Small Town Life

My town, Ojai, is the kind of town where everybody knows everyone and everyone has a small price to pay for living in a rural paradise. I love my town. I can drive up the road and be at the Krishnamurti Institute within minutes, soaking up spiritual vibes and contemplating life from the shady vantage of a massive lemon tree.
I have my pick of cool places to eat. I love Reuben's, which has the best Mexican food in California. I can eat at all kinds of places...but, things I love about Ojai are disappearing. The Tottenham Court Tearoom closed, leaving a huge hole in the social whirl here. I loved having tea there with my mom when she came up from San Diego to visit me. She misses the tea. I miss the cute piano player.
Something else has been missing in Ojai lately.
People's stuff.
Yep. Stuff started disappearing here from people's cars.
And sometimes, the cars too, vanished.
I happened to notice a red sedan with a man and woman in front roaring up and down Ojai Avenue. They were conspicuous by sitting around smoking dope in the kids' playground behind Busy Babes (tacky).
These stoners, or as my friend Stacy insists, chemically aware folk, were not at all secretive or even selective. I didn't think much of their presence at first since we are a happening town (honest!) and visitors come here either on their way from LA to Santa Barbara or on their way TO LA from SB.
But these people seemed to drive around and around.
It all came to a head this week when they allegedly stole a credit card from one of their victims and bought a nice meal at a local restaurant - not my Reubens - and next thing we knew, they were being arrested.
They are transients who got wind of the rather nice life here and thought they'd ease us all of the burden of being happy and thinking we were relatively crime-free.
Bridget Campbell, 21, and David Williams, 26 have pretty hefty bonds they have not yet posted so they languish in Ventura County Jail pending arraignment.
Thankfully they were caught midway through a coastal crime spree that began, apparently in Santa Barbara.
The beauty of small town life is that thieves stick out. Especially stupid, voracious ones.
There's another huge benefit to this beauty. Being in a small town means that when you are able to identify your stolen property, the police return it immediately. No need for it to languish in the limbo world of "evidence."

Country Boy

I am so excited. I contracted to publish my first M/M book with Extasy Books. My novella, Country Boy, is all about a well, country boy, who wins a spa holiday vacation package to the Caribbean, only to discover that it's a gay resort. And he's not gay. Nope. Never. Not all all.
Or, is he?
My gorgeous cover arrived today and it all seems to be real now.
This idea came to me after a dear friend of mine won a trip to a nudist colony and he's so buttoned-up it was the nightmare of his life. I took the idea and turned it around. And around and around.
I live in Ojai, a couple of hours north of Los Angeles. Most of the town is about a 90 minute drive, but I live in the foothills of Topa Topa and know all about country boys.
Being gay is not exactly the hottest thing you can be in Ojai, one of the few places left with organe groves and real-life cowboys. It's old-time California and it's peaceful, calm and soooo not gay.
I am excited about my book because it addresses a lot of the ideas I feel about gay life, straight life and areas in between. As I sat writing it, I would look out of the window in the evenings at sunset to watch what we call The Pink Moment, a point when the sky is infused with a sweet, pink hue.
I almost called the book The Pink Moment because just as improbable as a pink sky might seem, so is a man who discovers his true sexuality late in life, and yet, we know it is true.
I write what I know, I write what I believe. On this day when gay marriage is still on hold in California, I have to believe in my dreams, and I have to believe in pink moments.