One of the things that was so interesting growing up in a small city in northern California - and later returning to work in this region after living in Los Angeles - is how much energy was spent on discussing L.A. Folks who had only seen L.A. on their way to Disneyland had opinions on just about everything from how people drive in "the crazy traffic down there," to the smog and how crowded and supposedly violent L.A. is, etc. But when I moved to L.A. for graduate school I saw that the residents very rarely worried about the opinions of others - in fact, for most Los Angelenos the world is contained within their county's boundaries. There's just no time for talk about San Francisco, Sacramento, Orange County or San Diego.
Yet L.A. is not like New York City, a jurisdiction whose residents seem obsessed with convincing others of their supposed superiority. People live in L.A. because they like living there - an awfully simple notion that seems to be so terribly difficult for others to understand.
Imagine my surprise when in today's San Francisco Chronicle I found these words written by the great columnist Jon Carroll, who seems to have hit the nail on the head (Kudos, Jon!):
(A friend) thinks L.A. is a place for the brain-dead. He says, if you turned off the sprinklers, it would turn into a desert. But I think -- I don't know, it's not what I expected. It's a place where they've taken a desert and turned it into their dreams.
I've seen a lot of L.A. and I think it's also a place of secrets: secret houses, secret lives, secret pleasures. And no one is looking to the outside for verification that what they're doing is all right.
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