DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

I resent the NY Times calling his “the view from the West.” Seattle is not “the West”.  The West begins somewhere around the Black Hills in the north and maybe El Paso in the South and extends to the Cascade Mountains and the Sierra Nevada respectively.  West of that is whatever you call the stretch from say, Carmel to Seattle, I’ve heard “Ecotopia” suggested.  South of that is the Central Coast and the Central Valley and below that is Southern California.  SoCal is not “the West”, although it is part of “the West Coast”, which is not the same thing.  You can’t wear Birkenstocks or flip flops in the West because they would pull off  when you stepped in a cow pie.  In the West, you just gaze at the horizon for a while instead of saying “Yes — No.  I mean.  It just doesn’t feel that way to me.”   (After you gaze at the horizon for a while you can say, “See them pronghorns over there?” This is a reliable conversation opener.)  In the West you don’t have to explain to anybody the inherent idiocy of the idea of an electric car because they know what it’s like to drive from Cheyenne to Salt Lake City in December.  I like to ride refers to horses not $1500 bicycles.  In the West, the skies are not cloudy all day, which they certainly are from Portland to Seattle.  Nobody in the West actually saw the movie “Brokeback Mountain” which was, in any event, fiction written by a woman who had no business moving to Wyoming and who came from Maine or something.  Nobody who has spent their whole life in the West has actually seen mold in the wild.  In the West, “dude” refers to a cowboy wannabe, not just anybody.  While Starbucks has spread everywhere, the prefered drink of the West is still coffee black, highly caffeinnated and so hot you can’t taste it.  One could go on, but in brief, the view through the mists of Seattle is not “from the West.” Oh.  I see it says “the West Coast.”  So I guess this rant was completely unnecessary.

 And that says all you really need to know about the New York Times: ‘West’ means ‘Left Coast’, not, you know, West.