Real Talk? Paso Robles is a place that is suitable for a day trip if you’re hitting all the wine country pit stops in California, Pokémon style. Maybe a weekend with your crew. The downtown is cute. The wine scene is frothing.

And it’s Christmas lights in the square were truly an extravaganza. I won’t besmirch the kind shopkeepers you’ll meet in passing checking it out for yourselves.

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…That being said.

I spent a month there. As I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to also do in Healdsburg and Temecula, in writing and research mode.

And in all my time ambling up and down the coast for this globalboho project for 6 yrs, including repeatedly to and through Republican saturated zones…

I’ve not ever had to stop myself from writing a hit piece on a place for inclusion in the book. But I can’t include Paso Robles without being real about it.So here goes…

“Paso Robles is racist as fuck” loses its meaning in an America white people are finally getting jumped and shot to death in as everyone looks on in the way Black People always have in this land, sans any true inflection point being reached.

Even the word “racist” has lost its verve in this climate because what’s actually afoot isn’t even racism. It’s jealousy-rooted narcissistic triangulation and bullying.

That nurse dude received the ” you think you’re better than me?! Well others might think you are!” Gangland style beatdown and execution that has been the weaponry of rightly insecure white people in this country since it’s inception.

And it is part of the American mindset because all of our popular culture has nurtured it. Long before they get to school we brainwash our kids with tales of cliques of jocks, pricks and mean girls who they’ll get to be collectively brutalized by as everyone else looks on, all “glad it’s not me!” If they can’t appease those monsters and try to Be like them.

He got jumped for getting between a group of five to eight guys who shoved a woman down and were about to beat Her to death in the streets. There are like 40 videos of this shit from different angles.

…but only One man got in there.

To protect a woman from a gang of white dudes beating her down in broad daylight.

If everyone with a camera had jumped in they could’ve cleared that clutch of fuckers.

Instead… they filmed the execution and posted it …as their civic duty. Nobody ran from the execution site in fear of their own lives.

They watched and filmed…and now lay flowers.

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What does that have to do with Paso Robles?

Understand. I had a good, productive, beautiful time in PR. For three of the four weeks. But it was because I consciously went out into the community on precise errands and had a love fest on the property I was basecamped on.

But the atmospheric pressure of that place as a person of color, even in the downtown, on display neighborhood I was in was so vitriolic that even I started to crumble week three. Because it crosshatched with the energy of the entirety of America enabling these pedophiles to reabuse their victims by allowing all this Epstein list shit to drag along on the national stage.

The dissonance was amplified. And unable to be unseen.

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Agoraphobia ran roughshod over me. I already have a tendency towards it. As an author and artist, almost everything creative about me tends toward the interior, hermetic. Part of why I ramble is to get it not to atrophy.

But there? It was intense, impersonal and ancient. An outside force. That i didn’t want to waste lifeforce fighting against.

I’ve been running all over this planet one way or another solo for a good 33 years. Including the south. I’m a northerner. But of Great Migration stock. My dad’s Dad had a Nat Turner streak in him that got him shoved up north after… having the right response to some bullshit when my dad was two. So my dad’s brain formed around a seed of terror of what evil white crowds tried to do to people they thought were better than them. & he was-aside from everything else afoot with us- always on the brink of losing his shit over my being all “fuck that, it’s my dime. I go where I want”in life. His dad used to have to cuss everybody out who got their hackles up over my freedom frying the fuck out, which made me love him all the more when I’d hear about it after the fact.

But I understood my dad. If you literally and truthfully escaped to the north from the south as a toddler in threat of your Dad being lynched, your crazy assed , itching for war firstborn daughter having the audacity to post up in Louisiana of all places doing God knows what.. might trigger you. That unveiling in him during that period was the only time I saw his trying to under his thumb me was rooted in terror of Others.

My life was different, but in no way sheltered from the dumb shit jealous stupid white people get up to in packs . Because I ran with and grew up with sane sincere white people who had to put up with the vicious morons whether a person of color was there or not.

But I also went to college for a few years in a city- fucking Cincinnati- that burned crosses in the town square at Christmas as an expression of free speech. Some of those same racist assholes burning crosses to intimidate were letting themselves be bent over cocktail tables and fisted in the best gay bars in town they spent daylight publicly railing against by hillbilly drag queens as floor shows.

But in the end, the hypocrisy? it’s all drag anyway. They accuse the dolls of doing horrendous things to kids when they’re the actual child eaters… on the grounds of what they’ve paid some doll to do to them on some dark backroad behind them (yeah, I said it).

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Of the litany of American dreams that have been openly catalogued and bought into by people of color who live in fear of the crazies one is that white people are the same kind of monolith the media tries to say black people are.

There are white people who bristle at all the racist shit due to one thing that flies over the brunt of black people’s heads, even as it goes down in their faces: the scars they wear in mind and body received from their fucking own.

There is a throttling throughline of motherfuckers being outright horrendous to one another. They bristle against privileged dismissal because they’ve been maimed by the same motherfuckers biting at people because they’re black.

“YOU will be abused by me and you will take it in silence as everyone else looks on. And you will not pushback against this because it’s the only thing I’ve got. & I’ll kill you to keep it.

America graduating class of every fn year imaginable.

My disdain with the American rule of Law has always lain right there. Because that’s the true law this country demands you be in complicity with. In every fucking sector. Because the American engine can’t run without that toxic bullshit. People take it as long as they get a paltry outlet down which to also give it, keeping the maceration machine lubed win loosh and human blood .

&frankly said? PASO ROBLES could be seen as the poster child for what that vibe is, white insecurity championing itself as white supremacy and calling itself ‘white pride,’ decked out in flags…represented by a town, for the cameras…Truman show style.

It was so bad that I had to force myself not to look up what the fuck was up with the terroir while I was there. Because I knew what I’d see and technically was in assignment the full month. So I had to find ways to stay IN love during my time there.

But in Hindsight? I see that the pointedly comfortable weekly outings to the farmers market made sense in a wholly different way. Most of the vendors on tuesdays were people of color. Didn’t notice it in process. The Saturday one? Raucous in comparison. The Tuesday ones were subdued…and i felt completely compelled to show my support there.

…and again. I was forcing myself not to put a word to the unease felt. To the knowing not to walk alone into neighborhoods without sidewalks at night or day. To noticing the sudden brandishing of American flags after I’d arrived in the block, like a white woman hadn’t forced a lil black slave girl to sew it in 1812, then took all the credit for the work. Grace Wisher. Look it up.

But when I cracked…and I cracked hard… It was because I got… that this perfectly painted and preserved town was just the kind of trap that my dad had been terrified of, of me winding up in, surrounded by.

Fake smiles faded, cannibalistic teeth out and gnashing about staying in line or else.

Not in the deep south, or the arid landscapes of Arizona or Vegas.

& it… was the America that the current administration has in mind for all of us. A fucking horror show.

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When I was leaving, I defiantly decided to give myself the “tourist day I deserved” In downtown on my way out. And it was fine. Picture book. Everything an afternoon in a quaint wine tasting town should be.

But I found it prescient that, in lieu of train station attendants… there is …a crystal shop. At said station. With incense, sage…an assortment of gemstones and rocks to help recalibrate you as you wait to leave. You’ll be drawn to whatever got offkilter during your time there.

I didn’t allow myself to fully look until it was almost over. & when I did, it broke my heart. It truly is an almost perfect expression of what’s afoot in America today.

That town lists as ½ & ½ politically, 40% of it would be classified as bipoc, generations deep.

And as “white pride” signs get hung over SLO county highways by folks who’ve willfully done nothing in their lives TO be proud of so they cling to the blanket statement white, and rage against those who do Do things of merit, the firestorm that erupted in Paso Robles over teens petitioning for a real history class that didn’t erase all the fucked shit done, while politely asking to be allowed to learn about ways people who looked like them contributed To the area is a masterclass in the vicious nature of all this supremacy on display.

I ran into all these articles interviewing people of color with long roots in the county crying out against the rough whitewashing Demanded of them to exist there. Parents screaming about critical race theory making their kids possibly feel guilty when it’s really they don’t want those kids asking them where they stood. Old white women clutching purses and screaming theft when black families move to town.

The entire insidious smorgasbord that only sets up on ground where much worse, uncleansed shit has happened.

98%of the people of color wordlessly jammed to the northern outskirts of town.

Paso Robles is the epitome of a place where bipocs are surely going “why do we stay here?” to one another whenever unseemly things go down.

A go along to get along town in the most of fashioned way.

Tow the line or find yourself at the end of one energy is effective and efficient there.

And what’s worse than the outright WS vibes in California…is that the ½democrat, 40% bipoc population cosigns that f’d energy to their own detriment.

And the loudest noise… in the press was from locals Mad the LA Times came in and interviewed locals whom were hurt by the nature of the town. A few times. Repeatedly finding the bad juju hadn’t changed.

They didn’t care not to be like that. They just didn’t want to be dimed out as the closerange racist jerks they were to their own.

…It sucked. But undercover racist folks will love it there. Even the Latino ones… but only for a beat or two. Because apparently, when the masks come off towards them they get it the worst because they’ve always been around. As second class citizens.

Some places bipoc folks hear about and want to go visit in lowkey defiance. Fight the power style. Make their racist asses have to respect your money vibes. Flex, flaunt, floss, whatever.

This is not that place.

Montecito? Chill. SUMMERLAND? LOVELY. Santa Barbara? Have a ball. San Luis Obispo proper was even okay, considering.

… I’ve NEVER felt I had to do this before.Say something like that.

But I had a friend… who’d been concerned about me because I was Not my self up there. I COULDN’T even truly talk about it while it was going on. I wrote one dude, trauma dumping in the damned near murderous throes of it.

When I finally told her what had been up?

Because I’d been there silently a month she’d been planning a family trip and was thinking of staying there.

She was like “Oh! Good thing you told me-”

Keep your money.

You can go there and fight for change if you want that kind of holiday. There are organizations afoot doing that work. Even standing up for those kids the sheriff and school board made a show of shouting down.

But if it comes out 🧊 rolls into that town it’ll probably be because they were called by someone’s neighbor who’d hated them for what they’d worked their asses off for and had for all the years they’d known them, smiling in their faces.

And it’s heartbreaking to recognize that vibration.

… but some people will love it for all the stuff I spoke on because they are that under the surface already. They’ll live for it as a place they don’t have to pretend.

…and I guess everyone needs a holy ground where what is holy energetically to and for them &what it is they’re about…is it.

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The people I was there for were lovely.

New to town.

& on the road enough to not know their neighbors…yet.

Which was weird… until it pointedly wasn’t.

Both from places with different vibes.

But they’re up on a hill that …a lot of neighbors have been … looking up at a long time as it was, if you know what I mean.

I actually prayed their honeymoon there continues as long as possible, too.

& I would go back for them. But I’d be degiantly suited and booted this time. Ready to fully hole up in the love nest if they needed me. But I’d have no illusion about the battlefield I was on this time, nor the beast.