Welcome toOHMYGODGETDOWN!

I keep waiting for the Nobel laureate or an Olympic decathlon champion to rise up and put my hometown on the map. Because everyone knows where Nobel prize winners come from. I hear Frederick Sanger's birthplace has a waterslide* and a gift shop.

But I'm rethinking the decathlon thing. I'm pretty sure the last decathlon champ anyone can immediately remember would be Bruce Jenner, who is now mostly famous for being the stepfather to the reigning succubi of reality television and a plastic surgery don't. I was going to say at least winning a decathlon would get you on a Wheaties box, but when was the last time you saw anyone buy a box of Wheaties? Was it Mary Lou Retton?

We've got an image problem out here in Inland SoCal already, what with the reputation for producing little except bros and meth.** While we can be proud of the very high quality of both, like Microsoft, we're only making things in large numbers that nobody really wants.

There's been some progress. Home prices are rebounding. Crime is down overall, as it is everywhere really. It seems like fewer and fewer people are being killed by the choking fume we call an atmosphere out here every year.

All indicators up! Or, OK, not precipitously down. Or at least, you know, hovering somewhere around national averages for most quality-of-life metrics in a way not to raise eyebrows or trigger Congressional investigations into neglect, mismanagement or fraud.

But apparently economic, criminal and/or transportational measurables within an unalarming distance of the standard deviations for typical Americans is not enough to make national news, oh no. For that we need a crazy and apparently invisible homicidal former policeman. He's shooting other cops a few hundred yards away from my high school. He's torching his truck at the ski area I was at a couple of weeks ago. If the news comes on and I have the opportunity to stand up and point at the television and shout "Hey, I know that place!," I'd like it for once not to be intertwined with something that is not inescapably and inarguably insane, evil or both.

There are good things about the Inland Empire. Not so much the schools, traffic, water quality or reliable stability of the earth under our feet, but by God we have... well, I was going to say "resolve" but that's really only a thing you point out after something awful has happened. Which I guess in our case just makes it that much more empirically true.



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*I hear the temperature and viscosity of the splash pool are very off-putting.

**Probably not happenstance, those two together.