“To have been born and raised in such a place is a stain on the psyche and a strange blessing, an embrace of soft air all your life, laced with whiplash Santa Ana winds sweeping off the wastes of the Mojave and electrifying an atmosphere already charged with the energies of untethered development and entrepreneurial ambition. Buildings are constructed and routinely erased, yet they remain implanted in the native’s mind like seeds of some vaguely remembered myth.”