This past weekend I was in Los Angeles visiting a good friend of mine. Now I haven’t been to LA in quite awhile. In fact I haven’t been there as a tourist in over 20 years. Which is really weird. I mean I lived in a city for 37 years that is only 7 hours away from LA. You would think I would somehow bump into LA by shear accident in those 20 years. Have you seen how huge LA is? It is like half the southwest corner of America. I even think there are parts that spill into Arizona and Nevada. Hell, there may be parts in DC for all I know.

Anyway, the trip was a blast, I did all sorts of things, blah blah blah. That’s not the interesting part. The part about this trip that I find interesting is how much LA reminds me of Arizona, Nevada, and pretty much any part of the Southwest.

Strip malls, suburbs, roomy downtown, wide roads, parking, sand, water shortages, and tepid weather as far as you can see. Other than some ocean on the west side of the city, LA reminds me of Tucson. Sounds weird I know. LA is about 1500x as big as Tucson, but the entire feel, attire, and lifestyle is much more like Tucson than I remembered. This maybe also due in part to the fact that Seattle is the exact opposite of Tucson in every way.

Anyway, I remember when I went to San Francisco, I thought SF reminds me of Seattle. Maybe not so strange; big cities, similar weather, techie-type jobs, expensive to live, denser inner city. But these are cities that are separated by 800 miles.

So this brings up a bigger issue: why in the hell is California one state?

I know I have talked about this before, but seeing it up close is so obvious to me that this state needs to be halved.

By the laws of transitivity, SF~Seattle, LA~Phoenix, Seattle NOT Phoenix, ergo SF NOT LA. How in the world are both of these cities in the same state?

These two important cities are not just completely different from each other, these cities are much more similar and influential to their immediate region than they are to each other. Oh yeah, these cities are also like 10,000 miles apart.

So it is time to split this behemoth into two separate states. Not on;y will it give them more political clout (2 more senators and more electoral votes), it may shut them up about seceding.