In Texas, we see California as a granola bar....full of fruits and nuts. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! j/k
If only ... I mean, granolas aren't scary like this See, that's the thing, though ... if only .... Up in the Seattle area, we have a number of places that exist for and because of the commerce and trade. Bellevue is a prosperous area, for instance, right across Lake Washington, and next door to that is Redmond, which is home to Microsoft and Nintendo. This is the land of "office parks", and other such developments intended to house business, and such things as restaurants, shops, and in some cases, homes, are an afterthought, placed here and there to make sure the employees can find a place to live or go to lunch. Understanding that such places do play a vital role in our region's prosperity, many also find such places scary, both aesthetically and in implicit moral/ethical dimensions. Irvine seems to look like these places, except that it seems to go on forever. Looking out over Bellevue and Redmond, you eventually see something else. Looking out over Irvine, this aesthetic seems to go on as far as the eye can see. And this is the part of Irvine I saw. For the billions of dollars spent building up the various office parks--I saw what appeared to be the Taco Bell headquarters, a large office facility for Golden State Foods, a huge building bearing the name of Knobbe Martens Olson & Bear, one of the state's largest law firms, &c., &c.--the only words that adequately describe the parts of Irvine I saw are "desolate" and "soulless". I left the hotel on Friday night, aiming to have a drink someplace that wasn't attached to a hotel. It wasn't the biggest thing, just seemed like a nice idea. I was surprised at how difficult it was. I left the hotel, wandered Von Karman and Michelson, and eventually ended up on MacArthur, across from the airport, grabbing a pint of Newcastle at the steakhouse I saw when coming out of the airport; I hadn't realized I had walked so far. (It would be dishonest to say that this was the first bar I encountered; there was another, in an El Torito restaurant next door, that, technically, I passed by en route to Gulliver's. For all the difference it made, I chose steak over chimichangas.) I asked the bartender, a longtime Irvine resident, what downtown Irvine was like. Apparently, there isn't much of a downtown Irvine. It was also explained to me that every once in a while, civic interests argue over the idea of fashioning a city center, but can't ever decide on specifics such as where and how big. One of my associates actually left the hotel in a car, searching for a grocery store. He found one, of course, but the strangeness of Irvine made a pretty firm impression. So don't get me wrong. The Taco Bell building is no more of an eyesore than some we have up here. The office park across the street reminded me of Bellevue, which isn't the worst aesthetic in the world. Even the 24-hour gym across I-405 from the hotel, the one with the massive television screen that you can watch from a half-mile away, isn't completely alien to my sensibilities. The streets are clean. There were no homeless or hookers prowling the shadows. Stumbling back to the hotel, tumbling down the embankment off Von Karman into the hotel parking lot, I was probably the least-respectable person in the area at that moment. Yet, still, Irvine seems a really scary place. Creepy, even soul-scarring if you let it be. There's obviously something about the place I'm missing. So I'm left wondering what, exactly, is up with Irvine?