California Dreaming

A Moment's Respite from the War

Thank you for your patience, dear friends; I took a desperately-needed break.

I was sick to death - like, existentially sick, soul-sick — from four years of standing at the abyss of what at times seems like the Devil’s Own Canyon, peering into its depths, and describing its emerging, florid horrors flooding by without cease.

My life as a reporter and cultural critic (and human) since 2021 often feels like I am forced to share a mantra such as this, in various iterations, week by week, day by day:

MRNA sudden death, mRNA sudden death; DNA alterations; miscarriages, miscarriages, population collapse; strokes, heart attacks, brain damage; poisoned breast milk; malformed babies; digital ID rollout; apps entraining our kids’ brains; EMF EMF EMF, from all directions, radiating us with no escape; microwaved clouds; weather warfare; strange s—- in the skies; sperm collapse via pesticides; human DNA in the food supply — The Beef Site reports that there is human DNA in two per cent of meat samples, and even in two-thirds of “vegetarian” alternatives to meat; family collapse; Netflix shows depicting religious leaders as fanatical abusers; Netflix shows depicting men as pernicious traitors, or rocklike cretins, and women as being emotionally fulfilled only by friendships with their best girlfriends and via stylish clothing and high-end sex toys; ever-changing coinages such as “bio-moms” (meaning what we used to call “moms”), and “people with ovaries”; a weeping woman, beaten to a pulp by a huge Algerian person with a male chromosome, in a boxing ring; people arrested for posting tweets in the UK, and the BBC’s “disinformation correspondent” wondering “will it change anything?”; a new bill allowing for full-term baby abortions, rushed through in the UK; “suicide pods” rolled out with fanfare in the UK, by an inventor who had previously been arrested for using the same device in Switzerland; MAID in Canada soliciting assisted suicides and creating workbooks about their loved ones’ assisted suicides, for children; a national blind eye turned to the organized rape of children, euphemistically terms “grooming gangs”, in the UK; a court ruling that clears a hospital in Wisconsin of medically murdering a healthy, loved 19 year old woman with Down’s Syndrome, Grace Schara; which means that anyone can be murdered medically in the US now; my friend, mindfulness expert Ora Nadrich, pointing out (and me increasingly being persuaded) that there may well be multiple dimensions alive currently on our planet — some more nefarious, it seems, than others; my friend Josh Stylman revealing, in sequential well-reasoned, well-sourced essays, that our very thoughts may not be our own now, and that most of the culture and history that I thought was organic, is probably manufactured; my friend Catherine Austin Fitts warning that the full-spectrum “control grid” is closing up; she and I being almost alone in recognizing in February 2025 that a massive theft of all of our government data was underway via DOGE and other Silicon Valley entrants into engagement with the Trump administration, and also recognizing sadly almost five months later that too late, too late, now, everyone sees that.

Kids’ workbook for Canadian medically assisted suicide:

Workbook for kids related to the assisted suicide of their loved ones. Are you Excited? Jealous? Grateful?

Euthanasia pod:

The times remain upside-down, even when it comes to the best of us.

RFK Jr is in charge of HHS; the mRNA injection is still being urged on pregnant women; he rolled out a long taxpaper-funded infomercial for wearables this past week, as I predicted would be the case when I warned that Casey and Calley Means’ business models, in their hyperinflated tech companies, are biometrics.

Our noble friend Dr Jay Bhattacharya is in charge of NIH now; he faced a walkout of bratty government workers when he gave a speech trying to point out that the events of 2020-2024 may have begun via a program that the NIH helped to fund. The news report of this event is as if narrated by Lewis Carroll in Behind the Looking Glass:

“Dozens of staff at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) walked out of a recent town hall meeting after Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya suggested the agency may have helped fund research that caused the COVID-19 pandemic. […] In a video obtained by CNN, Bhattacharya is shown telling staff that, based on his review of scientific evidence and public opinion polling, he believed COVID may have started due to research funded, in part, by the NIH.

“It’s possible that the pandemic was caused by research conducted by human beings,” Bhattacharya said. “And it’s also possible that the NIH partly sponsored that research. And if that’s true — ”

At that point, dozens of NIH employees walked out. Bhattacharya called the walkout “silent dissent” and continued on with the meeting.”

These are scientists. And by now, anyone with an internet connection who has been paying attention, knows that COVID-19 could have been, is likely to have been, developed by research funded in part by NIH. But the scientists did not ask: is that possible? Is that true?

They walked out.

I guess what I am trying to say is, sometimes this river of horrors, lies, murder and mendacity is just too much.

Does it matter if I engage with it? Does it matter if I tell you about it? What changes? What saves us?

How does anything that one person does, help, in a torrent of evil such as this?

How do we survive this?

How do we keep looking, keep processing, keep checking the plumb line for “decency”, keep reacting?

Are processing, noting, objecting, how decency is kept alive?

Or are we kidding ourselves that this does anything?

When will the gates of Hell — or is it Cern? Be closed again?

Seriously.

So yes, it became too much for me. That has happened two or three times since 2021. My physical health was breaking down; my awareness could not keep up with processing the stream of evil, of corruption, of human sacrifices.

I came to California.

I am on a vacation with my family.

*****

Here, for a week, I have shut off my social media. Here, for a week, I am not checking news or email.

I am in a wooden house on a wooded hill in Sonoma County. It is a less ramshackle version of the house in which I grew up, also on the side of a wooded hill, in San Francisco.

We spent a day on landing, in “the city”, which is what all native San Franciscans call San Francisco (never, Heaven forbid, “Frisco.” That is for newcomers or for tourists). This was after we picked up the rental car, and before my mom’s plane arrived.

The Mission District is not so different than it was when I was a seventeen-year-old flaneur, in 1979, sitting on the sloping grass on Dolores Park, wearing denim bell-bottoms and a cropped knit top with a rainbow decal, and a jean jacket. My then-straight hair, which reached my waist, was parted in the middle. I talked to my friends about Kerouac and the Beat poets, and music, and high school gossip. The boys had shoulder-length hair then, also parted in the middle; they wore T-shirts with rock bands’ logos on them — The Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd. In those days before devices, we sat in circles on the grass, gazing intently into one another’s eyes while we spoke; some of us, especially those of us who were high, would lie on the grass, gazing at the white, fluffy clouds that passed, changing shapes, on sunny blue days; on grey days, we’d marvel at the bank of fog that slowly rose up from behind the hills, to blur and coddle the city’s heights, and sink into its valleys.

(I still embarrass my loved ones by lying down on grass, in cities; I guess adults on the East Coast, don’t do that. I try to tell them how important it is to lie on the grass and watch the clouds pass. But my advice makes no sense now. The sky has changed, certainly out East; there are almost no gently moving, natural clouds now, continually changing shape, to watch traverse the heavens.)

Today’s Mission district, though some physicality is intact, is spiritually and materially completely different from the scruffy, gritty, humble neighborhood of my youth. Now it is polished; money has poured into it, as is true throughout the city. Artisanal bakeries, written up in magazines for foodies, dot the corners where hardware stores used to display mousetraps and flashlights.

Valencia Street boasts day spas and handmade soap stores. We bought, at Tartine, a sourdough loaf of what has been described as America’s best bread, a “morning bun” of indescribable tenderness and flakiness, and a pain au chocolat; and we ate at a table outside in the gentle, golden sun. Passersby, male and female, were almost universally fit and cheery-looking, wearing running clothes, and escorting baby strollers or a variety of joyous dogs on leashes.

In the park, as we lay on the grass, I looked with my heart hurting a bit — because I had loved that city so much and because it was so changed in its essence, and because I could never truly go back — at the beautiful Mission Dolores High School building, erected in 1927; a phantamagoria of elaborate Baroque decor, merged with clean stucco and art deco lines; a dreamy architectural style — “California Churrigueresque”, referencing mid-18th-century Spanish Mission architecture — that flourished for a moment in San Francisco and LA — and then, nowhere else that I have ever seen:

The young people at Dolores Park, who were playing Frisbee with their dogs, or napping or picknicking, were well-dressed professional young men and women, mostly of Indian and Chinese descent. It was a bucolic scene. They seemed like nice young people. But the culture of my youth was gone. That history of radical democracy in the city; the poetic experimentation and longing, the thirst to find an American rhythm, an American soul - was now shaded, irrelevant; a relic of the distant past. The provincial, what-will-happen-next, rebellious, edge-of-the-American-continent, questing energy of San Francisco, that lust to touch the heartbeat of the American moment — which had endured for the hundred and thirty years since the days of the Gold Rush, through to the era of the Beats and of the hippies, and right up until I had tasted it myself as a teenager, so sweet, so wild — was gone.

The vibe now was smooth and affluent and pulled-together. Sleek ponytails; very expensive sneakers. Techies had moved in; this was now a global and a globalist city.

We got the car, and my mom, and drove North. The suburbs subsided, as did the overbuilt valleys of Marin, that used to be fairy-like emerald-green slopes down to blue pirate inlets. North to Corte Madera. North to Santa Rosa.

The suburbs thinned. The grotesque development of Northern and Central California, the hideous sprawl, the parking lots and malls and storage facilities and big box stores defacing some of the most beautiful landscapes in the world, cause me so much pain whenever I witness them, that my loved ones know just when I will exclaim with dismay: “What happened! That wasn’t there! Those were almond orchards!”

We had now passed Santa Rosa: the rows of townhouses, the new flimsy residential homes with their identical finishes, the Macy’s and Target stores.

At last the foothills of Sonoma County emerged into view, unobstructed. Soon the landscape I remembered from my adolescence came into view. Thank God, Thank God, I thought — I had not been in this area since the early 1980s — it is not all gone.

I breathed a deep sigh of gratitude.

At last I saw the ramshackle wooden farm buildings I recognized from my youth; the vineyards and the apple farms. The deep primeval forests.

Believe it or not — it was another time — my high school boyfriend Mark (now a marine biologist in Hawaii) and I used to take a Greyhound bus, alone, carrying our rolled-up sleeping bags and backpacks, to these towns. I was fifteen and he was 17.

We would then hitchhike, to camp in the forests. It is a miracle that we remained safe.

Though surely the times and the area too had dark aspects — we did not see them; it seemed a peaceful Utopia, to us: back-to-the-land hippies; one golden meadow unfolding after another; young people with guitars, and with golden retrievers who wore red bandannas around their necks.

Someone was always ready to share a ride, or food, or a beer; music, or drugs (we were both pretty nerdy; we’d politely puff at a joint that might be passed, but decline anything harder). There were always cheap cafes in these little towns; coffee with cream in thick white mugs, and rice and beans. There was always an affordable campsite somewhere, and a carpet of soft pine needles. Unbelievably, both sets of our parents let us just take off, and launch ourselves into this hippie paradise.

Life was so easy. Everything was on low branches, glossy, for the taking. The world was going to be revolutionized. Peace, love, freedom, would surely be ours within a year or two.

I used to think the whole world was like that; that surely meadows and redwoods and hippies and communes, and people offering food and joints and music, extended clear across America.

I used to think that my whole life would forever be like that.

Lol, as we say.

#####

2025 again: we came to winding roads, and climbed into the redwood forests. We passed place names that thrilled me with the vibration of memory: Cotati, Sebastopol. Past a white goat standing still in a field, heavily bearded; past little shacks with statues of Buddhas out front. We climbed a steep drive; we found our vacation rental, a brown shingled 1970s house precariously overlooking a deep ravine, and parked.

I got out and walked to the end of the street. A few cottages dotted a road that some pioneer had carved out of a ridge of a mountain. At the dead end, the mountain dropped right off into a heart-stopping valley; there were redwoods above you, redwoods below; hawks and ravens overhead; the barking of a dog far away; a meltingly sweet sun descending nearly behind a peak; the scent of rosemary and sage; of golden and red nasturtiums; of purple oleander, which my mother had always warned us never to eat “because it is poisonous.” (Why would we be eating flowers? I always wondered.)

I sat with my loved ones on the deck of the cottage. We were quiet, and the quiet was like the antechamber before God’s throne. Two hawks circled; one of the hawks broke away and spun in circles right above our heads, twelve times. “Hi, Dad,” I joked.

Everything seemed archetypal. The sun came through the boughs of the redwoods like the strings of a harp.

Then: a sleep for three nights, each night deeper; and layers and layers of fear and dread and anxiety shed off from me.

My dreams were full of journeys I struggled to accomplish, and of other people’s toddlers left in my care, whom I wanted to return to their parents. I was trying to keep a child not my own, and a dog who was mine, alive and afloat, in a vast, warm pool, in some sort of resort. I tried to hand a child to his parents through the window of an old green truck. In another scene, I was lured by a siren who tried to get me to leave my woodland path. Anxieties and duties arose in my sleep and peeled away from me, and evaporated into the deep blue air, leaving me lighter when my eyes opened every morning.

One day, we drove to Sebastopol; I stopped in a second-hand bookstore. The old wood of the timbers smelled like the cedar of my grandmother’s attic in Stockton. I did not even care that a book by a sad entity, full of lies about me, was displayed on the center table. That missive was from another life, another world, a worse world, where such things even registered. I could walk two doors down and look at vinyl: the Mamas and the Papas; Joan Baez. I could walk next door and flip through the vintage clothing that is so different in Northern California than anywhere else; I could imagine buying an embroidered Mexican peasant blouse, or an Indian batik vest, or a tunic in a Japanese indigo shade made with the Shibori method, in which patterns are set in dye via folding and clamping. I could wear frankincense oil. The costume-y options that beckoned, would never work in Brooklyn, in my life back East; or on the videos I make as my day job in “real life”; or in upstate New York or Massachusetts, where we spend time. People dressed like grownups there.

But here — I could be back in what is really real for me: in a land of make-believe; where children and adults, even older people, even old people, don the clothing of miners or of troubadours or of fortune-tellers. Why not? Who cares? I missed that playfulness so deeply.

I felt that for 46 years, since the day I left my real home, I had been in costume; the costume of adulthood, of seriousness.

I let emails pile up. I ignored texts.

Yes, California is a mess, politically. Yes, not far beneath the idyllic surface there is homelessness and drug addiction, corruption and lunatic belief systems.

But also, California - my California, that golden land North of the city, settled by waves of dreamers; those valleys of crazy abundance, of red-black cherries and baskets of prickly lychee nuts, glassy inside and bursting with sugar; and bottles of wine in the most modest of supermarkets, ranging from garnet to ruby to orange and peach and stonefruit yellow-white; that bosom of Gaia always refreshed and new — the cactus blossoms and the squash blossoms, and the tourist sign in Monte Rio by the Russian River, probably from the 1930s, that hung over the street and read “We Await Your Return” — endured.

True, deep California somehow had transcended the stupidness of the day.

I was home, home, home.

####

Today, for the second time, we went to the river. I had seen a beloved cousin for lunch, and hugged her tightly. She and her mom had not ever cut us off during COVID; unlike some other relatives of ours, they had not judged us or condescended to us or rejected us. I don’t even know if my cousin and her mom agreed or disagreed with our views; it did not matter; we were family. That reconnection, that real hug, was healing.

Now my loved ones and I were resting on a local beach, a crescent of warm sand along the Russian River. The river was named for an early 19th century Russian settlement at nearby Fort Ross; amazingly, and forgotten to conventional histories, Russia had colonized California down to this southernmost point, from 1812 to 1841. There are Slavic crosses in the local cemetery.

There were inner tubes that you could rent for ten dollars. Kids lounged in their black tubes on the green river. Dads carried toddlers on their shoulders, into the gently flowing water. Moms spoke to their small children merrily, all around us: “Yes honey, it is melting. Ice cream melts. Just lick it.” Or, jesting, to a child wandering away carrying a package of Pringles: “Are you going to find a family that has better chips than ours?”

Lying on the sand, I felt the solidity of the earth supporting me; absorbing the silt and bitterness and mess of my grief, and of my nearly five years of ever-escalating mourning.

I felt the sun as a blanket over me — the sun that is nowhere else as it is here: a coverlet of steady earthly love.

I let it all go.

Eventually I made my way to the water. A loved one’s borrowed Tevas protected my feet from the little round stones.

I waded into the water.

It was icy, then bracing, then numbing, then warm. It reached my hips and my ribs and then my clavicle, and then I kicked off, and swam.

I swam to the middle of the river. The water was warm to three or four feet down; and then the chill clear current prevailed. Around me were canoes and kayaks. I swam further into the heart of the river, and I was alone. A bridge was above us all, far away. A row of multihued ducks, used to humans and ignoring us, swam past me. A tangle of roots and trees were on the far side. My loved ones were distant now, on the opposite shore.

I let the water hold me up. The river would sustain me. She — it was a feminine force for sure — would carry me.

I was in no danger.

I was held for a while by the earth herself, and her waters.

Woman to woman.

You finished a huge part of your job, was what I understood.

It’s okay.

You can rest, was what I understood.

You can rest for a while, she said.