This Is Misery?

I've been thinking more about the Forbes magazine people putting Cleveland at the top of their list for most miserable U.S. cities. My initial gut reaction is to say that after years of hawking magazines, I haven't seen a whole lot of people buying Forbes, and those who do seem to me to be about the most miserable lot this side of those who buy All About Beer magazine (let's face it, if you have to read about beer, you're missing the point by a mile). My next thought is good, let outsiders think Cleveland is so miserable. That way they stay away and leave all of us here with enough elbow room to enjoy all the great things about the place.

Turns out the "misery index" these Forbes nabobs used included such trite, been-there-done-that items as crime, government corruption, housing foreclosures, unemployment, etc. Significant issues, sure, but hardly the be all and end all of daily life in the used-to-be-quite-big-but-dwindling-yearly city of Cleveland. So I started compiling my own anti-misery index, a list of various amenities that make living quite nice and serve as quite a powerful antidote, especially when considered en masse, to any perceived misery lurking in the environs.
A small but significant sampling of my anti-misery list (a list I'm sure any sentient person would agree is pretty universal and one in which Cleveland scores pretty high across the board, I might add) should go a long way to convincing the Cleveland put-downers they wouldn't know a knackwurst from a bratwurst if one or the other gave them gas for a week. See how many of the questions posed below your city can honestly answer a resounding YES to, as Cleveland easily does each and every one.

• Can you find five bars within a ten minute drive where they serve Guinness on tap and know how to pour one?
• Does a good percentage of the population know what a pierogi is?
• Can you get a good pierogi within a fifteen minute drive?
• Within ten minutes can you drive your landlord to the emergency room at dawn on a Sunday and be welcomed by the staff of the Cleveland Clinic, one of the greatest hospitals in the world, as I did this morning?
• Does your community have its own year-round collective catharsis entity (aka Cleveland professional sports teams) that acts as universal scapegoat, whipping boy, and repository for everyone's private miseries?
• Can you get anywhere worth getting to in your metropolitan area within thirty minutes, regardless of the time of day or night?
• Are you basically free from any catastrophic natural disaster, other than a measly blizzard every once in a while (okay, including April, but what's a baseball home opener without snowballs to throw at the opposing bullpen?)?
• Do the vast majority of your licensed drivers actually know how to drive in snow?
• Does your city's collective inferiority complex help to lessen your own individual one (I mean, how many New Yorkers or Parisians probably beat themselves up all the time, thinking, "I'm not worthy of my city"? That doesn't happen in Cleveland.)?

Michael Stanley Band-This Town