Even though I was born in California, I've spent all but about four years of my life here and I often feel like an alien, unrelated to those folks back East who think the world ends at the east bank of the Hudson River or the western shore of the Mississippi.

I never really appreciated this gulf of understanding until once when I visited some very distant cousins who live in Spencer, W. Va. Spencer is a little place, not as big as Milpitas used to be. It's got a town square, a Baptist church, a few red brick, smoky houses and my cousins' jewelry store.

The store is not very big either and doesn't do a lot of business--but then in Spencer, you don't have to do a lot of business. Spencer, like a lot of West Virginia, is not an expensive place to live. It's also not a very interesting place to live. Most everyone is white, Protestant and poor, but then no one is very rich either. A lot of people live off gas leases--that is, gas companies have drilled gas wells on their property and now pay them a royalty for the gas they extract from underground. Coal is no longer much of a business and agriculture is dead. You can't live on less than 40 acres and survive.

But seven generations of my cousins have lived there and live there still.

My cousins greeted me, somewhat warily, I thought, when we got to Spencer. They treated me with great civility, but at a distance, and when I left said something which pretty much summed up their feeling about California and Californians: "Keep those crazies out there."

I don't know if they included me in the craziness or not, but clearly they wanted to isolate themselves from what they perceived to be what was happening in California. And so now it seems does the rest of the country.

In the recent political fracas both candidates pointedly ignored us. One knew he wasn't going to win the state under any circumstances, the other seemed certain he would. So they concentrated on the so-called battleground states (one of which was not West Virginia)

They visited California seldom and briefly.

And although we've got more people and more diversity within our boundaries than any place else in the nation, they could have cared less. Nor does the rest of the country.

Take, for instance, same sex marriage.

Californians, especially many Northern Californians, looked upon it as some kind of wave of the future. But it didn't look that way in West Virginia, or Kansas, or even Ohio. There it seems--putting it politely--to be a sin, an aberration, even a crime. Keep those crazies in San Francisco.

Even California's primary election gets something less than national notice. By the time it rolls around the decision as to who will be the major parties' nominees is already past.

We have become the tail which the dog is wagging, the other way around. And by the time California's ballots have been counted, the president already has been elected. All we have left to find out is how the often strange propositions on our ballot have come out.

The only attention these get nationally is from the eastern media who thinks they are all strange. Even recalling a governor is strange to the rest of the country. Another California craziness.

It's been said that California sets trends. Maybe. But it certainly doesn't decide elections, and even though its delegation in the House of Representatives is the largest in the land, it certainly isn't the most powerful. Most California Congress persons are Democrats and the Republican majority in the House doesn't want to have anything to do with them.

If this makes you feel disenfranchised, join the club. It really doesn't make any difference which party you belong to. Whether you are a Republican or a Democrat, a Green or a Libertarian, the rest of the country doesn't really care right now what California does.

We're just those wild westerners whose moral values are suspect and whose intoxication with Hollywood (whatever that means) still leads to long hair, odd dress and wanting to walk around in few clothes.

Or, at least, that's how my cousins in Spencer and a whole lot of other people from east of the Rocky Mountains think of California and Californians.

Well, so be it. But I know one thing: I'd a lot rather be in California-- anywhere in California--than in Spencer, W. Va.