We're back in California, although sadly just visiting. If fortune smiles, we will hopefully be here on a permanent basis soon.
It's strange to me to think that we've been away for five years. Although I like Maryland - it's a blue state for one thing, so it's not infested with those God Damned Republican Assholes - and I like my little neighborhood, I think of myself as a Californian. Progressive, tolerant, visionary, a child of the Golden West. It's a dry heat, or should be. My forebears came here before the gold rush. When I stepped outside this afternoon holding my infant son, the air was redolent with a familiar smell, a smell of dry hills and greasebrush. The smell of summer.
Five years. The last two, driving past both the White House and the U.S. Capitol on a daily basis. There was a time, once, when that would have seemed sort of exciting. Now I just give them both the finger and wonder why half my country is fuckwits.
Politics permeates Washington D.C.. This may seem obvious, but until you live in several different places and experience the background saturation you don't really understand. In Silicon Valley, there's a background hum of technology. The radio ads, the billboards, the conversation overheard in the lunch joints, the jobs you and your friends have. In Los Angeles, it's the entertainment industry. And in DC, it's politics.
And politics is a greasy, horrible beast, particularly now. I won't miss it a bit.
I have, I think, shared the three things about living in the DC area which are superior. Fireflies. Thunderstorms. Great museums. But I've seen the fireflies, and visited the museums. And last week a thunderstorm dropped a tree on my house.
Driving down to San Luis Obispo from the San Jose airport, I was struck by how little things had changed. The vast overpriced subdivisions didn't seem to have lapped any further up the hills. The outlet malls hadn't eaten the fields and farms of Gilroy entirely. The air still felt the same; the fog still rolled in over Salinas and kept Watsonville the artichoke capital of the world.
The artichokes in my garden have all died; the same with the cilantro. The potatoes are going. We had a wonderful spring, wherein I laid out and planted and weeded and tended my garden. Now in Maryland it's ninety degrees and ninety percent humidity and ninety thousand mosquitoes, and I hate going outside and I hate staying inside. Here in California the stores simply open their doors during the day. Screens not required.
It's only when I think about it that it sucks. I can sleepwalk through the days.
It's gonna be a pain to move three thousand miles back. It's going to be annoying to sell the house in short order, and it's going to be difficult to find a place to live here. And it all hinges on finding a job, which is an arduous process. Nor will our joint income be what it is now.
But every holiday that we stay out there is another holiday my son doesn't get to spend with his grandparents. And that's a finite set. There is some celestial counter with that number on it, and it only ever gets smalller.
How much money are each of those dates worth?
- Sun Ra