Your City Sucks, By Jonathan Papelbon

(Ed's note) I am thrilled to introduce Kate Preusser as the latest writer to join our staff. Many of you will know Kate from her excellent Fanposts and the unstoppable force of nature that is her twitter feed, which can be found at @1nceagain2zelda. Welcome Kate!

So just because a certain no-hustle Jason Mraz-listening floppy-haired dingus gets his Underoos in a wad, suddenly The Pap finds himself persona non gratin down at the feed farm, if you pick up what I am putting down.  So they want Drake instead of Meek Mill?  The Pap isn’t troubled.   It don’t flap The Pap!  But don’t you try to trade The Pap to any of these garbage cities, because I will go Ric Flair on your sorry Shane Douglas asses.

Milwaukee
Okay, first of all, The Pap cannot be traded to a city with so many damn letters.  Screw you, Milwaukee, I’m bored of spelling you by the ‘a.’  Your lake is full of raw sewage, as are your people. I would rather have a colonoscopy starring Jose Bautista’s flipped bat than eat your dairy-and-wurst-based regional cuisine while sucking down this backyard pisswater you call beer.  And screw the Packers and prettyboy Aaron Rodgers.  The Pap does not share the spotlight.

Minnesota
Where is this dumb team anyway?  What, Minneapolis and Saint Paul are so impossible to choose between you just have to lay claim to these matching bilgewater pork rinds?  It’s double the flavor, double the suck.  This state has all the lousy weather and chubtoaster populace of Wisconsin, but without the winning football team.  It’s the Malt-o-Meal of states, it is garbage and The Pap has better places to be.  LIKE RINGSIDE AT WRESTLEMANIA, BITCHES. 

Cleveland
People are giving The Pap flack about my no-trade list but I am doing a community service here by listing America’s suckiest cities.  Yakkity yak, The Pap about to flack back. I am doing God’s work here, people.  Anyway, the first three cities on this list are all interchangeable to me.  Sometimes when I wake up in a hotel and have no idea where I am, I just turn on the local news, and if the first news item I hear makes me powerslam the TV to the floor out of rage over its sheer inanity, I know I’m somewhere in the Midwest.  (Also, that mascot is pretty racist, and that is coming from someone who played in earshot of FedEx Field).

Detroit
The Pap is 35, people. That’s like 67 in professional sports player years. I don’t have time to live out my golden years running from roving biker gangs patrolling this carapace of a once-great American city in the smoking hellscape that is Detroit.  Seriously, you guys invented the term "ruin porn," and for that you should be torpedoed to the bottom of Lake Whatever with your coney dogs and New York transplants who think they're "saving Detroit" because apparently Sarah McLachlan has been singing about them in commercials.  Just let Detroit rot and fall off like the blackened toenail it is, people.  You're standing in the way of progress here.

Chicago (South Side)
Chicago has the same terrible weather as all these other cities, but at 200% the cost!  You think you’re special because you have a river of hobo pee and Ditka sweat that is so incredibly toxic, dyeing it green every March is the least of its problems? From what The Pap can tell, Chicago is full of investment bankers who pretend that drinking an Old Style and eating some of the soggy diaper cake they call pizza magically transforms them into hardscrabble Ewok-gutted Bears fans who can tar roofs just by spitting on them.  The Pap sees through you, you soulpatch of a city.  Screw Chicago.  (At least, the South Side. Even The Pap loves the Cubbies.)

Baltimore
Baltimore, you are actually not a bad city.  The Pap loves the Inner Harbor. But for reasons that totally have nothing to do with a certain player whose name sounds like a cartoon chihuahua or a lower-tier Mexican fast food restaurant, it’s best for the Pap to stay away, as in "at least two hundred yards at all times" away.

Philadelphia
Another garbage city with garbage weather and a matching garbage sports team.  Actually, make that all the garbage sports teams.  Someone raise John Sherman from the dead, because Philadelphia has a monopoly on failure.  Seriously, the density of failure in South Philadelphia is so intense that at any moment Broad Street is going to reach event horizon and start collapsing in on itself, taking that grease-stained Wiz-smothered pretzel jockey fanbase with it, and The Pap ain’t trying to be a part of that.  Not anymore, at least.

Pittsburgh
Same state, same crap weather, same stupid liquor laws, except Pittsburgh makes Philadelphia look like Xana-freaking-du in comparison.  There are three square inches of green in this city and they surround the grave of penny-pinching Andrew Carnegie who is somehow revered here as a god despite the fact that he literally ground men’s bones for his bread. Pittsburgh is a pathetic steelstain of a city and all the Terrible Towels in it should be soaked in gasoline and used to Molotov the whole place into hyperspace.

Phoenix, Arizona
Screw the whole dust-crusted super-plus tampon that is the state of Arizona, and screw those bukkake new Diamondbacks uniforms.  Pap out.

Denver, Colorado
Colorado, you seem like a chill state.  You have tall mountains and beer and a general vibe that tells me it would be okay to finally start wearing that Kangol hat I got last Christmas.  But the Rockies are bad.  They are so so bad.  So bad that I left the Mariners on this list ahead of you. Colorado Rockies, you are like a really hot girl with a banging bod and crippling acne.  Call me if you ever get on that Proactiv flow, girl.

Miami
Pitbull is your fault, Miami. Forget getting to watch The Pap pitch; you should be sliced off these United States like a pre-cancerous mole on a septuagenarian’s back fat.  (Tampa Bay, we coo. Your park is full of stingrays and GILFs and that is baller.)

Arlington
Everyone knows Houston is the young hot second wife and Arlington is the cronebag first wife who got all the diamonds in the divorce in exchange for having her youth and vitality slowly sucked away one biting comment at a time.  Texas is a dead, soulless state where time is frozen back when the Cowboys were actually good—basically a Roadrunner cartoon  set on infinite loop with a cranky toddler wielding the remote—but Houston can still get it, especially when it wiggles into its Spanx and goes dancing. The Pap is excited to begin measuring his alcohol intake in Altuves.  Sounds so much better than "quarts" or "irreversible liver damage."
…wait, Wrestlemania is in Arlington this year? [Sound of frantic dialing]


The Entire State of California*
Have any of you sausage rolls ever seen a disaster movie?  Then you know that everything bad happens in California.  Floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, secret underground volcanoes, alien invasions: all California.  Or, regarding that last one, Washington DC.  But The Pap doesn’t want to talk about that.  Screw California, is the point.
(*Anaheim is excepted from this list because The Pap knows DISNEYLAND IS MAGICAL.)

The Entire Country of Canada
The Pap is American, Baseball is American, and the Toronto Blue Jays are an abomination on par with Crystal Pepsi.  What’s up with spelling the words with all these additional us?  You trying to beat us at Scrabble, Canada?  You know what else has a lot of us in it?  FAIULURE.  Also, poutine is not nearly as fun as it sounds. Poutine is a toilet bowl at the UCSB In-n-Out, and it, along with the entire city of Toronto, should be strapped to that weird tower that looks like a Christmas ornament you snort cocaine off of and rocketed to the sun.

The New York Yankees
Not even The Pap wants to be a Yankee.  But Terry Collins, if you’re reading this, call me.