South of Washington

For chrissakes it's not PLAUSIBLE for a reasonable sane person to have these opinions and be taken seriously in this town. After that most people give up and conform to the wildly liberal platforms brought on only by having a friend, or at least a friend of a friend, who is

• gay 
• had an abortion
• is black yet shops at the Outlets
• or can read Hebrew. 

Being raped by diversity is a different kind of oppression that forces you to adhere to the un-sticky. Can you even fathom how impossibly difficult it is to participate in this Kum Ba Yah nonsense while still hosting the facade of not giving a shit about anything? Makes me wonder how we would react if shipped to Mississippi for a exchange student program. The sad part is, we're not even that diverse. 90% of the people living here are white, upper-middle class, college graduates who shoot the breeze with their neighbors every morning. People who get a kick out of vacationing to Florida or Texas because it's so damn foreign to them. EXCEPT that we kid ourselves by believing that "there's good in everyone and by the way I have slightly agnostic viewpoints because I'm cultured and I read blogs sometimes". Venture 12 miles to the north and you instantly realize that the one time you held a gun belonging to your friend's father does not make you brave/dangerous, it makes you an asshole for assuming as much. Oh, and posting an article with the comment "kind of interesting" is not taking a stand; it's a cowardly coping mechanism that allows you to see how everyone else feels about the matter before agreeing with them. Whatever.

The Fish Market

It gets real windy in Ohio. Like an invisible ocean sweeping above my head. I hear it while I'm lying in the loft. The wooden boards below the straw creak in protest, pleading with the wind to cease its manipulation. Sometimes I fear the roof to be ripped from the walls; the only thing separating me from that ocean. I toss in the hay, visions of a giant pencil in the sky sketching the lines of turbulence. A crack, and the wind sends a tree branch cascading to the Earth, the sound finally muffled by the wood's blanketing leaves. My eyes flicker open at the din. It's official: I can't sleep through windstorms.

If you ever wind up gravitating toward a valley in your life, remember: if you can't convince them, confuse them. Fairhaven honed my perception of the valley, and it confused the shit out of me. Once you stop resisting the reality of it, you experience the shit you would normally overhear in a smokey bar in Queens. Shit like... an old man as a child, taking his younger brother down to the fish market, but being too poor to pick up dinner. They've survived this long, though. How? There must be some method to the daily scrounge which has become their entire futility. One of the grubby kids clears his throat, yells a few choice curse words up at the fishmonger, and is rewarded with a grin and a codfish hurled down at him from the boat. Brilliant. Insult the sailors in the right way and you have a free meal. I muse this glory of culture shock as it enters my ears. "I'll have to remember that one".