contagious car culture

I detest car culture in all its forms. Indeed, one of my minor life goals is to avoid ever owning a car. So far, so good. Sometimes it’s nice to get a rental and explore forested highways and New Mexican desert wastes (I adored my rented convertible in Santa Fe in August 2005), but on the whole, if I can’t walk to something I resent it on some level.

For this reason, Los Angeles ought to be hell on earth for me. But I rather like the place, for reasons I’m still struggling to articulate (Ian Bogost and I were discussing this yesterday; he was a USC undergraduate and UCLA Ph.D. student, so he knows the place as well as a non-Angeleno can know it).

As for walking, I suppose I could leave this hotel and go for a morning walk. There are sidewalks here, after all. But somehow it would feel about as absurd as riding a subway train in my Iowa hometown of 4,000 people. It just wouldn’t feel right to go for a walk in Los Angeles.