Then there's the atmosphere -- half the time you can eat the air,
it's got so much stuff floating around in it. It takes the edge out of
the colors. Down here even the traffic lights are pastel. And people!
With a lot of these folks you'd have to check their green cards just to
make sure that they are Earthlings. Then there's the police. In Portland,
when some guy goes bananas, the cops rope off a sixteen block area around
him and call a shrink from the medical school who stands atop a patrol car
with a megaphone and shouts, "OK! THIS! ALL! STARTED! WHEN! YOU! WERE!
THREE! YEARS! OLD! ON! ACCOUNT! OF! YOUR MOTHER! RIGHT? SO! LET'S!
TALK! ABOUT! IT!" Down here they don't waste that kind of time. The LAPD
has SWAT teams composed of guys who make Darth Vader look like Mr. Peepers.
Before they go to bust a bookie joint they mortar it first.
-- M. Christensen, "A Portland Innocent in LA"
