My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

A frank interview with Douglas Freedman about Bakersfield while driving south on the 5.

my robot is pregnant: what does Bakersfield conjure up in your mind?

Doug: oil and meth.

mrip: you’ve been there?

Doug: Jenny (Doug’s girlfriend) grew up there, and I’ve been there a couple times with her, kind of introduced around. it seems like everyone’s life is marked by a sadness from being trapped there, yet nobody wants to leave…

mrip: you know how big trucks have those stickers on the back that say ‘if you can’t see my mirrors, i can’t see you’?

Doug: no, but I’ll look for them.

mrip: no? oh. it’s a safety thing. anyway, i want to make one that says, “if you can’t see my mirrors, it’s because i broke them off and i’m doing coke in my cab right now’.

Doug: ha ha.

**

We kept driving, it took about five hours. Once we got there, I asked locals what they thought people thought of Bakersfield. Here’s Joel Johnson:

mrip: What do you think other people think of when they hear “Bakersfield”?

Joel: i don’t think they think about Bakersfield.

mrip: Why not?

Joel: There’s nothing coming out of here. When you’re 17 there’s this incredible lack of…anything…i don’t know…when i first left here, i’ve come and gone a lot, been around a lot of places, i went to Memphis first. everyone i met there said, ‘I wanna go out west and surf and smoke pot’…people have a concept that’s so deviant from the majority of California. there’re two places where it’s like that, but everywhere in between it’s as conservative as the midwest…

***

The local high school nickname is “the drillers” – picture an oil derrick gushing oil. The high school mascot always helps you understand where you are. Bakersfield, thanks to Chevron’s technological breakthrough of forcing steam underground to flush out the oil, has been producing 85,000 barrels a day from the old Kern River oil fields that were languishing in mild 10,000 gallon a day output until then. (I read that in the New York Times)

***

Doug: Isn’t this town kinda shitty?

mrip: that’s what they say. but that’s how we like it, right Doug?