I took the train from Oakland to Oxnard CA on Friday. The trip took ten hours, but the seat was comfy and the legroom vast; nor did one have to endure any TSA-administered police state bullshit. Five minutes out of Paso Robles (irritatingly mispronounced by the cunductor as "Pass-oh roh-BAH-less") I happened to glance out the window and saw about ten or a dozen ancient rusted steel beer cans, with "church key" punctures on their tops, beside the track. In this country the beverage sector had switched to seamless aluminum containers with pull-tabs by 1965, so these cans must have lain undisturbed by the tracks since they were first deposited as litter half a century ago.

Elsewhere: a school of porpoises, about twenty in number, clearing the blue Pacific as the train rolled along the coast. And although I've lived in this state for over sixty years, I'd never seen until this past Friday the stretch of California coast between Gaviota and Pismo Beach. The highways go inland there, and access to the coast turns out to be the near-exclusive playground of the denizens of "Hollister Ranch," a development for rich folks (average property: 100 acres). State law says that you can use the beach if you reach it by sea. Otherwise, you either live in Hollister Ranch or you're chums with a resident. Miles and miles and miles of gorgeous beach with scarcely a soul thereupon. Apparently the National Park Service attempted to claim the coastline a couple of decades ago, but the landowners dropped a few hundred thou and engaged a former congresscritter to put paid to that notion.

These people will go right up against the wall come the revolution.

cordially,