Southern California is Hell

Southern California is Hell

Matt is left behind. I have never been to Washington State or Oregon. OK. Matt was in Seattle.

In fact he was jealous of the next journey. Seattle to Los Angeles. By train.

He needn’t have been. Train is by far the most civilized way to travel. You can walk around, chat to who you like, doze or sleep when you want, get fed and do a fair number of kilometres.

Ah!  Amtrak does not exactly rocket along. A journey of 1,377 miles was scheduled to take 35 hours and 40 minutes. That is about 62 kph. Compare that to TGV or even the good old Great Eastern London to Edinburgh. Can you imagine that in modern times that is acceptable? Perhaps that explains why there is only one train a day on that route. The USA is crying out for high speed trains but they won’t get them. The car lobby and Boeing will stop it.

 If you do not live in the USA (and even if you do) you do not understand the power of propaganda here. No other country in the world has so much propaganda. It starts at the highest level. The flag waving above half the houses. (Ian got threatened by some guys who said that the Irish flag was not sufficiently beneath the “Stars & Stripes”)  The land of the hope and the brave. Hmm. A slightly more accurate portrayal would be the home of the coward and the drone. In the USA everybody who has ever served in the armed forces is a “veteran”.  The most likely cause of death in the armed forces of the USA is murder by a fellow member of the said “brave.” It is difficult to imagine a country less accurately described than that it is “the home of the brave.”

Propaganda goes on at every level.  For most Americans the concept that there are things worth seeing outside the USA is anathema. The slaughter rate on the roads and by guns is assumed to be normal.

Local TV is dominated by “Man bit dog” type stories. National news only occurs 2/3rds of the way through a broadcast and international news is Israel or somewhere else in the Middle East where the USA is supporting fascists or bombing the fuck out of somebody.

It is a deeply uncivilized country.

Don’t get me wrong, there are many places that I have been in the USA and many people that I like but the weight of evidence suggests that, on the whole, the USA is an uncivilized country that is so conceited that it refuses to learn from others. Its downfall will occur in the first half of this century.

Having said that I have just thoroughly enjoyed two wonderful and contrasting visits in Southern California.

Tom met me in Los Angeles at 9.00 p.m.  Well he would have done if the train had been on time. Amtrak is so crap that he could not check. So he listened to the radio for 1 ¾ hours until I arrived.  The two best bits of the Seattle-LA trip are the mountains half way (at night) and the coastal bit near the end (in the dark because the train was so late.)

Tom is a very good host. He gave me his bed, which I rather graceless sly accepted.    

Tom is also diabetic. This means, in the state of California, that he has a licence to legally buy marijuana. No apologies to the Captain Kirk fans for the split infinitive.

As would any reasonable citizen would do, he exerts his rights. Normally that means he only smokes at weekends but when a fully qualified tester arrives in town what is he supposed to do?

Inbibe and we did. The first day after the pick-up consisted of a three hour drive round parts of LA. We were out of the car for a good ten minutes in that time.

What followed was a visit to his folks who live in nearby Orange County. Lovely people, good food, get your washing done etc. One small problem. 3,200 bottles of wine. What is one to do when invited to sample? And after that bottle? And the next? And.... A rather pleasant evening.

Next day up before the noonday sun? The Getty museum? Universal studios? Disneyland?

Er. No. Hack round a 9 hole golf course. Twice. A spot more parent-paid for food and a splash of wine that sets you up for the following day.

The following day consists of another 9 holes of golf – stoned. This was a new experience for me. If you are going to hit a drive a long way in golf you must grip the club firmly.  If you are stoned you think that you grip everything firmly. This is true – I have got callouses gripping motorbike handles in the past. So I gripped the club hard and hoped. It went a long way. I wonder where. During the next five holes Tom was even more shit than me.

Off to Newport Beach to meet his lady acquaintance. A spot of dinner then off to a superb bar.

Think Hemmingway. Seedy does not get near. Western film swing doors, pool tables but not enough real cowboy hats. Men who weighed more in kilos than their age smoking and playing better pool than I have ever been capable of. A quiet blonde who sat at a table for an hour and a half (not that I noticed) suddenly became the classic blousy pool player – and she could play.

Tom is a decent pool player so we survived a couple of rounds but the beer had done its damage so we stayed at the acquaintance’s. Unfortunately she was teaching ice-skating in the morning so we got kicked out at 6.30 a.m.

True Californian fog back to his folk’s for a three hour kip then true Californian traffic for a journey of an hour and a quarter or so to deliver me to Ian.  Naturally on a six lane highway (that is six lanes each side) it took 4 hours.

The USA transport systems are as ridiculous as their healthcare systems.  OK, I won’t go on about the shit transportation system any more but consider the USA spends 16% of GDP on healthcare (only Cuba has a higher percentage and they send doctors as aid workers all over the world) whereas in Europe it is about 8-9%. No prizes for guessing who lives longer by a margin of two years.

Ian’s – a real different experience. Unlike me, Ian can manage a decent relationship with the opposite sex.  This time he has stumbled on one that involves a family. She also appears to be rather nice. There are two great difficulties with this situation but we will come to those later.

Ian moved to the USA 17 years ago – the fool. To make it worse he was in upstate New York. The populace of small towns there are like the Midwest – narrow-minded, ignorant in the extreme and completely confident in their knowledge. Arseholes. Of course Ian managed to find a few reasonable people but none he called real friends until he had been there many years.

Anyway he has moved to Southern California and lives with the aforementioned attractive woman a dozen years younger than him. She has two daughters. Ian is not used to family life but, in his rather gentle way, seems to cope OK and I have not noticed any problem at all. But, as many of you know, I may not possibly be the best judge.

Anyway, Tom drops me off in this sober household near San Diego. We sit in the garden and drink tea. TEA.  Hardly my beverage of choice but Ian developed Parkinson’s three years ago and he has found alcohol a bit of a no-no and he lives in a tea-total household.  PANIC! I am a man of infinite resource and manage to contain myself for the next three hours until we find ourselves in an establishment for the sale of Maguritas. (Sod the spelling.)

Sitting with Ian in the garden is a delight. Reminiscing isn’t really my thing but I haven’t seen much of him in the last seventeen years (we used to go walking together about thirty days a year in those days). Oriels are small birds and hummingbirds are smaller – having them buzzing around is great. Mel (Ian’s partner) liked some of our stories about misdemeanours twenty or thirty years ago. In mid February it reached 31 degrees (or 87 to the yanks) – what is not to like in Southern California?

Well a bit.

CARS

CARS

CARS

The concept of walking is abhorrent, unless you are taking your dog out.

Naturally I have done some. A little warm for lots of walking but T-shorts and shorts in February under a clear blue sky is good enough for me.

Melissa’s mother offered to get her granddaughter (they are both in the house) to drive me less than a kilometre to the shops so I could shop and granddaughter would come back later to collect me. They are both pretty nice people. The ridiculousness of the suggestion appeared to be beyond Pam – who, despite her political views - is a perfectly acceptable member of the human race. Morgan –granddaughter - was not consulted. This is America – children are expected to do as they are told and even (although not in California) call you “Sir. “ Pam thought it was over a mile because, naturally, she had never walked it. Obviously it took me an hour to cover the kilometre by the direct route because of my navigational difficulties. Even though it is mid February the temperature was 84 (29) so a couple of revivers were required.

I mentioned the problem of traffic. There is another.

Ian became friends with an Irish priest in Jamestown, New York before he moved West. Nothing wrong with that if you don’t take it seriously. Get pissed with an Irishman and fed by his wife is OK in my book. Except Ian carried on going to church when he moved West.

Frederick the Great of Prussia in the eighteenth century said something like ”Christianity was a lot of legends invented by orientals and given to our Europe where some charlatans used it for there own purposes and some fools believed it.”

Melissa appears to belong in the last class. We held hands round the table while she prayed. For fuck sake what have I shrunk too to be so “nice.” I am losing my character. These days I class myself as a militant atheist. Even if there were such a thing as God why should she be interested in one of seven billion of a particularly destructive species on a small planet around a very insignificant sun on the outer arm of a perfectly ordinary galaxy? Christians (and other nutters – Jews and Moslems) are so arrogant. I have heard all the rubbish about spirituality faith, can’t believe in finality etc. many times with no shred of evidence offered to support such ideas. Can it just be they are so stupid? Do the monotheists not understand that they are unnecessarily divisive; they all worship the same God by different names? A bit of a bugger that, individually they tend to be nice people – whether Christian, Jewish or Moslem. I truly believe that they do not understand how evil their petty beliefs are in the way that they manifest themselves collectively against other groups who believe in the same things.

Anyway. Blue skies, sitting in the sun in February, flowers in bloom, lovely birds around you, decent food and good wine. Yes Southern California is truly hell.