Note from the Editor:

East coast to west coast; I was now arriving back at the west coast along which I’d become a warrior.  Was it to smooth some of those less-pleasant training-program memories out, giving me a decent taste of California life just like I’d hoped for during my first chats, pre-Marine Corps, when I was still using AOL?  Possibly.

The drive had been long and trying, and I’d encountered more negativity from the animals called humans.  I’d had to deal with that crap from corrupt cops up in Virginia, and scummy sailors in the shipyards, then again back in the South, including in shit Texas, along the way, and even a few times while out on my trips overseas; to Japan and Peru.  The Californians –initially– received me much more politely, so I felt good about having relocated this far, crossing the whole continent… yet again.

There is a much different atmosphere on the opposing coasts.  It is particularly noticeably when you spent only time in the Marine Corps, after evading drug-runners, on the west, followed by more creeps, and even neighborhood shoot-outs, while on the overall-negative east.  I was now free and amongst peace-loving civilians now that I was making my second long-term pass to and up all over the west coast, and it felt like I’d arrived in chill slutty hangout paradise, almost everyone smiling and in bikinis or board-shorts.

I didn’t like who I was with, or what it was taking to move and settle in, but I now see I would have liked it far less, had I ended up going in the other direction; if I’d experienced the chill west coast before the cramped and congested, extra-polluted, long-since colonized and overrun-with-urban-sprawl east, I probably would have ‘gone postal’.  As meh as this relocation was, it was still moving me closer, year by year, to the life and locale I really wanted, keeping me in going in the direction I really wanted, and keeping me from ever being truly trapped or stuck.  I even got to experience what seemed to’ve been a time-warp or space-warp along the way (somewhere out in Arizona or New Mexico, which, in case you don’t know, are states known for those things).

My new apartment was in Point Loma, on a hill overlooking the Pacific, with healthy palm trees swaying in the warm breeze.  The complex was somewhat barracks-like, but cleaner, taller, quieter, and surrounded by rolling hills, nice homes, and restaurants offering delicious food.  The beach was within walking distance.  Hotties were everywhere in tight and little clothing.  A few friends drove and flew out to see me, and my experiences with the police out here were all more like stoner encounters than anything intimidating or worrisome.  This move from east to west had made so many things so much better, and I was about to see that it was undoing (fixing) all that had happened when I’d moved, the other year, the other way.

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Vocab of the Day:

  • hydroponics: growing plants in nutrient-rich water trays, needing no soil

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2009-2010 articles are here.

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Peru Lake-bed Ruins:  circuitboard-looking lake-bottoms on a large scale high up in South America’s tallest mountains

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Poking Fun at Fake News:

Here we also see fake news about an ‘attack’ with ‘suicide bombers’ against a U.S. property on foreign land.  I don’t think anyone actually likes U.S. presences abroad, except the tourists and representatives spending time over there.  I wouldn’t be surprised if all those ‘suicide bombers’ were actually just people defending their homeland from rude invaders taking their sweet time in order to seem reasonable and tolerable, and that a few were even un-involved passersby targeted in ways that made them look like they’d exploded on their own (i.e. “spontaneous combustion” that isn’t so spontaneous).  Aim a laser, microwave, or other energy weapon at someone, and watch how quickly they appear to explode, just like a ketchup bottle in the microwave, and how quickly the uneducated –and downright evil– all around them assume they were religious fanatics with suicide-vests on.

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