{"id":107,"date":"2007-02-19T21:41:27","date_gmt":"2007-02-20T05:41:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/davidgogel.com\/backroads\/?p=107"},"modified":"2007-02-19T21:41:27","modified_gmt":"2007-02-20T05:41:27","slug":"isla-vista","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluehighways.us\/?p=107","title":{"rendered":"Isla Vista"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Isla Vista is located adjacent to the University of California Santa Barbara [UCSB]. A one square mile town consisting primarily of apartments, a few businesses and a population of over 20,000. Isla Vista was considered by many to be second only to Berkely as a hotbed for political activism, and first came to national attention during the protests of the Vietnam War. The image above<\/span><\/font> is a poster made from a photo of the burning of the Bank of America. Isla Vista first came to my attention as a teenager when I discovered that while only in junior high school, I could walk into a keg party, held nearly every weekend, at one of the frat houses. That eventually added up to spending a long, cold night on the beach without the luxury of a jacket, but theonly other option offered from the local police was to be taken in custody. They really didn’t want to bother with paperwork and told us to just leave Isla Vista. Without car, 2:00 in the morning…where else could we go?, except of course with the kind officers for a ride to juvenile hall. That ride would come a couple years later. For the next few years it was a regular hangout, playing pool late night, and hanging around the beach throughout the day.<\/span><\/font>I lived in Isla Vista on three separate occasions, my first apartment out of high school, and two more times for summers when the town wasn’t so crowded and when the law changed allowing Isla Vista to sell beer and wine, and I was at an age to legally purchase it. Passed out on my dog was taken the summer after high school, and is a pretty accurate representation of what that summer was like. My buddy Hugh and I first moved to Isla Vista for the summer just before heading to college. Hugh worked at an electronics firm and I spent days playing pool at the UCSB Student Center with a transplant from Boston. We both were pretty good and soon found that hours of practicing straight pool daily was beginning to be less challenging. Moving our rack to the snooker table our aim had to be dead on, the table was both wider and longer and we were using oversized balls for the size of the snooker pockets. At first, for a few days that is, our shots rattled around the pockets but not dropping in. By day four we were on track. After a week of straight pool on a snooker table we were good, and after moving back, the tables looked like the little quarter a game tables found in bars. We were dead on and won a number of small bets with players who thought they were the next Fast Eddie. We took on and beat all comers. I never hustled pool, but I grew up with a table in the house since I was in the seventh grade and could usually hold a table at the bar until bored or blind. I can’t say the the same for hustling my friend Hugh when it came to chugging beers. Hugh’s weakness was not being able to back away from a dare, or the idea of losing in competition. The chug a beer contest started one night… hold the beer can upside down with mouth wide open and pull the pop tab. Glug, glug, glug – however, as simple as it sounds I never thought I could beat Hugh, nor did I ever once try. I simply reached down and grabbed an empty, there were plenty around, and out of the corner of my eye watched Hugh… just before he thought he crossed the finish line first, I crushed my empty can, filling Hugh with another 12 oz. of disappointment. The second chug was usually by my coaxing, but the third was definitely Hugh’s futile attempt to pull out a victory before staggering down the hall talking to himself. This continued for a couple months but there was change, Hugh was getting faster. I barely had time to reach down and grab an empty, he was really fast, really, really fast. I placed money on Hugh on more than one occasion and never did have to pay out.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Isla Vista is located adjacent to the University of California Santa Barbara [UCSB]. A one square mile town consisting primarily of apartments, a few businesses and a population of over 20,000. Isla Vista was considered by many to be second only to Berkely as a hotbed for political activism, and first came to national attention […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-santa-barbara"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluehighways.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluehighways.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluehighways.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluehighways.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluehighways.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=107"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluehighways.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluehighways.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluehighways.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluehighways.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}