Temperature rising, security falling

Ach du lieber (that means, 'heavens' in German, I think), my snorting and hacking and noseblowing cleared several checkout lanes at Trader Joe's this morning. I feel too warm. I tink I em catching a cod. Good time to go beddy bye with "Golden Dreams: California in an age of abundance, 1950-1963,” Kevin Starr’s surprisingly lively perspective on that generation’s economic, social and cultural forces. I’m only a hundred pages into this seventh volume of California history and I haven’t read any others. Yet. But this is good information for those of us who hope to live another fifteen years.

If you don’t live on the Left Coast you may not give a damn about the state's past or present. But you ought to. California is the eighth largest economy in the WORLD and we're in dire straits here because, Starr writes, it's the last territory of global abundance. Of plunder, if you like. That means, folks, that the good times are over. Forever.

Not just because of W. Bush or Wall Street’s greed but because we are at the end of empire.

Reset your expectations and hunker down.