El Cajon, CA

Karl's Corner really highlighted why I dislike my hometown of El Cajon, CA.

The strip malls, tract homes, stucco, weeds, smog, oppressive heat, and general depressing suburban brownness tainted my feelings toward the entirety of San Diego County such that I wanted to flee to the Pacific Northwest for as long as I can remember. I craved mist, grass, evergreens, climbing vines, shingled houses, rainy mornings, and cuddliness. In the last few years I've realized there are cool parts of San Diego, but still this passage from Sleepless Nights hit home (she moved from Kentucky to New York):

"It is not true that it doesn't matter where you live, that you are in Hartford or Dallas merely yourself. Also it is not true that all are linked naturally to their regions. Many are flung down carelessly at birth and they experience the diminishment and sometimes the pleasant truculence of their random misplacement. Americans who are Germans, Germans who are Frenchman, like Heine perhaps.

The stain of place hangs on not as a birthright but as a sort of artifice, a bit of cosmetic. I place myself among the imports, those jarring and jarred pieces that sit in the closet among the matching china sets. I have no relations that I know of born outside the South and hardly any living outside it even today. Nevertheless I am afraid of the country night and its honest slumbers, uneasy even in the daylight with 'original settlers' and old American stock. The highway, the asphalt paths, the thieves, the contaminated skies like a suffocating cloak of mangy fur, the millions in their boroughs - this is truly home."