

Yelp tells me that the best music venue in Santa Barbara is Velvet Jones, and I walk out into the cool night air and make my way down State street. Fog has rolled in, and it changes the night into something different—close, even cloying, on the edge of ominous and hopeful. I like it very much, and I like my free self wandering the streets of this city that I will never be a citizen of. Things are very quiet, quieter because of the fog. I see Velvet Jones and walk up to the door. Locked. I pull again. Locked. A sign. Disappointed, I move down the sidewalk looking and listening for other activity. There is almost none, but I still like walking through the fog, anonymous and free.

I pass by a bar that has some activity, men playing darts and a few people at the bar. I look up at the sign: The James Joyce. Now we’re talking. Happy now, I go inside and order a Guinness. I am in The James Joyce drinking a Guinness. There’s only one thing missing. I download Ulysses on my iPhone and begin reading the first chapter, Buck Mulligan tormenting Stephan Daedalus with his blasphemies and social offenses. I keep waiting for someone to ask me what I’m doing, and I will ask them what they think the lamest thing I could be doing is. Then I will tell them: reading Ulysses in The James Joyce while drinking a Guinness. No one asks. No one even notices. I begin to hear the conversations of the two women next to me, twenty-somethings with whom I usually have a lot in common. Not these two. They are complaining about their lives, and their complaints are parochial and lame. They remind me of my lunch with the man who complained about his life. Screw Joyce. What these people need is Whitman: “I am he who tauntingly compels men, women, nations,/Crying, Leap from your seats, and contend for your lives!” But there is no contending in Santa Barbara tonight, nothing to contend, no life to contend for. I leave without finishing my beer.

My last hope is the waterfront. Surely, something is happening there. But there is only darkness and fog—and me. And it all comes down to me. Emerson: “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” I do trust myself, my instincts and intuitions, my words and my deeds. In that trust is freedom, and it’s more than just another word for nothing left to lose. It’s real and ultimately all we have or need. I smile as Penelope and I trace our way back to the modest hotel. This will be my last night in Santa Barbara for a while, and I won’t be living here, but I will be living.