substitute

Bet you'd live here if you could and be one of us.

( Read more... )

Contemporary Fetes Galantes and Fetes Champetres here in Dude Ranch Nation:

• Burning Man
  
• Humvees and Diesel
  
• Cardio Pole-Dancing
  
• Harley Culture
  
• The House of Blues
  
• Pimp and Ho parties
  
• Eco-Tourism
  
• Porn Chic
  
• 35-year-old suburban homeboys
  
• The Tattooed Hausfrau
  
• "White Trash" chic
  
• The Simple Life (tv)
  
• Prison Cool (jail slang, prison rape jokes, wings on the velour tracksuit)

Suspicious lamp prompts evacuation
A Huntington Beach homeowner saw the object in a garage.

By RYAN HAMMILL
The Orange County Register

HUNTINGTON BEACH — A report of a suspicious lamp in a garage led to a neighborhood evacaution today before the Orange County sheriff’s bomb squad determined that the object was harmless.

A Mangrum Drive homeowner called Huntinton Beach police about 3 p.m. after seeing wires protruding from the base and an unfamiliar light bulb, Sgt. Dave Bunetta said.

Police officers visually inspected the lamp before calling the bomb squad and the Huntington Beach Fire Department’s hazardous material unit, Bunetta said.

Residents within 300 feet of the house were evacuated for about 3½ hours during the investigation.

The house is next door to a home day care, which also was evacuated, and two blocks from Marina High School.

I got an In-N-Out double-double last night and ate it in my car. I had the seat kicked back and the sunroof open, and I was looking straight at the full moon. Mars is still very close, so I could see the Red Planet with an unaided eye right there too.

It doesn't take much to send me into an astronomical trance. I think about the fact that I'm looking at another planet, and how far away and huge it has to be, just looking up at the moon. When it's full and looks oversized on a clear night, the moon is just hypnotizing. Mars even more so, since I can look directly at and see an impossibly remote place that maybe, just maybe people might visit someday. I was pleasantly dragged back into sophomoric "oh wow the universe" mode that way and spent a while there.

Years ago I noticed that living in suburban Southern California has a particular depressive effect. When you're surrounded entirely by man-made things — signs, stores, roads, parks, airplanes, houses, gas stations — the world starts to feel like an extension of the people around you and their attitudes. And here, the man-made world around us is new and cheap and tawdry and already falling apart. It's a mess of convenience stores sprinkled over beige bedroom communities, strip malls, sterile little parks, drive throughs. The scenery does not inspire. Eventually I get bad theology in my head: the world was built by money-grubbing assholes who didn't care about their work, and it's falling apart.

The cure for this is nature. I am a city boy at heart. I don't much enjoy camping, small-town rural life terrifies me, and I feel naked without a used bookstore and some good coffee down the street. But I like to visit nature. Even an hour staring out into the Pacific Ocean is a decent recharge. But really I need a day in the desert here every few months. When you're out past 29 Palms with nothing between you and some craggy mountains 30 miles away, and it's perfectly silent except for creatures you can't see, there's no 7-11 to get you down. For me it's a reminder that the world has its own vastness, its own power, its own logic and function, and that my little world of stoplights and shoe discounters and empty greasy parking lots is small and not representative.

Slumped back in my car seat staring at the moon and Mars last night, I thought "Yeah. It's time to go there." Not Mars or the moon (which would be cool also), but the desert. It would be good to shed a layer of suburban grime and doom again.

Then I sat up to get going and fries fell down my pants.