Of course, whenever someone writes a biting article on our little valley of angels we call Los Angeles, a bunch of people send it to me. Today's was this guy from Vice who for some unexplained reason has moved to "the worst place ever" to live. Usually that means he's here for the same reason every other person who hates it: Trying to get famous.
"But I'm not like the rest of them..."
Yea, that's what they all say. Maybe he's here specifically to collect data for toothy commentary in Vice as they've had a hard-on for taking this place down a few notches ever since their short-lived store was met with an almost non-response. Either way, I'm just here to suggest to anyone out there thinking of penning their own micro-tomes to the dusty city by the sea -- skip it. It's not really that we care about the criticism -- we are way too egocentric for that -- it's more for the simple fact that they are embarrassing to read.
Because we already know. We know there are too many weird hippies here. We know Cafe Gratitude is insane and we know David Spade probably doesn't deserve a Hollywood Star, regardless of the fact that bitching about stars is goofy. We know the air sucks, the people can suck and the fashion sucks. We know, we know, we know. We know everything anyone has to tell us about this town and more.
So reading an outsider's take is often a face-palming experience likened to someone observing the streets of New York are crowded with people or London is gray with a lot of shitty food. The kind of observations that fall under the no-shit-Sherlock category. A rant on the shortcomings of Los Angeles is the writing equivalent of beating up the drooling, skinny kid in elementary school, yet every genius wants to roll in for a bit and think they are the first to notice our emperor is naked. Oh we notice, we just don't care.
Unlike every other city that is about the sites, locations, and places, we instead exist in the negatives. Many would even argue that it is the excess of annoying that makes that which isn't so great. To not see this is many a traveler's -- or newly-resider's -- greatest mistake. They all come here and try to go big, only to realize what we could have told them from the get go: The big mostly sucks. It's the small that makes this place amazing.
That's why people who have found the small hold onto it so dearly while simultaneously uncaring if others see it. It's the friends, the parks, the beaches, and the taco trucks that get overlooked so often by starry-eyed travelers who later reinforce the negatives to their friends without realizing they missed almost everything. But as residents we have fully accepted the shortcomings and often suggest to those who can't that they should probably leave, because the last thing we need here is another car on the road driven by a dude flipping off the joint because he's made the mistake of moving to the worst place ever.