Yellow cab, gypsy cab, dollar cab, holla back.

Whenever I go to another city, I try to sink into the gut of its daily life, dropping down as an unassuming inhabitant, just to see how it feels and maybe because I'm suspicious that I'm missing out on something by planting my roots in Southern California. I've just finished a four day pleasure binge in New York, the the city that welcomed me from the womb. The streets of the Upper East Side caught my diaper-clad baby butt with open arms as my mother accidentally dumped me onto the curb while learning to operate a baby carriage, amongst other complicated machinery no doubt (true story, my own mother dumped me out of the stroller while taking me on a walk to the Met... explains a lot, huh?). New York is the city that my parents fled in 1989, like some kind of neo-dust bowl refugees staggering out west where American Dreams are served with a side of palm trees.

Well, mom and dad, I think you were on to something. New York; nobody can live in this place. I'm sitting in some bar that is certainly too cool, fawning over bankers in suits and journalists and people who actually seem like they might be intellectuals. I almost feel lost without having met an actorwaiter holding a Redbull vodka or rolling my eyes at a hipster who lives with his parents as he gushes to me about a really really deep documentary he's working on about [insert third world county here] . "New York City is full of the smartest people in the world," one of these clever creatures tells me after sipping his scotch. I think it might be true. But if they're all so smart here, how is it possible that they haven't figured out a way to get out of this awful city yet?

I could never survive in New York. You can live in a tenement with no windows, cracked wood seeped in a century of filth, a heart of darkness buried in your own living room. When you live in a 6-story walk up, whether or not you want to get out of bed becomes a major moral dilemma. I'd be making five page lists of the implications of leaving home out every time I ran out of toilet paper.

And then, when you do finally descend your own little Machu Picchu staircase, you're greeted with head-on warfare between god and your umbrella. And let me tell you, nobody wrote a long story full of spiritual guidance about an umbrella, so I don't like my chances in a rain storm.

I fought through the battle, obviously with borrowed rain gear since I only own flip flops. When I made it to the subway station, it dawned on me while a rat scampered past my feet that the Radiohead song "Packt Like Sardines in a Crushed Tin Box" must be about the subway. Tin boxes full of sardines I'd say is a euphemism for subway cars, actually. Looking in, I almost thought we were all heading to an internment camp in those things.

I know what New Yorkers should be thinking. As they shell out their hard earned dollars to live in the lap of desolation, they dream of the promise land in Hollywood where you can escape your day job at a shady bank that eats up your soul and earn your keep without even using one brain cell. All you have to do is dress in the right costume in Los Angeles, and you'll be flying by Beverly Hills in your Maserati in no time.

Sure, maybe New York is the cultural epicenter of this country, maybe it is full of intellectuals and business masterminds. Realism. People who read literature more often than gossip blogs. People who know beauty comes in more forms than botox and bleach. Sure, any old street corner in New York can keep you curious for years, with enough bars and restaurants to serve you all the booze you need to think New York is a nice place. Sure, you'll never be lonely in New York. You'll never be bored. But... I think you might just end up angry.

Is it worth it? Could I sacrifice freedom and sunshine, a sprawling apartment with windows and an elevator, my rat-free Japanese sedan; all to be in a place with people who have substance? Nope. I'll just have to wait for all those intellectuals to figure it out and move here and join me on the beach... hell, even my parents figured it out. It's not that I didn't have a fabulous four days of eating and drinking my way through the city. I can visit New York any old time and love it, as long as I don't ever have to live there.

Los Angeles, until death do us part.