By: Kay Ebeling
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Gradually in increments so you don’t notice it day by day, the nation changes.
Gradually in increments so you don’t notice it day by day, the nation changes.
For example, over past few years, the
people staying in camp grounds in the resort town where I live have stopped
being families on vacation and instead become families traveling desperate searching for a place to live, as 2018 converts in my head to 2081 much like George Orwell converted 1948 to 1984 as he wrote.***
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I quit going to doctors
a long time ago. Every clinic is so overrun with patients that the harried medical staff only have time to hear two or three words of your
symptoms. Then the city college nursing grad, never a doctor, prescribes whatever medicine whose keywords match something you said. Often the
medicine has a new name but is no different from one that was taken off the market only months earlier for its killer side effects.
The end result is poor
people die, while pharma companies gather data on their new products, just one of many slow incremental changes people in USA have lived with over past few years.
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There are empty houses and condos in almost every U.S. city and yet thousands of people live on sidewalks, in cars, and in
campgrounds and motels.
The empty houses in the
resort town where I live were built for upscale renters, families on vacation
with lots of money to spend. But most
families today are too broke to take a vacation. So the empty homes stay empty. They sit in pristine
condition, waiting for that illusive wealthy person to show up and rent them
for one week, paying so much rent that it's worth it for the owner to keep the house empty most
of the time.
No one knows who the owners of the empty houses are or where they live.
No one knows who the owners of the empty houses are or where they live.
Meanwhile, moms with
kids live in motels and campgrounds while those houses stay empty.
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Climate
In my head I'm a climate scientist.
Sometimes in my head I still work at NASA, although lately for the first time in my life, I don't
regret leaving my job at LBJ Space Center in Houston in 1983. For years after coming back to L.A. and dabbling
in different jobs but never really accomplishing much, I wished I was still at
NASA, often cried in my cocktails about the opportunity I gave up there.
Then Donald Trump got elected in 2016 and, as President, started eviscerating
scientists and moving smart people out of government agencies such as NASA that deal with
science. Now for the first time in my
life I'm glad I didn't stay in Houston, where I was on a career path that guaranteed
me that inevitably I would take steps up the salary G-levels
I was hired as an Admin Tech, a program
where if I didn't screw up, I’d end up in Washington, still at NASA or at some other
agency, in some executive position.
Instead in 1983 I came back to Hollywood and worked at a chi-chi PR firm in Beverly Hills and then in 1987 got pregnant with Lizzie.
Even in the 1970s there were geologists at NASA already
concerned about changes they were seeing in Arctic and Antarctic ice levels.
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It was the climate scientist in me that moved me to
South Lake Tahoe. In 2014, having no reason to keep living where I was, I got on a Google map and clicked on the little yellow man
and started looking for a place to move. As I walked up and down the streets here in South Lake, I saw all the shabby buildings here and figured, that's why so many rents are low in this chi-chi town in Craigslist ads. You can live, not great but live, in
South Lake on less than two thousand dollars a month.
Often in conversations at the bus stop someone who’s
lived in South Lake longer than I have will repeat a local maxim: “It's poverty with beautiful scenery.”
I moved to Tahoe because there's water here and the
temperatures don’t go too intensely high or low and the air is clean if you go
out early before the traffic fills the atmosphere with car exhaust.
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It is getting warmer here, like everywhere, but as long as you stay out of the sun, you can still stay cool in the summers. At some point people are going to start installing air conditioners, I predict. Tahoe has Always been a summer resort, since white men first found it, because of its cool summers, but I bet in a few years more rentals will come with air conditioning.
It is getting warmer here, like everywhere, but as long as you stay out of the sun, you can still stay cool in the summers. At some point people are going to start installing air conditioners, I predict. Tahoe has Always been a summer resort, since white men first found it, because of its cool summers, but I bet in a few years more rentals will come with air conditioning.
There's water here, lots of it. Lake Tahoe is more than a mile deep in places and
huge. Plus it's cold water, COLD water,
so cold that people don’t really swim in it.
At the shallow sunny section of the lake at the Commons, mostly tourist swimmers take a dip, but I
don't think I've ever seen anyone out there in the lake doing laps, your
muscles would cramp up.
The water in Tahoe is So Cold that long time locals say, if you ever dove down into it, you’d find perfectly preserved bodies
of dead mobsters from the Nevada side. James Cameron should bring his device
here for a dive, wonder why he hasn’t, but I digress.
He better hurry as our blue lake is turning turquoise and
in some places green, because of all the
CO2, I think, from all the cars driving by to look at the beautiful lake. They release gas, and it settles over then sinks
into the water, turning it gradually from blue to green.
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Posted by Kay Ebeling
Producer of City of Angels Blog
not just L.A., the city of angels is everywhere
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Posted by Kay Ebeling
Producer of City of Angels Blog
not just L.A., the city of angels is everywhere
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