i was born in a children's hospital in anaheim, california in 1970. my family had a history in cali going back to the early part of the twentieth century when my grandfather was orphaned and moved to southern california to live his uncle - a prominent figure in the orange county musican's union, a trombonist with his own big band.
i have seen the journal my grandfather wrote in the month-long drive it took to get to california from nebraska, complete with pictures of the boards they'd have to lay down to get the car they travelled in across certain hazards.
after he grew up, he returned to nebraska, learend how to fly in the war and developed his master carpentry skills. but shortly after the war, he began dragging his family across the country looking for work and rarely finding it.
then one day he landed back in southern california where he was given a job by one howard hughes as a line 'electrician'. it was a simple job, and one that he did the rest of his working lfe, until he retired - some ten years before his death.
he was poor his entire life, and yet a staunch republican who could not dwell long enough on the need to buy american products. to the extent he spent most of his pension on maintaining a Ford truck he'd bought, that was such a piece of shit it broke down almost weekly.
"fortunately", his wife also worked for hughes and between the two pensions they maintained a relatively comfortable retirement in a small two-bed condo. while opinionated and set in their mid-western ways, they were salt of the earth people who cared deeply for california.
but like all of us, the world changed around them in ways they found difficult to percieve. i'll never forget my grandfather lecturing kids at fast food "restaurants", and their lack of desire to help a customer, or just do their job - but he never realised that the manufacturing line mentality of fast food practically guaranteed this kind of disinterest, and that his expectations of social decency no longer applied.
i grew up in a small incorporation called La Palma, a two square-mile series of concrete, track homes and a hospital crammed in between cerritos, buena park and cypress - where tiger woods grew up. 90s sitcom star john stamos went to my high school, motley crew had a couple members from the area, and the infamous McMartin (of child molesting fame) family's daughter was an english teacher there - she was arrested during class in front of the whole school.
on perhaps 3 days of the year the smog would clear enough to see the san bernadino mountains only some 20 miles away, while the beach was another 10 miles the other direction - i could ride my bike there in about an hour if i peddled hard.
however, by the time i reached 20, few people i'd known my whole life lived in southern california any longer.
the strip mall on th corner of the block i used to live, now houses around 20 businesses, all of which are vietnamese - obvious in the absence of any English letters on the signs. an unexpected migration pattern, given the number of Patels and Kims in the phone book when i had lived there in the 70s and 80s. cerritos had been the vietnamese migration center in our area when i was younger, not la palma (garden grove, where "little saigon" is, was the highest vietnamese concentration, but that area was on the other side of orange county).
one day i joined a little musical activity called drum corps, where we would climb into buses each summer and do a two-three month tour of the united states. in that activity, which i did for some 8 years all the way up to age 20, i met my future wife, a young british girl who'd flown out to march with our semi-famous group.
but this activity also had kids from all around the southern california area, from san diego out to palm springs up to santa barbara. in the eyars i marched, a lot of the kids were ghetto, from hawthorne, wilmington, torrence, even the dreaded lennox - while some were the children of hippies from redondo and santa barbara.
this was a legacy of the corps' history, where in the 70s young felons were given the opportunity to avoid imprisonment by joining the corps.
unlike some of the other prominent groups in the activity, we were also notoriously drug-riddled. we have stoners, speed freaks and alcoholics on every bus, and our loose southern california style - tennis shoes instead of spatz, baseball hats instead of shakos and our color guard was armed beach chairs & beer coolers instead of rifles of flags - trumpted our arrival at each performance to the glee of the kids trapped in miltiaristic precision-performance units.
it was not unusual to see one of our kids sent home during the summer for getting caught shop lifting, or for getting pregnant on the road. it was real Bad News Bears kind of stuff, but very enlightening and put us as kids in a rare situation compared to the average southern california native.
southern california, and now most of the state, is notoriously segragated. communities rarely intermingle, and the gang problems that pervade and fester in cali are quite clearly a serious effect of this subtle and rarely discussed cause.
it is odd to see people walking down the street, other than at the beaches and the basic determining social factor is too often what one can afford, rather than anything like common interests.
even the churches of california are highly segragated and one of the stoking grounds of communal separation, where all groups sit around and point fingers at each other, rarely taking the time to ever even meet each other and get to know what it is exactly they are pointing their finger at.
and california continues to grow, ceaseless migration packs her borders with every group of people imagineable, with as many of it's migrants from other parts of the country, as those more commonly discussed, the illegals from south of the border.
after living with my wife in england for a few years, i eventually returned to california, only this time the bay area was my new home. i rented a house boat in sausalito and started my first company, happily pushing along the net boom and finding myself in the right place at the right time.
hhaving had family and friends int he bay area of the 70s and 80s, i couldn't help but notice that the same dynamic which tore LA apart and segragated her so plainly, was now occuring through the course of the 90s in the bay area.
once bastion of laid-back liberal ideology, the area was suffering from the net bubble's affluenza. where in the 80s you might see people sitting around smoking a joint reflecting on how good life can be in such a beautiful city like san francisco, it was more common to see the suburbanites invade the town each weekend with their Lexi, comparing and contrasting their hard won status symbols - priding themselves on their "cultural" awarness, which rarely amounted to much more than having visted some boutique shop that sold international trinkets, or purveyed international cuisine.
but when you talked to the children of the san francisco melting pot, you quickly understood that these kids had little idea of life outside the bay area, let alone america herself.
arnold schwarzzenegger is about to become the next Actor/Governor/Web master of California - my home, my native land - and a place i hope never to return to live.
presuming this "prediction" proves true - he will have achieved it completely off the back of superficial imagery, and a support network that dwarfs the average californian's ability to participate in its own government.
he knows nothing of the state i love, the state that has carried so much of modern america, subsidising entire regions of the US, off the backs of men in aerospace manufacturing lines like my grandfather, dedicated civil servants like my parents, small business owners like myself (or my dear friends the Kims, and the Patels in La Palma, or illegal immigrants who turn the san juaquin valley into the amazingly profitable land of the Rancheros that comprise the world's largest agricultural output.
and so the california freak tradition lives on, straight out of venice beach where the gubernator missed the suicidal tendencies that really defined cali's internal reality. her constant migratory magnet, never letting her ever stop to consider the true underlying dynamics of a society that has made blind segragation a way of life.
california's child
Yorba Linda's kiss
Santa Ana's wind
San Francisco's bay
San Diego's blush
the California bounty
never stood long nor still
while the ambition of growth
met suburban land fill
passing over the pavement,
90 nose to nose speed
looking up at the poles,
from the backseat of greed
i remember a child
caught lost in the race
who forgot how to smile
a segragated embrace
the jet-stream purple pink
setting suns each warm night
the broken skating rinks
the kid's guns out to fight
the parents who let go
for malls of cash delight,
the tattoos of suicidal
and tendencies that might,
the broken shards of labor
on the backs of wetted favor
tastes a Californian flavor
pastes a billionaire's waiver
and so the state of being golden
would never come to wealth
would never be emboldened
or be conscious of itself
the land of nature's bounty
is covered in the glut of speed,
and children run away from home
for fear of parent's greed.
>> yorba linda (mp3)
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