San Diego Shines Its Light on Loopy Dads

So we’re sitting in this little border town sipping margaritas and beer, observing that San Diego has a special light all its own.

“Like Paris,” my friend Chris says.

“More like Dusseldorf,” I say.

We raise a toast to Dusseldorf and order appetizers. Actually, our kids are ordering appetizers.

Don’t you love it when you segregate kids at the end of a long dinner table, and they retaliate by ordering three kinds of appetizers on their own, at $6.99 a pop?

Kids who will walk right past a dime or quarter on the floor will think nothing of ordering a $7 plate of cheese fries.

This is the generation that will be looking out for us in our old age, and if that thought doesn’t make you pour everything you can into your 401k, nothing will.

“Who ordered the calamari?” I ask when it arrives five minutes later.

“I did,” says some kid.

“What about the popcorn shrimp?”

“Me,” says another.

This is how decadence begins. How societies crumble. Loosen the reins just a little and there’s all this youthful indulgence. Rome’s decline probably began this way. With an order of fried mozzarella sticks.

“Appetizer?” asked the waiter way back when.

“Why not,” said Marcus Aurelius’ kids.

We’re on a mini-vacation to San Diego, L.A.’s well-scrubbed little suburb to the south, where all the women are blond and tan and the men ... well, frankly I don’t so much notice the men.

There may be no men here at all, for all I can tell, just roller-blading women with their false fronts careening down the boardwalk as if they are about to fall over forward, if you know what I mean, gravity being what it is.

“You really went to college here?” I ask my friend Chris.

“Yep,” he says.

“God bless ya,” I say, raising another toast.

San Diego. Sometimes you think it’s the most perfect place on Planet Mirth, and you should move down here immediately--cancel the cable, sell the house and take Betty and the children to live the way God meant for people to live, a healthy, sun-drenched lifestyle.

For one thing, there’s all this water, seemingly lapping against every doorstep. Sparkling Mission Bay right next door to beautiful Mission Beach.

Twenty-seven states have no oceanfront at all, and the hard-working city folk of San Diego have carved out their own Gilligan’s Island? Seems almost greedy.

But that’s not all. There’s this weather, too, a climate-controlled 72 degrees at all times and a sea breeze sweet as cherry pie.

Move here immediately, a voice in the back of your head says. Move to God’s Country, California-style.

“Who ordered the crab?” the waiter asks.

“I did,” say three kids.

But there’s this decadence everywhere, too, even at your own table, and suddenly your paradise is taking on a slightly seedy, weather-beaten quality.

Suddenly, you notice that here in San Diego, there are 1,000 surf shops but no churches apparent.

That special light? In San Diego, it comes from the rear afterglow of a million tourists stomping the brakes and screaming, “Did that sign say Sea World?”

After dinner, we walk along the boardwalk, where the evening is darkening quickly, the color of a good bruise.

“I like San Diego,” says the little girl as we stroll the beach.

“Me too,” I say.

It’s Thursday evening, and the drunks are starting to come out. The surf always draws the drunks and a lot of spiritual awakenings. It must be that endless horizon. Or a tad too much vacation booze.

“Have you ever,” I ask my friend Chris, “had the feeling you were on the verge of something really profound?”

“Nope,” he says.

“Me neither,” I say.

Along the sand, fires burn at makeshift beach parties. Guys with three-day beards drink from 16-ounce cans wrapped in brown paper.

They are a wild bunch, these beach people, Fourth World people in a First World paradise. They curl up like question marks in their old blankets, swilling beer and admiring the sunset. In some ways, their behavior is infectious.

“Look out, I’m going up,” I say, indicating my intention of walking atop the short, fat wall that borders the beach.

“Huh?” says my wife.

“I’m going up,” I say. “Walking the sea wall.”

“No you’re not,” she says.

“Why?”

“People are eating,” she’s saying, nodding at the beachfront restaurants.

For some reason, this strikes us as hilarious, my friend and me.

The two of us laugh about this for 10 minutes. About how two dads can get into trouble so easily.

“I wasn’t getting naked or anything,” I tell our wives.

“He wasn’t going to moon ‘em,” explains my friend Chris.

It’s not so much what my lovely wife said--and you have to admire her sense of decorum in a world so absent such things.

What’s funny is what we’ve become: suburban dads, guided by suburban rules. I am, in any direction, 10 steps from being able to purchase whatever kind of hallucinogenic a guy could crave. But I’d better not walk atop that sea wall. . Loosen the reins a little and

So we laugh.

“People are eating,” we say over and over.

Each time, it triggers another round of big belly laughs that echo from here to Tijuana. For me, there are actual tears.

The yellow-eyed beach people look at us funny, as if we might be loopy or slightly dangerous, suburban dads high on a few days off.

“People are eating,” I tell my friend, and we laugh some more.

One hundred yards offshore, the sea lions stop.

“What’s that sound?” the sea lions probably wonder.

“Dads,” one of them says.

And that about explains everything.

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Chris Erskine’s column is published on Wednesdays. His e-mail address is chris.erskine@latimes.com.