merced : the last suburban frontier

i have spent many a day and night, near and abroad wrestling with my Joycian love/hate nostalgia for my hometown of merced, california. as an angsty teen with too much time and a loaded pen, i carved out a fantastical narrative tracing the steps and lives of the quirky suburban characters that filled my sphere of reference then. reading the scripts and sketches now they seem all too preposterous, and would prove to be so, if it were not that every tit and tat of caricature were the absolute truth. indeed, merced is ripe for the picking...imbued with a kind of backwater suburban intrigue and quirk befitting a wes anderson-meets-jeffrey-eugenides-meets-jd salinger-meets-steinbeck narrative mongtage. ah yes, the heavy fog of nostalgia, romanticism, and hysterical realism has engulfed my memory of merced. it is distilled, suspended in neither perfection nor dissapointment...but rather, it dwells, as it is, in the sleepy california sun.