"It's a scientific fact that if you stay in California you lose one point of your IQ every year." - Truman Capote
Accomplished - we drove to Tahoe and back yesterday. Six hours in the car for six hours on the mountain. The penance of the middle class. Is penance the right word? Are we middle class? Are we intelligent? In California it's very difficult to tell. Comparing yourself to others here is alternately depressing and infuriating - you are always greatly outnumbered by the wealthy, the imbecilic, and the in between. The multitudes are multiplying.
We never seem to have enough money to live anywhere else, but we can do things here as long as we remain living here. We probably could not afford to come here to do things very often if we lived elsewhere, so it sort of works out. California is the Disneyland of states. The hot dogs and soda are overpriced everywhere. Florida is the DisneyWorld of swamps. I won't bother with the French and Japanese versions of Disney. I've never been, and my reductionism might sound like silly pride, or nationalism, or worse. Can you imagine traveling to France or Japan and wanting to go to Disney? My guess is both places are exclusively filled with Americans. Well, Americans and some regional retards. It might be fun to visit and try to tell them apart. On acid.
Skiers are assholes. I've tried avoiding this conclusion. Over time they have won me over. They are self-entitled, rude, and mostly oblivious to others, intentionally. I almost had to punch one of them in the face yesterday but my son was there. That's not the sort of thing you want a child to see. Or rather, you might want them to see it, you just don't want them to remember it for the rest of their lives. Raymond Carver has a story about it. Though in that story, if I remember it correctly, the father and son grow closer because of the fight with the neighbor. I could have that memory all wrong. Fiction interacts with and then becomes the murk of memories.
I have a friend, an avid snowboarder, who has tried to point out to me how often it is the skiers that are oftenest causing problems for others, or openly transmitting some bad attitude, usually couched in a strong sense of entitlement. Yesterday broke me. Everywhere I looked it was almost all I could see.
Humans ruin so much. Just look at what they've done to the past.
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