I can feel the city humming from over the horizon, before we get anywhere near. Occasional sparks of light merge slowly into an organised gridwork of towns until finally it’s there just below us, stretching in every direction endlessly.

The winding ribbons of the freeways are so bright it hurts the eyes.

It’s almost too much; too crazy. I’ve never seen anything so out of control, so wanton, so… American.

At this height, as the plane begins its final descent, the City of Angels wears a halo; a filthy crown of smog encircling countless square miles.

It’s not the picturesque hills and “Victorians” of San Francisco, and it’s hard to fall instantly in love with LA. Even from a distance, she’s clearly a filthy whore of a city.

As I step out of the plane at LAX I’m wondering what new tricks she’ll be able to teach me.

This article first arrived on the interwebnet on Sunday, June 26th, 2005 at 7:46 pm .
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There are thousands of articles on this very subject all over the internet. 39% of them are cleverly-disguised attempts to sell you little blue pills, 26% of them lead inevitably to a badly-researched, logically inconsistent Wikipedia article and 5% are written in an ancient Navajo dialect which is only spoken by 2 professors. The remaining 30% are, like this one, of very little interest to anyone besides their original author (and even he's a bit bored by it).