Chuck Norris' California

I often find myself missing the California I knew as a child. Back then, drunk driving was a ticket with a modest fine because cars were slow, handled poorly, and drunk drivers mostly ended up in the ditch solo, not head-on into a bunch of school kids in a minivan. Big accidents with lots of deaths were super rare. Drunk driving was a self-resolving problem. Same way unprotected sex leads to babies. Back in the day, California's narrow roads, uneven surfaces, no white stripe on the side... all were big clues to either slow down or die. You needed to be perceptive and very intense to live through something as trivial as driving on a country road.

The roads I grew up on were also set to state max speed limit once you got out of town: 55 mph. That sounds slow in today's nomenclature, but consider. We had heavy thick fog almost every morning. You couldn't see around the corner. You might not see the corner until you were about 100 feet from it. You'd see the glow from oncoming car headlights about 400 feet away, but not the car until it was half the distance. In the old days, the center line in the road was white dashed. We didn't even use yellow yet, and no Bots Dots. Or reflectors. We didn't have them in the roads yet. That came in the late 80's. There was also no bicycling shoulder, or shoulder at all. The country road I grew up with was two cars and 8 inches wide. If the oncoming car was wider you slowed down and both swerved, hoping your wheel off the road didn't drag you into the ditch. And sometimes it did. I saw plenty of cars in the ditch from that. The fire department was pretty busy dealing with all the wrecks, but we were less about lawyers back then, and more blase about safety. Nerf was for kids, not for grownups. Grow a pair (tits or testicles).

I miss those days. People today are so obsessed about safety, about living the longest they can, about their comfort and preserving their childishness. In the 1980's, it was like Chuck Norris was normal. Who is like that now? Everyone was a bad-ass. Housewives smoked and drove 450 hemi engines in their woody stationwagon or shag carpet lined Van. Not a Mini-Van, but full on, painted scene of the side, van, where she and their father got it on and started their family in the first place. Back then, shotgun wedding was literal. All women were like Faye Valentine. They didn't have time to get fat. Too busy with the brats. Back then women weren't ashamed to only be a housewife. Other women respected how hard it is to raise kids and run a household. It was an understood reality. We didn't have talk shows for women to brag about sloth and selfishness. It didn't exist. That was a 90's disease. In the 80's we were tougher and just got stuff done. It wasn't even interesting enough to brag about doing stuff. You just did it.

I miss that.