Doing Time

We finally have our parole date, the day our exile in Hooterville mercifully comes to an end...

March 10.

We'd move sooner, but it's just logistically impossible. Such a shame.

We moved to Bakersfield on September 12, 2009, the day after the 8th anniversary of 9/11. From one unimaginable tragedy to another. For those first few months I used to keep track of the days, like an inmate, but after 100 it just became too depressing to contemplate. Every once and awhile morbid curiosity would get the better of me and I'd tally up the days of our unplanned stay. The last time I checked we had just crossed the 800 mark.

Now that we have an exit date I figured I'd add the days and see just how long we will have been stuck here by the time we see Bako in the rearview mirror for the last time. And the final number will be...

911.

Make of that what you will, but it's kinda creepy.

Mean Streets

We spent the weekend in the mountains with friends, celebrating our sudden good fortune and waiting for snow, which never came. At some point the dinner conversation veered to the subject of this blog.

"It used to be funny, but now it's just mean" one of my good friends remarked. He shall remain nameless. Robert.

Well yes, point taken. But tell it so someone who cares. If you want unoffensive good fun, go here.

Here's the deal... I started this blog a week after we moved here because I was suicidally depressed and couldn't afford a therapist, not that I would've wanted a local one even if I could afford it.

As horrible as the situation was, I tried to see the humor it. It was easy to be amusing back then because we were delusional and honestly believed this was going to be a very temporary aberration. We were so sure our stay here would be brief, we were reluctant to sign a year lease on our first place because there was no way on God's green earth we would still be here in a year. Our stay in Bakersfield would soon be nothing more than a funny cocktail story...

"You think Turkish prisons are bad, well, let me tell you about the time we lived in Bakersfield..."

Then one year turned into two and it stopped being so amusing.

I think the turning point was the opossum.

So, try as hard as I might, the anger and bitterness and resentment and desperation and loneliness crept into the blog and yes, it became mean. So shoot me. You try living here and staying cheerful. I defy you. Besides, I never imagined anyone would ever read all of this, it was just my little journal of despair.

But that's now all in the past, bygones.

I did decide over the weekend that in the weeks remaining here I'm going to try and be a little more charitable. It's the least I can do. If I have any regrets at all about the blog, it's the language. I've been dropping altogether too many F-bombs. The other day, on the morning news, some old fart was on saying that cussing is a mark of low intelligence, but what the fuck does he know? All the same, I'm going to try and clean up my language for the time remaining. I'd like to go out on a high note.

Some Enchanted Evening

Saturday night was amazing.

Not so much for the party.

The client throwing the party is a pretty small operation and even though it was at a swank Beverly Hills hotel I figured it wasn't going to be a grand affair. The words "Cash Bar" on the invite pretty much guaranteed that. All the same, we scheduled our departure to allow for traffic and yet arrive fashionably late. The party was to start at 8:00.

Unfortunately, due to someone's unexpected "hair issues", we ended up leaving almost an hour later than planned and then found ourselves stuck on the 405. By the time we pulled up to the hotel, it was 9:30.

And the party was winding down.

There were only about 20 people still there and whatever food there may have been was long gone. I finally found my client, we were meeting for time. He went around and introduced me to "the team", and I likewise introduced the boyfriend, who's hair, I must admit, looked amazing. We went to the bar and ordered a couple of drinks and made small talk with our new friends for about 10 minutes. I noticed the few remaining people were starting to trickle out and saw my client closing his tab at the bar. The party was basically over.

Normally I probably would have been pissed, driving all that way for less than 30 minutes of action, but the truth of the matter is my social skills are pretty rusty and that was probably the limit of my current abilities. Baby steps.

So there we were, waiting for the valet, at 10 o'clock on a Saturday night in Beverly Hills. Starving.

My first thought was, well, let's just grab some fast food and hit the road back. We could probably make it by midnight. I mentioned this to the boyfriend and he turned to me and said 'Fuck That".

And he had a point. It was the very first time the two of us had been back in the city together since we moved two years ago and it wasn't an opportunity to squander. He made a suggestion: we aren't giving each other gifts this year, we most likely won't be back in the city together for a long time, we're all dressed up for the first time in ages, let's splurge and have a nice dinner at one of our old favorite restaurants. A night on the town will be our gift to each other.

Maybe I've lived in Bakersfield too long, but I thought it prudent to call the restaurant and make sure they were still serving dinner. It's not that there aren't dining options in Bako at 10pm on a Saturday night, it's just that they all involve drive-up. I called the restaurant and the host must have thought I was a rube; of course they were still serving dinner, the kitchen was open until 12:30. God I miss the city.

We arrived at the restaurant, in the heart of West Hollywood, around 10:30. The street was teeming with people and the restaurant was packed with members of the tribe. I'd forgotten what it was like to be around other gay men. We proceeded to order a three course feast and just kind of basked in the warm glow of all the holiday decorations and good cheer. It was the best night the two of us had had in a very long time, since at least before we were exiled.

By the time our entrees arrived the restaurant had started to thin out and by around 11:30 we were almost the only people left. Without all the chatter you could finally hear the music playing softly in the background and just around the time we asked for the check, "Home", by Michael Bublé came on...

"Let me go home
I’ve had my run
Baby, I’m done
I gotta go home
Let me go home
It will all be all right..."

We left around midnight and were back in Bako shortly after 2.

It isn't home, and it never will be.

Social Graces

Increasingly, for me anyway, the worst part of our exile isn't so much the "living in Bakersfield" aspect, although that's no walk in the park. For me, the unbearable thing is the isolation.

For over a year now, I've worked from home, alone. The boyfriend leaves at 6:30am and doesn't get home until 6:30pm and most evenings he's so tired he's not much of a conversationalist. All of my contact with my clients is through email, which means the only time I speak most days is to the dogs, and as you can imagine, it's a pretty one-way conversation.

I can't remember the last time I heard anything from friends and colleagues back in LA, and to be honest I haven't made the effort to stay in touch. Initially, I was so ashamed and embarrassed by our banishment to Bako, and so convinced it was going to be brief, that I only told a couple of people. Better to let people assume I was still in LA and the less I talked to anyone the simpler the web of lies I'd have to spin to keep the charade going. But in the end, I've dropped off everyone's radar.

We've made some feeble attempts at making friends here, but the bottom line is we have nothing in common with the people here and the more people we meet, the more resigned we are to just cocoon ourselves in our little tract house.

The end result for me is I'm starting to fear I'm losing my ability to function in polite society.

When one of my clients shockingly called me earlier this week, I found myself having difficulty forming coherent sentences since I'm so out of practice in speaking to humans.

And tonight, my grasp of social graces is going to be put to the test because we're driving into Beverly Hills to attend a Christmas party.

It's a company party, thrown by what's now my best and most important client. I wasn't surprised I was invited - I designed the invites. I've never actually met the client, he was referred to me by a friend and we've only ever communicated through email.

Initially, I declined saying we had a prior engagement. Schlepping two hours each way to mingle with strangers for an hour or so seemed ridiculous. Of course I couldn't actually say that since the client believes I live in LA. But he was insistent. We simply HAD to attend, he said. The "or else" was implied. And so we're going.

God I hope I don't fuck this up. I don't know if I can even walk and talk at the same time anymore, let alone be witty and charming, which is kind of what's expected at these things. Hopefully it's like riding a bike. Come to think of it, I don't know if I can even do that anymore.

I should have practiced.

The Lost Decade

I was listening to NPR yesterday. I listen to entirely too much NPR. They offhandedly mentioned that yesterday was the third anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the event that seems to have pretty much started the Great Recession, the first of many dominos to fall.

It's strange because it feels like both so long ago and just like yesterday. Within a year of that date we'd both lost our jobs and our home and found ourselves exiled to Bakersfield. Good times.

They also helpfully added that 1 in 3 economists feel we'll enter another recession within the next 12 months (the first one ended?). The consensus, they say, is that there won't be any noticeable improvement in the economy until 2014, and it will probably be 2020 before things return to "normal", if they ever do.

Armed with all this new information, one thing became crystal clear to me...

I need to stop listening to NPR.

While We’re On The Subject Of Tragic Anniversaries...

Today marks our second anniversary of life, so to speak, in Bakersfield.

Words fail me. Neither of us could even imagine we'd still be here.

Back in 2009, when our lives were in freefall, the survival instincts kicked in and our thinking at the time was "any safe port in a storm". If that port turned out to be Bakersfield, so be it. It beat living in a cardboard box under an overpass. Not by much, but it beat it.

We could handle a year, we thought. By then the economy would surely be on the rebound and we'd easily find work again somewhere civilized.

But here we are, two years later.

Marooned.

Final Destinations

Well, that's one less escape route.

Over the weekend, Allegiant Air, an airline I'd never heard of before, quietly discontinued flights from the sad, little local airport to Las Vegas. They had only just launched them in November, with much fanfare, but there just wasn't enough demand to justify them. It would appear that while the Bakersfield locals have no problem gambling with their health by living here, it's a different matter when it comes to their cold hard cash.

Back in the Go Go Boom Days at the turn of the century, Bakersfield took a gamble of their own, investing millions to upgrade the airport into something approaching respectability. The end result... Meadows Field. It was going to be a great, big, beautiful tomorrow and Bako was going to be the next great megalopolis and needed an airport to support that pipe dream. I gather that at one time it actually hosted a fair number of airlines and flights.

But then everything came crashing down and now the airport sits mostly vacant. Every time they show it on the news it just looks so forlorn. They really need to see if they can rent it out for filming. Maybe a zombie movie. Might as well try and get some use out of it.

At any rate, they still have a handful of flights, mostly connectors to cities that have flights that actually go somewhere. Your choices are Denver, Phoenix, Houston, LA and San Francisco.

As far as choosing an escape route goes, I think we can safely scratch Houston. If there's one place I can imagine hating to live more than Bakersfield, it would be Houston. Actually, all of Texas... just scratch it.

And now that I think of it, Phoenix too. The Arizonans have shown themselves to be a little too wacky in recent months.

I hear Denver is lovely, but I'm a little too old to learn how to operate a snow blower.

So that leaves LA and San Fran.

Now you would think that with all my whining on the blog that the obvious choice would be LA. And who knows? We may yet end back up there one day. But over the past couple of months, out attitudes have... shifted. The longer we're away, the more we seem to be adopting a "been there, done that" mindset in regards to the City of Angels. Nothing personal. "It's not you, it's me..."

See, here's the thing. To try and divine the future, some people read horoscopes, some people are into astrology. Or numerology. Or other ologies. But we recently discovered something about our own lives. It would appear that hints to our future...

Hang on our walls.

Years ago when we redecorated the living room at our townhouse, (and by "we", I mean "the boyfriend") we couldn't find exactly what we were looking for to hang on the wall over the couch. So we decided to make our own art. We were both fans of mid-century architecture and hoped one day to own one of those houses. So we painted and abstract vision of a Neutra house and put it up. And wouldn't you know it, within a few months we found just such a house and bought it.

And then a few years ago, the boyfriend gave me a framed Fortune Magazine cover as a Christmas gift. The covers of the magazine in the 30's and 40's were each beautiful lithographed work by famous artists of the day. A boss had given me one as a gift and I had started collecting them. Unfortunately, around the time I discovered them, so did everyone else. I had collected four of them before the prices got out of control. The one the boyfriend gave me made five. And this is it.




I have to be honest... I wasn't a fan. Don't get me wrong, it's nice in it's own way, but it certainly isn't one of the best. But it was given in love and soon joined the others on the wall. I think what I disliked about it was that it was such a bleak desolate vista...

Just like outside of Bakersfield!

Seriously, it looks just like all the wasteland south of town. And north. And east. And west.

It would appear that what we choose to hang on the walls determines our fate.

So with that in mind, when it came time last week to finally finish decorating our bedroom we once again ran into the issue of what to hang on the walls. None of our existing art or prints really worked and we hadn't found anything else that we liked. So once again we decided to make our own. I'd find some photos or graphics on-line and trick them out and we would get some cheap frames. As I sat down at the computer I asked the boyfriend what our theme was and then we both realized that whatever we chose might determine our fate.

"What's it to be?" I asked.

"San Francisco" he replied.

So we now have prints of the Golden Gate and Lombard Street hanging in the bedroom.

Let's hope that the third time is the charm for this drywall voodoo spell.

The Long Road Home

I have to admit, it's getting easier.

It used to be when we returned from a weekend away we were both in tears by the time we got to the city limits.

Then, for a long time, it was just a shellshocked numbness, like we were returning to prison from a weekend furlough.

But today I found myself relieved to get home. And by "home", I mean the place we keep all our crap. Home may be where the heart is, but there's little chance of me leaving mine in Bako. And by "relieved", I mean three hours with two hot, squirmy dogs on you lap in the car is too much.

But all the same, I was surprised at how happy I was to be back.

That in itself may be a bad sign. It's a little worrying.

Casa de Bako

I knew this day would come, eventually. I knew this was a post I 'd have to write, eventually. I tried to prepare for it as best I could, and now that day has arrived.

*sigh*

We bought a house.

And by "we", I mean" the boyfriend". I had nothing to do with it. The house in LA was in my name and when we lost it in a short sale I became persona non grata to the US banking industry (The Nigerians still seem quite fond of me thuough, judging by the e-mail). My credit is ruined, I probably weigh more than my FICO score. All my credit cards were cancelled and now the only plastic I carry is a debit card and a supermarket club card, and that's actually registered to one of the dogs (I don't like people tracking what I buy and I still get the perks. My little dog got a free subscription to Sunset Magazine and I'm pretty sure I enjoyed it more than she did.)

But I digress. Back to the house.

When the boyfriend first proposed this cockamamie scheme of buying a house I thought he was mad. I know it made a certain amount of sense from his perspective. A year and a half of job searching in LA and other civilized lands had led nowhere. He now had a job in Bakersfield that he was actually enjoying and doing well with and making decent money. Homes were so cheap in Bako that owning actually saved us several hundred dollars a month over renting. It seemed... rational.

But it was still Bako, and I was still operating under the assumption we were still trying to get the hell out. But I could tell by the crazed look in his eye that this was a matter that wasn't up for discussion. I've learned from experience in situations like this to just play along and hope the fever burns itself out. And for the first couple of weeks I thought it would do just that.

Since he was going to have to swing this deal all on his own, we started looking at foreclosures. Luckily for him, the San Joaquin Valley is the epicenter of the foreclosure crisis in California and there was plenty to choose from. Almost every house for sale in Bako is a foreclosure, but the thing you learn very quickly is that people who lose their homes in foreclosure aren't very happy. I'd go so far as to say they're angry. Holes punched in walls, doors kicked off their hinges, windows shattered. Everything that wasn't nailed down had been stolen, as well as quite a bit that was. Missing toilets, kitchens stripped of cabinets. One house was even missing all the baseboards and door trim.

It was becoming very discouraging. For him.

For me? Not so much.

But a funny thing happened after the first couple of weeks.

First of all, the caliber of the houses went up dramatically. So much so that we ended up putting an offer on a house. We were outbid the next day and the boyfriend was crushed. I wasn't. Although the house was great, it was located on "Snowflake Court". There's no way in hell I was going to live on "Snowflake" in Bakersfield. I would've had to get a PO Box. But still, the houses we were looking at were nice enough that I could actually picture ourselves living here.

And the second thing that happened was with my job.

I had actually grown to love it. Go figure.

I had taken it out of desperation and in the initial weeks I hated it. But soon I found the work challenging and fun. For the first time in years I was actually feeling, dare I say it... creative. And the nicest thing about it was the freedom. For twenty years I'd watched my work be put through the middle management meat grinder, with every low level executive putting their personal stamp on the process. The final product was usually so butchered I rarely took credit for it. But when I approached my Bako boss with my first big project, girding for the criticism and rejection I was used to, I almost had an aneurysm when he said...

"If you like it, it's fine. That's what we pay you for".

Imagine that? I'd never heard that before. I could definitely live with that.

So there you go. I was onboard. We looked at houses and several seemed promising. Ideally we wanted to stay in our current neighborhood. We'd really grown to love it's Brady Bunch, Carter era charm. It was close to everything and walkable, as long as you had a map and were good with mazes. But the houses in this neighborhood were way over the budget.

And then...

I was walking the dogs one day and noticed a house around the corner had just come on the market. The front yard was overgrown but the house appeared to be in good shape. And the price, shockingly, fell right in our sweet spot. We arranged a showing and fell instantly in love with it. It hadn't been ravaged and the only apparent fault with it was the elderly woman who had owned it loved wallpaper. REALLY loved wallpaper. That alone was going to be a project. But despite it all, the boyfriend put in an offer, it was accepted and we entered escrow in October.

Of course, three days later I was laid off.

I assumed, for whatever reason, that that would put the brakes on the home purchase. But it was then that I learned that I was on a runaway train, one where I was only a hapless passenger. As I mentioned before, the boyfriend was buying this all on his own and he wasn't about to let a little thing like my unemployment stop the presses.

So here we are, 60 days later. The house closed yesterday and he finally got the keys.

The house isn't without it's problems. For example, here's our "spa"...



If only all of life's problems were so easy to fill in and cover over.

I still haven't quite figured out how to fill in the massive gaping hole that was my career, but it appears in the near term I'll be filling it with a lot of peeled wallpaper. I've been designated the home fixer. I guess if I had to be unemployed, now would be the time. We have three weeks to get the house livable.

And by "we" I mean "I".

Oh, and the best part? It's across the street from Jim!

The Big Question

Some days I get pangs of guilt for mercilessly mocking Bakersfield. Feelings of regret. Moments of remorse. Second th.....

Oh, who are we kidding. That never happens.

It never happens and let me tell you why - Even the natives aren't terribly fond of this place.

A woman I'd worked with gave me a lead on what could potentially be a lucrative client. I'd actually already done work for them, but I'd done it as a freelancer through one of the agencies. She gave me the contact info for the owner, but after two weeks none of my e-mail or voicemail had been returned. Undeterred, I put together a slick little promotional package featuring the work I'd done for them and decided to hand deliver it to the office. I figured I wouldn't get past the receptionist, but I hoped it would at least get in front of the owner.

I stopped by the office and explained who I was to the front desk staff. The receptionist excused herself and surprisingly enough returned with the owner. I gave him my brief intro and he invited me into his office for a little chat. I handed him my samples and as he started to leaf through them I started in on my standard spiel...

"Yadda, yadda, yadda, and then last year we relocated from Los Angeles to Bakersfi..."

He cut me off.

"Good God, son! Why on earth did you do that?!"

Trust me - I cry myself to sleep each night trying to answer that question.

He looked genuinely concerned and I found myself stumbling for an answer.

He explained that he was Bakersfield born and bred and that the only reason he was still there was the business. As it was, he and his wife also had a home on the Central Coast, and he only drove in to Bako a couple of days a week as needed.

That isn't the first time I'd heard a story like that. Evidently if you're looking for the neighborhood where all the successful people of Bako live, look no further than... Pismo Beach. Two hours away.

He liked my work and said he'd pass it along to his son. Turns out he's grooming him to take over the business.

"I'm counting the days 'til that boy takes over. Can't wait to get the hell out of here for good".

I know the feeling.

Back In Bako

And so we've returned, from the land of "cee-ment ponds and movie stars", as the locals refer to it.

The drive down wasn't so bad, but the drive back in holiday traffic was hateful, not the least because of our destination.

Two days is just too brief, but all in all it's probably for the best. The longer you're away from Bakersfield, the less likely you are to return. After about four days you'd probably just send in a change of address and take a loss on everything else. Lord knows I thought of it. Although I'd obviously miss the boyfriend, I did have the dogs with me. If I'd thought to take the laptop, returning would have been a tougher call. Sorry honey.

I did get a proper Bako sendoff when I left on Friday...

I got cropdusted!

I was driving south, about 20 miles out of town, when something caught my eye approaching from the west. A small single seat plane flying not more than 50 feet above the crops. It was trailing a white cloud behind it and as it passed overhead my windshield was misted with God knows what. No doubt a toxic witch's brew of banned pesticides.

None of that sissified "organic farming" here. Them's fightin' words.

We take our fruits and vegetables as God intended them.

With a double dose of DDT.

You Say Tomato

"Who would want to move there?! It's in the middle of nowhere! There's nothing there! No shopping, no restaurants, no culture! Who in their right mind would live there?!?!"

That was Donna Sue, on the TeeVee.

I hear 'ya sister. Tell me something I don't know. I feel your pain.

But the amazing thing was that Donna Sue wasn't talking about moving TO Bakersfield. She was complaining about having to leave... for Barstow.

It seems that the Burlington Northern Sante Fe railroad, commonly referred to as B.N.S.F. and pronounced "Bieneseff" by the locals , has decided to move their substantial local operations to Barstow. And the Bako employees has been told to move it or lose it, as in their jobs.

They aren't happy.

There have been protests outside the local headquarters for the past two nights, not by the actual employees (who are prohibited from doing so by their union contract) but by their families and loved ones. Like Donna Sue.

She railed on about the injustice of the whole situation, basically calling poor little Barstow a hellhole.

Pot. Kettle. Black.

Donna Sue seems convinced Bakersfield is some sort of cosmopolitan utopia. Has she ever been on the other side of the mountains? It just goes to show you that one person's assbackward cow town is another's shining city on the hill. It's the metropolitan food chain.

When I lived in LA, all the transplanted New Yorkers bitched and moaned about how nothing in the City of Angels measured up to the infinitely higher standards of the Big Apple. And here I am, a transplanted Angleleno, bitching and moaning about the relative lack of sophistication of Bako. And now we have Donna Sue, having a cow about Barstow. It's a devolutionary death spiral.

At least we aren't at the bottom. Not yet, at any rate. As long as there are the Barstows of the world, we'll always be better than someone. That's something, I guess.

Same Old, Same Old

So week two on the panhandling circuit. At least I shaved this morning, first time in a week. I want to appear "professional", after all.

I applied for unemployment last week, the first time I've been able to do that. Over the past couple of years I've worked for several employers essentially full-time, but I was never on the payroll and considered a freelancer, so when I was ultimately cut loose I was on my own. But thanks to my brief salaried stint here in Bako, the vast untold riches of unemployment have been put at my disposal... $240 a week! While that may be chump change back in LA, that's real money here in Bako. Not that I can get used to it. The minute I accept a piddly $500 contract job, the State of California will consider me FULLY EMPLOYED! and pull the plug.

But I have been methodical over the past week. After a thorough assessment of the Bakersfield job market, an exhaustive review of the available job openings, and with consideration of my art degree and 20 years experience in the advertising business, I've determined there are exactly two career paths available for me...

Tattoo artist and children's face painting.

Although I faint at the sight of blood and I hate children, so both may prove problematic.

The pipe dream of getting work from LA is also proving to be unrealistic. The great promise of the digital age was that we would all be able to telecommute and work out of "virtual offices". And it actually came true for awhile. A year ago when we moved here I was able to maintain the charade of being in LA and accepting work I could do at home. But the Brave New World ran head-on into good old human nature - people are by nature control freaks. No matter how much work you produce off-site, how quickly, you still can't shake the perception among clients that you're really just surfing porn in your underwear on their dime. Plus there's no way to stand over your shoulder and browbeat you when you aren't there, and that is evidently a very important part of the process.

And then you have to add in security concerns. Clients aren't comfortable with all their assets floating around with faceless freelancers. There's always the chance that an un-retouched photo of Julia Roberts could show up online and then heads would roll. Personally, I think that's little more than a red herring. The real concern among clients is that people like me will post the clever, brilliant, groundbreaking work that they've done on their own websites, the work that the clients have almost always KILLED, and then they'll be exposed as the talentless hacks that they are. I've seen it happen before...

"Can you believe THIS is the movie poster they went with... when they could've had THIS?!?!?!?!?!"

Clients HATE that.

The bottom line is most clients want you on-site now, even if it's just for a day or two. And unless I'm prepared to sleep in my car on the streets of Burbank for work, I think trawling for work in LA is beyond pointless.

So that leaves really only one option. Beating the bushes for work here in Bako, going door to door like Willy Loman if necessary. Not my first choice, that's for sure. But it's not like I have choices anymore.

It Was An Observation, Not A Wish...

I was just recalling my first encounter with Bakersfield.

It was October of 2004 and the boyfriend and I were passing through on our way to a long weekend with friends in Yosemite.

I'd never driven up Highway 99 before, and it wasn't making a great first impression. The air was orange and foul and smelled like a sewer. Farm equipment off to the side was kicking up great clouds of dirt. The windshield was being bombarded by bugs. And as we approached Bako, both sides of the highway were lined for miles with "Bush/Cheney '04" signs.

I turned to the boyfriend and said...

"What a hellhole. You couldn't pay me to live here."

So here we are, six years later.

I now live here.

And nobody pays me.

If only I'd kept my thoughts to myself...

If I Was A Rich Man

So late last week I allowed myself a pity party, particularly on the long slog back to LA on Friday.

But today is a new day, a new week, and there's no point crying over spilt work.

Last Tuesday I had received a call out of the blue from a creepy sounding man in Tarzana. He owned an agency that catered to construction related industries and he had been referred to me by a person he refused to name. He had looked over my website, liked what he saw and was interested in meeting me.

"How about Friday? he said.

My first instinct was to pass. Although my Bako salary was minimal and I could certainly use the extra income, it would have meant concocting a cockamamie excuse to take a personal day off and I didn't feel like I could chance it being so new in the job. But then he said the magical phrase "this would be ongoing work" and suddenly I had a change of heart. Taking a personal day for a one-off job was iffy, but doing it for a potentially ongoing revenue stream seemed a reasonable risk. I told him I'd get back to him in the morning and then spent the afternoon and evening trying to craft the perfect lie.

Call in sick? Family emergency? Death in the family? What to do, what to do.

But as fate would have it I was canned the next day, so I was free to schlep into LA guilt free.

In the past three years I've had many strange meetings and this one certainly makes the top ten. I won't bore you with details save to say when my new client walked into the room it was as if he just stepped out of a touring production of "Fiddler on the Roof". A bear of a man, he had a long unkept beard and was wearing a yarmulke and a prayer shawl. And he was barefoot. The meeting was odd but productive and it looks like we'll be doing business together. He said he'd call me midweek with work. Let's hope Tevye is a man of his word.

Beyond that I wrangled a job from Hollywood. I had forgotten how much I'd grown to hate entertainment work. That is, until the check clears. I'm booked for today and tomorrow and will make more in two days than I made in a week in Bako. And there are a few more irons in the fire so we'll see if anything comes of it. All in all, I'm looking on the bright side, such as it is.

The trip to LA was odd for another reason. In the first couple of months of living in Bako I had had to trek back to the city at least once a week to tie up loose ends. I always looked forward to going back "home", even though once I got there I was usually consumed with sadness and despair. But I hadn't been back to LA since February and this trip back proved to be different. I found myself getting increasingly anxious as I cleared the pass into the LA sprawl. And once I hit the 405 like a brick wall and found myself inching along, stuck in the "morning" rush hour at noon I found myself thinking "thank God I don't have to deal with this anymore." It should have been a two hour drive, but I had allowed myself three. And still I barely made it to the meeting on time. The whole time I was in the city I found myself completely stressed out. While I was sitting in the meeting I kept eyeing the clock, hoping to end it before 2 so I could get back on the road before "evening" rush hour began, to no avail. When I finally hit the freeway at 2:15 it was already gridlocked. "How do people live like this? I thought to myself, conveniently forgetting I had done it for 25 years.

Once I finally cleared greater LA at Castaic, two hours later, I finally felt myself start to relax. And when I cleared the Grapevine and started descending back into the San Joaquin valley I actually kind of felt at peace. It was Golden Hour and the sun was shimmering off the wheat fields. Or maybe it was dead corn, who can tell; I still new to all this farm crap. At any rate, it was beautiful.

They say you can't go home again, but I guess that all depends on where you consider home. And to be honest, I'm not sure I know anymore. But I'm pretty sure it aint LA.

It Was What It Was

Last week was a rough one, emotionally. The sad grim reality finally set in that we weren't leaving.

Not now. Not any time soon. Maybe never.

What triggered it was the decision to formally, officially abandon the search for a job back in LA. It had long been an exercise in futility and had devolved into a kabuki-like morning ritual. It really wasn't much different from playing the lottery; deep down you know, rationally, that you aren't going to win and yet you're equally certain that the day you stop playing will be the day your numbers finally come up. And so you keep going. For awhile.

When I first found myself out of work in the summer of '07 I lept into action. I worked with two head hunters, registered with 8 different placement firms and joined God knows how many online services. One of them aggregated job listings from every job board you'd ever heard of and many more you haven't. You entered your parameters and every morning received a tidy little email with every single listing it could find. In the beginning it ran a dozens of pages and took hours to sort through. By the end it was reduced to only a handful of listings, mostly for entry level positions or unpaid internships. It was really my last link to the LA job market, and last week I finally pulled the plug.

Over the course of three years I lost track of how many jobs I applied for; I stopped counting at 500 and that was before we moved to Bakersfield. The whole process only generated one interview, back in '08. Working against me was the fact that the advertising business is a lot like "Logan's Run" with 40 as everyone's sell-by date. I was already well past that when I started looking for a job.

But it's not all doom and gloom. The job I took in Bako, originally as a place holder, temporary, stop gap measure has turned out to be better than expected. The pay sucks, but so far it's covering the bills. The work is interesting in a Bako kind of way. I have insurance for the first time in years, which is sadly considered a luxury nowadays. And they take out my taxes which will avoid many sleepless nights around April 15th.

So one door closes. Whether or not another one opens remains to be seen. But it was time to put the past squarely in the past and move on.

And so it goes.

Where Has The Time Gone

Today is the first, and one would hope only, anniversary of this blog. I didn't realize I started this thing the very first week we were here; I thought it took a couple of weeks for the despair to consume me. But, here we are.

In honor of the dubious distinction, I've reinstated the rolling panoramas of Hooterville at the top of the page. It was never my intention to stop them, just a horrible housekeeping error. A couple of months ago I decided to do one my infrequent stabs at being organized. My computer desktop was a complete mess and I started purging unneeded files. The images for the blog were in a folder labeled "Bako" and when I saw the word I reflexively deleted it.

Most be something Freudian.

At any rate, the boyfriend has to work today and I have nothing but time on my hands, so I rebuilt them. Now you too can experience the wonder that is Bakersfield.

Come back often, they'll change every day!

Year Two

I honestly thought we'd be gone by now, our nightmare year in Bakersfield quickly fading into memory, mentioned only humorously in passing over cocktails...

"Well if you think THAT'S bad, let me tell you about the year we lived in Bakersfield..."

At the very least I thought I'd be staring at a wall of neatly packed moving boxes, even if the details of where we were going were still to be ironed out.

Exactly why I thought that is a mystery. It's not like the circumstances that drove us here in the first place have changed. In many respects, they've actually gotten worse. Probably just a survival instinct, an act of self delusion to keep from stringing a rope over the rafters of our rented two car garage.

But surprisingly I'm not all that upset. "Resigned" is probably the best description of my mood. Maybe it's all those hours of watching "Lock Up: Raw". I'm always amazed at how homey some of the inmates at San Quentin have made their cells. It just goes to show you that anything is doable if you work at it. And besides, there are people in far worse shape than we are, so maybe we should just be grateful for what little we have.

So I guess we should make ourselves comfortable. Looks like we're going to be here awhile.

And Speaking of Unimaginable Tragedies...

Today marks the one year anniversary of our exile in Bakersfield.

Shocking But True!

A few weeks ago we mysteriously started receiving a subscription to US magazine. It has our address on it, but someone else's name. Nothing too surprising about that... not knowing where you live? That's so Bako. We figured it would get sorted out soon enough so we might as well enjoy it while we get it.

Flipping through the pages it became painfully obvious that we are now completely out of touch.

Who were half these people?

Paris Hilton was arrested? Again? Where was I?

Why on earth are the Kardashians famous?

Why does any of this matter?

I must say it's somewhat liberating breaking free of the gravitational pull of the Celebrity Industrial Complex of LA. Until you leave you don't really notice how much celebrity and fame are deeply woven into the fabric of Los Angeles. And that aint necessarily a good thing.

Celebrity foibles and sightings are such a staple of the local news that at times it's indistinguishable from "Entertainment Tonight". And we aren't even talking Brangelina A-listers here. Thanks to the new Reality TV manufacturing base, a new crop of famewhores is dumped on the market weekly. A year ago the meatheads of "Jersey Shore" were less than nobodies and now they have book deals and fragrance lines and "Snooki" has entered the lexicon.

It isn't overstating it to say celebritydom is pervasive to every aspect of life in LA. You can't escape it driving down the street, where "stars" leer down on you from every bus and billboard. Streets get closed for crews filming NCISCSI:Miami/LasVegas/NewYork. Or get blocked by roving packs of paparazzi watching Paris shop at Kitson.

Every mom and pop establishment has a wall of signed head shots, as if it really matters that Howie Mandel uses the same dry cleaner or Ricardo Montalban once used the same car wash to detail his Corinthian leather. Restaurants and clubs rise and fall on who's seen and who's not and they secretly pay to get an appearance. I hear Paris charges a cool $100K to show up at your door.

Probably a lot more for the gratuitous cooch shot sliding out of the Bentley.

We used to have a townhouse in West Hollywood two doors down from an unassuming French restaurant. One day it closed without notice and became shrouded in scaffolding. Six months later it emerged as DOLCE. Ashton Kutcher was an investor and it quickly became the white hot center of the A-list club crowd. Now the paparazzi were trampling our front yard and you couldn't leave because the driveway was blocked by a limo full of Olsen Twins. Within a month or two, Ashton cashed out and sold it to some other investors and soon after the celebs departed like a swarm of locusts for the next new thing. Last time I was in LA I noticed DOLCE was gone.

It's now an unassuming French restaurant.

One afternoon on Sunset I was almost run off the road by careening SUV's driving on the wrong side of the road chasing a white Range Rover, followed by a couple of squad cars. It was complete pandemonium and ended up as a massive traffic jam at rush hour. When I got home I turned on the local news to see what it was all about.

It was Britney Spears going for sushi at Blowfish, pursued by stalkerazzi.

Last summer, just as we were packing for exile, Michael Jackson died. His last tour stop, the rented Beverly Hills Mansion, was just down the hill from us. For weeks after it was like a scene out of "Apocalypse Now", with squadrons of helicopters hovering and swooping over a now deserted house. Why? Why not?

Up close it all looks like glitz and glamour, but looking at it from a distance now it all just looks so stupid. What a complete waste of time and effort. I thought I would miss it quite honestly, since I worked tangentially to the entertainment industry, or "The Industry" as it's known in LA (as if there's no other kind). And I have to say it's a bit of relief that I don't.

There's something to be said for living in a place where the biggest celebrity in town is the high school quarterback.