Only in America...

... do drugstores make the sick walk all the way to the back of the store to get their prescriptions while healthy people can buy cigarettes at the front.

... do people order double cheeseburgers, large fries, and a diet coke.

... do banks leave both doors open and then chain the pens to the counters.

... do we leave cars worth thousands of dollars in the driveway and put our useless junk in the garage.

... do we use answering machines to screen calls and then have call waiting so we won't miss a call from someone we didn't want to talk to in the first place.

... do we buy hot dogs in packages of ten and buns in packages of eight.

... do we use the word 'politics' to describe the process so well: 'Poli' in Latin meaning 'many' and 'tics' meaning 'bloodsucking creatures'.

... can a homeless combat veteran live in a cardboard box and a draft dodger live in the White House.

The aspiring psychiatrists from various colleges were attending their first class on emotional extremes.

"Just to establish some parameters," said the professor, to the student from the University of Houston, "What is the opposite of joy?"

"And the opposite of depression?" he asked of the young lady from the University of Texas.

"And you sir," he said to the young man from Texas AM, "how about the opposite of woe?

Give me those sudden earthquakes, mud slides and brush fires any old time, the kind of disasters that make you jump right up and run into the great outdoors, and don't keep you waiting in front of the Weather Channel in your mobile home.

How can people live on the East Coast, much less Florida? It's the state of less-than-Biblical plagues, like hurricanes, tornadoes, thunderstorms, bugs, snakes, tourists, theme parks, monster truck derbies and cheap housing developments.

Whenever a hurricane tears up the Florida coast, Californians naturally have to ask some questions about that wacky state of grapefruit and gun nuts. Are hurricanes divine punishment for Floridians' Sybaritic lifestyle of shuffleboard, jai alai, driving on the beach and one-stop shopping for beer, ammo and bait?

I'd much rather face a 7.1 temblor as punishment for too much weird sex, architectural food and Internet start-ups. "Two million flee hurricane," said The Examiner headline as Hurricane Floyd's 150-mph winds moved toward the Florida coast on Tuesday. That's an astounding number of people, about 15 percent of the population of the state.

Let's face it, though. You can do worse than flee Florida, a land that's barely land, where no hurricane is strong enough to blow the bugs away. This is no joking matter because people's lives and homes are in danger. But why is it that typical California disasters always lead to jokes, ruminations and columns about how weird we are to live in California?

Whenever Florida gets leveled by the wind, all you hear are a few lame jokes about trailer parks. You don't hear anything about the rich Floridian drug smugglers and embezzlers who keep coming back for federal disaster aid to rebuild their smashed beachfront homes.

"Trailer park" is a laugh line. "Beachfront home" is not. Californians are resented. Floridians are not, and for good reason. They have to live in Florida, where winter is colder than you think and summer is hotter than you can imagine, except for the daily thunderstorm break, which operates like a steam setting on an iron.

There are many wonderful people in Florida, particularly the few natives, but basically the state was a trick played on gullible, freezing Yankees by Henry Flagler, the original salesman of swamp land.

I've lived through some powerful hurricanes in Florida and New England, and I experienced the '89 quake and the '91 Oakland hills fire. Nobody wants these kinds of disasters in their lives, but for some reason I find quakes and fires easier to take. You can prepare for fire by cutting brush. But when a hurricane is on the way, you sit helpless watching the TV weather map and the biggest blip in the world moving toward you like a rotating nuclear explosion.

Hurricanes give ample time to escape to higher ground, although higher ground in Florida is a few miles south of Athens, Ga.

Most folks stick with their cheaply constructed homes and trailers until the last minute so they can protect their Elvis spoon collections and not live in a gym. Then, all at once, they hop in their cars and jam the causeways and highways. Then maybe they loot.

When a quake hits, there you are, dead or alive, prepared or unprepared. An earthquake is a giant lottery. Your fate depends on happenstance, like whether you happened to be standing under unreinforced masonry. Quakes   don't get names like Floyd either. Floyd was the barber in Mayberry. Here in California we talk ominously about the Big One, or somewhat less ominously about the Pretty Big One. Or else they're numbered '06 or '89 like vintages.

The U.S. Weather Service retires the names of hurricanes if they're big enough. Hurricane Camille killed 256 people, so they hung up her jersey.  There's something very weird about treating a killer hurricane like Magic Johnson, but that's life on the twisted East Coast.

The U.S. Geological Survey doesn't retire numbers, and we remember exactly what those numbers felt like. The only joy in small quakes is trying to guess its number.

Nobody goes out in a hurricane and tries to guess if it's Category 4 on the Saffir Simpson scale. It's easy to tell because the roof goes away and there's an alligator in your stovepipe.

Yes, you have to be crazy to live out there on the Right Coast, where Beltway and Manhattan snobs make fun of us, but send their own aged mothers to live in that snake-ridden appendix hanging at the bottom of the old Confederacy.

Best of luck to all our friends in Florida and points north on the East Coast this hurricane season. But whatever happens, don't even think of moving here.

California is suffering the ultimate disaster, houses that don't shake, slide or burn, but just sit there skyrocketing in price. You don't have to be crazy to live here, just rich. 

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