D-FENS

I am a California boy through and through. I love San Francisco's crazy homeless people; I love San Diego burritos; I love Orange County's cookie-cutter perfection. I love living 20 minutes from the beach and being surrounded by the hottest girls in the world. Nobody can dispute the fact that California is the most badass state in every respect. But there is one universal truth about California that nobody wants to believe:

Los Angeles sucks. God, is it terrible. This is not one of those LAKERS SUX DETRIOT RULEZ!!!!1 things. There is something to be said for city pride, but eventually you have to realize that you just might live in an enormous hellhole. Orange County is nice, but it's like living on the rim of a toilet bowl - you're bound to get some pee splashed on you from time to time, and eventually you're going down the tubes too. I don't really consider myself an Angeleno (I hate that word, too) but I still know the place intimately. I grew up in the metroplex and I spent a LOT of time within city limits, so I feel more than qualified to say that EVERY other major American city I've spent time in outstrips LA in nearly every category. Here are the big winners, though:

1) Traffic. I want to stab myself in the eye with a fork when I hear anyone complain about traffic in other cities. LA's urban planning looks like someone dropped a plate of wet spaghetti on a road map. There is no fully appropriate metaphor to describe the freeway system other than a botched abortion of concrete and steel, because there is zero logic to it. Driving across town? Give yourself an extra hour, because you never know when the 110/10/5/405 will lock up. This completely fucks one of my biggest personal tenets: BE ON TIME. BE SOMEWHERE WHEN YOU SAY YOU WILL BE THERE. LA traffic makes this impossible, because it could take anywhere from 20 minutes to 3 hours to get ANYWHERE. This is true 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, as I can attest from the four-hour delay I hit driving home from the Bay Area last month at 1 A.M. on a Sunday. And of course, every once in a while this is the result of...

2) Televised car chases. These happen with alarming regularity. In 8th grade I remember coming home from school just in time to see a guy stop his truck on the 10, delaying thousands of people for two hours, and then set the vehicle on fire with his dog in it. This was just before he blew off his head with a shotgun. On live television. For about two weeks all the TV stations were contrite about showing a graphic scene of real-life violence to an audience of the hundreds of thousands of kids who were undoubtedly watching. Then like a month later they aired another one that ended in a motorcycle slamming into the back end of a bus. You stay classy, KTVU.

3) Size. The city itself is ENORMOUS even for the number of people who live there, spreading in a more or less uninterrupted stream of low-lying industrial buildings from Thousand Oaks to San Clemente. You can walk across San Francisco in like two hours in any direction. Try that in LA and you’d better bring a week of rations and a bulletproof vest. This means more time spent on those beautiful freeways.

4) Pollution. Everyone owns at least one car, since the public transportation system is virtually nonexistent. Sports practices are occasionally canceled due to “air hazards.” Nowhere else outside of Mexico City have I heard of this. Furthermore, a good 50% of the beaches are contaminated by some variety of toxins and the ocean has the appealing color and consistency of a can of watery pea soup. Not only that, everyone goes on about the weather like it's not virtually identical to what's found anywhere from Cabo to San Francisco - and you can't get lung cancer just by being outside in other places on the West Coast.

5) Sports franchises. Expect fair-weather Lakers flags every time playoff season rolls around, and expect the seats at any sporting event to be filled with a combination of a) Justin Timberlake, Cameron Diaz, and equally abhorrent celebrities on the lower levels and b) bitter Raiders-tattooed vatos in the upper deck waiting to get drunk and stab someone. In the absence of an NFL franchise, the football fans, too, are like homeless divorcees – blindly wandering around, searching for something new to glom onto, pretending they don’t care about their loss. They’re also all Raider fans – imagine downtown Oakland on game day except without the benefit of an actual football game being played.

6) Violent crime. Parts of East LA make "Falling Down" look like a fairy tale, except with much less English. Feel unsafe in New York? LA's murder rate is TWO AND A HALF TIMES AS HIGH. You have to go to the South or Detroit to find a comparably violent city.

7) Culture. This is a place where Ryan Seacrest can get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and the home of "Us Weekly." This is a city that has put on the mantle of the American film industry and then used it to give us "Soul Plane," "8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter," and "Cheaper By the Dozen 2." This is the Mecca for faded jeans, metrosexual douchebags and pink drinks. Everything about LA is saturated with an insatiable drive to impress the perceived yokels from Middle America with shiny pretty things. Furthermore, the residents tend to look down on the rest of the country through their Chanel sunglasses like they’re the world’s authority on anything pertaining to style or entertainment. If you need barely-legal fetish porn or a man-purse, welcome to paradise.

Plus, all this trendier-than-thou attitude is thinly spread over a giant proletariat of Mexican immigrants that grows larger by the day. I can't wait for ten years from now when the entire valley becomes a war zone. When the Battle of Dominguez Hills is fought I'll be watching from Boston or someplace and thinking "Shit, I hope my parents are okay. Good thing they laid that minefield in Garden Grove back in '08."