don't live here

Another night in Orange County, land of the rich and the bored, where the climate never changes and all the bars close at 11PM sharp.

This place is a prison, and these people aren't your friends.

We've built a pretty damned comfortable existence for ourselves in this little enclave of the world. Consider the length of life's evolution, from boiling sludge in a primordial ooze, through all manners of beasts and filthy creatures, ranged across a brutal world trapped in the terrible grip of entropy, time, death and decay. Now here we are, little pink fleshy creatures with baseball caps and pay phones and space programs. Humans. The pinnacle of all Creation. And we're so terrified of the rest of the world that we build places like Orange County, where people can go to pretend they're dead and in Heaven, to hide far, far away from all the nastier aspects of existence on Earth.

If you've ever been here, it's quite amazing. They might as well play theme music from hidden speakers in the rocks. It's Disneyland for grownups -- except nobody who lives here realizes it's not real, it's a sham, it's just a shiny happy bubble filled with shiny happy people. No one here could tell you that. They show you the theme parks and the beaches and the strip malls, they show you the million-dollar houses, the bright white sidewalks and rolling green grass. It's all really very impressive, actually. I should know -- I lived here for eighteen years.

Then you leave here and the bubble pops. And you realize, now you're in the Real World, you're fucked.

But that's okay too, because in the long run, everybody's fucked! We're all just fleshy organisms -- we eat, we sleep, we die.

All the nifty little plastic things you bought for yourself are going to be melted down for fuel someday. All the complexities of your social hierarchies and the rules you've invented are houses of cards, and a simple breath of wind will blow it all away. None of it matters. You just didn't know it before you left Orange County.

The illusion of permanence. Perhaps that's the greatest sin of this place.