PC bumper-stickers in a vast Suburban Wasteland
(for more pictures, click here)
When I was in High School, in a little Hick town in an inland valley (soon to be part of the greater San Francisco Bay Area Suburban Sprawl – SFBASS) called Livermore, most of my cool friends (all six of ’em, more or less) were a year or two older, and about half of them ended up going to Sonoma State University in Cotati. I didn’t visit there much, but it was discribed as a cool little college town. There was also a “planned development” to the North (soon to metastasize) into a bloated generic-looking suburb called Rohnert Park (which unfortunately spread to infect the town of Cotati itself). …
Cotati still retains some vestiges of the quaint little college town it once was, but now it mostly consists of a suburb of Santa Rosa (which, having no actual industry to speak of, is itself a vast suburb of the San Francisco Bay Area). Which currently makes Cotati a weird little town. There are still some very cool people here (I found out about a local Zen Sangha from a gentleman at a local cafe). Sonoma State University is actually (although I really haven’t checked this out lately) a fairly hip college. Project Censored, a nationally renowned center for media research and First Amendment issues, and the advocacy for, and protection of, free press rights in the United States, was founded, and is headquartered at Sonoma State. Unfortunately, the town in general has a very “hick” vibe to it– as do all of the towns in Sonoma County along the Highway 101 corridor.
At this point it appears that the University crowd seems to pretty much stay to itself, and avoids the “townies”– a term I never heard of until after college. Probably because Humboldt State University– my alma mater— was built high into the redwoods on the slope of some pretty tall hills, and the University crowd pretty much took over the downtown from the “townies”, who at one time worked in the local Lumber Mills– now mostly defunct (according to Government statistics, the #1 industries up there appear to be pot growing and alcoholism)– and who confined themselves to an area of town disparagingly referred to as “The Bottoms”.
