day one...orange county

Flying into O.C. was always strange. Looking out the window at the plane curves from its coastal course towards John Wayne Airport, the lights of the county are already fully illuminated. The sky continues its nightly attack out over the cloudless canvas and creates momentary battle lines. Strip mall signs and streetlights maintain the fight through the night. The stars are forgotten. Darkness is losing.
We haven’t even touched down into its loving asphalt arms and already the overwhelming immensity of this place begins to take hold. The concrete continues to curve and wind itself into an endless labyrinth neatly decorated by the occasional palm tree and community swimming pool to help distract and ease your search. Don’t worry; you got your escape baby. The freeway is your never-ending syringe rushing right into the smog filled vein of Southern California. Tap in and Baby’s got her mainline and taking 80 million people, every two-car garage, decaying apartment complex and neon sign with her. Come visit and check out of reality for good. There is nothing more numbing than the constant distraction of countless billboard advertisements, fuzzy orange lights, and the constant low murmur of moving cars and still empty parking lots at night.
Moments later at 80mph, I stare out the window. Familiarity sets in. A map begins to take shape in my mind. However, it is outdated and expired. The county has continued its dull redecoration of its façade. This process is never really stops. A new sign, a new paint job, this restaurant to replace another. It’s not long before my map fails me and we are someplace unfamiliar. Suddenly, streets and intersections that are entirely unknown to me surround me. However, in no way is it exciting or exotic. No, it looks exactly like the street before it. The only difference is that I recognized that intersection. Another entirely common, ordinary Orange County intersection filled with all you chain store accommodations to make you feel completely at ease and at home no matter where you find yourself in the LA-OC metropolitan area. Realistically, there is no real difference between the intersections I am familiar with to the one that I suddenly, moments later find myself confused and disoriented in. The moment passes and I am quickly back on another street that I recognize. However, the disconcerting sensation remains. I grew up here. These streets despite there changing shops and colors are firmly etched into the creases of my memory. Yet, amidst all of this, I can within moments find myself in a place that is entirely unfamiliar. Within yards of everything I know, I can suddenly be surrounded by nothing I know and be lost. And abruptly, my entire reality is altered. However, it is not necessarily changed by the new and unfamiliar. Rather, its distorted because I am encircled by symbols and logos, words and names, stores and advertisements that I fully recognize, but they are in a space which before never existed or was once wholly something else.
The obsessive-compulsive desire to constantly fill space and let no open area not be filled with something is bizarre and will not cease. Physical, inanimate representations of my past are completely disappearing. The construction and constant redevelopment is turning my memory into a lie. A remembrance of a place and time that has since passed is no longer physically represented by the same environment. Progress for the betterment of the community. Digression and the eventual total dissolve of space, place and environment of events that took place in my life.
In the next 5 years my high school will be completely torn down. An Apartment complex I once lived in is completely gone. The trees, parks and hundred plus apartments took the wrecking ball and have since been turned into a town-home community. A 1,600 acre marine base air station that existed on the outskirts of Tustin was officially closed in 1999. After much debate as to what to do with the space, it has been decided that it will be redeveloped into housing communities, a new high school, a small park and couple of strip mall areas. On the base there are two massive blimp hangars that are listed as some of the biggest wooden structures in the entire world. Originally, only one was to be torn down. Now it is presumed that both will be torn down. The development of the base is already underway and last night I drove on roads that while living here were restricted only to military use. I presume over the course of my life, Orange County will continue to “develop” in such ways that eventually everything will become almost completely unfamiliar. I don’t want to be apart of a resistance against change. However, if with change comes the total destruction of that which is unique and representative of a specific area in place of that which is entirely common, ordinary and can be frequently seen all over this county, this state, America at large; then what’s the point? What is this desire for this uniformity? This desire to make everything exactly like it is down the street from your house? My sentiments are not a resistance to change but rather a resistance against change in place of uniformity.
This place is electronic junkie. Our minds struggle for the strength to contemplate or reflect. In the morning the sky is completely empty; a continuous light blue canvas occasionally disturbed by a commuting airplane or an overreaching palm tree. Coupled with the expansive flat and endless ocean, and to continuing push towards providing you with the ease and familiarity of a uniform space of chain store and signs; Southern California is a beautiful death. No matter how long I stay away, apart of me will always be attached to numbing electric drug that allows you to live without ever really having to think. Sweep away the consequences with the back pages of the daily paper and a 42-inch television screen.