The class I taught the next day again was smaller but still lively, and the time passed quickly. Before I knew it, I was once again packing up my stuff, and making sure everything was locked. I swear, leaving the office was sometimes like the space shuttle taking off, have to make sure everything is secure and in its place and off or in its right setting.

I was off to go behind the great Psychedelic Orange Curtain. Ever since I had read Philip K Dick, saw Scanner Darkly, and started hanging out more with Daryl & Harry, Orange County has looked completely different to me. I basically grew up in Orange County; I spent the first 13 years of my life in northern California, but all my formative years, high school, college, all the years where you actually start to think about abstract things, philosophical things, basically coming down to what does it all mean and what do I mean in it, those years were all spent in Orange County. As I think I mentioned earlier, my first psychedelic experiences took place in Orange County, my first farthest past-the-goalie sexual experiences took place in Orange County, and all of the important stuff, or at least what I consider important, took place in Orange County.

And when most people think of Orange County they actually now probably think of the TV show, of fake boobies in Newport Beach, of conservative republican goings-on, of right-wing industrialized Christianity, embodied in such places such as the Crystal Cathedral and Calvary Chapel. They think perhaps of South Coast Plaza, spend spend spend, and women who dye their hair blonde and wear only Juicy and carry only Coach, of mad dashes to PF Changs in Fashion Island dressed to the nines in hopes of landing a doctor husband or maybe it reminds people of a bunch of rich, stuck up, terminally bored white kids with nothing better to do than sneak into their parents' liquor cabinets and then have good times that end in hushed up abortions a few months down the line. And surely there is that in Orange County, there is no argument there.

But...

Timothy Leary himself went to Orange County, settling in the South, Laguna Beach, Corona Del Mar area. Philip K Dick lived and loved and wrote in his communal crash pad apartment in Brea. The Hell’s Angels ran LSD out of Cook’s Corner down by Holy Jim Canyon in Rancho Santa Margarita, and Trabuco Canyon is an Elrond’s forest full of well-meaning and good-natured hippies who literally hug the trees and play guitars outside at sunset. And of course, yours truly scaled the cliffs of Little Corona with the stars reflected in pupils that had usurped the entire eye and wandered down the paths of Star Ranch Sanctuary with mushroom dreams on the brain and a spiral notebook in hand, ready to write what the plants told me.

When I now go to certain places, I can feel that subtle electricity in the air that is the exact opposite of plastic surgery and Greg Laurie’s altar calls. It sounds like the hum of progress that is not just forward but backward and inward, to the wiring behind the walls, the chips inside the mainframe, the quarks inside the nuclei of atoms, like the buzz of a billion stars that all swirl together to form galaxy upon galaxy and remind us that there are no real borders. Anywhere.