109 Comments

I can relate so strongly to this, and I wish I couldn't. I've got the same feelings about Canada - in my humble opinion, the landscapes of the Great White North are unparalleled in their majesty and beauty, and there's nothing more restorative to my soul than going back there and spending time in nature. Yet the regulatory miasma hangs over everything like an invisible cloud made of permits and No signs, carrying with it the hallucinatory nightmare demons of post-modern ideology.

Canada might not have ever been an especially exciting place, but it was at least well governed, clean, safe, and the ethos of politeness meant that people generally agreed to live and let live - the deal was, don't be a violent jerk, pick up after yourself, and you can do basically as you please. Now that ethos has been perverted in all the expected ways: obey and agree, for if you don't, you're a rude, racist, climate-denying antivaxxer, etc etc.

There's nothing more painful than watching powerlessly as your homeland descends into madness and tyranny so deeply that the madness eclipses everything you love about it. It's like seeing a family member turn into a drug addict. There are flashes of the person you love, but they become rarer and shorter as the drug takes control, and deep down you don't need anyone to tell you how it ends.

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Aug 10, 2022Liked by Chris Bray

Been here in los angeles since 1997. It has gone from a great time with mostly good people to a mostly terrible city with almost exclusively awful people. Just found out tonight our catholic school is going to be lock step with LAUSD yet again.. so bring back the testing and the masks if there are positives. I hate it here so much now.

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Aug 10, 2022Liked by Chris Bray

CA will survive these morons. And ironically, it will probably be the immigrants that finally throw these bums out. Immigrants generally don’t leave their countries, face danger and poverty, just to settle in a place that offers the same sort of corrupt government they fled. They are by and large, courageous and faithful people, far better than the average college-educated American these days. Perhaps this is why the Ds are quietly starting to build the wall.

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Aug 10, 2022Liked by Chris Bray

Beautifully said. CA is in my rear view mirror for more open and truly diverse and free places. So sad.

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Aug 10, 2022Liked by Chris Bray

born at cedars sinai, raised in unincorporated la county, college in the bay area, career in biotech afterwards. married someone from santa barbara. A FUCKING CALIFORNIA CLICHE.

when we first started talking about leaving, i put on a brave face. i hadn’t realized how much i’d thought of the state as ‘home’. by the time we signed a new lease in a new state i cried tears of relief.

we feel lucky, as if we have escaped.

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Aug 10, 2022Liked by Chris Bray

We're staying in my hometown San Diego, fighting back and taking back territory. Memories of CA almost brought tears to my eyes. It's worth fighting for.

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Aug 10, 2022Liked by Chris Bray

It feels weird to read the name Jerry Brown in a positive or neutral way. 😅I am “only” in my mid 30s so my impression of him is based on his governorship during 2011-2018(?) that coincided with my conservative turn and also my dads super dislike of his first 27 terms. 😂

San Bernardino is cool because we don’t have enough money to allow ourselves to be told what to do. I used to HATE breaking any rules so you can imagine how odd it was to find myself and my 4 kids among the delinquents at the playground when the city I live in tried to yellow tape it off.

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Aug 10, 2022Liked by Chris Bray

This piece hits home for me pretty hard - I spent so much of my childhood on these same roads. I learned what it meant to love my country at the annual Fourth of July parade in Bridgeport CA where my family has been vacationing for the past 50 years. I developed a deep love of history in the haunted streets of Bodie and overgrown fields of Aurora. We’ve hiked and driven untold numbers of miles on back roads and Jeep trails. Then I’d return home after this trip each year to So. Cal and go to school in what felt like such an open, diverse melting pot of individuals and ideas. We had annual passes to Disneyland where most nights we’d go just to have a hot chocolate and watch the fireworks. I drove PCH in my first car (a 65’ VW Beetle) several times a week as a form of behind-the-wheel-meditation. We left CA for good to head to greener pastures approaching seven years ago and watching the decline of a place that shaped me has been deeply sad. It has felt eerily similar to mourning a lost loved one.

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Aug 10, 2022Liked by Chris Bray

I hear you. Not all is lost. California is a lesson to learn. I’m in Texas and we are getting a lot of refugees from mismanaged states. We welcome them all but we have a deep fear of their failed state’s politics being imported here. What can we do to prevent the “metastasization of regulatory chickenshit” in Texas. If you could go back 50 years in California what could have been done? Please pray for Texas and our freedoms. I often think about and pray for my fellow Americans in California. Especially the F 250 types that enjoy the wide open spaces.

“Did I say that, or just think it?”

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Aug 10, 2022Liked by Chris Bray

California's staggering natural gifts make up for a lot of governmental and cultural malarkey. Yet there comes a limit...

In a place like Detroit, sane people would have given up long before and moved elsewhere. Which is what happened long ago. California is seeing this only now.

There is no Law of Nature saying that the pendulum must swing back during anyone's lifetime. South Africa and Mexico are full of stunningly beautiful and bountiful places, yet they grind along under generations of hopeless misgovernment. I don't have automatic faith that California can be saved. It will be a fight, and the Forces of Good could easily lose.

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Aug 10, 2022Liked by Chris Bray

I too grew up in CA. I lived in Anaheim, 2 miles from the “Magic Kingdom “. Life there in the 60’s/70’s was almost Mayberry like. Orange groves in abundance. Farm fields stretching all the way to Huntington Beach. We were free range kids who were basically kicked out of our homes on summer mornings and told not to return until dinner. I left for a job in 1987 and haven’t looked back. Southern Cal feels third world to me now. My wife and I still have family there and in Northern Cal, but I will not return. Each visit reminds me of the degrading, crowded, arrogant liberal takeover which has occurred. Everywhere I go there are millions of people crowding ahead of me. I’ve told my wife that I will return to California under one of two conditions: in a box, or in an urn. I grieve for my lost state. It was once beautiful and vibrant.

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Aug 10, 2022Liked by Chris Bray

This old farmer says: Yeah to all of that, but move it back to the 40's, and imagine!! I grew from bean, through teen and into young adulthood, with a wife and family in that wonderful world. But the 70's brought a huge change. No more groves and groves. No more little pocket neighborhoods, separate but almost equal, and getting closer week by week. Not PCH but 99. On a Greyhound. With miles and miles of open opportunity. Yeah! You grew up in a GREAT place, - just 30 years after the prime. I have returned many times over the last 40+ years, and each time I did, I died a little more. It has turned from and Eden into a cesspool. The folks who live there are generally so entrenched that they smell the rot but they can't figure out where it is coming from. Oh well - - - this too shall change. However I fear it won't be for the better. A nasty, infected sore won't heal until you clean the debris out and treat it with TLC.

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Aug 10, 2022Liked by Chris Bray

I have been visiting California since I was 18 years old in 1978 and have seen the changes happen with the eye of the observer and I must say it leaves me disillusioned. The west has been in my heart since I was a child and it is the openness and the sense that you are out on a limb that has kept me in thrall. When I was a young Deadhead and to be in San Francisco was a feeling that was thrilling, visiting with friends and drinking a six pack catching up at Twin Peaks and looking at this most amazing city roll down at your feet, you knew this world was for you. Now when I go to SF it has become a city of wealthy people, homeless and the crazed and it makes me sad beyond belief. SF was always a city that was little rough around the edges but it had room for everyone and it worked. Unfortunately, they have broken the city I love most in the world and I don't think they can put it back together. I knew the city I loved was gone when they gentrified the Mission District and they turned China Basin in to a baseball Disneyland. They can have it now, it's theirs and they have ruined it.

I still get excited when I head to Cali for my three week road trip each spring but when I retire next year it will be to the Black Hills in South Dakota. When I look at the rolling prairie in South Dakota in the spring when the grass is green it moves my heart the way a woman did when I was young.

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Aug 10, 2022Liked by Chris Bray

I'm British, but I used to visit the US often in the late 1980s (as a late teenager then) to mid 2010s.

I collect old soul records (what we call 'northern soul' over here), and you could find £1,000 gems for 50¢ in thrift stores, or piled up in dusty boxes in the backs or attics or basements of record shops.

Occasionally I would track down old artists, or producers, or record company execs, and get records straight from the horse's mouth.

Where that happened, I'd pay them in dollars close to the nominal Sterling amount - fine when it was $2 to the pound - because they were usually broke and I felt they deserved finally to earn some cash from records they'd made thirty, forty years before.

Record store owners I ripped off mercilessly - if they couldn't do the work to find out the value, and it didn't occur to them to wonder why these crazy British collectors were paying for flights to come and find this shit, that was on them.

Then eBay and the rest of the internet took off and ruined everything.

Anyway, I digress.

I loved California, came often, and my wife and I had a memorable two weeks there in the 90s, before we were married, driving up the coast, stopping in a log cabin in Sequoia and the Wawona Hotel in Yosemite, and generally having a blast.

Coming from a relatively small country - albeit that we were not strangers to the States or other expansive places - I remember seeing a 'next gas 100 miles' sign somewhere and thinking, I'd better fill up.

At the time, I had an inkling I might move to the States, possibly to Cali - we're both keen skiers, and Heavenly looked great - but I'm glad I didn't. The UK is now completely fucking mad, too, but it's *our* mad, if you know what I mean. Plus we have cricket.

Sadly, as unvaccinated heathens, we may never even visit again.

Funnily enough, one of our daughters is dating a Californian guy she met in Germany (he's in the USAF, and still posted in Europe). She's not vaccinated, either, so I can see trouble ahead.

Another great piece, Chris. Keep them coming.

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Aug 10, 2022Liked by Chris Bray

It's far more than a Lost Coast. We lived in a perfect house with an avocado tree on Newport Avenue, two blocks straight up from the Ocean Beach Pier in San Diego.

I walked to school every day at Ocean Beach Elementary and lined up outside our classroom to say the Pledge of Allegiance and sing America the Beautiful every day with the entire school, from 1965 to 1968.

We seemed to have wonderful teachers and a diverse student body. Many of the kids were extremely poor, living in what were essentially beach shacks.

But my father sensed danger in the neighborhood, with the head shops taking over the little stores and stoners in the alley behind our house.

We moved away to the Pacific Northwest when I was 9.

Every summer I go back to visit. Our old house is now worth $2 million and we can barely afford to visit.

Ocean Beach's little downtown zone is decidedly scuzzy now. But I still dream of living there again.

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Aug 10, 2022Liked by Chris Bray

California is a coloring book example of what happens when the entire left edge of a state drives everything, and the values are NOT centered in local control and personal freedoms.

Washington state is a mirror for your memoir. We've inherited so many CA runners for 30 years- now we suffer from the same burden, a populace constantly working from a "what can the govt do for me?" mindset. There is no winning, even survival is questionable.

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