Santa Ana. I have a couple good friends who live in this city and over the last couple of years have taken hundreds of excursions there to go to open mics downtown, and when these regular excursions first began, I was stuck by how it felt a different world than the quiet, forested suburbs of south Orange County where I lived at the time. This is the exact charm of Santa Ana, it's a slice of lively, challenging, smoky, colorful, burning life dropped unexpectedly just north of serene, glossy Irvine and the vast scented malls and private clubs of Newport Beach. I won't remember all the times I've paid too much for IPAs at restaurants in the Spectrum but I'll never forget waiting in a cold night for late bus on Santa Ana's main street outside of a condemned dentist's office, having a conversation about government brainwashing with a woman with one arm while fireworks launched from Latino family barbecues popped and crackled in the sky above us.

If you don't live in Orange County, or even if you do, you might know it as a playground for vapid tan wealthy white Republicans, as much an expensive fantasy version of America as a certain theme park here. Like any interpretation of anything in the world, this both quite true and completely wrong. This is, after all, the region that gave the world the The Real Housewives and Richard Nixon (you're welcome, America). However, Orange County, bless it, refuses to neatly fit this caricature, and Santa Ana is one reason why. This is why I love it-it's one of those places that completely refuses to meet your expectations. Did you know that Santa Ana, Orange County's capital, is almost 80 percent Latino? Did you further know that Orange County has a long-term homeless population of over 12,000, almost as much as LA's, which is the highest in the nation? Orange County as a Babylon of nihilistic Euro-American decadence isn't a lie, or the reality behind a lie-it's simply one part of the big truth. Santa Ana is another part.

I commented earlier on the personas of cities, and how LA has one that beguilingly, smirkingly pleasant, like it's holding something behind its back. Much of Orange County has this same atmosphere, but with the volume turned down. Santa Ana doesn't-though geographically, culturally, and aesthetically it's the doorway to the larger realm of Los Angeles if you're coming from the south, it has an atmosphere of difficulty, struggle, and hope. The lights pollution doesn't look bleak or dystopian here, it looks the eerie first stirrings of a new day at the 5 AM after a hard night.

So whether you live there, live nearby, or haven never been, live a little in the monkey wrench in Orange County's works. Patronize a taqueria. See a local music artist at the Yost Theater, the Observatory, or Beatnik Bandito. Go to an open mic at a coffee shop. Stroll around and take in the Virgin of Guadalupe shrines, pawn shops, used bookstores, bars, and neighborhoods of one of Southern California's most weirdly enchanting cities.