Nowhere is nothing like it used to be and everywhere is what nowhere once was. I'm staying here. As one of our Santa Barbarans yelled in a movie “Remember the Alamo!” I'm ready, Davy! Besides, where else in this country could I be walking down a street, see some broken down old guy across the way and think “Did I make out with him when I was a teen and he was a cute young hippie?”
I read this piece with a great deal of sadness and the realization that the California that we all knew and grew up with is gone. I believe it can come back, but, in a different form and, hopefully, better.
Approximately 1.6 million conservatives Left California in the previous few years. If they had stayed, that would’ve made the difference between the super majority that we have right now and a conservative legislature. I have often thought of leaving in California but will remain to fight.
A pitch also needs to be made for more conservatives to move to California. Touting its appeal as a prized retirement lifestyle, for those ............who can afford to live in California.
There is so much more to California than LA, SF and Sacramento. Even lower home prices, once one leaves the mismanaged Democrat population concentrated urban cess pits. Who unfortunately provide most of the harvested Democrat ballots, that control our state election outcomes.
A California native here, and I can still find "California" once I leave the coastal perversities and keep my head down in my adopted new home town of Santa Barbara. Which at one time when I first moved here in the 1970's was the southern-most limit for Northern California, according to demographic markers at the time. More people read the SF Chronicle, more people thought of SF when "going to the city, etc. etc.
No longer, Santa Barbara has morphed smack dab into fully-failed Southern California progressive dysfunction. And of course later SF outdid itself, following in suit.
The divide is no longer Northern or Southern California, but coastal and non-coastal California. A shout out to non-coastal California where one can still find some of the old California fundamentals, small towns, agrarian cycle ethics and a closer sense of community. And see more than one Trump signs left unvandalized.
BTW: it is apple time at Gopher Glen up the coast off Highway 101, where back country roads and farm stands remain a timeless road trip where the seasons do change.
California, as we remember it through our long & fond memories, is to never return, as with the remainder of the United States & The World… unfortunately, the decades, and hundreds of years in some cases, of mismanagement (by design) and abuse, has left a wake of destruction…
Fortunately, the worm is turned, and we are seeing the systematic destruction of the Old Guard, but it’s a war that we all must step up and fight, locally, here in California, across the nation. We are in the final battles of The Silent War…
TRUTH & TRANSPARENCY IS THE ONLY WAY FORWARD> Transparency and Prosecution is the ONLY WAY forward to save our Republic and safeguard such criminal and treasonous acts from occurring again…
A client from Colorado asked this week if this was Northern or Southern California? I said I prefer to call it "Coastal Central" as awkward as that sounds. But I hope to separate it from the twin horrors that SF and LA have become.
When I think back in nostalgia I am all too aware that the reasons I came to SB in 1975 and immediately decided to stay are GONE. Yet I remain now for other reasons, long evolved, persistent.
Yes, that is what I say now too -- except I say Central Coast California. Few ask for anything more. That usually gets a blank stare in return.
When one concentrates only on this Central Coast chunk of California, it is remarkable what low key pleasure and quiet beauty it still offers. And well as very satisfying culinary destinations.
Who, anywhere, can beat the Toffee Crunch cake at the Madonna Inn outside San Luis Obispo. Or the Chocolate Mint ice cream pie and broiled lamb at the Loading Chute restaurant in Creston. Bob's Wellbred in Ballard or Los Alamos. Fish tacos on the San Luis pier. Freshly made sausages in Lockeford. The now sadly missed Tuna Melt and Peanut Butter Pie at Jack Ranch near where James Dean met his end. Now bypassed by the new and much safer back route from Paso Robles to Highway 5. At one time, there was a key lime pie in Salinas worth the detour but they switched to canned lime juice and all was lost.
Mainly I use the term Central Coast California because Santa Barbara is now such a pretentious brand, so I like to avoid that tainted association.
Boy, that is one vivid dream! Funny how they’re always scattered with truth’s and fantasy. I wish everyone had a chance to grow up in the California of yesteryear. It was such a magical place.
Been thinking about this piece and jotted down some memories of my own
I fell in love with California over 30 years ago and moved here in the ‘90’s
But the Appalachia is my home.
Everyone knows California, subject of books, songs, movies…but Appalachia…not so much.
Remembering autumn in the Appalachia as a young man walking to school thru the woods:
Everyone is both rich and poor at the same time. there is no frame of reference in the woods. No politics. No ocean or surf. No great causes…The smell is all around and through you…wood and dead leaves rotting everywhere you step and look. Winter bite in the air, you can see your breath for the 1st time since last winter ended. Walking quiet through the woods. Chilled air carries sound further. The only sounds being dried twigs cracking beneath my feet and my own breathing so I switch to silent mode by breathing through my mouth, stepping more carefully deliberately breaking any pattern or rhythm. You don’t see deer, raccoons, squirrels and birds as much as you “feel” them. You know exactly where they are and they know exactly where you are. There is equilibrium in the woods. I would go this way for half of an hour or more before reaching a clearing where my school was. Long before this point I could just make out the sound of the highschool marching band practicing, over a mile away, preparing for football season….The noises and voices of my schoolmates pull me completely out of the peaceful woods and into a different world.
A world without equilibrium.
I would quicken my step and abandon the quiet and yell to join in.
I miss that world most of all, that walk in the woods, Appalachia in the Fall. 😊
I was fortunate to grow up in Santa Barbara in the late '40's - 50's - and before the idiots of the late 60's. I was surfing before it became popular from '65 on up.... (a crowed day in late 50's early 60's was 5 guys at Hendry's, Leadbetter, or the Ranch.)
State and San Roque/Las Positas was the "sticks".... Lemons, what was left of the Walnuts, and Goleta was the grocery store for the ranches "out there." Post WWII military was mostly gone. It was a time when Mom would hand us a bag lunch (yes a real brown bag) and say go up to what is the Cater Water Plant and spend the day.
No longer.
Santa Barbara was the last of the hold outs for "compassionate? density" but that was gone by the 1980's. The ethic of work and honesty was fast fading when I started working full time in the summers (1959). Working for $1 week allowances (mowing, taking the garbage out, finding week-end jobs was considered "beneath" most of the kids in my neighborhood by 1963. Yep S. Calif is gone. Sacramento and the "everyone" is due housing and government supported jobs today is the rule. Think I am kidding look at the fast approaching government destruction of the carrying capacity of both land and "we demand housing." No longer affordable without government handouts.
Mr. Griswold is right. The California I once knew is gone but it is being hammered into dust by the we are government comply crowd. (Right Marti, Helene, Gil, Falcone, Dave, June, and the list goes on).
Ok, have a good day. Remember UCSB has an enrollment of about 40K this year.
I'll dare to call it what it is: White erasure. As our people are erased, our norms are erased. People are not equal. They are not interchangeable. We were lied to about that.
Nowhere is nothing like it used to be and everywhere is what nowhere once was. I'm staying here. As one of our Santa Barbarans yelled in a movie “Remember the Alamo!” I'm ready, Davy! Besides, where else in this country could I be walking down a street, see some broken down old guy across the way and think “Did I make out with him when I was a teen and he was a cute young hippie?”
I read this piece with a great deal of sadness and the realization that the California that we all knew and grew up with is gone. I believe it can come back, but, in a different form and, hopefully, better.
Approximately 1.6 million conservatives Left California in the previous few years. If they had stayed, that would’ve made the difference between the super majority that we have right now and a conservative legislature. I have often thought of leaving in California but will remain to fight.
A pitch also needs to be made for more conservatives to move to California. Touting its appeal as a prized retirement lifestyle, for those ............who can afford to live in California.
There is so much more to California than LA, SF and Sacramento. Even lower home prices, once one leaves the mismanaged Democrat population concentrated urban cess pits. Who unfortunately provide most of the harvested Democrat ballots, that control our state election outcomes.
A California native here, and I can still find "California" once I leave the coastal perversities and keep my head down in my adopted new home town of Santa Barbara. Which at one time when I first moved here in the 1970's was the southern-most limit for Northern California, according to demographic markers at the time. More people read the SF Chronicle, more people thought of SF when "going to the city, etc. etc.
No longer, Santa Barbara has morphed smack dab into fully-failed Southern California progressive dysfunction. And of course later SF outdid itself, following in suit.
The divide is no longer Northern or Southern California, but coastal and non-coastal California. A shout out to non-coastal California where one can still find some of the old California fundamentals, small towns, agrarian cycle ethics and a closer sense of community. And see more than one Trump signs left unvandalized.
Look what $650,000 on 3.5 acres could still buy you in Marysville, CA https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/770-Ramirez-Rd-Marysville-CA-95901/16546536_zpid/
BTW: it is apple time at Gopher Glen up the coast off Highway 101, where back country roads and farm stands remain a timeless road trip where the seasons do change.
Thanks for this piece. I am from where you are now (Appalachia) and 1st fell in love with the California of the 1970’s.
It was a magical place to be sure.
I’m sorry for your loss. I miss the Appalachian mountains and family and slower simpler pace of life I once had.
I am guessing our respective hometowns miss us as well, but we have changed as much as the places we remember.
You can’t go home again except in our dreams; and living in the past is self indulgent. But it is nice to reminisce from time to time.
California, as we remember it through our long & fond memories, is to never return, as with the remainder of the United States & The World… unfortunately, the decades, and hundreds of years in some cases, of mismanagement (by design) and abuse, has left a wake of destruction…
https://x.com/wallstreetapes/status/1964894148244459764?s=61
Fortunately, the worm is turned, and we are seeing the systematic destruction of the Old Guard, but it’s a war that we all must step up and fight, locally, here in California, across the nation. We are in the final battles of The Silent War…
TRUTH & TRANSPARENCY IS THE ONLY WAY FORWARD> Transparency and Prosecution is the ONLY WAY forward to save our Republic and safeguard such criminal and treasonous acts from occurring again…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2qIXXafxCQ
PS…Great Article, surf is up…hope to see you riding the Rincon waves soon again
Glen shaped a handful of my boards. He was a great person.
A client from Colorado asked this week if this was Northern or Southern California? I said I prefer to call it "Coastal Central" as awkward as that sounds. But I hope to separate it from the twin horrors that SF and LA have become.
When I think back in nostalgia I am all too aware that the reasons I came to SB in 1975 and immediately decided to stay are GONE. Yet I remain now for other reasons, long evolved, persistent.
Yes, that is what I say now too -- except I say Central Coast California. Few ask for anything more. That usually gets a blank stare in return.
When one concentrates only on this Central Coast chunk of California, it is remarkable what low key pleasure and quiet beauty it still offers. And well as very satisfying culinary destinations.
Who, anywhere, can beat the Toffee Crunch cake at the Madonna Inn outside San Luis Obispo. Or the Chocolate Mint ice cream pie and broiled lamb at the Loading Chute restaurant in Creston. Bob's Wellbred in Ballard or Los Alamos. Fish tacos on the San Luis pier. Freshly made sausages in Lockeford. The now sadly missed Tuna Melt and Peanut Butter Pie at Jack Ranch near where James Dean met his end. Now bypassed by the new and much safer back route from Paso Robles to Highway 5. At one time, there was a key lime pie in Salinas worth the detour but they switched to canned lime juice and all was lost.
Mainly I use the term Central Coast California because Santa Barbara is now such a pretentious brand, so I like to avoid that tainted association.
Boy, that is one vivid dream! Funny how they’re always scattered with truth’s and fantasy. I wish everyone had a chance to grow up in the California of yesteryear. It was such a magical place.
The California we knew is gone thanks to Newsom and the corrupt politicians. We don’t even have a good senator or rep anymore. Sad.
Ouch.
You can’t go home again. 😊
Been thinking about this piece and jotted down some memories of my own
I fell in love with California over 30 years ago and moved here in the ‘90’s
But the Appalachia is my home.
Everyone knows California, subject of books, songs, movies…but Appalachia…not so much.
Remembering autumn in the Appalachia as a young man walking to school thru the woods:
Everyone is both rich and poor at the same time. there is no frame of reference in the woods. No politics. No ocean or surf. No great causes…The smell is all around and through you…wood and dead leaves rotting everywhere you step and look. Winter bite in the air, you can see your breath for the 1st time since last winter ended. Walking quiet through the woods. Chilled air carries sound further. The only sounds being dried twigs cracking beneath my feet and my own breathing so I switch to silent mode by breathing through my mouth, stepping more carefully deliberately breaking any pattern or rhythm. You don’t see deer, raccoons, squirrels and birds as much as you “feel” them. You know exactly where they are and they know exactly where you are. There is equilibrium in the woods. I would go this way for half of an hour or more before reaching a clearing where my school was. Long before this point I could just make out the sound of the highschool marching band practicing, over a mile away, preparing for football season….The noises and voices of my schoolmates pull me completely out of the peaceful woods and into a different world.
A world without equilibrium.
I would quicken my step and abandon the quiet and yell to join in.
I miss that world most of all, that walk in the woods, Appalachia in the Fall. 😊
...Take me home country roads, West Virginia ..... John Denver ....who does/did not just love that song?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAGHgVhR6TY
I was fortunate to grow up in Santa Barbara in the late '40's - 50's - and before the idiots of the late 60's. I was surfing before it became popular from '65 on up.... (a crowed day in late 50's early 60's was 5 guys at Hendry's, Leadbetter, or the Ranch.)
State and San Roque/Las Positas was the "sticks".... Lemons, what was left of the Walnuts, and Goleta was the grocery store for the ranches "out there." Post WWII military was mostly gone. It was a time when Mom would hand us a bag lunch (yes a real brown bag) and say go up to what is the Cater Water Plant and spend the day.
No longer.
Santa Barbara was the last of the hold outs for "compassionate? density" but that was gone by the 1980's. The ethic of work and honesty was fast fading when I started working full time in the summers (1959). Working for $1 week allowances (mowing, taking the garbage out, finding week-end jobs was considered "beneath" most of the kids in my neighborhood by 1963. Yep S. Calif is gone. Sacramento and the "everyone" is due housing and government supported jobs today is the rule. Think I am kidding look at the fast approaching government destruction of the carrying capacity of both land and "we demand housing." No longer affordable without government handouts.
Mr. Griswold is right. The California I once knew is gone but it is being hammered into dust by the we are government comply crowd. (Right Marti, Helene, Gil, Falcone, Dave, June, and the list goes on).
Ok, have a good day. Remember UCSB has an enrollment of about 40K this year.
Yes, the SB Destroyers do have names. Thanks for listing them. And they kept getting re-elected and re-cloned. That is now on us.
I'll dare to call it what it is: White erasure. As our people are erased, our norms are erased. People are not equal. They are not interchangeable. We were lied to about that.