“Fuck you,” Brian said under his breath as he slapped his palm against his forehead, killing the mosquito that had just bit him. “Mother fucking skeeters. You may have tasted my blood bitch, but you’re dead now!” The afternoon was turning into evening and all the bugs were coming out to play.

Brian sat outside of the service station he worked at, waiting for his shift to end. A fucking dead-end job in a fucking dead-end shithole, off a fucking nearly forgotten highway, in the middle of the fucking California desert.

People think of California in all sorts of ways. Stereotypes about hippies, liberals, homosexuals, and other “fruits and nuts” of the counter-culture; or Silicon Valley tech geeks; or Hollywood greed and glamour; or endless summer days and beaches filled with beautiful people. The truth is that the majority of the central part of the state is like something out of a David Lynch film—a really boring David Lynch film.