10/13/2010 – Bakersfield & Pismo Beach

I visited my friends Aaron, Tanja and Jose in Bakersfield. I hadn’t seen Tanja or Jose since I left Bakersfield some 10 years ago. Bakersfield hadn’t changed much climactically since the last time I had been there save for the increase in smog, decrease in visibility, and smell of rotten and burnt meat in the air. The increased methane in the valley due to cattle ranching has also affected the area tremendously. The smell is reminiscent of that of Greeley, CO where the smell of the slaughter houses permeates the area. I drove into the dust bowl of San Joaquin valley in the early afternoon.

Despite the cool foggy winter season, this fertile land gets hardly any water and maintains its dusty barren terrain for most of the year, save for the irrigation systems that give this dusty, polluted valley the infamy of being the bread basket of California.

Bakersfield’s energy is reminiscent of a Kidney point, IV 2, Blazing Valley. This valley does not lack heat – the usual indication of this point, however. Quiet the opposite, the valley is burning through the resources it has. Bakersfield is at once opulent in the richness of the oil reserves which feed the few, but is deficient in wealth of resources which make people work extremely hard to scrape a living. Most people that live here wish to escape in some way or another but cannot overcome the inertia of depression, poverty and hopelessness. Instead they squander their precious resources on drugs and alcohol. Many dream of leaving for greener pastures, and the few who have left look back on their time in Bakersfield with relief that they found it within themselves to overcome inertia once and for all.

As the methamphetamine capitol of California (if not of the US), the drug-production and distribution culture is rich and bustling. Frequent murders and shootings occur across the city. The city is populated by haggard, tweaked out faces who exhaust all of their innate Jing and energy in that which makes the trap of Bakersfield barely palatable. Burning their Kidney essence, the Water element can no longer restrain their Fire. Most engage in hyper-sexuality where their physical valley blazes with uncontrolled sexual and hedonistic urges. A sub-culture develops which lacks self-control, willpower, and money to escape its self-gratifying desires. The result is “lets party our lives away as hard as we can, because we’ll never escape our bondage”. It is for this virtue that Blazing Valley is known to calm sexual, emotional and hedonistic desire by cooling the blazing fires and restoring wisdom, innate willpower and resources back to the parched individual.

Likewise the point’s most familiar use is the warm up a cold, frigid and frozen person who’s emotional anxiety and fear of survival prevents them from enjoying all that life has to offer. This point, coupled with IV 3, Greater Mountain Stream, or IV 7 Returning Current could send down the floods to quell the burning and exhausting fires and cool the valley, once again restoring balance.

Aaron and I took a road trip to Pismo Beach, a town about 3 hours southwest of Bakersfield. I love road trips for the reason that you can see the effects of elevation and water completely transform the landscape and what is possible. Water: pure potentiality manifested through Wood as the child element. Metal: inspiration and heavenly guidance, which directs the highest purpose of growth around the central pivot, the Earth.

The flat lands of the valley housed the cotton fields and almond groves – all land perfectly organized, parceled off and planted in linear rows for expedient harvest. As the hills rose out of the smog, the deadness and barrenness of the landscape truly showed its lifeless belly. The clay and dust lay about – pure potential, unanimated, and unactivated by Water and Wood. The winds blew up eddies and sand devils that danced in the lowlands, evoked by spirits which traverse the mournful and desolate flatlands with the sound of weeping as they passed – crying for the lifeless.

The closer we wound to the ocean, the greener the hills became. Plant-life acclimatized to low water becomes resilient, hard, gnarly, and stubby. Soon the hills change from gray-beige to lush dark green. We have been diving in a cloudless sky and we escaped the smog-covered valley. Approaching the next valley where Pismo beach can be found, we encountered a strange weather phenomenon. The heated ocean air lifted a fog of the water which covered the entire valley and beach front in a thick mist. For a normally sunny California beach, I felt like I could have been in a cloudy, wet and cold New Jersey in winter. The air was frigid, fishy, mixed with seaweed and the metallic smell of seagull droppings. I had exchanged my shorts and t-shirt for a sweater and pants.