“Let’s find some beautiful place to get lost…”

The title of this post is a line from an Elliott Smith song. I am currently lost, but not in some beautiful place. I am lost in Orange County.

I think writing blog entries from strange places (and thus, having a laptop) is pretty much the coolest thing ever, because so many of my thoughts have a sense of place. This is one such entry.

I’m on my way back to L.A. after a crazy whirlwind two days crashing at my friend Sean’s timeshare in Palm Desert. One of my favorite things about the drive to Palm Desert was how on the way you pass a freeway sign that says “Indio – other desert cities – right lane.” Desert cities! Cities in the desert! It’s so… I don’t know, it just grounds you as to where you are in the world. Not where you are like, take exit 91a and then exit 46b and get off on the 405. That’s how people travel nowadays; using an iPhone with Mapquest you can circle the world and never know the name of a single town through which you passed. For some reason being more vague helps to be more descriptive. On the way back we passed under a sign pointing towards “Newport Beach – other beach cities.” If I ran the world all signs would be like that.

One thing I noticed about Orange was how there are no such geographic landmarks. I get that to an outsider most suburbs look like a blank slate, but even then I find you can get the hang of a place by thinking of it terms of landmarks that are, you know, not manmade. A lookout point on a hill. The county park. The edge of town. Orange County doesn’t have any of that stuff. It’s just a flatland that goes and goes, strip malls and strip malls with orangey stucco and lines of rustling palm trees between the stores and the parking lot. Each of the towns have names and little slogans. We dropped Sean off in 70-degree weather in Yorba Linda, “Home of Gracious Living”. Then we passed through Plascentia, “All-American City”, as proclaimed by a red, white & blue sign along the wide parkway we were driving on.

Here are the few observations I made for myself about the O.C.:

1. They don’t say “hella”. (let’s start with the basics)

2. Unlike in L.A., there are protected lefts.

3. Part of what makes these SoCal freeways such a hot mess is that exits branch off to the left and right. For my first few hours on Mapquest duty I was confused when my friend Sierra kept asking of a freeway merge, “Which side will it be on?” Even if you’re staying on one freeway you have to be in the middle lane just to hedge your bets, because at every merge there’s a riot of lanes going different directions, like fraying ends of a string.

4. All of the street names are in Spanish – usually precious developed-community names like “Calle de las Penumbras” – which casts a funny light on the “All-American” thing.

5. At the same time, everything is so American. We passed by Valencia High School, its baseball diamond shimmering with heat, fronted by a sward of manicured lawn and elegant monterey pines, and I couldn’t help but imagine a bunch of attractive people from a 90’s chick flick hanging out on the grass talking about where the big party is on Friday night.

Everything is just so pretty. It’s like Dulock from “Shrek.” I think the only thing that really irks me about the place is (was? We’re now safely on the freeway passing downtown LA) how green and perfect everything is, in light of one very specific thing about this weekend: the views of the OC kids toward water. They would tend to leave faucets on while washing dishes, turn on the shower and go fold their clothes while it got hot, that sort of thing. And when I called them out about it, they’d be like, “Oh, you Santa Cruz hippies. Bitching us out for squandering the gifts of Mother Earth or whatever.”

Those words echoed through my head as we passed by the green, green lawn in front of every house. I imagined the people in the houses turning on their sprinklers every morning, letting them go and go until the grass runs with mud and the extra water gurgles bleeding out onto the sparkling pavement, and not thinking twice about it because if you want your front yard to be pretty, that’s just what you do. It’s just so… bubble-brained. As my English teacher from high school would say, they live in Fantasyland. Like, these people have all the money in the world and all the prestige in the world, and they just don’t get why they’re lucky. They don’t get who pays for Orange County to be beautiful.

This traffic is ridiculous. I can’t believe I have to spend six hours driving home on Highway 5 tomorrow after this weekend’s GPS-failure shenanigans. I’m hella ready to get back to NorCal, brah.

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