Fri Mar 02 2001 at 1:06:03
For a while there I used to commute, weekly, from Los Angeles to Whidbey Island, Washington. My wife and I wanted to escape from Babylon, the Land of Smokes and Shadows, as the Chumash tribe used to call it, and find a Better Place to raise the boys.
Whidbey Island, and Seattle in general, fit the bill. We
liked the rain, and the green-all-around that is its issue, and the fact that people actually
read in the Pacific Northwest all the way from Portland to Vancouver and beyond was certainly a plus.
The honeymoon was short-lived. In the first place, the media specifically mediocre television shows and egregiously ill-inspired music were more insidiously pervasive in Seattle than they were in L.A., the operative factor being that my fourteen-year-old