the time i went to new jersey and was accidentally cool

The first toll booth I ever saw, I threw money at. Not metaphorically. There was a basket, and you were supposed to lob your coins into it at speed, and my cousin did this with the wrist-flick of a teen who never once considered the physics. I aimed. Missed. Somewhere on the Garden State Parkway there is still, I assume, a quarter of mine, minted in California, embedded in New Jersey asphalt like a fossil of my incompetence.

Everything I did wrong out east turned out to be right, is the thing.

Back home the cousins' hand-me-downs marked me. The castoffs that made me an outcast on the Pacific were suddenly throwback chic, worn correctly by virtue of being worn without irony, and I had done nothing except put it on in the morning cuz no other clothes.

At a party I mumbled something, I do not even remember, some piece of vulgarity I had absorbed by osmosis and deployed by accident, and the girls decided this was charisma. Understand that I performed nothing.

I was a broke minor who lost every dollar he had at the Monmouth Park track (also never seen, the horses, the little printed sheets, the men who read them as scripture) and then I got bounced from a boardwalk casino for being the penniless kid I was. Later I saw Springsteen through a chain-link fence, tickets costing every money I tossed, partially, into a toll basket. Garden state green vs Golden State drought-flavored gold.

None of that was actually cool. All of it currency converted, by changing coasts.

The neon franchises had names I never heard, symmetric yet confident, outposts of a country I apparently did not entirely inhabit.

And here is where everything curdles. New Jersey was the punchline, the scrappy coast, good enough and somehow proud of it, the place that gave computer science C++ and the whole ship-it-it-works-stop-improving school of thought. I looked down on it once. You might have too. Probably.

Now there is a Whole Foods in Berkeley, and a Texas chain transplanted to the one town that should have resisted hardest, and the people in every New Jersey WF replica marvel at vegetables that never knew a can.

California got colonized by that exact good-enough ethos it sneered at, but the tomatoes are still ... and I cannot decide if the neon lost or what won.