The East Bay of San Francisco.

I have never seen so many gang tattoos and people that look like they love Crack in my life. Inter-mixed with a booming tech economy.

Concord is caught in a gang war between those who have, and those who also have but have guns and no fear of jail. A prosperous underclass as best as I can tell. They drive 80K dollar cars, blinged out, and throw cash around like their advisaries in their newly leased Lexus's and pressed white shirts.

It's a unique america in the walls of this breezy valley. A programmer will catch his reflection in a set of gold teeth at least once a day. 24" dubs will grace curbs in front of a clean room. Tattoos, the harsh kind, not the suburban girl variety. These ones tell stories of death, and memorialize fallen friends and foes, not a love for happy pentagrams. The gaunt cheeks of the alternative economy hold ground everywhere and resist the gentrification of necessity that the land values in CA have created. They check each new visitor, and they are always watching as the oblivious yuppie treads heavy and loud, only noticing them when its just in time for a threatening glance. They walk a razors edge of tolerance for cheaper housing. And I wonder how this will play out.
If the economy slows as I think it must, this will be a failed economic infiltration, and in ten years the rusted doors of Coldstones, and The Bombay Trading company will be long closed, and the thin Meth faces that grace the street will be different but the same, and perhaps populated by some of the techie optimists who over extended, overbelieved and over trusted this ficticious economy that burned the artificially low interest crack, and the addictive off shore job trading crystal in its furnace pipe, only to become so addicted to wealth that it kept consuming until there was nothing left to sell. And we sit watching as wealth flows upward, the same as the streets, to the corporate pimps pockets. And we watch as lives are just as disposable to Chevron, or Wal Mart, that we're their bitches. And we best not step out of line and ask for no health care, or no job security or we'll get the powdered slap. Just keep workin to make them rich, keep slavin and buying into that dream that they love us, until we are to old, to unskilled, to expensive to keep, and they'll up and move on to their new bitches, their new sweet virgins who believe the lie in China, or in South America, and us used up old whores will wonder and pass which lie began it all, which was the one that made us buy into the mistake of our life. And even when their gone we still need more. More of something.

Happy thoughts on a sunny day, downwind from shut refineries artificially inflating the price of gas in California.

We's all bitches. Ciao.