Wednesday, May 30, 2018

Just trying to fix my mind.



The Bay Area is a pretty stressful place to live. It feels like people are always pushing on you, or trying to herd you in one direction or another. Amazing things happen here, but half of it is just an illusion. Sometimes it all just gets really overwhelming. It's a super bi-polar place.

So, Mr S. and I decided to rent an Airbnb cabin in a small very Northern California town. Normally when I leave my area I'm going to place that is bigger than the place I live. The sort of place that by them time you leave - you feel like you can't wait to get back to Silicon Valley to decompress. Like Las Vegas. This time however I chose the smallest town I could find. The population was somewhere under 500 people.

I've pretty much always lived in a city. But even the one time I did live in a small town in Texas, the population was around 10,000. So I wasn't sure exactly what I would find and how my mind would cope with small town living, however temporary.

Day one, your brain is fighting to disconnect from the world. The airbnb didn't even have a TV or clock in the bedroom. When Mr S. and I roll into a town we squeeze everything we can out of it. So when we get back to the place we are staying, we just want to lay in bed and eat and drink and watch the local channels on TV. I thought I would hate being so disconnected to the world, but I didn't.

Day one, I felt like based on the Bernie stickers on the cars, I couldn't live there. We are all searching for the place that will cause us to pull the ripcord on the Bay Area, and the stickers that said Billionaires can't buy Bernie was definitely a knock against it. You figure if 10% of the cars have those stickers, the shadow Bernie people must be around 40%. And the people who think Bernie is not extreme enough are probably at least 10%.

And I went to a Bernie rally! I hated that I found them to be lovely people. Really naive people who can't do math or think about things very deeply. But lovely nevertheless. Still the stickers cause your eyes to get stuck in the upright position. Lots of people make it seem that if you just get out of the Bay Area - the rest of the State is more conservative. And I pretty much think from San Fransisco to Washington is completely torched. Most of the places we stopped were a poor mans Marin on steroids.

But by day two, the quietness started creeping in. I don't think I've ever been anywhere so quiet. The volume of the voices inside my head started to turn way down. Now I don't know if I have ADD, or Silicon Valley causes me to have ADD.

By day three I started not caring about all the Bernie dudes. We managed to get sunny weather all the days we were there except the day we drove in. That is apparently not normal. But it also contributed to me thinking I could live there. In normal weather, I'm sure that would work against the zen that the quietness gave. It's normally a very cloudy place. I thought it would rain the entire time.

It took three days for the volume inside of my head to become completely quiet. It took 4 hours for it to come back. Two of those hours were in traffic.

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