[Blarg]

Bakersfield. So empty and devoid in life the place feels like it has an infused sense of evil. If deadness and mindless conformity could be evil, then Bakersfield will give you a feeling of absolute evil. "gaze blank and pitiless as the sun," from the Yeats poem The Second Coming, springs to mind. The town has that kind of gaze. I'm sure it is the center of some Satanic cult.

I agree on L.A. The place is a desert, but devoid of the natural beauty even a desert has. Very little foliage anywhere, and most of that brown. A lifeless holding pan for hot smog. Everything man-made and most of it dirty and in bad repair. Unutterably smug people with less to be smug about than could be imagined, mixed with a lot of misery and poverty. Fake boobs everywhere and a society and culture that seems built around them.