Burning Eden

Soon, California will be nothing but a scorched memory, but I want to remember sunshine and beaches. I want to remember possibility, a place where dreams are born into the real on palm-lined streets beneath endless, eternal blue skies, where the drugs were always good, and the people were always beautiful. 

When I lived in Arizona, California was Eden, the real vacationland, the magic country from which everything good and pleasurable thing came: Disney, music, oranges, avocados, almonds. Blue water and wine and the lure of driving west with the sun and never coming back.