America's Gloomiest Cities

Remember when 'quality of life' was the newest sociolinguistic flavor of the month, like maybe sometime in the 1970s, and you couldn't turn around without someone referring to their personal, local, regional, national, gastrointestinal, sexual, or ecological quality of life?

You don't? Well, in that case, maybe you'll remember 'lifestyle' - another neologism that has outlived its 15 minutes of fame by about half a century. Popular phrases come and go; most run their course, are retired and put out to pasture. Add your own least-favorite overused phrase, but beware, by mentioning it you'll be putting it back into circulation.

Luckily we have the likes of BusinessWeek and the inimitable James Lileks to come up with a replacement phrase to bring the cultural lexicon into the age of the not-so-great depression: America's Gloomiest Cities.

Here's a magazine issue that will fly off the racks: BusinessWeek has released a list of "America's Gloomiest Cities." Next month: "America's Best Organic Soup Lines." You'll want to know if we made the list, and I'm loathe to tell you. These "America's Most (Fill in the Blank) Cities" stories may have actual science behind them, but A) So what, and B) Who cares? (Lileks)

First of all, anyone who can write like this will never be out of work. Second, for reasons that many of my readers will immediately understand, I love BusinessWeek. I think it's the best magazine of its kind on the planet, and I wish its editorial and production staff everylasting success and well-being. Lileks goes on:

Well, we do, of course. Every citizen wants to know where their city stands on a list, even if it's the Top 936 Places to Raise a Ferret or some such ginned-up idea. It would be great if we were No. 1 on the "Top 75 Cities That Don't Care About America's Best City Lists," but even then the media would note the fact and spoil it for everyone else.

Secondly, for reasons that only Gven Golly might understand, I take these rating systems seriously. I've been redesigning the color scheme of my personal parachute ever since Richard Bolles airlifted his bestselling book into career planning and job placement centers across Amerika in that same decade (see above) that no one reading this can remember.

Long story short, Gven didn't share my enthusiasm for systematically cataloging my preferences for places to live and work according to the geographical, psychological, and socioeconomic criteria neatly charted along the X and Y axes of neatly constructed, rational Cartesian grids. How anyone can draw up a decent itinerary without some criteria is a mystery to me.

We've always had different methods of navigating the planet, making it even more miraculous that we've kept co-navigating all these years. While I'm busy drawing straight lines on all the charts and graphs and maps, she's on deck intuitively sniffing the breeze and pointing, "Let's go there." Given her penchant for sunshine and aversion to overcast, I don't think America's Gloomiest has a chance.

There is usually somewhere warmer than where we are, although there have been exceptions. She was agreeable when I suggested Chicago. She was less than enthusiastic when I lobbied for the Redneck Riviera of South Alabama, and Central Swingstate sounded pretty good by default after a year in that cultural backwater.

Lately we've been talking Asheville, Portland, Santa Fe, Traverse City, and Chicago again, although it's all in the idle speculation stage, with no solid information to base anything on. My friend Tom was in Sedona recently for a wedding - his wedding - and by all accounts it is an amazingly beautiful place. Coincidentally another friend was there about the same time en route to a large hole in the ground allegedly carved by a river, which was pretty amazing too if you're into that kind of thing.

I'm not sure the desert would be my first choice. I like trees too much. It's probably genetic. My people came from within a few miles of the North Sea, the Bay of Fundy, the Mississippi River. I might be a fish out of water around all that high, dry red rock, high-energy vortex or not. I'll take a pine forest and a babbling brook any day.

While I'm busy being flippant, there is real journalistic research behind these reports of gloom. Apparently Portland, Seattle, New Orleans, and Detroit have high rates of suicide and depression, not just rain and unemployment. So there is reason for gloom.

Just like there is a suicide belt, there is also a homicide belt (Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and Baltimore) and a stroke belt (Southeastern U.S., including South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi). (BusinessWeek)

Maybe this teaser article will kick start me into some research of my own, adding other parameters of importance, such as parks, the arts, public libraries, hills, and snowfall to determine the best place for an unemployed editor to live. This could become a project.