Playground of Angels

Excerpt from Yes'
And You And I

Watching the world, watching all of the world,
Watching us go by.

And you and I climb over the sea to the valley,
And you and I reached out for reasons to call.

Coming quickly to terms of all expression laid,
Emotion revealed as the ocean maid,
As a movement regained and regarded both the same,
All complete in the side of seeds of life with you.

I'm not the type to use song lyrics in a description. However, I was listening to one of my old Yes CD's on the way to a friend's house who lived in the small town of Rancho Santa Margarita. RSM is one of those odd towns, like it should have a gigantic "inspected by 49" punched on the side of every one of the steel structures. Let's go back in time, it's 1997, and Rancho Santa Margarita is a rolling expanse of brush and hills. The toll road, highway 133 is being built through the hills, and the contractors realize that their road is going nowhere. That's California for you, keeping the money flowing by building freeways through vast planes of unadulterated nature. Heaven forbid we in California have a tree that can't hear the roar of a freeway next to it.

Then some smart guy came with a great idea. Instead of build a road to a town of particular importance, let's just BUILD a town for the ROAD to go to! Wabam! A few strings are pulled, and before the environmentalists at Greenpeace could organize a protest to save ten thousand acres of trees, RSM emerges from the ground. It's probably one of California's most successful weekend projects. After all, RSM has been deemed as the number one place to live in California.

Granted, that statistic was determined by a group of yuppies and soccer moms. As for us REAL human beings, we see it as a nice town with nice vistas, yet freaks us out because there's a freaking playground at every conceivable nook and cranny. I swear, I would have to step over a bustling playground when hopping out of the shower. And not just playgrounds, but also at every possible venue, there's either a swimming pool or a jacuzzi. And with those, there's always a weight room as well. This is a town where you'd find the horror of horrors: a Starbucks across the street from a Starbucks.

It's a town that just hopped out of the ground and was infiltrated by Whirlpool and Maytag to build the jacuzzis before any plans were made for housing! "I'm sorry ma'am, we must buldoze your house to make way for a public laundry room." "But sir! There's one just five doors down!"

Attention potheads. Every high school kid in this town has a dimebag, and the police are too busy pulling over El Camino's for looking too "urban" to really care.

That's the story of this town. Beautiful place, really. Wouldn't mind living there, granted that seventy-five percent of the rent is for a mountainside view. But if it's to live in a place where there's a Wendy's within spitting distance, and to have the main street Alimeda be considered a traffic nightmare because the average commute speed is only thirty-five at rush hour, it's definitely one of those jewels far away from everything. I had always wanted to do a photography session there, and just last week, I finally got the opportunity.