Sacramento Blues

The trouble with Oakland is that when you get there, there isn't any there there.
---Gertrude Stein

The ultimate American paranoiac fantasy is that of an individual living in a small idyllic Californian city, a consumerist paradise, who suddenly starts to suspect that the world he lives in is a fake, a spectacle staged to convince him that he lives in a real world, while all people around him are effectively actors and extras in a gigantic show.
----Zizek.

The Sacramento papers, however, simply mirror the Sacramento particularity, the Valley fate, which is to be paralyzed by a past no longer relevant.
---Joan Didion.

Wandering races have such looks, the bones of one tribe, the skin of another.
---Saul Bellow

Go west. You will find yourself. But behind the push outwards is also a desire to escape from what one is. I am not what I am. The appeal of Houdini, the quintessential escape artist, in a century that will worship the self-made man, the man who can re-invent himself. We are the result of a series of journeys, of decisions made by other people. What happened to those parts of us that stayed behind, the dead branches of our future?

I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.

And on this journey, those at the end of it are handed down, from generation to generation stories and words and particular gestures that are borne amidst those harsh tribulations: a frontier mentality. The womenfolk pass along delicate heirlooms, reminders of a lost world, whilst the men, preserve an ethos whose identity depended on the vigilant assertion of boundaries. All the time, things accumulate, like the debris of history, stored for use later on.

He was apt to feel this mysterious weight, this growth or collections of nameless things it was the business of his life to carry about. That must be what a man is for...
(Bellow)

Each child born into such a lineage, that of the sea-gypsies, those who pine for the open road, was himself a radical new beginning. they would always remain marginal people, looking in from the outside, quirky, eccentric, utterly unreconciled to the larger movements of the times, the consensus of history.

Starting in the 1940's , linked booms in aerospace and real estate were turning millions of newcomers into Californians..[they] tended to see the land as subdividable , not hallowed and bet their lives on the future.

But the conservative part of us was resolute, it was suffused with the conviction that we had long outlived our finest hour. From now on there could only be obsolescence, a style of soul that is out of sync with the times. Style is character, the place where the self meets the world. And if the world moves on?The times , they are a changin'. In the speculative booms, those who choose to remember the past also fear being buried by it. The dark memory of the sea, that loss of life that haunts the present.

Southerners are people who find strength in the maintenance of ritual-those who insist against all odds on remembering. The northern mind, on the other hand , is restless, abstract and despises the sun-and-wheat-consciousness of the brown-eyed ones. And yet, something tugs at the heart of the traveler: the tragedy of too quick an unmooring from the past. How much of the past do we, should we, carry forwrad. Too many lives have gone into making this one. Is the only reality the journey itself?

The afternoon heat would bleach those towns so clean that the houses and the buildings seemed always on the verge of dematerializin; there was the sense that to close one's eyes on a Valley town was to rsik opening them a moment later on dry fields, the sun bleaching out the last traces of habitation, a flowered straw hat, a neon advertisement which hasd blinked a moment before from a wall no longer visible.
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--citations: Joan Didion, New Yorker