A native of Los Angeles, I recently told two New York friends that the experiential difference between these two great cities, for me, is comparable to the difference between reading the Internet (L.A.) and reading the newspaper (New York City). L.A. can be dense, yes, but generally, in L.A. you proceed directly to the thing. A bee-lined Prius spirits you to your destination swiftly as a high-speed WiFi connection loads any chosen URL. While ads and commerce may distract, if the driver—the web-surfer—is to be lured from her chosen course, she must forsake her current path/location totally before proceeding to the next. New York City reads like the Old Gray Lady for me. Here you follow any front-page story to the inside of the newspaper past myriad new points of entry. Headlines and teasers beckon you to different stories—international, local, wires—like subway stops opening up to the many pocket neighborhoods as diverse as can be. In New York you’re infinitely distracted, guided by impulse and chance (then there’s of course the New Yorker in LA in a Prius or another car––another story). Surface from the subway, cross town, happen into a bistro for a glass of rosé, or even read that rare piece on Bolivian unrest.

It’s an apt metaphor, I believe, because either city can drive the id totally nutzo. I wonder what Darryl Strawberry would think of this comparison. The former baseball star has spent a good deal of time in the major megalopolises of both coasts. Strawberry grew up in South Central but started his Major League career with the New York Mets—later returning West to join his hometown team, the Los Angeles Dodgers¹, at just the time my youthful baseball obsession was peaking. Perhaps Darryl would appreciate the element of distraction I see as inherent in the experience of the two cities, with his history of deleterious drug and alcohol abuse, depression, and womanizing—which burgeoned during a mostly fatherless, aimless childhood and adolescence in Los Angeles, blossomed during his days in New York with the Mets, and blew his career totally back in L.A. with the Dodgers.

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^{1. He later did a stint in San Francisco with the Giants before ending his career back in New York with the Yankees, making him the only player in MLB history to have played for all four original New York teams.}