Always nice to come home, but also a little melancholy. The economic dislocation of the region can be followed from Abu Dhabi, but not really felt without being in SoCal.

The recession was almost two years old when I left for the UAE in October of 2009. And the SoCal economy seems hardly better — if any better at all — in August of 2012.

The people who didn’t have jobs when I left? Many of them still do not. Not full employment in their preferred fields.

Or they remain in jobs they do not like or are not confident enough to leave. One told me: “Still doing” the same job. “Still pretty much loathing” it. I wonder how pervasive that is.

Three California cities have declared bankruptcy, gas is $4 a gallon, and I really don’t know how all those laid-off teachers and journalists and construction workers make their way. And how do all the new college graduates break into meaningful employ?

In Long Beach, every teacher with less than 11 years of experience has been laid off in recent years. Those noble experiments of small classes in the lower grades? Long gone. Along with a lot of teaching jobs.

Even notions that ought to be easier, in a time of a long downtown, are not necessarily better.

The freeways seem as jammed as ever. A couple of days driving around the 60 and the 91 and the 10 and the 5 left me frazzled, and I wasn’t even at the wheel the whole time. If gas is $4 a gallon, shouldn’t people be sitting at home? Or walking or cycling? Then what are we doing, at a dead stop, on the 91 at 10 a.m.

People are making less, but prices don’t seem to have fallen. How does that work?

The middle class, in SoCal, seems at great risk. Unless you work for the government, what do you do to make $50,000-plus a year? Run your own business, perhaps?

The big private employers are all gone. Aerospace, which was the backbone of the SoCal economy a generation ago, is just about dead. The steel mill, the auto assembly plant, several military bases, the US Navy base … all gone. What is left, besides The Industry (Hollywood), the ports of Los Angeles/Long Beach and tourism?

I firmly believe that the younger generations, especially, should begin to look overseas for employment. Or outside California.  They really don’t want to live with mom and dad as they approach 30.

The state, and the southern half of it, may come back some day. OK, it will, because of the climate.

But it won’t come back soon enough to make a difference in the lives of many of us.  Which you don’t necessarily think about until you come back and drive the streets of Southern California.