Editing this

You’d never know that on a regular basis fire rushes in, followed by floods and mudslides. You might never be able to tell that this place is a natural-disaster theme park, not by the way it smells of jasmine and eucalyptus and something I can’t even name.

It’s a kind of Old World, the type that really should be spelled Olde Worlde. So different from San Diego, where a 10-year-old McDonald’s might be considered something historic. What’s weird is that we’re dealing with some similar elements: red-tiled roofs, white stucco, a ripoff of Spain.

Spain. I don’t want to think about what happens there.

ALSO:

The Uber driver laughs at my reaction when she drops me off. “First time?”

“Maybe my last.”

“It’s no Santa Barbara, that’s for sure.”

She has a slight cleft palate, nothing horrifying, just a small split of the lip. Nothing I would notice if I was normal. But I’m not.

“They put the shit out here,” she continues, unashamed at cursing in front of a kid. I like her for it and remind myself to give her an awesome review. “All the chain stores go in Goleta. All the assholes head for IV.”

I glance out the well-cleaned windows of her beautifully maintained Civic.

“Yeah,” I say, sounding as vague as I feel. What I’m seeing out these windows scares me. There’s a whole lot of dark, the distant lap of an ocean, and a hell of a lot of exposed flesh. These aren’t girls who ever had to worry about excess hair, about trying to get it taken care of at some random clinic they pulled off Yelp, about their face blowing up like yet another type of circus freak.

I never even liked Cirque de Soleil, let alone Barnum and Bailey.