Sunday's Quote: California Dreamin'

I'm listening to Sirius ch. 35 ("Chill") as I write this, just as I practically always do when I write much of anything.  This particular station, which almost by itself is worth the $14.93 I've paid each month since December 2006 -- even despite the frustrating inconsistencies of this emerging technology called satellite radio -- is similar in format to a weekly feature on local Memphis radio (hosted by "Babalu") called Waves.  And every bit of it takes me back to California.

The Eccentric Conservative is Southern to the bone, and that's an inherent quality which will never change.  But every time I feel relaxed, my head returns, if only for a moment, to a portion of the Golden State that stretches about 390 miles from Thousand Oaks to the South Bay.  It's been too long since I've returned, and while the last of my family left in the mid-90s, I have long maintained some aspiration of uprooting -- for reasons I cannot fully explain -- to the Central Coast or Emerald Triangle.

I resist making decisions based upon emotion, but somehow my resolution feels right.  And I suppose that's good enough.

"There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience.  And then there is California."

-- Edward Abbey (1927-1989), an iconoclast of sorts whose work was set primarily in the southwestern U.S.

"Big Sur is the California that men dreamed of years ago, this is the Pacific that Balboa looked at from the Peak of Darien, this is the face of the earth as the Creator intended it to look."

-- Henry Miller (1891-1980), novelist and painter

"Let's drink to California, way out by the sea, where a woman's ass and a whiskey glass made a horse's ass of me."
-- Anonymous toast