Chapters
Lenore Najinsky runs the Blue View Hotel in Santa Monica, California, PCAU. In addition to providing our entire crew with rooms and a complementary breakfast, Lenore sat down with us to talk about her family's long history in the region.
Well, as the story goes there's been at least one Najinsky in California since 1850. There was a big hullabaloo about gold the previous year but the few records we ever managed to dig up said a guy named Anatol Najinsky was probably just an undertaker. Needless to say, we got out of that business a long time ago. Granddad was a movie producer back in the 20th. Nothing big, nothing most'd remember, but he made a name for himself. That's how we got the hotel. He bought it so my dad could have a career in his home town, seeing as he didn't want to go into film himself. It was my uncle Matt who stayed in entertainment, only he thought he was a documentarian... not that there's anything wrong with that. Sorry.
Anyway, Matt shot this crappy digital doc about the Autonomy Years. I can show you a copy if you're so inclined. I have to warn you, though, he didn't get all of his facts straight. Too much of an idealist. He really got caught up in all that political stuff, which is funny seeing as the whole idea behind Autonomy was that nobody had a stomach for politics anymore. Matt's movie, it's called "Pacific Dawn", which is stupid because the sun doesn't even rise over the ocean on the West Coast, it tries to say that it was some big, popular movement that got us the country. Dad tells a different story. So do most of the folks I know who actually lived through the Transition.
Long story short, in the last decade or so of the States there were pretty limited resources from the Federal government. If you didn't ask for help, they didn't even acknowledge you, let alone actually send aid. The DEA, those were the big anti-drug cops back in the day, they stopped getting requests from Los Angeles County real early. A lot of the colleges started getting more funding from private investors than the government, so they stopped asking for help, too. Sooner or later there was barely any Federal presence at all in the region, same goes for Cascade. Dad says he and his friends just started smoking joints on the sidewalk and making extra cash by selling discs of downloaded software, back when they use to still use discs. As long as nobody got beat up, robbed or tried to drive wasted, the cops just left you alone. I guess by the time the RNE and NAR got started, everything was already pretty much squared away out here. Dad and Granddad were already using Union Credits during the post-US interim. Of course, uncle Matt had been using them since two years before that.
I don't know if I'd call myself a patriot or anything, but I'm still glad it happened. I grew up watching Granddad's collection of old 20th DVD's. Glitchy as hell, but whatever. All the movies about home, about here, they're crazy. I recognize some of the places, except they're so violent and uneasy. I can't imagine home looking like that. All the guns and the poverty and the crime... Granddad told me about these riots they had right in town when he was my age. Race riots. Uncle Matt may be a bleeding heart but at least he was fighting a pretend revolution against crap like that. I mean, just look at this beach. Why'd anyone want to riot in a place like this?
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