For the last couple of days, I’ve been sinking my head a bit into trying to understand the local political and community scene. We’ve now been here a full year. I can’t fucking believe that we did the whole home buying thing, got through the anxiety, down-sized to sharing one bathroom, and we’re still here. And, I think we’re staying.

So, yesterday, we decided to check out a local version of an international event. We sat in the sand in the outline of the numbers 350 and had our picture taken. I wish I knew where the local pictures are, and I would link away. Alas, I fear the photographing folks aren’t uploading folks, since I checked the main website and all the area ‘blogs. The point of the action was to highlight the environment, global warming and the parts per million of carbon dioxide that may not kill us all.

Before heading to the beach, I had been reading up on the local ‘blogs. Basically, there’s one called the Pacifica Riptide, which seems to be one guy’s vanity project along with help from his friends. It skews pro-environment, anti-development, but most of the time it’s local tidbits, like who’s playing down at the local bar that advertises on the site. Because it purports to want friendly discourse, and because it’s run by one guy, the editorial policy is that John decides whether your comments stay or go.

(My own experience with that editorial policy was harmless and happened around when I started living here and discovered the site. Somebody had posted some pictures from Africa with a headline that said something like “Running with the bulls in Nairobi.” It was some city or country, but I can’t remember where. Anyway, I commented that the caption was clever enough but kind of dumb, because the picture had to be cows, the docile women-folk of the bovine world, because the local variety has horns. I got the joke, but I have a pet peeve with factually inaccurate jokes, and had the picture actually been of bulls, the photographer and the dude posing in the picture would likely be hurt or very dead. My Africa-correcting, joke deconstructing comment never saw the light of day. No loss to the blogosphere.)

There’s now a newcomer in the wonderful blood sport of ‘blogging, Fix Pacifica. It’s slant is clearly pro-development, anti-hippie liberals, and quite possibly has come into existence to fuck with Pacifica Riptide. No doubt in my mind everyone in both camps knows each other, and I don’t know who slept with whose wife or who bitchslapped the family dog, but they all hate each other. There’s just a whole lot of name calling going on, and now they have both been slinging poo back and forth.

The best episode of yet another lame internet fight is this weekend’s. Fix Pacifica FIRMLY stated at it’s outset that it would be the new, sweet clean voice in town, unafraid of the truth, and, therefore, no censorship. In less than a month’s existence, that policy was sorely tested and lost. Cue interwebs hilarity.

In the midst of sorting through my own stance on development within a clearly anti-development town, one with a hugely negative local reputation for its NIMBY zoning policies, I figured out for the locals, it comes down to two big issues: (1) restoring a golf course that the City of San Francisco actually owns, which was designed in the late ’20s, built in the ’30s, below sea level with the kind of regard for environmental impact that folks had back then. As time and the elements have marched by, the original course has had some holes washed out by the inevitable storm and ocean rage, and it’s back nine got exiled to the other side of the spanking new highway projects of the ’50s and ’60s; and (2) the depending upon to whom you talk, the dream multi-million dollar complex or bill of goods planned by Don Peebles, a Florida developer who bought an old quarry near the beach on the cheap.

I don’t play golf, and given that Northern Cali isn’t lacking for holes, I’m not sure if I give a rat’s ass one way or another about the course. It’s falling down, and one camp wants to give the land away to the frogs and snakes and national park system. The other side, cautions that economic collapse will afflict us all if the one clear revenue stream dries up.

I plan to ask my co-workers who work in land restoration and conservation and with the national parks to figure out which plan helps me the local resident.

As for the pro-developer rhetoric, never in my life have I been given evidence to trust a dude from out of town out to make money who tells me his plan has my best interests at heart. In a good world, I expect to occasionally align with a developer’s dreams, but I’d be foolish to lie down and take it with a hand shake.

It’s only a matter of time, before M. and I show up at a city council meeting. And, if we do, it’s thanks to a nice man named Lazar(?) who explained the local politics as we all sat in the sand and made a 350 for the cameras.

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