Update: those of you not from Cleveland will learn much about the town’s self-image simply from the existence of this post.

To clarify: yes, parts of Los Angeles, as if this is not common
knowledge, can have crappy weather sometimes, plus occasional
chunky-style air.  We get mudslides.  We get smoke from wildfires.  We
get a bay as filthy as Lake Erie’s long-ago worst every time it rains. 
We’ve got not just one frustrating baseball team, but two.  Plus
traffic that can rival some third world cities.  Median home prices
which start at roughly your wildest dreams and go from there.  And a
nice big seismic fault under our feet, which is deeply reassuring in
the age of Katrina.

I left out the racial tensions, sprawl beyond imagining, and state
government run by a right-wing Austrian.  And yet I still love Los
Angeles.  Lots.  Much as I still love Clevo.

Email I’ve glanced at (I never have time for it all anymore, sorry)
looks maybe  5-to-1 able to comprehend that the following is not a
comparison of one place to another, but a standard-issue, rather
pedestrian complaint about the cheapness of sprawl anywhere.  But since
some Clevolians still freak the instant they hear a word that isn’t
praise for a comeback the city made a decade ago, rest assured: if I
saw a Taco Bell worth praying to in Guatemala, I would write about it
there.

[Post begins here.]  In Ohio for a few days visiting family in and around the Snow Belt. 

Some
things never change.  The Indians lost a game in the ninth inning a few
minutes after my flight landed, so at least that was the same as
always.  And the weather is intolerable, which it usually is here, so
that felt familiar.

Most of all, the conversion of the remaining
bits of greenspace into a vast shopping imperium continues unabated. 
The small town I grew up in, which once had empty expanses of woods
between little neighborhoods of small homes, is now a strip mall
fiesta, one of the leading retail destinations in the entire state. 
The new Taco Bell is incredibly shiny.  Really.  If Taco Bell ever
decides to become a religion, I now know what the cathedrals will look
like.

Not far away, the newest megamall is another in the
current fad of simulated-town monstrosities which architecturally remap
selfish consumption as a form of community.  Its name, which to me
sounds like self-parody: Legacy Village. 
As if the great legacy of our forebears, one we will proudly fight to
pass to our children, is the right to eat at Cheesecake Factory.

This is just a middle-aged guy looking at his old hometown and saying it’s not what it used to be.  Doesn’t make it less true.

PS: can’t we all just learn to enjoy the fact that the Indians do suck, possibly for years to come?  (Much as this space guessed
on Opening Night, just from looking at their ages and stat lines.)  We
can still love them.  Roll with it.  It’s just a different kind of fun.