SANTA BARBARA STREISAND

Leaving L.A. initiates a calm awaiting the impending reentry into dread. Not real dread, but. The respite of escape allows the mind to look back with a wider and deeper breadth. The dread comes when experience and progression finally get perceived, if only vaguely. Three months passed so fucking fast. A way of speaking affected from unclear sources. Is he a faggot, from the East Coast, rich, poor? And no one cares really.

Santa Barbara gives new shape to the term “bourgeois.” The people there are “nice and stupid” to use the words of my friend and host for the weekend. And such generalizations are sweeping and perhaps unproductive (hey, fuck productivity). There are some smart graduate students there. I stayed with a few.

But the decadence of the place is infectious. Its perfection, its amenable and laxed aesthetic (the mellow sun’s hum imbuing everything, the cleanliness, the kindnesses of strangers, craftsmen houses and higher up, compounds worthy of the best of the well-heeled with taste). The place is tasteful. A nice place to die. A nice place to be youngish too I guess. A nice place to visit, for it’s not too far removed from L.A. to seem foreign but it’s rather foreign enough. A less pretentious South Bay empowered by the summer sun rather than oppressed by it. And white, white, everyone’s so white. But not oppressively so because here, the division of labor, the hegemonic structures that fret in the soil remain in the soil, quietly festering beneath the manmade pond with this raggled duck that looks half chicken (dubbed a “Chuck” or a “Dicken” by my associates… I prefer Dicken for many reasons) and makes you wonder why this duck decided to live its life here with this one other duck and why don’t other ducks live here or maybe there’s a person or people who take care of that and make sure the park duck population is perfectly small and quaint. I pray for the duck infestation, thousands flying from every reach to stake their claim and relish in the easy warmth of Santa Barbara Botanical Garden Bliss. They’ll never let that happen. God bless them for that. For I can sleep at night knowing that there’s at least this place were thousands of people can live a clean, relaxed, rustic (to them… so so clean to me) existence, where men freely walk shirtless displaying muscles, chests so shapely and ample I wanted to leap from the moving car and weepingly supplicate myself before these bronzed gods of pecs and abs and saunter and sweat. No no. What’s come over me. No. Yes. Yes.

Then the return after the, yes I guess it is, the exorcism. Not better rested, but presented with the well-needed foil. Pros and cons to the life I live. I liked it there, but I like my friends there, not the place. I like my life here. And driving south on the 101, returning for the first time to my home in the heart of the city, I felt good and comfortable and glad to be back, reinfused, injected into the yearning vein of motion and fast-time, of vanity and mental sterility, of sickly wealth and embarrassing poverty and every shade of gray in between. And I poured myself a strong glass of vodka and cranberry juice. Some call it a Cape Cod. I call it a Vodka Cranberry. I call it home.