I’ll talk about San Francisco later.

Made it to Ukiah, the biggest town in Mendocino. Came up through Napa, which is beautiful, and then around Lake Clearwater. I’d heard of it as a hippie town, center of the marijuana growing industry.

Ukiah is the sketchiest fucking place I’ve ever stayed, and that includes several cheap motel districts, South Central among them.

My first thought was “wow, for a hippie town, that’s a lot of signs advertising assault rifles”.

My second thought, driving down the street was “wow, there sure are a lot of institutions that deal with abandoned children”.

Then I checked in at my motel, and walking across the parking lot there was a normal-looking couple in a normal-looking truck, and the woman waved me over and asked, all friendly, “hey, do you happen to know where I could find-” and her voice here dropped like 15 decibels - “some crack?”

I didn’t, but she went knocking on other doors at the motel and I guess someone did, because a while later she was back out in the parking lot very loudly imitating a chicken.

The internet told me the bar one way down the road was a meth den with cheap drinks, I tried the other way and there was a microbrewery with a reggae band playing and young people with dreadlocks dancing. So that was a bit better, but you listen to the conversations and their lives had an absurd amount of violence in them. Not even related to criminal enterprises or feuds or anything, just absolutely pointless violence between friends and lovers. One girl was complaining about how this guy was avoiding her after she beat him up after he threatened to blow her foot off with a shotgun. One of the stories on the front page of the local newspaper was a 27 year old man who was arrested for - while driving! - severely beating his passenger girlfriend in the head and attempting to force a knife sharpener down her throat.

Also I had random people driving by yell at me on the way to and from the bar. One called me “fatass”, one called me “faggot”.

Dude I don’t even know. Apparently it’s still harvest season, when hippies and drifters from all over flood in to trim the marijuana crop for pretty good pay. And judging from cowboys and sailors when a bunch of transients get their pay all at once things get wooly. Maybe it’s different the rest of the year.

Finally, passed by a bunch of tents in a park on the main drag. From experience in Santa Cruz, Berkeley, and San Francisco, I assumed this was #OccupyUkiah. Turns out it was a Boy Scout camping event for the Pumpkin Festival.

I think I’ve finally gotten far enough away from LA that I can count on having the best style in the bar. Bay people are on average noticeably less attractive as LA people, but there’s enough that’re attractive enough, and they aren’t nearly as hateable-on-contact.

There’s woo enough here that I’m willing to press on to Portland in hopes that gets better, but it’s not nearly as grungy or liberal as the reputation or even what I remember from a college visit a decade ago. (A decade!)

Now it was raining so maybe that’s why there were fewer protesters and crusties out than Santa Cruz, but it still showed up in the way people that were around presented and what I heard them talking about, and the literature and flyers left up in public. I remember on that visit coming across a flyer for a protest schedule for the month that was almost full. One entry was “meet at the BART station and decide what to protest”, that one stuck with me.

I’ve seen more relationships, romantic or friendly, between 20somethings and greyhairs than I can remember anywhere. Maybe it’s the the college thing, but I don’t remember seeing anything like that in Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, Ithaca, or Westwood. I mean I knew people who went to professors’ dinner parties, but they didn’t hit the laundromat together at 3 in the afternoon or play Connect 4 in bars.

Shit closes down weirdly early. There are a bunch of restaurants that close at 4 or so. Maybe students have brunchable weekdays, but it doesn’t stop there. There are coffeeshops that close at 6, student bars that close on 11 some days, a bar down the street that closes at 7, when I went up to Telegraph at least half the undergrad eateries were closed by 8.

I guess this signals a higher-than-normal ratio of labor costs to rent, but given what I hear about Berkeley rents and the unemployment level in adjacent Oakland that’s kind of weird. The People’s Republic has a living wage thingie of almost $15/hr including benefits, but that’s only for city contractors.

Lots of traffic-calming design. Boulevard medians, traffic circles, non-arterial grid streets are broken up by walling off intersections diagonally into two butt-bumping right turns, which is a new one for me.

Maybe that shit’s necessary, because Berkeley has the worst fucking drivers I have ever seen. I saw a car fuck up a right turn! It just stopped at an intersection where the cross street had stop signs and it didn’t, and there was no cross traffic anyway and then just waited for, for, for I have no fucking clue what, maybe until the stars were properly aligned.

And then within an hour I saw another car do the same fucking thing! And that’s not to mention left turns, which are at least fuckupable in theory, and boy do they put that theory into practice.

Maybe it’s a regional thing. I was taking some ridge roads around Tiburon the other day and there was, I shit you not, a public awareness campaign encouraging drivers to stop at red lights.