Every once in a while, the no-kids, flexible-work-life works out.
Four weeks ago, when Caleb’s workplace offered to send him and six other coworkers to San Diego, there was no way we weren’t going.
So I booked cheap Frontier flights—the kind where you only pay to get slingshot in and out of the sky (relatively on time)—and suddenly we were in Cali.
Turnaround time: three weeks.
Weekend plans: none. Not even a place to stay.
Vibes: off the charts.
The characters are as follows.
Logan: Mechanical Engineer. Grand Haven surfer with Jesus hair. Single twenty-something in the middle of remodeling his house by hand.
Andy: Mechanical Engineer. Ex-Hope football lineman. Nerdily obsessed with capybaras and seals. Brought his girlfriend, Maggie.
Collin: Work-from-home product engineer who lives in Seattle. Every conversation with him ties back to Seattle.
Shawn: I don’t know what he does. He asked to be dropped off at the Harley dealership on Wednesday and we didn’t see him again until the next morning.
Chad: Thick beard, talks with a slight slur that thickens with alcohol. Grew up in Grandville, but if he’d told me he was from rural Kentucky I would’ve believed him. Sings along to Zach Bryan in a high falsetto.
Mike: Works in Purchasing. Shorter than me. Every other word is the “f” bomb. Obsessed with his wife.
Jeremy: Very nice. Very tall.
The fun thing about a guys’ trip—specifically guys who are mostly engineers—is that it’s a guys’ trip. Maggie and I were just along for the ride.
By Wednesday, we had been to the aquarium, witnessed Logan order milk (to drink) at a brewery, had a boat-building contest, seen a Padres game, and had nearly fifty beers. We visited the USS Midway, tried Peruvian octopus, and got sunburnt (bad).
Collin and Andy bought matching capybara shirts at the zoo. On accident.
But best of all was the conversation.
Because straight dudes talk just as much as the rest of us do… just about entirely different things.
Take first morning, for example. Logan, Andy, Jeremy and I were the first ones up. As we sat in the hotel courtyard, Andy looked at Logan and said, “Did you see Mike’s text?”
Logan and Jeremy both started cracking up.
“Yeah. I laughed and went back to sleep. That’s his problem.”
Andy leaned over to me.
“Mike got hit by a car this morning.”
Or take Wednesday evening. We’d been to a baseball game, wandered downtown, and gotten Chad drunk. All Logan wanted was to see the sunset over the Pacific.
We drove to a taco place for dinner—a spot in La Jolla called Jose’s that sat at the top of a hill that (sort of) overlooked the ocean.
As we were looking over the menu, Chad, to my right, says “I don’t know why we keep going to all these fancy places. What the hell is ceviche?”
Someone teased him.
We laughed.
Collin ordered ceviche.
Thirty minutes and ten beers later, Collin leaned toward the table, a serious look on his face.
“Do you guys think the bars closing at 2am infringes on the American value of freedom?”
On Thursday, as we hiked along the cliffs in La Jolla, Collin told us the story of a neighborhood he had considered living in (in Seattle, of course). But something had happened—a funny noise or an odd person walking too close to him—and he said, “yeah, man, my sphincter loosened up, and I had to listen to my sphincter.”
We talked about the Boeing facility (in Seattle), blood sausage ice cream, and Top Gun. They teased me for wanting to see the San Diego Central Library, teased Andy for even considering walking into a Harley dealership, and teased Mike for… everything.
It’s the end of the week.
Here I sit, in a bright coffee shop in North Park on Sunday morning, all of them now gone back to GR. I leave tomorrow.
I know there’s a lot to be said about how straight dudes could learn to talk to one another. We see all sorts of conversation about the male loneliness epidemic and “red pill” communities.
But this week was just fun. Nothing needed to be serious, and no one told their life story or dissect their childhoods (as my friends often enjoy doing). Those things are useful, and they do have a place in the matrix of community-building.
But so does fun.
And for me—as one of the more somber people I know—I feel like I could learn something from that.
