The Big City Over & Out

The Big City

Part 28 of 28

Happy Leap Year tomorrow!

A Whole Additional Day of Life

and You Did Nothing to Deserve It

We’re at the last chapter of our little talks on The Big City. As far as a dedication of the series to someone, that's something I’ve never done but I’ve been encouraged to do so. So I’d just like to commend it to everyone who has feelings whatsoever about the good old cold Big City and the smaller, homier places we all revere so much. And then, more particularly, I want to dedicate it to a guy I met near the interstate the other day, Griff. Griff's a guy who's down on his luck and has a sign asking for whatever you can spare. Griff appears to be a religious guy with many good values, wishing as he does, continually, God's blessings on all who share the interstate with him. It could very well be he's sucking up. If so, at least it proves he knows about the sweet spot of American culture. And proves he's conventional in upbringing whatever his deviance from the norm today. But he's using it as a cudgel against us to loosen the old purse strings. Duplicitous! I don't think I like that. What's he going to be doing tomorrow, waving the American flag? Get this guy in politics. "I'm down and out, I deserve your vote!" Way to go, good Griff -- hope that's your name, something like that, maybe Lief, whatever, love you, Bro. But I don't anything smaller than a dollar, so not today.

OK, enough foolish preliminaries out of the way, this is the last post of the month which, if memory serves, very well could be February 2020:

Personally, and just let me say this simply enough so everyone can understand it, I have a soft place in my heart, at times, more or less equal for Big Cities and little towns. So I have an anecdote today for each place. (Please don't fear if you've already been immunized, no anecdote will be needed.) Then those times come, of course, when I say, “The Big City? I can take it or leave it!” And there’s a variation on rejecting it immediately, abruptly, and forever that's not nearly the tugger of the heart, but sometimes the heart also deals with things by a stern attitude, not just the usual mush.

I’ve had a bunch of significant days in my life in the Big City. Huge profound, significant days, like my first day here, making my first call to the police concerning crime, then having to look at the mugshot books, then while I was there I got to bid on some unclaimed booty.

The Big City gets the greatest crime, naturally, thanks to the gargantuan population, the great amount of things to steal and numerous places to burgle. The other side of that coin is that the general public is wary and getting in some good jabs at criminals with door cameras and boobytrapped boxes and packages that help recycle common body fluids and solids. The devices in the packages are where the real excitement is, how they’re able to start spinning and emitting chemicals, poisons, just totally triggering the device, it's spinning, it's wild!

The littler towns also have had a soft place in my heart many times. I used to live in a small town, several years, and knew the place like I knew my own body, skills I was able to hone further with puberty. I was just thinking of a guy I used to know as a kid, then I saw him one single day as an adult, then he was gone, died sometime shortly after that. I looked him up today to see what he died of, which was, damn! I forget now. It wasn’t a broken heart, of that I’m sure, because it mentioned he had a wife.

What was my theme? I keep forgetting, because I have so much on my mind on every subject; it’s hard to narrow it down to one thing. But now as I recall, it was The Big City, my feelings, thoughts, and, yes, insights into The Big City. A place that exists and a place that, like it or not, I call home. And probably will till I'm able to get the hell out.

I Buy Tires With Home Cookin'

The Big City

Part 4 of 28

Now that I’ve seen both sides of the equation in this deal -- how it is in the small town and The Big City -- I can finally say with pretty good authority that the Big City, for all its bragging, hasn’t got anything over the small town. I'm able to see what’s good and what’s bad, and I’m telling everyone who’ll listen. And there's a lot of stubborn idiots out there. But no one can talk me out of it once I’ve made up my mind. Consider this a one-man stampede over the Big City!

Immediately when I start thinking of the baker, the butcher, and the new tire pusher back in the small town, I first think of the values I learned there. I think through all this stuff and you know how tears well up in your eyes? That’s what it is for me, except they're gushers. I get sentimental, then my whole life sweetens, then reality hits me squarely in the face -- the Big City I foolishly moved to -- and I go whole hog ballistic, with the terrible consequences of punishing myself. Crying and complaining that things aren’t what they used to be, to the point of denying myself supper and going to bed hungry.

I let my mind drift. The small town, gotta love it. It’s incredible now when I think back on it how much money I owe to so many people. And today I have the new tire guy in mind for some reason. Mostly for the many ways I deprived him of a good living by never having the exact change in paying for a tire. And he’d always shave a little off the price, giving me the comfort of riding on tires not bald or knobby while I only put out a few shekels.

I still have to think he was always glad to see me coming. Him with that small town grin you can't help but love in small town merchants. It conveys a lot, that he and I are friends, with there being no doubt that we go together -- merchant and customer -- and if anything threatens the fragile balance of that relationship everything could go to hell and we’d both be in a pickle, and not just us but the rest of the population that depends so much on keeping the system in place. Because, really, we might not survive through the day if we veered from it so much as a silly millimeter!

In the Big City, however, just to offer one stark contrast, it’s dog eat dog till the last dog’s dead, which is any minute now! How do they avoid the fragile balance of the small town? There’s always new population they've never heard of washing up on the Big City’s shores. Rubes like me from the small town as well as immigration from other Big Cities, mostly lowlife cheapskates who don’t pay their bills showing up to take advantage of the Big City largesse, more fraudulent in the long run but manageable in the short. Because everything they do depends on volume. If the tire dealer loses half his inventory to vandals, he makes it up on volume. But in the small town, a vandal takes one tire it takes the dealer a full nine years to make up the loss.

I needed a couple new tires just a few weeks ago. And, yes, I went to the Big City sharks, who wouldn’t look the other way and give me the tires as loaners for a six-month test drive. These despicable sharks wanted cash, or worse, credit. It knocked me for a loop and that night I fell asleep longing for the glories of the small town, where I might ride on free tires till they popped. Because in the small town a few promises and an occasional apple pie goes a long way. Gets me from place to place.

I Reign A Small Town King

The Big City

Part 3 of 28

Even as a small town king myself, so often I find myself rejecting the prejudice small town morons have about the Big City, essentially that it’s evil. That goes against my competing small town values of prejudging any case. I had the impartial justice bug even as a kid, anytime I was accused of something. “Take your hands off me, you filthy devil,” I remember saying as a kid to one of my accusers, the school principal. That's what I should've said.

Another way to look at it is, Hey, we’re supposedly small town kings! If that’s what they call us, shouldn’t we embrace our royal identity and live out the truth how we have it over everyone else. It’s an injustice, it cries for legal help, to believe anything else. Although a lot of this language about us being small town kings was likely just a cheap shot by the main proponents of the small town vibe against the Big City. Meaning, yeah, sure, you’re a “small town king,” but apart from the debate with the Big City the message was always, “Don't embrace it as a thing,” or “When push comes to shove, we make the rules, we can change them.” A terrible thing as a kid to recognize. “You set up the parameters of my supposed royalty and you can knock ‘em down. 'We’re the ones calling you kings, We giveth, We taketh away.'"

Obviously in a situation like that, where the propaganda is widely touted even as you see how shabby it is -- like finding that all your birthday presents were just cardboard cutouts of the real thing, or your surroundings a Hollywood set when the director yells “Cut,” are things no kid wants to face. “But, but, you said!” “Yeah, kid,” the cynical adult says, “We know what we said. Stick around, clean your ears, there’s no telling how much more you’re going to hear about your so-called promise. You’re promise equals exactly this: The principal bares his ass and everyone lines up on their knees in lockstep to symbolically kiss it.  These are the insights the typical kid doesn’t know what to do with. Maybe just grow up to parade his own backside around the town, with one of two motives, to expose the apparently false teaching that every small town kid’s a king, or to keep embracing it, with the fear that to reject its truthfulness is to make even the promise vanish. Then what are you left with? Shambles, a small town vibe little better than the hated Big City.

I’d love to find the documentation on this stuff. It could be, given their low opinion of us, they were very careful to collate together all the documents, distributing them at meetings and then storing it all somewhere secure. But it could actually be easier to find than we think. A man serves as mayor or principal or even flunky only so long. I’ve seen how these meetings go, in unrelated fields. “We’re going to collect all the papers, etc.,” and the reality's often different. A guy’s talking and accidentally packs his papers home, they’re misplaced, they’re forgotten. Only to be discovered years later in an estate sale. “What have we here? A Nazi plan to make us think we’re all royalty, when, in fact, we’re peons from the word GO? This is what the exalted small town thinks of us, so desperate to keep us from the possibly true Big City propaganda that the Big City turns out the best kids, the true royalty!"

At the very least, friends, it’s disappointing to grow up and suspect your entire youth was a carefully nurtured lie, and now you're left to counsel a bunch of widowed children in their old age. But I simply got out, and here I sit, now a resident of the Big City. And I've seen one big difference here, they don’t even tell you you’re a king. The subject never comes up! Which explains a lot.