Spatial-Temporal Discontinuity

Ok, so yesterday we took "the back way" home from Big Bear. Which means we were on the north side of the San Gabriel Mountains, and once again driving through small towns in the middle of nowhere - not unlike last weekend's exercise on California 166.

One thing I noticed - houses are cheap (by southern California standards, anyway) in Victorville. I saw many new housing tracts advertising "3-5 bedroom homes, from the low $80,000s." Wow.

Anyway, one of the little towns we rolled through (while observing posted speed limits - don't want to attract unnecessary attention from the local constabulary) was the misnamed Apple Valley. Number one, the only apples in Apple Valley are in the produce section at the Stater Brothers (more on that later). And number two, if you define "valley" as "a low place between mountains," which I think is pretty acceptable, then, yes, it is a valley - but it's an awfully flat, wide, valley. Like twenty or thirty miles across. I suppose "Tumbleweed Flats," while a more accurate description, would have depressed real estate values even further.

We were sitting at a stoplight next to the aforementioned Stater Brothers when a strange moment from the past flashed out at me.

(We now begin today's navel-gazing.)

My first job upon graduation from college was at a small magnetics engineering company. Mostly we designed and built custom transformers, but the owners of the company also held a patent for a money-saving lighting controller. The design was okay in theory, but not in practice. (I realize that at least a few engineers read this but I'm going to forego technical explanations. Let's just leave it at that.) As such, they had trouble selling very many of them - but one customer was (you guessed it) the Stater Brothers grocery chain. As grocery stores are a notoriously low-profit operation, I think they were willing to give it a shot.

So, sometime in 1989 or 1990 I went to the Apple Valley Stater Brothers store - at 5:00 in the morning, when I could turn out the lights for a while - to swap out a circuit board and do some general maintenance. And suddenly, I found myself there again - twelve years later. My life now is so completely different it's hard to figure out where to draw a line to connect 1989 Brad and 2002 Brad.

The Talking Heads had it right - "And you may ask yourself - how did I get here?" It's strange how your path in life seems to be made up of incremental steps - each one making sense in the context of your current situation, but each one taking you toward places you had no idea you were heading.

Weird, isn't it?