These days, my nerves are frayed a bit thin. It’s been more than a year since I left Orange County, traded in the prefab, cookie cutter unit for hard wood floors and a clawfoot tub, traded a vaguely aesthetic beige box for an ugly, monolithic old monstrosity built at the turn of the 20th century to house the families of factory workers.

Of course, there aren’t any factories here anymore, at least not many. The factories died-off years ago when America stopped producing things. They moved overseas, where malnourished kids would do the same job for a dollar a month. Worcester’s haunted by the old. The old folks on my street sit on their stoops like they’ve done for decades. At the newspaper I work for, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, the old-timers get a wistful, sad look in their eyes when they talk about the old-style, hot metal method of printing the paper, as if all this cutting-and-pasting and computer pagination was an unseemly shortcut, like not doing it the hard way, the irrevocable way, were somehow less honest.

From my porch, I can see row after row of aging buildings. I can see the nearby corner deli, where the old guy that owns it sneaks a cigarette himself behind the counter. If I were to wander down the street a bit, I’d see row after row of bombed-out warehouses, where the goods they don’t make here anymore aren’t stored. Inside one of them, you can take a rickety old elevator that probably hasn’t been safety-tested since the Carter administration up to the top floor, and be greeted by immense metal sculptures of pyramids with piercing eyes gazing out of them. In another, a punk band thrashes to the smell of motor oil embedded in the walls.

Worcester is dilapidated and haunted, but it has its treasures, and for all its faults, its ugliness and its past-mindedness, it’s real. Real as this building, which has lasted a century, and will probably last another one if the crazy cowboy in the White House doesn’t start pushing buttons randomly. Real as the sadness in the voice of an aging newspaperman, nostalgic for days when printing the news could scald you. Where you had to get it right the first time.

I’m as impermanent as the ember of this cigarette, and if nothing else, I damn well know it. I’m from Orange County, and Orange County is about the electric crackle of the new. The buildings are new, the music is new. Even the Republicans are new. Orange County is a gamble built on ocean sand and adrenaline. It’s a metaphor for consumer culture, where even it’s self is worn and discarded before the next issue of Style is printed. And you can say what you want about its Conservativeness, but consider this: in most conservative places, the mindset is about retaining the past. In Orange County, it’s about shaping the future.

The poet James Still once wrote, “Being of these hills I cannot pass beyond.” I’ve often felt like that about Orange County. Although I’ve left often, I’m always drawn back, as if by tides. When I was young, I thought that O.C. was no place for an anarchist-stealth-Christian-punk-rock-listening-pacifist-writer-and-poet. Too many contradictions brewing in my head, so many that it often felt like my brain was on fire, and none of the contradictions matched with the sterility surrounding me. I was wrong, but then, the young often are. You learn that after awhile.

I love Worcester, but I don’t belong here. Not really, or perhaps, not yet. There’s still too much ocean in me, too much of my spirit drawn westward, although I too have my ghosts, and I still, to paraphrase Rimbaud, wake with my head alight with flame.