Columbus is Washington DC minus the DC, Tampa minus the beach, Dayton plus a few hundred thousand more suburbanites, Boise minus the urban funk.

If the blackouts had occurred in Columbus, nobody anywhere else in the country would have bothered to turn the lights back on. What would be the point? Does anything ever happen in Columbus? Has anything ever happened since the day it was founded in 1976? You would think that something, sometime would have happened in a place that so many humanoids clustered in their pod-like housing tracts call home, for lack of a better word. (Sorry, I’m excluding that exciting period when they built all the malls.) The local newspaper is an excellent reflection of this homogenous suburban wasteland.

Columbus is not a city. Granted, it is a region. It is an economic enterprise zone. It is a humongous planned community for active adults. But it is NOT a city. Cleveland, a place I truly hate, is ten times the city that Columbus is.

On the plus side, Columbus is not Morgantown. But as bad as it is, when you’re driving into Morgantown, at least you know you’re in Morgantown. If you woke up in Columbus with no knowledge of how you got there, you’d need a Global Positioning System to tell where you were. You certainly couldn’t tell from any local dialect, topography, architectural characteristics, etc.

But Columbus does have Ohio State (little-known fact: when TOSU was founded in 1982, it was called Penn State-Columbus). And Columbus is growing, spreading ever larger. But so is the irregularly shaped black mole on my ass. And, as with the mole, more Columbus is not a good thing.