Thanks for the honesty. Glad to know I'm not the only one. Of course I know I'm not the only one intellectually, but it's still comforting to hear other smart downwardly mobile people (did I just coin a phrase? Probably not) actually detail a bit of their experiences. I always appreciate Chuck G's personal remembrances as well - in fact I appreciate most of your posts. By the way: Chuck, I never had a chance to respond to your response to my last post, but the call letters KKGO come to mind for that jazz station you couldn't remember. I was born in L.A. but didn't spend much time there after that except summers - though I lived in the valley for a year and Santa Barbara for two. I think that is where I must have been listening to KKGO...Anyway, I'm sure no one else is interested in this Cali minutiae but I wanted to mention it.
Read the first part of the Rolling Stone article. It's amazing that there is any humanity left in Santa Barbara.- vis a vis so-called social work or any aid or help for struggling people. It reminds me of the sheriff in The Big Lebowski: "now we got a nice, quiet little beach community here, and I aim to keep it nice and quiet. So let me make something plain...keep your ugly fuckin' gold-brickin' ass out of my beach community..." Even though it was a parody of Malibu, it could pretty much apply to any "beach community" these days...It certainly applies to all of Hawaii which has gone the giuliani route, displacing homeless people every other month and fucking with poor native Hawaiians every day. But don't get me started...
This is the worst of times for a lot of us and I see no hope on the horizon...
Aloha,
J