This used to be my playground

I fucking hate this town but it's mine to hate. I hate feeling like an outsider in my own town. I come downtown on the weekend, namely Sunday, and I feel like I am intruding on everyone's experience. Faces aren't familiar and they're giving me weird looks. This town is too fucking small for all the shit they try to put on every weekend. There is one road through town. One. Everything else is a residential and even those streets are packed in with cars, people walking their dogs, baby strollers, their hats and sunglasses, fanny packs and arm loads of Ojai Visitors Guides. And they are all 50 and older. All of them. They take their sweetass strolling time crossing the streets and think it is perfectly acceptable to drive 10 miles an hour…10 miles an hour…down our one road. I know you're sight seeing and all but some of us actually live here and have shit we need to get done. There is not enough parking for anything, ever. The farmers market sends them out in droves and then there's the peddler's fair down the street. All the pretentious environmentalists with their organic this and save that, hemp this and purified that. And the artists. The artists! I consider myself an artist but I must not be as I'm just not an asshole. I guess I should work on that. The snotass theatre in town, Theatre 150, just moved into the funeral home. The funeral home. I'm all for using all kinds of spaces for anything but seriously, I'll never be able to see a show there and not think of the friends funerals I have been to right there in that very room. They're such fucking snobs and I shouldn't be surprised. They aren't community theatre but they're not equity either. I sent my headshot, resume and letter to them when I came home from college and no one ever contacted me or returned my calls. Like this town needs more elitism. If you ever thought Malibu was bad then you truly haven't been looked down on. And that's what I don't get. I'm not supposed to feel this way in my town. MY town. I was born here. I was raised here. That's my jr high and my high school and, what's more, that's my parent's jr high and high school. This is where I hung out as a kid, this is where I hung out as a teenager, this is where I did my first play, this is the park my family gets together at every Easter, this used to be the Christmas tree farm where we went every year the day after Thanksgiving to cut down our tree. I went to high school with the families that own Rains, Boccali's, Serendipity, The Hut, Rubens, Bonnie Lu's, Corrales, and zillions of other companies and eateries in town. And yet because I am not pretentious, loaded with cash, a famous actor or writer, or a tourist, I am made to feel like vermin. Is this Les Miz? I wanna go home. And I thought I was. It makes me want to wear a bright pink shirt that says, "I was born here! Ojai Native, make way!" I fantasize about getting into an argument with someone about a landmark or an event and them trying to impress me with, "I've been in the valley for 15 years!" and I say, "I've been here for almost 30 so suck it." I over heard a man once who was so impressed by this woman who said she had been here since 99. I wanted to scream, "I've been here since 78!" I've had tourists totally shocked to hear I was born here when they roll through town for the tennis tournament, creatively called The Ojai, the countries oldest amateur tournament. Yes, this really is more than a vacation destination to some people. Yes, we have a hospital and schools and even banks! And more art galleries and hoity toity shit than you could ever want to see. The actual living here part is lost on people. It really is a community with families and gatherings and our own histories. It's one thing to walk into Tombstone and be surprised it's a functioning town with a post office and natives all it's own. That town has a huge history and is a national landmark. We're no Tombstone. We have our own major events for the much less informed and even less interested as they're of a spiritual and new age nature. Yes, all the movie stars live here and yes, The Bionic Woman took place here and that show Brothers and Sisters, and we were the final shot from East of Eden that represented Shangri-La. Guess what our city nickname is? But we're not what you'd think of as a tourist mecca. I never felt like I lived in a tourist trap and goddamn if I don't. This town used to feel warm and worn and broken in and comfortable. Now everything feels shiny and plastic and straight backed and rigid. And it's just too fucking small. Why do I feel like a stranger walking into a coffee shop? And the two chairs at the bar at the Starbucks we now have, outside the city limits of course, were taken this morning. Along with all of the other chairs. And in one fell swoop I have nowhere to go to write. Done. One shot. So I drove out to the other end of town to Soule Park and am squinting vigorously at the screen that wasn't made for outdoor use. Maybe this is the cosmos telling me my time here in this valley is done as it slowly squeezes me out. I would agree with it. But this used to feel like home. And more and more often I feel like a ghost walking the streets of a once familiar land. The clock is ticking down.