I’ve lived at few different addresses since arriving in Encinitas, CA. A brief stint in the parking lot of the Auto Zone and two weary nights as a guest of the California State Park system… during spring break.  Now, it’s not that I don’t like parks, or frantic, boozy parents who pilot massive RVs feed their teenagers sugar and hot dogs and start drinking massive quantities of vodka & Red-Bull as soon as the sun goes down. It’s just that I don’t want to share a narrow driveway with them. Read on…

If you’re going to make it in Southern California, you need to embrace the fact that teeth whitening is a way of life here and so is the freeway. Southern Californian’s worship their freeways in the same way that the Incas worshiped the moon, or Potsie worshiped The Fonz. The freeway is all powerful and the magic portal to all things. If you need something, anything, the freeway and only the freeway can give it to you. If you forsake the freeway, then you are lost and will have nothing but tacos, donuts and liquor. This is a maddening proposition for a guy from a town with a handful of blinking lights and who doesn’t know where he’s going most of the time. To me the freeway is the “dirty look and honk out your anger” hour. But with the music loud enough and dark enough sun glasses on, I can ignore most of that.

In Star Wars, there were these Jawa people who wandered the desert plains in search of scrap metal and robots to hijack. They supposedly lived on some distant planet in a galaxy far, far away but I swear I saw a couple of them last night, cruising the parking acres of Harris Ranch near Coalinga, CA. They looked perfectly at home and quite comfortable. So did everyone else for that matter. Harris Ranch isn’t so much a ranch as it is a long-haul truckin’ oasis in middle of the nowhere that is otherwise known as California’s Central Valley. A barren place save for the mega farms, miles of uninterrupted pavement and the occasional gas station cathedral. Read on…