matt ralston

Your Guide To Vacationing In Los Angeles If You’re An Asshole

There is nothing sadder to me than watching families from the midwest visit the Hollywood Walk of Fame. This is a part of LA that every local strives pretty strongly to avoid. It’s comprised of sticky sidewalks, places that sell crack pipes, and aggressive homeless people missing limbs and convicted rapists dressed as Spiderman.

The attraction of the place is that there are celebrity names embossed onto the sidewalk. Looking at names printed on the sidewalk is roughly as thrilling as reading the text “Craig T Nelson” on your desktop browser, which is actually a far superior experience because your home office most likely doesn’t reek of piss.

The depressing thing is watching the entire family pretend they’re not totally disappointed. Crew cut dad wearing cargo shorts and a shitty T shirt with graffiti of a dragon on it, 13 year old daughter wearing inappropriately short shorts, pudgy son, nondescript mom with a bob cut and quite flabby triceps.

We’ve all seen it a thousand times.

I live not more than a mile from this Walk of Fame, and I know what you tourist people do. You come here, fail miserably at vacationing, and return to your third tier town to talk shit about LA and how terrible it is.

But, here’s the thing, LA isn’t terrible.

You’re terrible. 

You have somehow succeeded in being less cool than this fucking guy, I hope you’re happy.

You could visit any town, spend your time in the shittiest part of it, and form a negative opinion of that town.

In my opinion, the best town in America is Santa Barbara. But that’s just my opinion. Picture your favorite town, and all the things you like about it. The restaurants, the parks, the kooky busker fantasizing about sexually assaulting you while covering Cat Stevens.

Then picture someone visiting your favorite town and spending the entirety of their stay waiting on public transportation and hanging out in the McDonald’s bathroom.

Even if you were in Narnia, you would firmly believe Narnia sucks.

So it kind of pisses me off when people visit LA, get duped into booking some discount hotel with a name like Hollywood Heights, located near the freeway and adjacent to a doughnut shop that is obviously a drug den, and proceed to say that LA is a shit hole.

I’m not saying LA isn’t without its problems, but overall it’s a pretty good place to live.

Certainly better than wherever these people are vacationing from.

The traffic here is really bad.

Yeah that’s true. That’s why you don’t drive from Hollywood to the beach at five in the afternoon. Sorry we couldn’t clear out millions of people so that you could drive eighty miles per hour to the Santa Monica Pier. A lot of people live in LA. There are more people in LA than where you live. Usually more people live in places where people want to live. Nobody wants to live where you live. So there are less people where you live. If your town proves to be in any way desirable, a lot of people will move there and you’ll have traffic also.

The drive from Missoula to Billings is five hours. You will see more of humanity in an hour of being stuck in LA traffic then you will on that drive. Malibu and Koreatown are more different than Missoula and Billings are. Little Tokyo and West Hollywood are more different than St Louis and Kansas City. But I don’t walk into a bar in Lincoln and complain that it takes an hour to get to Omaha. This is what you’re doing when you bitch about traffic. It’s annoying.

If you go out in public hoping to catch a glimpse of a celebrity your priorities are completely misplaced. 

Let me sum up the entire experience and save you the trouble: That guy is way tinier than I thought.

He’s also not a jerk. You were bothering him while he was eating with his daughter. You’re a jerk. 

Did you know that if the animals in the zoo were smart enough that they would kill everyone who patronizes a zoo because they’re being held captive?

It’s the same with celebrities, just the inverse. When they see a TMZ van full of boogery idiots drive by their house they briefly consider taking the entire party out with a machine gun, but they know that going to jail would jeopardize their plans of lounging by the pool and screwing models.

It’s simply not worth it.

Nobody is impressed with your photo next to the Hollywood Sign. 

Have you never heard of Photoshop?

I was asking a Mexican friend of mine why it is that Mexican people decide to have so many children. She informed me that in Mexican culture it is seen as an indicator of a man’s virility when he has many children. So basically, if he has seven kids, that is proof that he has had sex at least seven times.

Based on that logic here’s my question: Why don’t you just publish a sex tape and save your money?

Going to the Hollywood Walk of Fame is like going to Egypt and visiting a replica of the pyramids. 

Just because you make bad decisions doesn’t mean you should talk shit about thirty million people.

LA is a good place to live. Not an especially good place to visit. It’s not Vegas. It’s good for a few years more than a few days.

If you’re going to come to Southern California, go to Malibu and Venice. Go to some gay bar in West Hollywood. Go to Manhattan Beach, Hermosa, even Laguna. Chinatown. Go barhopping in Los Feliz. Go to fucking Sugarfish.

If you take your kids to Disneyland you’re a horrible parent. 

Why not tape their eyes open and force them to watch media conglomerate propaganda in a dank room at the airport?

If you’re an adult couple with no children and you visit Disneyland you have a diagnosable mental disorder, see a therapist, he can’t hurt you anymore.

LA is a large area, it’s not that complicated. 

It took a while to get from Disneyland to Ventura County?

No fucking shit.

I don’t want to get overly scientific, but it turns out they’re actually really fucking far from each other. LA County has a much greater land mass than that of greater Des Moines. It’s easier to get from one end of Tacoma to the other, in large part because it’s one tenth of the distance.

As part of a new feature if anyone has any questions about their impending trip to LA, feel free to email me at matt@mattralston.net and I will respond and also google you and talk shit to my friends about your haircut.

Also, just go to San Diego or Santa Barbara, what the hell is your problem?

Leave a Reply