Easily Accesible Alternate Realities

Today I went over to my friend's house in Marin County. To say "Marin County" to most of you means nothing because you are from Seattle, Portland, Idaho, other places. However, to most people in the SF Bay Area if you mention Marin a set of images will invariably come to mind for them. Marin is probably one of the wealthiest counties per household in all of America. Many celebs including Sean Penn and George Lucas live there and nearly all the houses are monstro-like in size but with 1/4 the occupancy and no vermin. I know Marin well because I went to high school there and after a few years away to gain some perspective I have gotta say there is no where else quite like Marin to find a bunch of people who are living in a totally different reality. Marin is a hub of new-age, hippie, progressive lifestyles and philosophies. The onus for this post came from a dinner my friend made me at her apartment tonight. She is in a holistic, organic health culinary academy right now and as she cooked the food (which for the record was unbelievably good) she launched into multiple lectures to me about how we are poisoning our bodies with the food we eat and how the answer is in refrigerating your grains and soaking your nuts and tons of other food health tips that seemed so insane to me I actually smiled and listened and considered them. This person also purifies her shower water and burns "essential oils" near her bed at night to help purify a variety of things I surely am not in touch with. The thing about Marin is the people there certainly do have the money to exist in these lifestyles and it may darn well be much better for you to live that way, it just isn't practical for 99% of humanity and that is where Marinites fail to see clearly. They are nearly militant about their way of life and how you actually cannot eat at Burger King because once you know too much you can't go back. Next time I'm in Berkeley I'll tell to the starving college kids on the street and get punched in the goddam mouth. I do however, love going over to Marin every now and then because for the $3 bridge toll I can zip across the Richmond-San Rafael bridge and without doing LSD, Acid or any other hallucinogen, fully immerse myself in a whole other reality. To close I will tell you a brief story about going over to this girl's house once a few years back. Her mom greeted me and I said hi to their dog, which is 15 years old or something like that and the mom told me how she has the dog on all these dietary aids and takes it to a therapist. She says all of this totally deadpan and straightfaced and it took me a terrifying to realize she was dead serious so I had to bite my lip hard. Then she waved a crystal filled with some fluid near my body and watched the fluid. "Good," she said, "your life force is strong." And she was dead-fucking serious.