There's No Place Like Home... There's No Place Like Home... There's No Place Like Home...

I've been back in Northern California for exactly a month and with the exception of the kindnesses I have experienced from the Red Cross people (mostly recently on the phone this afternoon), the ever so patient, friendly and steadfast folks at the Quality Inn where I have been staying over the last two weeks, and the delightful moments that I have been able to catch with my kid, it has been a frustrating, disillusioning and really kind of sad.

As has been obvious from the many opportunities I have had to do interesting and fun things, the month has not been any kind of horror, it's just that after 28 years in Northern California it's become very very clear that this place is not my home any longer. Even my good friends who offered to put me up are benignly out of touch with the sense of lostness and confusion that I feel. I try to be perky and funny and interesting, but it doesn't really come off. I try to get to work and do what I have learned (over so many years) how to do and somehow I seem to just be missing the groove.

The simple fact is that I don't belong in Northern California any more. The deep heart I felt in the culture, the people, and the land; the depth of spirit that drew me here 28 years ago has evaporated into the air, or fallen off the cliff into the Pacific. It's been replaced by a soft and callous, pseudo-liberal semi-concern that doesn't ever become real and is something I can no longer accept or stomach. Liberals in Louisiana have to fight for their lives... because, like the song says, they really are "tryin' to wash us away." In Louisiana (as well as a lot of other places that Californians look down their noses at) people learn how to put feet to their politics because if they don't they'll get passed over, pushed aside and generally dumped on. In Northern California it's easy to be liberal. You can claim the virtue of voting against George Bush and still be condescending toward homeless people, people of color, queer folks, and anyone else that is different from you (including Cajuns, rednecks, and Republicans). There is an atmosphere of liberal superiority here that does not bear out in the wider world. It's an atmosphere of out of touch superciliousness and it's positively creepy. It's disgusting and shameful and wrong.

Unfortunately, it probably IS to be expected. After all, it's important to remember that California has already given us Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and is working on sending the ex-Austrian body builder to the White House. The Left Coast is a safe place from which to claim philosophical and political ascendancy while remaining safely encapsulated in a bubble of pristine political correctness.

Which brings me back to HOME. Like Dorothy, I have met some interesting people and have had some interesting adventures; some genuinely wonderful good times. Right now however, I'm feeling like a person without a country. I was picked up by Katrina and deposited in another land.

I want Glenda the Good Witch, and a pair of Ruby Slippers.

There's no place like home.