As someone who grew up in not so fancy Hollywood in the 1970s, attended Le Conte Junior High School and Hollywood High School (no glamor there I assure you), moved away, moved back, married in LA, had children in LA and finally escaped, I can vouch for the pure unadulterated awfulness that is Los Angeles.

Yes, LA is wonderful for its ethnic diversity. I do miss that in the Pacific Northwest. That's about it. The sheer human density and traffic are awful beyond belief. The divisions of wealth and poverty are exacerbated to a painful level. The air is disgusting. The movie and media industries infect everything, with their deep superficiality... and if you are not a part of that joyous superficiality... angling or climbing within the biz... you quickly discover that relative to the soul of that city you are a nobody and a nothing. (This is particularly true of "West LA" ... elsewhere, I can't say.)

Do places have souls? I once read a learned treatise that explained that Las Vegas is a completely ordinary American city in every measurable social scientific and political sense. It was a remarkably convincing proof, and if you believe that study you'll believe anything. I believe that the soul of Las Vegas is exactly what you think it is ... one long drunken thieving gambling glut of superficiality and depression, surrounded by failed dreams and service industry jobs. I don't care how many Tibetan mystics and salt of the earth folks you say live their day to day lives in that hell hole.

So also, Los Angeles. It's a fine thing that G. Keillor now travels in circles where he meets the many academic and media stars that call LA home, and that he enjoyed a cruise around its wealthier streets. Of course there are folks who like their lives there. You'll find such folks in every place. But you have to look deeper, explore the dark places, ask about the balance between darkness and light, ask about the poor and dispossessed upon whose backs the high and the mighty build their glorious lives, explore the relationships between all these players on this stage.

You have to ask "where does this place get its water from, and who did it steal that water from"?

You have to ask "what is this place's relationship to the planet earth and to the local environment?"

You have to wonder is this the future, or what the world looks like a moment before the oil runs out and oil based civilization draws to its sudden close?

I miss the ethnic diversity, but LA is, other than that, simply and plainly hell on earth, or at least one of its several portals.

Like any moderately happy married monogamist guy ... I wonder about other partners, polyamory, etc.

But then I think about my kids, and the effects of constantly shifting romantic attachments on their lives.

Much as I might like to add a sexual partner or two to my married life, I just can't see how it could be in my children's interest to follow that fantasy.

Someone will get pissed off eventually. Someone will move out. Some child will be sleeping at two houses. Some child will not have Mommy and Daddy waking up in the same house, and being there for him/her every day. You just know it.

So I'm going upstairs to my wife now, to sleep with the woman I've slept with for 15 years and produced 2 children with. I give a little sigh for other possibilities, but I don't think I'll follow them. It's all "for the children", the most important reality in my life, the most important thing I've ever done with my life, the only reality that will matter in the end.

My feeling about marriage is "it's really not about you (or me)" Not once kids are involved. (Exceptions for really miserable relationships of course...)

So far that seems to outweigh any other fantasies or desires for complex tribal arrangements and middled aged sexual or romantic variety.

My desire and excitement for my spouse waxes and wanes (but it does wax sometimes!) but none of that matters too much because my commitment to my children is absolute, and I don't think I or most people are very likely to be able to live out a life of total commitment to a litter of children in a polyamorist community.

(Someone will have a counter example of course... but I'm speculating about most average folks... including me.)