Jesus christ I have missed you all!

I spent two weeks in California recently, bookended by three weeks of 70 hour work weeks before and a completely mad two weeks of work on the other end. So here I am, finally making my first posts back here in what feels like a decade. I'm going to ramble and bitch and talk about my life for a bit all here because it's going to be fucking cathartic and if any place or people in the world deserve to know about me, it's Hubski. You've all become some of the most important people in my life and it feels right to talk about my feelings for a bit. Things have been shitty for a while, so whatever. I don't mind if you don't read it, so I'll let you know below where I'm talking about my trip mostly.

Anyway.

I went home to visit family and friends in the town I grew up it. I do this once or twice a year, begrudgingly, mostly against my will. I do have friends I love to see, but almost none of them are in that town. I go because my mother still lives there and living in that town with my sister is truly the most taxing mental experience I can imagine and I couldn't possibly tell her 'no' when I provide some brief respite for her by being there. Thankfully for everyone involved, my sister is leaving soon enough, and then she's probably going to jump on a plane with all her stuff three minutes later to DC and-- if she had any desire to create a better world-- will burn the entire place to the ground before leaving.

My hometown in San Ramon. About 45 minutes outside San Francisco, 30 minutes from Oakland, and part of what they call the Tri-Valley, where San Ramon is really part of the amalgam of towns including Pleasanton, Dublin, and Danville, while more or less being non-distinct from the other large surrounding towns of Livermore and Walnut Creek. There's nothing really special about these places. I'm sure there are hundreds of them across the country that are just as unworthy to mention or visit as here. But the one thing that really stands out about it/them is the absolutely ungodly, filthy, actually obscene amounts of money.

My family grew up very poor. My parents bought their first house in 1988 in a small, new community called Oakley. At the time, it was a desert that was being built into a suburb. (Side note: boy the times have changed. They worked as a cashier and a car mechanic and bought a house and built a pool and fountain for it, then had a kid and lived... okay. Try that today.) A long dull story short, they moved to San Ramon, my father was an abusive, alcoholic, cheating, brutal asshole, and because there's such an abundance of justice in the world, got a chance at a career, got rich, got a trophy wife, and now lives in the south of France. I hope to never hear from again. Either way, it left myself, my mother, and my sister living in one-bedroom, low-income apartments on a car salesperson's income.

Let's start there.

What does a one-bedroom, moldy, leaking, government-defined low-income apartment cost 45 minutes from the city cost? Did you guess over $2000 a month? Because the answer is over 2000 dollars a month.

As such, we had practically nothing. However, it did allow two children to grow up experiences both sides of the world; because while my sister and I were eating pasta for the 23rd straight night, we lived in a place best known for Blackhawk, and if that link doesn't give you an idea: it's the most republican city in the county, one of the most in the state, and was mentioned by the punk band Rancid as "the place where the rich people hide." The average home price in the entire tri-valley at one point was well, well over a million dollars. Like much of California, it's defined by tech jobs at this point, and a lot of that is centered around San Ramon's Bishop Ranch, a corporate park that had plans going back to 1955 but really took off around 1980 when there was... nothing there was almost nothing back then. This place includes the world headquarters of Chevron; what was once the world-headquarters of Pac Bell (A very nice building. Four 1/4 wings that was high tech when built, including a robot on tracks throughout that can speak, who's role was delivering mail. My father used to work there); and a massive regional headquarters of Toyota. There is.... a lot of money being thrown around there.

Of course this didn't mean much when I was a kid, because despite how absolutely evil and manipulative and amoral kids are, the one thing that doesn't really come into the equation at that time is money. Thank the god of small things. But come middle school and high school, I absolutely felt class disparities, and I absolutely became angry. Nothing quite hits a teenagers mind as succinctly as barely eating for a year, then learning about a 16 you know getting a Lamborghini for their birthday, paid in cash. He promptly totaled it. I didn't have ways back then to express to people why I wouldn't have them over to my house. They show me their place with their bedroom, and they're interesting hobbies like their violin playing that had gotten them a scholarship, or their new rifle that they took hunting to Montana the week before, or any of the things that decorated their bedrooms. I'd given playing my instruments years before because of the pressure from my father. I wouldn't be going to college because of money. I didn't even have a room. I didn't even have a bed. I slept on a couch for six years. I don't know how to tell peers I'm embarrassed, especially when I was so appreciate of everything I had from my mother who, by any way of looking at things, is an absolute saint. I could not possibly have a better mother, and she alone is the reason I've turned out so well.

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This is the part where I'm not rambling about myself as much anymore, if you want to know about my trip, and just read general rambling.

So, yeah, anyway, I got out. I never felt a connection to California really, and obviously not to my home town,and I felt way more in place on the east coast. DC is my home, absolutely, 100% my home. I love everything about being here, but my worldview was built almost entirely from California. This trip back was the first time in a long time though, and I fully consider myself an east coaster at this point, so I was really viewing everything there for the first time as an outsider. I really wanted to be able to make observations and separate what I felt from years of abuse and hardship, and say once and for all if, yes, I truly despise this place or it's been tainted for all those years.

Anyway, it's a fucking terrible place. Capitalism is disgusting and boy oh fucking boy does it live gluttonously in California. I landed in Oakland late at night after a four hour layover in Boston, and I was actually pretty excited to get there, because really, as a huge Orioles fan, there are few things worse to me then spending time in their territory. (Actually on the way back, I had an even longer layover there and the bar tender at the airport bar I was getting blitzed at, playfully, refused to turn the game on for me because he was bitter about the season. Whatever AL East champs now and I couldn't be more exited woooo!)

Immediately getting out of the airport I'm blown away by how much money there is. I'm just not really used to seeing 15 Porsches at an airport to pick people up. It was cool to see how much Tesla has really taken off, because there were at least 5 of them there, but it's still a shock. It set the tone for my entire trip. Everything is defined by wealth and capitalism. It's inescapable. My hometown area of San Ramon/Danville/Pleasanton is nearing the same size as DC, but every single bit of it is suburban homes. No, really, I need you all to understand the scale of this. Imagine 6-10 completely uninterrupted miles of one million dollar homes and schools. There isn't a store, restaurant, or anything else in between. It's just very expensive, very generic homes.

You know what, fuck it, I'm done talking about that place. I don't know anyone there. I want to talk bigger.

When I go home, I get the fuck out immediately to anywhere else but my town. I have a car there that my mother uses while I'm away, but when I'm there, I log around 1500 miles in a week. I usually hit up some combination of Santa Cruz, San Francisco, Oakland/Berkeley, Santa Rosa/Point Reyes, Yosemite, Humboldt County, and whenever I have the time, drive down Highway 1 to San Simeon.

The one fantastic thing about California, and the one thing I'll always love, is that I can get the fuck away from people. There is so much gorgeous natural beauty away from anyone at all that it's just myself, whatever music I have, the road, and all the beauty around me. I don't care what else you do in California, but if you are ever there, you need to drive down highway one at some point in your life. Get as much of it as you possibly can. Start north. Start in Fort Bragg, or fuck, even better, start on the 101 up in Crescent City and head all the way down to San Simeon. Stop as much as you want, wherever you want. It won't matter, because most wherever you do will be extraordinarily beautiful. just don't go south of there. LA is... god, fuck LA. I don't have time to write about LA. I'll write about LA some other time when I really just want to talk about the evils of the world.

This time, I was poor as shit and only had the time and money to visit my friends in Arcata, who go to Humboldt University. Arcata's a nice place. Next to Eureka, lots of nature, no corporations. Don't talk to anybody. You'll regret it.

That's really my main issue with California, though: the people. Everyone's so obsessively driven by such petty bullshit. I love technology, I work in technology, but to be that focused on the newest consumer object, or driving yourself to the point of death to get a chance to be a code monkey for one of these companies is fucking ridiculous. Or outside that, or part of it, needing a six figure salary to even live close to comfortably because of ridiculously high demand is bizarre, but instead of fighting it like most places, wanting to end gentrification, everyone seems to embrace it. More McMansions are built, more expensive cars are bought, more shops open up that charge fucking $13 for a sandwich smaller than my hand. Everyone wants massive corporations to come in and buy up huge amounts of land for a new office building, or they want another walmart that's larger than the campus I work on. It isn't sustainable, firstly, it isn't healthy, secondly, and that class disparity I talked about before is fucking bonkers. Has anyone here been to Oakland? There's the Oakland hills that have five million dollar homes and then literal fucking slums. Houses made of plywood and sheet metal in the city. People without electricity living in these things and the homeless communities are massive. Look at the numbers for SF, Oakland, and LA. These are absolutely because of Reagan's fucked up policies, but they're still like that today, and no way in fuck are these even top ten priorities for the politicians there. It's always about catering to that top percent.

And I'd forgive all of that if everyone wasn't so vapid and unaware of the world. California is the beginning and end for so many Californians. It's the best state in the country because they're told it's the best and they know it is, but I've never heard an argument for that. I know people who've chosen to stay there despite the fact that they can't find jobs in their field and are paying the two-thousand-fucking-whatever to keep having the privilege of sticking around. And then outside their underemployed jobs, there's just absolutely fucking nothing to do outside the cities themselves. You literally have a movie theater 20 minutes away, and that's all for the suburbs. All right then, let's drive to the city, there's bound to be culture in one of those righoh no that's right, we drove all that away for more office buildings. San Fransisco has some good music venues left, between Slim's, the Great American Music Hall, and the War Memorial Opera house, but outside that, it used to be a lively, diverse city. Now there's tech employees. Oakland and Berkeley had some of the best goddamn poetry cafes I ever went to. Each year I hear of another one closing because that place is fucking gentrified, so they either couldn't afford the new rent, or the buildings were sold off to be demolished and rebuilt. LA is the worst of all, but again, that's another post. Maybe one of the other residents out there can chime in with their own opinions of the place. I know kleinbl00 hates the fuck out of it, and maybe insomniasexx does too.

So what makes this the place people want to be? They sure as fuck aren't there for the nature, because I don't know many of them leaving regularly to our national parks. I feel like I missed some fundamental part of growing up there just for not liking it. I always felt like an outsider, and I think, the longer I'm away, it's just peer pressure. All these people have been told for so long that California is great and you're wrong that they... just believe it after a while. I'd say 80% of the people I knew have never left the state, so what frame of reference do they have? California is fucking massive, so it's really, really isolated from other people that aren't Californian. And given how expensive it is to live there, there are very few people who move to California to give them even a shred of reference; and generally, those that do are fairly rich already, so that's fairly isolated from the real world too. It's a closed system.

I've noticed, though, that there are two types of "California ex-pats" I meet.

Person type 1: The one who, when learning I'm also from California, waits for my cue for my opinion on the state VERY carefully, and when I say how much I despise it, exasperatedly says they do as well, and it's such a relief to meet someone else who feels the same way; that they felt they were the only one. They're always careful because they're afraid I'm

Person type 2: the raging fucking asshole who, whenever he goes anywhere and talks about [place], goes on to rant about how much he fucking hates [place] (ESPECIALLY DC. God don't get me started on this subgroup of people here. Fucking hell.) and how much divinely superior California is and cannot wait to get back to California because nothing is as good as California so much so that they refuse to try to enjoy anything in the place they live because California.

So it's just a place where people wear blinders about life, is what I'm getting at. And it seems that companies have latched onto that, and know how easy it is to suck these people into brands and money and useless fucking shit. They've done so damn well with it. Fools and their money and whatnot.

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I don't know what I'm going on about now. I'm just a crotchety, angry misanthrope yelling about unimportant shit right now. I'm sorry for making you all read this crap. I can't tell you how much getting out meant though. I had to stay there for two years longer than I had ever wanted to, and if I didn't get out on my last attempt, I truly don't know how long I could have gone without suicide. Even visiting takes me to a very dark place mentally and it just needs to come out about how much everything about it disgusts me.

I've never been as good about talking about these things in meatspace, because even here, in text, when I have the time to organize my thoughts and emotions and put them down, it's mixed up angry jargon that I don't edit as it comes out, but I'm always more true and honest in text, and I really fucking love so many of you, and I really consider a lot of you as my best friends, so it seems right to put it here, especially knowing how many of you can relate to shitty childhoods and that shithole.

Anyway.

I'm back. I missed Hubski.