Controlling the Present

Today I went questing for a new car. My old one actually still runs and runs well, but the insurance company has already laid their demon eyes on it and are trying to reclaim it quickly so they can cut me a wholly inadequate check and wash themselves of me. Well, screw them, I liked that car and don't have another one yet. So, I find myself traveling thirty miles south to the lovely town of Hemet, a place whose look matches exactly the quality of the name. Hemet follows in the great tradition of shitty places given equally shitty names, and I'm not sure which one determines the other. Were places like Gary, Indiana, Twiggs County, Georgia, or East St. Louis awful places to begin with, or did they mutate along the aesthetic lines of their names?

Hemet is, surprisingly, in the desert. It is just a poorer city than Riverside and cannot afford to import and steal as much water as we can, so the place is rather dryer, dustier, drabber (?), and other similar-meaning d-words. Despite being located in the blasted wasteland between two other blasted wastelands, Los Angeles and Arizona, people here (and I'm sure elsewhere) are crazy enough to insist on maintaining some sort of lawn. Despite the fact that the closest body of water is the Pacific Ocean, residents of this little burg have created gravel front yards, lined with fences. The classier homeowners in fact lay down Astro-Turf, complete with a brick-lined walkway to their front door. Some of you may have read that and thought it was a typo, or that you haven't had your bran muffin this morning and are hallucinating, so let me repeat that: Astro-Turf yards. With brick-lined walkways, to keep the plastic weeds out. Ten-to-one they actually landscape that shit with a Pop-Pop toy mower.

Why do these people insist the world must change to fit their needs? All around Riverside there are fountains and lush lawns, as if people are flaunting the water in the face of four billion years of geology. "Haha, desert!", they seem to say, "we're such opulent persons and such engineering geniuses that we pipe in water from hundreds of miles away just to gush it up in the air for no reason at all!" It reminds me of the opening scene in the novel Dune where the ruler of the desert planet pours out a glass of water onto the ground before a state dinner, displaying his elevation above the natural state of things.

Well bad news human beings! You are not exempt from the natural state of things (see Global Warming). Stop trying to terraform an already abundant planet. Any good argument of course must offer a solution, so mine is this: stop moving to the fucking desert. Who the fuck walks 100 miles in the scorching sun and plants his flag right next to an ocean of sand-blasted rock and a sun-bleached cow skull and says, "Let's put a city right here! And you know what, let's call it Riverside just to fuck with people!". So in protest I've decided to stop drinking water altogether and imbibe nothing but bottled spirits and beer. It's for your own good I'm doing this, you know.

I didn't buy the car.