Seattle

A logging camp in the Pacific Northwest that made some money selling camping gear to idiots fighting for the chance to freeze/starve to death while looking for gold in the Yukon. It then became a logging camp with airplanes and progressed to a logging camp with airplanes and computers. Now it is a logging camp with airplanes, computers, and the biggest collection of snobs, posers, and self righteous assholes of every persuasion ever assembled. Its residents espouse a particularly aggressive type of unpretentiousness that succeeds in setting new human performance benchmarks for pretension. Almost no one there is from there. All of its adult residents diffused there down a steep identity gradient toward a place where they thought they could find, buy, import, hire, or outsource an identity of their own. By the way, how’s that going for you so far? Maybe a few more Frank Gehry scrap piles masquerading as buildings will help. Most of their time is occupied by lecturing less fortunate citizens of this country on how much better everything in Seattle is than in any other place on earth. This leads to obsessive comparing of themselves and their utopia to cities with actual histories and cultural identities, such as: New York, Boston, San Francisco, Tacoma, etc. This delusional herd of “enlightened and beautiful” people exult in, not suffer from, a collective, and well founded inferiority complex. Speaking of being lectured to by these uberwankers, just try and bring up a hobby or interest of yours without having it spelled out for you in a smarmy, condescending tone how the lecturer has pursued that hobby or interest to the most extreme ends humanly possible and how your own pathetic dabbling fails to so much as amuse them. (Try mentioning hiking or some other outdoor activity and watch the fun!) It also has great scenery, weather (despite what you’ve heard), and coffee, none of which make it worth the effort of trying to live there. (unless you’re filthy rich as are way too many residents) In our lifetime, a humongous earthquake will shake the entire heap of coffee grounds, bicycles, Frank Gehry buildings, ecofascists and wankers into Puget Sound, an act not unlike the flushing of the toilet of almighty God. I’ll miss the space needle, but not the people in it.