I spent about four hours today driving back and forth between an AT&T store and an Apple store and getting sick from the overstuffed scenery. The area was just above Route 8, an east-west freeway in northern San Diego, and it has to be one of the ugliest areas I’ve ever driven through in any area of the globe. Seriously — I was actually feeling nausea.

I saw the lamest minds of my generation driven mad by overdeveloped, freeway-clogged hills and valleys, filthy with condos and malls and fast-food joints and corporate chain stores and looking for an angry cappuccino. Everyone cruising around in their late-model cars and talking/texting on their smart phones and driving in a sort of mad-impulse way, accelerating and then hitting the brakes whenever and doing sudden U-turns between slurps and sips. It’s psychotic — tens of thousands of Louis the Sixteenths driving over/under/sideways/down through grandiose remnants of the over-leveraged Clinton-Bush economic boom. It’s all less than zero.