There's great beauty in Santa Cruz. Bad place to be if you don't have a car though. The city is remote and surrounded with hilly forest with one major highway feeding into it. You can take a bus in and out if you really need to. And then once you get to the BART system you can go pretty much anywhere. About a 3 hour trip into the bay area from here. Yes, a robust mass transit system is a good thing.
Pleasant trip really. The nice thing about not having a car is that it forces you to explore places you would have never cared to set foot in previously. You find yourself venturing into the thickets, meeting interesting people and seeing interesting things along the way. You grow hungry and find some hole in the wall food joint and it tastes very good after travelling all day. Fascinating people here. And highly damaged people too.
And it is as if the BART train generates its own genre of atmospheric drone music. The various sonicscapes whipped up by screeching rail can be very dense and fascinating. One can simply sit and read or glance at the window or watch people, or do a little of everything. It is a better way to travel. One is left to attend to various activities that would otherwise be impossible considering the concentration and energy it takes to drive.
In terms of people, I think it is only partially true what they say, stereotypically anyway. Los Angeles people are supposed to be self-absorbed and image obsessed, while San Francisco people are down to earth and gracious. I've seen a mixture of both in both areas. It is true the culture is quite different: Northern California doesn't seem to be as materialistic and there is a more widespread interest in ethical food, environmental concerns, and other topics subsumed under progressive politics in general.
But these interests themselves become mere tribal symbols, or signals one can use to identify themselves with a certain trendy culture, if one is not adopting a greater ideology of change. Patterns of self-interest and daily social cruelties manifest themselves here as well, unfortunately. There's a serious drug culture here, but a good dose of LSD is not necessarily a panacea for the serious modern problems we are contending with, but only a piece of the puzzle. Upon taking a psychedelic, one becomes blissfully aware of the great beauty of all things, but upon repeated dosage I'd imagine the effect wears off, which is what I've seen in many drug enthusiasts.
It is the opening of the valve itself, and the immediate experience of the stark differences between the unfiltered world and the contrived human world of symbols that should inspire the greatest changes in one's worldview. But as the experience becomes repeated and then modulated with the help of other drugs, it just becomes another distraction to be paid for, not unlike our myriad forms of mass media. Though I suppose one's own personality determines much of the overall drug experience.
And it always comes back to the money. Here as well as everywhere else, there is a vague sense of a tightening, and a darkening. Horizons that used to be wide open (this is why drugs could inspire such revolutionary movements in the 60's) are now slowly and subtly constricting. People are growing fearful and stressed, keeping their food separate and nickel and diming each other when it comes to favors, instrumentalizing each others' relations as it all goes back to how much money one has to keep a roof over their head and food in their stomach, and of course, drugs coursing through their blood, tickling their brain to take them away from the realities of our late empire, where they, along with the rest of the bottom are slowly being ground to dust. During sobriety, they walk the halls and streets like ghosts, murmuring about how they can't wait to go to this weekend's electro party. Mood rhythms follow a bi-polarity: smiles and good feelings for a bit and then a minor setback and the clouds come in and suddenly people are treating each other monstrously. Energy levels are low. Everyone keeps to themselves most of the time. You meet someone bright and vibrant and then go to contact them and there is nothing.
The environment doesn't fare too well either, ironically enough. This house in Santa Cruz must have been a beautiful place. There's a great backyard that has a potential for thick gardens but the overgrowth is full of dog shit. There's a garage full of junk and the house at least stays clean but there's much more to be done.
And so who is to blame? The more you begin to think about it, the more difficult it is to spread blame. People are tired. Still forging ahead, thankfully, but tired nonetheless. People need their distractions to maintain simple sanity. And there is little energy left to create when one is working 40 hour work weeks in a meaningless job simply to pay rent and eat.
Well, I could go on. There are great things happening here. As they are everywhere else. There are bright spots among the darkening oceans. You just have to find them and cultivate them. Hopefully eventually we could link them up. There's people doing great things with food, with housing, with energy, with really anything you could think of. We see that the problems are holistic. When we speak of crisis, we sense that there is something deeply wrong with an entire system of thought and action. Thanks to our growing interconnections, we continue linking up the good parts of our culture, the parts worth keeping. It is important not to get too bogged down where it sinks.
Not sure how long I'm going to last out here. Not getting too many bites for work. Running out of money. So it goes. It has been interesting.
