(The carcass of a New Yorker, abandoned by zombies)
Work and then more work. It is soul robbing. In New York I spent only 4-6 minutes in transit each direction to and from work, on my bike. Now it is up to an hour and a half. Time spent not just wasted, but expensively wasted, in a car, burning gas. I must figure out a way of making the time more productive, otherwise I will lose my mind. Yesterday it defeated me. I had big plans of things to do when I got home, but an hour and a half later I was beaten, all I could do was drink a beer and complain about traffic.
I'm beginning to see yet another side of California emerge, this side is even much worse than the "surreal" side I had seen before. It is glimpsed in people's normal daily behavior. As I drive closer towards SF I see more of what could be described as your standard "angry-rich-white-people." Housewives that are fat and pissed off at life and everyone living, mayonnaise coursing through their veins, ready to shake their jowls at anybody that gets in their way, affixing their blood vessels on anything between them and what they angrily believe they deserve. I thought all of those people lived in no-nonsense places like Oklahoma and Idaho and Arizona. I had greatly deceived myself about California in some ways. I have visited many times in the past and I wrongfully assumed that the state was filled with the type people that I met here when I was visiting: young and fun and well-dressed liberals and drug aficionados, with nothing but free time and expendable income. I though that maybe the whole state went to Burning Man every year...
Nope.
Who would have guessed that so much of "middle" America was all crammed over on one side of the country, and pretty pissed off about it as well. No wonder they say that California's going to slide into the ocean one day. It feels like that fate is only a single bologna sandwich away. I had envisioned a liberal, forward-thinking community, filled with free spirits, and progressive ideas. It's actually just a very beautiful version of Texas. The people are angry, self-important, demanding, rude, fat, pale, and ugly. Well, some of them. But it seems that since I've been going towards the city I somehow can't avoid those people. I'm surrounded by them. Any second they're going to devour me. It's as if they're zombies that eat not just human brain tissue but any fatty part of the body, sometimes the whole thing, eyes and ears and anus and all.
I used to claim that New York was where people went to blossom into the assholes they always knew they one day could be. I guess California is one of the places where people just stay and make-do with whatever asshole ambitions they have, expanding out into their own cozy environment to wreak the havoc they can on the lives of others in close proximity to them, with their inflamed pudgy asshole wrath.
"He had long nostril hairs, powerfully intimidating, like an unscheduled nightmare." - Bukowski
