Good afternoon from Hermosa Beach, California. We're here for a few days parked in the parking lot of St. Cross Episcopal Church. Monday we head north of Los Angeles to Ventura where we'll be staying at a regional park for a few days. From there we wind our way north towards San Francisco where we'll be in April. There appears to be lots for us in between.

Southern California continues to wow us with spectacular weather and great things to do outdoors. The past few days have been warmer than normal/usual, but today it is sunny and 62 degrees at the beach.

With this post I begin my yearly break from Facebook. It's past time to withdraw from that platform for a while. I'll continue to post here on missingpersonsrv and return to Facebook after Easter. I'm not giving up Facebook for Lent, it's just got drawn that way.

​Watch this space. Peace.

Good afternoon from Long Beach, California where Melanie, Miranda and I are in residence for a few days at St. Luke's Episcopal Church. 

The church is situated about a mile from the coast where, among other points of interest, boating is a thing as well as oil derricks made to look like off-shore apartment buildings. Melanie and I rode down to the beach yesterday and traveled the Shoreline Pedestrian/Bicycle Path which runs along the beach. Great ride, but for the bit of cool dripping rain that fell during part of our ride. Nothing really to complain about, but one gets spoiled after so many days without rain. Besides, the rain provided a great reason to stop at a local brewery for a beer and chicken wing snack.

As has been our habit recently, we're parked in St. Luke's parish parking lot so Melanie can speak to parishioners about  how EPF can assist with their social justice issues. When we arrived yesterday, we were told they were finishing up feeding  some of the homeless population and providing showers for them too. Yesterday, I'm told about 200 people came through. But for a glitch in uploading the information, they would also have been registering people to vote.

We continue to see many homeless people on the streets, Long Beach is no exception. Last night we witnessed them sleeping on the street just outside the church parking lot gates. 

Which brings me to something that seems increasingly important during this election year. As I was riding a few days ago, I remembered something from our time at the Columbine Memorial Service last April 20th in Columbine, Colorado. 

During the service no mention was made of guns or the gun violence that happened 20 years ago, but they did mention their use of the catch phrase, "If you see something, say something." I won't go into the myriad reasons why the use of that method to combat gun violence is mostly wishful thinking, but I would like to put it to use during what is increasingly a very contentious election season.

In the run up to our elections in November, I would advocate, "If you see something, say something. Thoughtful."  Let me clear, I'm not necessarily advocating debate or arguing with anyone online or otherwise, though that may be the case, but something akin to what Kurt Andersen advocates in the book, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, A 500 Year History, which, by the by, is an excellent read.

[D]istinguishing among the factually true, the dubious, and the false, at least outside religion, doesn't involve judgment calls about taste or "appropriate" and "inappropriate." This struggle should be less fraught.

But it will require a struggle to try and make American reality-based again. We few, we happy few, we band of sisters and brothers-- in fact, we're not really so few. Fight the good fight in your private life. You needn't get into an argument with the stranger who claims George Soros and Uber are conspiring to make his muscle car illegal, but do not give acquaintances and friends and family members free passes. If you have children or grandchildren, teach them to distinguish between foolish and wise. We need to adopt new protocols for information media hygiene. Would you feed your kids a half-eaten casserole a stranger handed to you on the bus, or give them medicine you got from some lady at the gym? Do you have unprotected sex with people you just met? Remember when viral was a bad thing, referring only to the spread of disease? The same goes for what you read and watch and believe.

And fight the good fight in the public sphere. One task, of course, is to contain the worst tendencies of Trumpism and cut off its political-economic fuel, so that a critical mass of fantasy and lies doesn't turn it into something much worse than nasty, oafish, reality-show pseudo conservatism. Progress is not inevitable, but it's not impossible either.

This is not just a progressive cause, liberals can be just as swept up the hysteria and by erroneous information and beliefs as their conservative counterparts. Check sources, see what reliable media has to say about what's being argued. In short, engage, but be informed. Be thoughtful. 

Get out of your comfort zone, open your eyes to what is taking place in your community. Our system is not working for a great many of our fellow citizens who suffer various injustices. Melanie and I see this daily. Now is the time for raising consciousness about the issues facing our nation. Before November. 

A belated thank you to Jessica Jew and her husband, Chris for spending time with us when we were in Los Angeles recently. Jessica took the better part of Saturday afternoon and showed us  the Natural History Museum and California Science Center. 

We were then invited to their home where we had a great dinner they prepared Saturday evening. We also got to spend time with Emile, their son.

Jessica is on Melanie's EPF board and was also responsible for bringing Melanie to St. John's Cathedral to preach and for several other events. 

Good afternoon from Trabuco Canyon, California and O'Neill Regional Park in Orange County. We
are here for a few days after spending three days in Los Angeles parked in St. John's Cathedral parking lot. 

Over the past few weeks we've been alternating our stays between church parking lots and various campgrounds around Southern California. 

The weather is wonderful here and reminds me much of spring in the South, minus the rains of the Southern spring, but sporadically punctuated by Santa Ana winds. Last night the winds blew at around 20-30 miles an hour with gusts reaching much higher, rocking Miranda periodically. Temperatures are generally in the 60's during the day and 40's at night. Spring in Winter.

Which goes a long ways toward explaining why Los Angeles has the second largest homeless population in the U.S., just under New York City. The weather in LA is more friendly to those on the street. 

We see homelessness everywhere we travel. I'm guessing some people here in our current campground are homeless. There's a couple camped in a tent with children. Their car tag is one from Kansas.

The photo above was taken in Riverside, California last week. The fire happened along the Santa Ana River. There's a bike/walking trail, the Santa Ana River Trail, running just over 50 miles along the Santa Ana River. I rode from our campground in Riverside to the trail then west along the trail for about 10 miles one afternoon. 

There are many homeless encampments along the 10 miles I covered on my ride. I can only imagine there must be many more in the 40 or so miles I didn't cover. Fires are not uncommon in a place that's dry and has low humidity and where people camp out of necessity. 

While we didn't travel extensively in Los Angeles, we did get out some, going to the California Science Musuem, the Natural History Museum and lunch on Saturday, then dinner on Sunday evening.  The homeless are everywhere downtown and all around where we were staying near the USC campus. They sleep on the steps of the cathedral and under nearby interstates.

On any give night there are 60,000 people who are deemed homeless in Los Angeles. A fifth live in shelters, a quarter live out in the open and thirty percent live in vehicles that may or may not be operable. 780,000 in Los Angeles spend 90% or more of their income on rent.

The economy is great. For some.

Which brings me to this past Sunday morning where I was, once again, in church. This time Melanie was given the opportunity to preach at St. John's. If you really want to know what she's been up to for over a year now, give a listen.  She'll tell you, pay attention, it's dark outside y'all.