The Collected and Ephemeral Works of
  Paulina Borsook
     California on My Mind

 

And when he was at Thacher, he was encouraged to make strategic friendships in this small elite school in Ojai, a beautiful redoubt in the Southern California 





coastal range where masters of new-age religions, screenwriters, and proprietors of spas now routinely  reside.

He would talk to me about how uneasy he was the pressures he felt from his parents, about who he was supposed to make friends with as opposed to who he wanted to be friends with and how conflicted he was about it all.

As it happened, two boys he was friendly with were subjects of interest. There was a descendant of a family that owns a company famous throughout the world for creating things like waterworks


and dams

and mass-transit systems and energy-extraction and just about anything you can think of that has to do with the built environment and usually ends up getting conflated with scary bad political power.


The other might be characterized as the offspring of California


agribusiness.


California agribusiness is integral to making California's economy the sixth largest in the world;


it is the major user of water in the state,


and the major user of power because the water


to turn semi-desert



to hydroponic farms of cotton and wheat


 

has to be pumped

from somewhere, usually the Sierra.


My princeling was encouraged to become friends with the built-environment guy, and the agribusiness guy. Not that he wasn't already friendly with  these guys in his same year, but he didn't want to make friends on the basis of efficacy and future utility.

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