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## I Remember California
> I remember redwood trees, bumper cars and wolverines
> The ocean's Trident submarines
> Lemons, limes and tangerines
> I remember this
>
> I remember traffic jams
> Motor boys and girls with tans
> Nearly was and almost rans
> I remember this
> -- <cite>Michael Stipe </cite>
Red is the color of blood entering the world. Our blood is blue while it is ours, but once it leaves it returns to the world red, not blue. Leaving you, leaving me, always red. Ever since I was a small child and told for the first time that blood was only red when it made contact with the air, I have wanted to go in a pure oxygen environment to bleed blue. Alas pure oxygen environments are hard to come by. So far as I have been able to research none of the astronauts -- who spent perhaps more time than anyone else in pure oxygen environments -- ever thought to prick their skin and produce a little blue blood.
Nothing seems so alien to me, so unsettling as bleeding blue blood. Traveling to other worlds, alien ships on the white house lawn, even something so prosaic as finally receiving that message SETI is waiting for in vain, none of it seems to me so alien, so exotic as the very simple, but deeply unsettling idea of watching blue blood ooze out of a cut in my arm.
Our planet is a place where blood is red. Like sunsets, like red rock mesas, like red clay, like red taillights, like muddy red marshes, our blood is red. Our planet is red, in part at least, though the moniker of red planet has already been assigned to another in our culture. I propose that's a misnomer, a mistake of observation. Mars has red dirt and, so far aw we know, not a lot else. It's monochromatic true, but it does not celebrate and revel in red like our planet. And since it seems painfully obvious at this point that no one will ever journey to mars, it seem high time we reclaimed that mislaid label and put back where it belongs, here on earth, The Red Planet.
California is a red state. The color overwhelms nearly every part of it, from the red of the golden gate bridge, to the pacific sunsets, to the alpenglow of the high sierra to the line serpentine red of taillights snaking up the 405 through the Hollywood Hills.
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