Nothing is simple when you have 8.4 million people living within 303 square miles. This seems obvious, but the daily impact of those statistics can’t be fully appreciated until you’ve experienced it. For every individual action, there are four typed, single-spaced pages of restrictions.

So it must be, one could argue, or else there would be anarchy. You can’t have 8 million people acting out their individual impulses. What if half the city’s residents decided to fire up the Weber for some burgers on a given Saturday? On the other hand, when staffers threw me a birthday party a few days ago, rules prohibited lighting the single candle on my pink-frosted cupcake…

City dwellers will never understand the folks who prefer the company of trees, and country folk will always resent the imperious presumptions of urbanites who think they know best.