Happy 2012 and a New Direction

Welcoming you, my fair readers, to 2012 I am. Writing like Yoda deliberately I am not. Well, that sentence I was. I've changed the name of this blog for the fourth time to kick off the fourth calendar year that I've been working on this program.

In my own brain I tend to break this blog up easily into rigid temporal and spatial compartments, and the name of the blog, the title that appears at the very top of the posts, has tried to reflect that. I hope you understand how serious I take every little change to the appearance of this presentation, this presentation of my brain's rather constant flow of thoughts.

The first compartment is 2009 and Brooklyn. That's where I started this whole endeavor, and the strain/wonderment of weary caliboy living Back East was the observatory's view. The second compartment was 2010 and Austin. I know we moved to Texas right as 2009 ended, and didn't leave until April of 2011, but for me 2010 will always be my Texas year, with cynical caliboy giving the what? eye to that strange breed of American that is the Texan. The third compartment was 2011 and Long Beach. This was our triumphant return to California, finally Making it Home for all intents and purposes, but there was still things to interest me (and us--you--my fair readers...at least that's my idea), there was still wild and weird history and visceral experiences to be had.

2009, Brooklyn, 223 posts. 2010, Austin, 217 posts. 2011, Long Beach, 272 posts.

Austin caught up to Brooklyn in number of posts for the very same reason that Long Beach had so many more than both predecessors: my monthly quota. In my preparations to train myself to write often for my fiction in 2011, I inadvertently bumped up my number of Texas posts (there are only 132 posts from 2010 alone) and created a whole lot of content from the sunny Left Coast.

My aim in 2012 is to keep posting, but not with the focus on sheer quantity of posts, like 2011. Rather, as I spend time working on my stories, I have some ideas for posts that I'd like to focus a little more attention on, possibly turning them into something more.

2012 is about quality over quantity. I'm resisting the urge to write about the movie Corrie and I watched the other night that I really enjoyed (The King's Speech). I'm avoiding the post about a crazy billboard or cool sidewalk crack pattern I took a picture of. These posts I want to coddle and nurture.

There may be less of them, but they should be of a higher stock. That's probably just my normal sense of pretension. Like the new title.

"Living in los Diez Sur" is how I'd really like it to look, with the Spanish portion italicized, but Blogger won't allow me to use HTML code in the title block, wysiwyg I guess.

Los Diez Sur is Spanish for "the southern ten". I like the idea of the poetic title for my ostensible new direction. If you look at a map of the state of California with the county lines visible, there appears to be a nearly horizontal line from the Pacific Ocean to Nevada, a line nearly parallel to the Equator. It's the combined northern borders of San Luis Obispo, Kern, and San Bernardino counties.

That line is the traditional demarcation--our very own rolling golden hill of a Berlin Wall--of the boundary between Northern and Southern California. I often break the state up into three separate identities: Southern, Northern, and Upper.

In any case, the things south of that line are Southern California. Any guesses as to how many counties there are down here? If you guessed diez, you're correct. SLO, Kern, San Bernardino, Santa Barbara, then the LA mess--Ventura, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, and then the border counties--San Diego and Imperial.

Since my Caliboy identity is NorCal bred, I still feel like a wide eyed outsider, so the analogy of my fish-out-of-water title-naming philosophy is still sound.

Quality over quantity. You be the judge.

I might even start a movie-only sight, or a sports-only sight...I just have so much time to write...