Welcome, and yes, it is a Dark Tower reference, which I’ll get to in a moment.
As hinted at by my title, I indeed live in the West, practically on the edge of the world. About five miles to my left there be dragons and whatnot. You’re more likely, however, to find some sunburned Zonies, very territorial surfers, a whole mess of bumper to bumper traffic, a great white shark or two, some moray eels of the aquatic kind, and a number of the blond kind that wear Dolce and Gabbana sunglasses that engulf their entire head.
It’s an odd place, paradise on one hand, the playground of the richest and most beautiful of the rich and beautiful, hell on the other if you step outside the painstakingly illegal-alien-maintained lawns into the blazing scrub desert. You can die of exposure under a rose bush in full bloom here. It has been 85F on Christmas for most of my life.
Politically speaking, and here we get to the important bit, since this will most likely be a political blog, this place is absolutely schizoid delusional. We have hippy communes and white supremacist compounds within miles of each other, and conveniently close to the local mental health facilities. We’ve got UCSD, and Scripps, where you can work in highly classified biological engineering for the Federal Government, then mozy over to the Che (Guevera) Café for a vegan all you can eat dinner and some punk rock. We’ve got old-time cowboys and rhinestone cowboys and midnight cowboys and ranchero cowboys and girls who wear teeny little straw cowboy hats for no reason I’ve been able to figure out. We have thousands of Marines and sailors, and thousands who can’t stand Marines and sailors. All in all we’re a tiny little red city, grudgingly holding our ground between the Mexican behemoth to the South, and the People’s Republic of Los Angeles to the North.
Here I am, in the middle of this mess, with my unfashionable politics and abysmal faith. In Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, failed gunslingers are exiled from their homeland and sent into the shadowy limbo of the West. I don’t sling guns much (though I have a nice little S&W on my Christmas list) and I wasn’t exiled from anywhere, I was spawned right here as a matter of fact, but I don’t much fit the landscape, and haven’t yet figured out where I would. I’m stuck here for the time being and plan to make the best of it. It’s a shadowy limbo however, even with all our touted sunshine, and I’m going to dredge up the best of it for your viewing pleasure.
To follow: the three questions always asked –
1. Why are you an atheist?
2. Why are you a conservative?
3. Are you out of your bloody gourd?
