LA sucks and you can't disagree with me.

Alternative title: Just suck it up and buy those tickets to Disneyland your kids were whining about.

We set the scene like this: blue skies, palm trees, and dazzling skyscrapers. There’s the famous Hollywood Walk of Fame, great food, and tourists bustling about. Some of the best movie stars were made here! Some even live here! Could it be? Could this be it? You’ve done nothing but work your ass off trying to get out of your desolate small town, and this is it! The City of Angels, your ticket to infamy!

Right?!

Wrong!

Let me tell you what this city is other than a collection of plastic bags and bird excrement. It is hot. It is crowded. It is absolutely run down. And, if that wasn’t enough, eighty percent of what the city is actually known for is beyond the average human’s reach.

Los Angeles is a city beyond nightmare. On one hand, you get Beverly Hills. Not only is this place extremely bigoted and pompous (with its own water supply, court system, police department, and fire department). Every house in the hillside is worth more than my house and yours combined with a mansion. And the stores? Don’t get me started.

If you want to get that handbag, be ready to pay up all that money you’ve been saving up for your ever-increasing college debt.

Down that street (and I mean literally) is your usual collection of homeless, pot-smokers, and drug addicts. Now, honestly? This wouldn’t be a problem. I get it. Not everyone can keep themselves afloat, so they find other means of getting by, for better or for worse. It isn’t them that makes the city bad, it’s the people they rely on that do.

It’s the fact that these guys are stuck out in tents, crowding the streets, and making the city atmosphere all the more uncomfortable. While you’re out there eating over-priced tourist grub from Pink’s Hotdogs or Canter’s deli, they’re starving and living off of stolen cigarettes. It sucks!

And don’t get me started on the night life. If you expect to survive in LA past seven PM, I’m sorry to say but it doesn’t happen. Watching my dad swerve around jaywalkers in the dead of night was enough to keep my heart pounding. One step out that door and I would’ve had a heart attack.

It smells of the city too. And, unlike NYC or Chicago, LA isn’t known for its public transportation. So you’re stuck in the push and pull of cars and buses and trucks.. Traffic. Graffiti. And more traffic.

So yeah.

LA sucks and it isn’t as glamorous as people make it out to be.

Especially in the Summer.

So, next time you’re planning that Californian family vacation? Consider skipping out on seeing Tom Hanks’s handprints and go on a trip to Disneyland instead. I guarantee you the meet and greets over there host a way better Mickey than the guy on Sunset Boulevard can pull off with his buddies.