Yeah SoCal can be pretty pretentious. I'm not in the film or advertising industry so I get a lot of weird looks. This can be exasperated by seafoaming your MINI and producing a robust cloud of gunk while they are filming a Vans commercial down the street! But besides all the pork pie hats, Buddy Holly frames, and ironic mustachioed DB's there are quite a bit of cool people in California (except for Prius drivers). I live in Venice and work near San Pedro and both have a good blue collar feel. I would say 90% of my friends are transplants from the east coast, midwest, or Europe. I've actually met some good people through rec sports and my MINI club. The car culture here is AMAZING!! You can go racing on the weekends at a variety of tracks (I would love to hit Laguna Seca), carve canyons up from the Pacific to the Valley, and see cars that have long since rusted away in other regions. Just last night I was leaving the gym and noticed a MINI GP (it's like the most souped up MINI you can get from the factory). I started chatting with the guy (from England) and it turns out he is one of the big shots in the MINI club. Next thing I know he's offering me a magna flow exhaust system, coil over suspension, and you name it.

The law probably started because people park a car and say they are "working on it" and then 5 weeks later you still have some jalopy parked in front of your house filled with In-Out wrappers, with transients living in it. They just passed a law here that states you need a permit to park from 2-6am. It was to stop all the RV people from filling up the streets. It sucks for them, but it's nice to be able to park in front of my house without a mobile meth lab parked there or finding that someone emptied their holding tank in the street. There were also some issues here with people just changing their oil over the sewer grates that drain right to the ocean. Not too smart.

You don't have a driveway or car-port? At least AutoZone lets you borrow tools and in OC you probably have less homeless crack heads wandering around. I literally saw a dude that could have been off of the living dead set. I almost just hit him with my car because I thought he was a walker. In retrospect it was probably jaundice from hepatitis. You could also just risk it. I'm not sure if you know how much the fine is or if you have been asked before not to wrench in front of your house, but sometimes it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission.