Good for you California, I have just one more suggestion to your independency:
Take all illegal imigrants of USA and send them to your lovely new country, join to Mexico and become the Mexfornia. I give 2 months to you beg for clemency to USA again.
California will not be able to exist as an independent country. If they secede from the United States, then the only viable option for them is to merge with Mexico (even Arizona and New Mexico can try this). The local economy will disintegrate if they remain as an independent nation.
You have to have some reason to say this before it makes sense.
When I was down there in the dot-com days, they loved to say that it was the 5th largest economy in the world. (When I was in Texas those folks liked to brag about everything being big, but their deer looked like large rabbits to me.) CA's central valley is productive enough to supply the entire U.S. with enough food to eat, and they have water coming out their ears (if they had not torn out all their dams and flush most of it down the rivers in order to save a certain small fish.)
Basically, CA has the natural resources to make a fairly thriving independent nation. Their only real problem is that they got all fucked up in the head somehow. It's a matter of conjecture whether they became a death-cult as a result of the brain eating virus or the other way around. One way or another, they could more easily lose Silicon Valley than they may imagine. It is composed in large part by migrants who've left for greener pastures before and are quite capable of doing so again.
Joining with Mexico would shorten CA's TTL by a few hops as the new owners carve up the spoils, but the end result is the same. Their kind of sickness could eventually drag the rest of the U.S. down as they chronically infect other states via money'd expats (most recently Colorado seems to have fallen quite ill) so I hope they declare independence sooner than later.