Also, There's Not Even Really A River

It's easy to be overshadowed when your not even a suburb, but an exurb. If you're not familiar with the term, it means specifically "occupied non-rural space designed to make suburbs feel better about themselves." Essentially, in a major urban area, there's the core downtown and whatever unfortunate highway ring that surrounds it. The suburbs sit snugly around that ring, all cinched and tszujed, accessorizing the main ensemble for a complete look. And then past that, there are the dangling threads, the tacky baubles and clash pieces that technically go with the outfit, but nobody really wants to acknowledge or invest the energy to reach to where they are to find out anything at all about them. These are the exurbs, the ascots of the modern metropolitan body social, the civitas sine suffragio, where we get to grow up with the same TV weathermen and destination theme parks as the inner districts, but with careful exclusion from any claim to citizenship.

Basically, being from Riverside, I can say I'm from Los Angeles, but only if I'm outside the continental United States. In the U.S. but outside of California I can say "about fifty miles outside of LA." In Northern California I can say "in the good part of the state, you fucking hippie." And down here, I have to say "Riverside" with the requisite amount of shame and then white-knuckle my way through minimum 10 minutes of smalltalk about how the other person could never imagine living in so mythologically distant and hellish a place.

It used to be that we were famous for a few things in our own right, mostly around this old hotel where Nixon got married and the fact that we used to provide most of the world with its citrus fruit before the whole industry fucked off to the pestilential dinosaur-harboring tax haven that is Florida, America's distended appendix.

Every once in a while there will be a flourish again where we'll struggle and strive against the restraints of our cursed non-beach-adjacent location to try and assert our name. We try to call ourselves the "Inland Empire," which sounds bizarrely grandiose, but a) it's also sort of taken by similarly empty expanses of inland Washington state and Idaho, the white nationalist capital of America and b) it's caught on less down here than "Valley of the Dirt People." But in our favor, David Lynch did make a film about us called Inland Empire as recently as 2006 which... uh... well, now that I think about it, it's a David Lynch film, so it's less about us than rabbits on television... I think? I don't know. A Laura Dern show was set here once. And that was mostly coherent.

What inevitably happens, however, is these spasms of notoriety come and go and we get swallowed up again by the glitz of Hollywood and Disneyland and we revert to being the place not on the way to either of those things.

It's not that our ideas of self-promotion are bad, there's just a lot of pop culture noise coming out of literally every space around us. Even the empty desert to the east is more popular.

As proud as I am of the place I live and as much as I'd like to fight some of the negative connotations* as not just incorrect and lazy but actively perpetuated by shitty places invested in the idea of maintaining someone else's shittier reputation just for the sake of the real estate comps, I can't get behind every initiative. Just last week a plane crashed into a neighborhood here for the second time in about 18 months. I just want to be on the record here saying that if some chamber of commerce opportunist out there wants to try to spin this tragedy into even more free publicity as the Neighborhood Plane Crash Capital of the World, I am firmly opposed to the idea. These crashes, however sensationalized they might be, are human tragedies deserving of respect and distance.

To deny either of those things would be to normalize the abhorrent. There's enough of that happening already.

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*True story: Breaking Bad was supposed to be set in Riverside, but fucked off to Albuquerque. Because I guess even our meth problem isn't sexy enough. Compared to fucking Albuquerque.