There is science, logic, reason there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.

Abbey sets up a mock-solemn hierarchy—science, logic, reason, and experience-tested thought—then punctures it with the punchline “And then there is California.” The line plays on California’s reputation (especially in the postwar decades Abbey wrote in) as a place of extremes: rapid growth, boosterism, fads, spectacle, and a culture that can feel unmoored from ordinary constraints. Read as satire, it suggests that California operates by its own rules, resistant to tidy rational explanation. In Abbey’s broader sensibility as a skeptical observer of modernity and mass culture, the quip also hints at unease with the state’s scale and influence, where the improbable becomes routine.