it’s a super nice day in Orange County.

I’m enjoying the cool overcast from an on-shore flow. Sitting out on the porch with Jesse napping is very pleasant. Knowing the most anything I might want to go get, is literally a few minutes away could really spoil me.

I’ll admit it, I like being in civilization. 

Don’t get me wrong, I liked living in the mountains. I liked my life and my other half and there was joy in our home. There were rough times to be sure, but any issues were offset by having silence, room, and a safe home. Those perks outweighed the inconvenience of having to drive a minimum of 30 minutes or more to get to a shopping center for stuff like clothes or a Costco. There were times when It felt like I needed a sherpa and we were planning an expedition to deepest Africa.

When I was working off the hill, stopping by one of those places, or as Jerry & I often did, meeting at a mall or whatever to take care of necessary shopping on our way home from our respective jobs, wasn’t a problem. We’d have a date night, have dinner, do our shopping and head home after most of the traffic was past.

Now that I’m alone and not working off the hill, being on the mountain is a bit more of a problem. I have little reason to leave and less reason to want to deal with nightmarish traffic getting to and from the various shopping centers.

Staying here in Orange County, with friends. I’m reminded of the advantage of being closer to a real city. In this case, an interconnected web of sprawling cities where the shelves are full and not every item is locked up behind plexiglass.

Over the past couple of days I’ve been struck by the difference in rite aid here versus home. Grocery stores, four within blocks of each other versus home where there’s only 1 or 2 within 20 miles.

Yesterday for example, was interesting. I dropped the dog off for a grooming appointment, drove 1/2 mile to a car wash, drove back to the plaza where I’d left the dog. Noticed there was a SportClips, got my hair cut, walked through a Trader Joes (hadn’t done that for years), compared prices at a Smart & Final, then got a message that the dog was ready.

Out where I live, that would have been an all day affair, possibly 2 days. The local SportClips closed during COVID. The groomer is 45 minutes away. The grocery stores and pharmacy are 20 to 30 minutes. There are 3 grocery stores within 35 miles, 4 if you include the Super Target and Walmart.

It’s funny. Before I settled down with Jerry, I was an Orange County boy. I knew my way around and  literally could lay my hands on just about anything I needed, anytime of the day and night.

Living in Escondido for the time I did, I was still out of the main urban areas of San Diego and honestly, I was glad of it.

This fire may have given me some direction. (Provided it doesn’t just burn everything down.)

I begin to remember what I liked about living here in OC and can directly contrast that with mountain life.

I know that I have too much stuff.

Being evacuated, I’m traveling uncomfortably light. The house on the other hand is uncomfortably heavy. There should be some nice balance in the middle.

Likewise much as I appreciate the convenience of OC, I don’t want to deal with the dense urban environment, the excessive noise and not enough open spaces.

This isn’t a criticism, it’s simply observing that moving back into a dense urban environment probably wouldn’t be the best thing for me personally. 

I think I need to search for a happy medium between the absolute rural out in the sticks places, and easy access to the niceties of modern life.

Okay, Not how I planed to spend this week.

As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, there are multiple fires burning in Southern California.

Tuesday afternoon I got an evacuation notice on my phone. Then, there was a helicopter flying overhead announcing mandatory evacuation. Then there was another evacuation notice on my phone, and finally there was the sheriffs department driving up & down the streets announcing evacuation on their loudspeakers.

Hmm, says I, they must want us to leave.

I suspected it was coming and I’d already planned to stage stuff in the event there was an evacuation. I didn’t get a chance to execute my cunning plan before the evacuation was upon me.

So I grabbed some stuff, put the dog in the car and away we went. 

By the time we left the house, it looked very much like somehow the neighborhood had been relocated to Mars on a very bad day.

Jesse was freaked out and would not settle down.

I was annoyed by that and of course the usual California driving skills or more properly lack thereof.

I made a brief stop, or what was supposed to be a brief stop at a storage locker where I unloaded a bunch of stuff in an attempt to give the dog more room to lie down & relax. This as it turns out was an error.

While I was able to offload, I wasn’t able to get back on the damn freeway. Either the exits were closed, or they were blocked by the aforementioned Excellent California Drivers. Many of whom wouldn’t allow a change of lanes. At least one of whom used the emergency lane to “get ahead” and forced me out of the lane so I was unable to get on the freeway safely. 

Mind you by this point we were 15 – 20 miles away from the evacuation zone and in no danger whatsoever. This was just normal California assholery. It is also the kind of behavior that begets freeway shootings.

I figured “Screw it” and stopped for gas. Then I found a whole string of entrance ramps blocked off forcing me to take surface streets parallel to the freeway until just before Pomona.

Once on the freeway it was a simple matter to get to Orange County and stay with some friends. It’s good to have great friends that will put you up in a pinch. It’s even better to have friends that will put you and your big ass dog up when they have a lovely pet free home and it is pet free for a reason.

My friends have gone above and beyond in this instance and I truly have no idea how to thank them.

At this point I know the firefighters are doing all they can do. I know that there’re no guarantees but I hate not knowing what is likely to happen. Is my house going to burn? Is it not? If it burns, then I have a clear direction. If it’s not going to burn, I’d really rather be home and not imposing on my friends like this.

In an attempt to minimize the mess and stuff that a dog invariably brings into your life, I had Jesse groomed today, while I was at it I had my car washed and my hair cut too. My hope with Jesse being groomed was that he’d shed a little less and wouldn’t be in any way offensive in terms of dog stink.

He’s been sleeping since we got back and I know I’m going to have to take him out on at least one, maybe two more walks tonight.

I don’t really think about it, but having a fenced in back yard is super nice. Their yard is not fenced in, so I’ve been walking Jesse on his leash a lot. Normally Jesse & I go for our morning walk, then I leave the sliders open so he comes and goes as he wishes the rest of the day.

If I move off the mountain, either because of the house burning down, or just because It’s time for me to move on, I will be looking for new digs that have a fenced in back yard after this experience, I’ve decided that is a must have.

Saw this Venn Diagram on Twitter

I don’t know who created this diagram but I’d like to tip my hat to them.

It accurately explains how I’ve been feeling lately.

I’ve been trying to write but have experienced severe writers block.

On the plus side I’ve been making progress cleaning out the house, so there’s that.

It seems lately that every time I turn around there is some fresh stupid hell created by humanity because collectively humans are bored.

I find that I’m looking forward to some extinction level event, for a change of pace.

I strongly suspect this sort of boredom happens all over the universe in every sentient species. It’s probably why we’ve not detected conclusive signs of other life.

I’m betting that all species get to a certain technological level, things get too easy, they get bored and start making shit up to terrorize each other. It’s not out of cruelty, it’s so they feel something, anything…

Species probably need a hit of adrenalin that they get from pursuing or being pursued in a forest. They need to have real danger, real life & death consequences, and real mysteries to confront.

Had we made it into space, we might have had a decent substitute. Death being less than an inch away in the cold vacuum of space, may have provided the stimulation to drive our creativity and invention forward. We all know we’re not going to make it into space in any realistic way.

The 1960s & 1970s was our window.

We had loads of men who were tough enough, for whom hardship and discomfort wasn’t a big deal. We had role models and heroes that every child wanted to emulate. Big men, doing big things, not for clicks, but because they believed in the potential and dreams of humanity.

The window has closed. 

All we have left is a long descent into barbarism. The herd will be thinned out due to disease, war, and stupidity. The surviving humans will forget, except in legends about all we accomplished. Maybe we’ll have another ice age and the glaciers will scour most of our cities and infrastructure from the land.

Ancient aliens meme.15 – 20 thousand years later when odd looking bits & pieces of our civilization and technology pop up they’ll be completely unknown and unremembered. So… those future humans will think of us as Ancient Aliens.

That’s more than we’ll deserve. The reality will be that we were a bunch of morons who contemplated our navels too much, demanded to be accepted while not accepting others with differing opinions, who lost the ability to think our way out of a wet paper bag, then turned our maintenance over to artificial intelligence, while eating bon bons on our overstuffed couches, waiting for our rudimentary service droid to come rub our feet or give us an orgasm that we were too lazy to work toward ourselves.

When the end came, most of us will have denied the obvious truth, instead of getting our fat asses off the couch and actually doing something useful.

This line of thinking has made me wonder how many times before this kind of thing has happened on this planet. Likewise, I wonder if it’s actually commonplace throughout the universe, and a function of technology. 

I’ve thought that perhaps there’s a very narrow window where a civilization reaches apogee. The only way a civilization survives is if they reach a point in technology & science that they realize their planet is about to undergo some cataclysmic change and this knowledge galvanizes the sentient species to focus on creating a solution to the problem.

If they fail, then they fall back into the muck, after some period of time they rise again with half remembered legends spurring them forward again.

To be clear I’m not even thinking about “Climate Change” as our moronic people think about it.

I’m talking a meteor impact like the one that may have snuffed the dinosaurs.

Consider this, the meteor needn’t actually hit Earth. Suppose something big came in at a fraction of the speed of light and hit the dark side of the moon? Say it splits the moon into pieces. Those pieces needn’t rain down on Earth. Just them spreading around in the moon’s orbit dissipating the gravitational effect on our tides and weather would be disastrous. There’s impressive climate change!

Or let’s say it was a large enough object that it changed the mass or orbit of the moon? What then? Destructive tides becoming the norm. Earthquakes and volcanoes restructuring continents over a thousand years instead of millions of years. Imagine that. What about the moon ending up in a decaying orbit?

Now imagine that scientists figure out the impact will happen in 300 years. Do people keep squabbling, or do they turn all their abilities, resources, and effort toward preparing and saving themselves? Ideally, if a civilization was at the right point in it’s development they’d figure out how to advance their technology to save their species.

The way we are today, we’d argue about what color the paint on a starship should be before we built the starship. We’d be arguing if there would be an appropriate amount of transgender representation on board the ark ship, completely ignoring that puberty blockers 10 years before rendered those folks incapable of reproducing.

Douglas Adams might have been more right than he ever imagined in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. We might really be the Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B.

Thinking along these lines is why I think we’ve missed the window.

We’re so caught up in irrational trivial matters that we’d squabble for 300 years and be squabbling / assigning blame right up to the impact.

Looking at our colleges today, it’s painfully obvious our youth don’t compare to the builders, dreamers, creators, and makers of just 40 years ago.

I suppose that’s why I’m not writing as much. It’s too easy to think, “People might be able to read the words that I write, but they’re not going to understand the meaning.”

Thinking like that makes walking the dog, & tossing stuff out of my life, far more productive activities. I need to get small, agile and light.

Then I’ll be ready for what comes next.