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nonameiguessonApr 29, 2021

This is quite poignant. It reminds me of my own time in middle school, which also happened during the recession of the early 90s, when the endless optimism and expansionism of the 80s, with the Berlin Wall coming down and boundless real estate gains and an expanding economy, finally came to an end. There was the oil price shock, the fall of the Soviet Union, and of course my most notable memory of being briefly trapped in a house while helping my dad on a contract job doing a second floor addition by the expanding wave of the LA Riots. 63 people killed and the National Guard marching through Los Angeles.

And I didn't know it until I read Into the Wild a few years later when I went to college, but 1992 was the same year Chris McCandless died, with great debates in all outdoor communities on whether he was an idiot or a hero. He stayed for a while in Slab City out in the Imperial Valley, with many residents living permanently in RVs. That place is amazingly still there, maybe an even better expression of whatever is left of the myth of the American frontier, public land owned by the State of California, donated by the Marine Corps, with people allowed to just live there as long as they want, with no real addresses or government-provided services and sometimes not even real legal identities.

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