I did not grow up here. I love my adopted home in the wet northerness and I hate having a warm sunny Christmas.

Having said that, there's a cosmic ray-gun of so-cal on me right now.

We watched part of low-rider TV last night and it's not at all alien to me. I knew some of those kids when I was in high school.

And there have been a lot of reminders lately from all directions. There was a great post on Mr Jalopy's site. And writing about the real LA invariable puts me in a Joan Didion state of mind.

It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself. Nathaniel West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust, and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end. Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds shows us how close to the edge we are. - from slouching towards bethlehem

and then head over to the Rancho Gordo blog if you can't quite taste so cal yet. (he's in napa, but cooks much more south).

Eva la Rue is moving again, and will slide back inland from the beach. my mother went to Santa Ana High. so much of my embedded and collective memory is california. parts of my soul are still there. it just takes so much more energy to live with yourself when you are in california. at least south of LA. you can, but you don't know how until you leave and by then, well, it's just easier not to. to find the soul you have to know the history.