
David Dirling
1.9K posts

David Dirling
@ddirling
Work in banking. Follow NASCAR





The Doobie Brothers appeared on “What’s Happening!!” on this day in 1978. The episode, “Doobie or Not Doobie, Part 1”, included the band playing at a high school in Watts, Rerun bootlegging the show, and Raj calling their hotel room and asking “Which Doobie you be?”



This guy on IG makes stop-motion animations using toy military figures mixed with real war-movie backgrounds. It’s insanely good. AI can’t touch this level of creativity.



We only had one TV so if I wanted to watch TV, I had to watch what my parents wanted to watch. Was it the same in your house?



We’ve been informed these two may know each other




What’s the first movie that ever made you cry?





I was born in California. Second generation native Angeleno. For 60 years, it was my home. I vigorously defended it against all the trash-talkers. But the slow, grinding circle around the drain began around 2005 and inexorably continued until the insane policies under Covid completely crushed it. It wasn’t just the institutions and leadership—though those were putrid enough. It was the people. Some were homegrown, yes, but most arrived with the slow flood of newcomers from the East, drawn by the sunshine and the chance to reinvent themselves from pasty, skinny, stooped, miserable assholes into bronzed, ripped, grinning, even-bigger-assholes. There was an uptight, judgy nastiness about them—an eagerness to boss strangers around; a tendency toward condescension, materialism and self-importance blended with obsessive virtue-signaling and the dogged pursuit of an oppressive, soul-suffocating conformity. The Great Rotting began in inland Orange County and gradually metastasized until communities that had once possessed distinctive, unique cultures merged into a big, bland, vaguely shitty blob. To me, the definitive image of the death of my California was the helicopter shot of bulldozers filling in the Venice skate parks. That was my Tiananmen Square—the moment I knew that “we” had been outnumbered by “them” and there was no longer any vestige left of the Golden State that raised me. Worse, there was no going back. My California is dead. In its place is a ghastly, shambling, zombie-version of itself; the animated corpse of Gidget, her decomposing, desiccated flesh squeezed into a teeny-weeny polka-dot bikini soiled with glistening body-fluids. The place I remember—my home, my native land—no longer exists. And it never will again. I am a refugee from a shining place obliterated by time. My heart was broken by its decline. I sought it out elsewhere and managed to find a reasonable approximation 9,000 miles away in the Tuscan hills of Italy. To those who fight for what was, I salute you and wish you well. But I loved California too much to inhabit the shell of it.













