though? things you love about a place are the things you hate about it as well, so you remove yourself just far enough and just long enough to let those feelings return and the reality is that you never really left at all, in any sense. You just gave yourself some room to allow that hate to turn back into love. After dealing with Michelle for as long as I had, it was certainly something I could understand. Because that was what we did. We kept on going through periods where we didn’t speak to one another only to get back together and do it all over again. How is it that people behave like that? Absence usually makes the heart grow fonder but if something is driving you crazy to the point that you need to get away, isn’t that a clue that maybe you need to stay away? Or does it just reinforce how special something truly is, whether it’s a relationship or a city? Maybe some people really do belong together and maybe some places are truly special for one reason or another. But some people don’t belong together and there are plenty of places that aren’t special in any way. Telling the difference was essential and not at all easy. Further out the influence of LA ends and there are cities that exist solely unto themselves. For better or worse, LA brought in people from every walk of life for all sorts of different reasons. It was pretty out here but the people here certainly weren’t here for the LA lifestyle or mentality or even a California one. It reminded me of where I grew up in Ohio in that there didn’t appear to be that much going on. Appearances can be deceiving but in this case they were quite telling. Their bar scene was fairly low key, but that just means the bartender is more likely to talk to you because he’s bored. And Cue had some stuff to say all right. He told me about the zombie war that he was preparing for as well as about all the gangs he had been involved with. I think he was kidding about the zombie war but I believed him about the gang stuff. You can’t listen to guy talk about a street fight where he describes how breaking a guys jaw feels and not think he’s telling the truth. But who knows? Maybe it was reversed and he really was getting ready for zombie warfare. Those were the people who lived here though. They were born here. They cut their teeth here. They lived
their lives their life here. They wanted to raise their kids here. And they were going to die here. It wasn’t a big town, so you could drive around and see people in every stage of that progression. And that was okay with them. These were people who for the most part had no concept of what it was like to live or spend time anywhere else and didn’t have a desire to either. It was not the California that I had grown accustomed to and as such, not the dreams that I had grown accustomed to seeing. What was it that compelled these people to have such an attitude and outlook? On the other hand, what was it that compelled people to think in