but who in your measly little world are you trying to prove that you're made out of gold and can't be sold

If you live in the United States, and say you live in California, people automatically assume that you mean Los Angeles, and everywhere else in the state is a gray area that exists only in their imaginations, or maybe not even there. In the past three years I've lived in LA, New York, Orange County, back to LA, and all the while commuting back to the Bay Area where I'm from to gather my marbles, and come back to earth. When I first moved to New York six years ago, I almost instantly fell into a chronic writers block, and for a while after, completely lost my fervor, and quit writing all together. It was only after I returned to the Northern California isolation, and went all "Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch" status, that I was able to come home to my pen and paper and snuggled up in the bosom of Mother Nature once again.