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I've been mildly obsessed with reading Scott Pilgrim recently, which is just too bad since I've only got 4 books out of 6. It's maybe the funniest thing I've ever read though (with the possible exception of Preacher, which is funny in a completely different way). Anyway that's not what I was going to talk about, here's what I am going to talk about. There's a second, vaguely related half of this that I'm probably going to do tomorrow. Check this out: I'm trying to post blawgs with some kind of narrative format now (let's see how long this lasts).
So what happens when I try to write stories is this: I usually procrastinate by getting a bunch of books from the library that deal with similar themes, so I can ostensibly see how better writers do it. Then I get caught up in reading books, and never actually write the thing. But anyway, recently I've been getting a lot of books that deal with small towns, because there's something about small towns that fascinates me. Probably it's not having grown up in one.
Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to be somewhere else. When I was younger, that somewhere else was in some kind of fantasy world, which I grew out of when I stopped really liking fantasy. Then I wanted to live in a city with personality- New York or Chicago or San Francisco or something. I still kind of want that, but now I'm starting to get jealous when we drive through little nowhere towns like Winslow or Strawberry, and I see old people sitting out front of their houses and run-down signs and roadside stands. I always want to tell my parents to stop the car, so I can pretend to be a resident instead of someone just passing through.
The problem is that what I really want is not to live in these towns, but to have grown up in them. I don't identify with my birthplace. Phoenix doesn't have an identity, as it were. We're a poor copy of LA, with all the same architecture and none of the history and interest. No one visits Phoenix unless it's for relatives or business. Even the buildings don't seem to want to be here- they're an uneasy combination of adobe and east coast brick, and the desert we've displaced is tamed and neutered into landscaping in a sea of suburbs. We can't decide whether or not we want to keep denying that we live in a desert.
Maybe this isn't something other Phoenix-dwellers feel, maybe I'd feel this way if I were born in New York or Tucson or Buttfuck, Illinois. Maybe it's just that I grew up without venturing outside my comfort zone, and by the time I wanted to have a sense of community, we'd moved to this button-down suburb where you saw your neighbors once a month if you were lucky. I've lived down the street from a friend of mine for half my life, and I've visited her house literally once.
I guess the real question is whether everyone has these identity problems, or whether it's just people who are raised in similar suburban nothings. Or there's the third possibility, which is that I was a weirdly insular kid and no one else feels like they were cheated out of the full possibilities of their childhood. I think that not having a community to identify with made me a little more fucked up as a teen than I should have been. All that faceless yearning for something more, all that teenage need to rebel- I think to be able to run away, you have to have something solid to run away from. If I were born in a small town I'd have millions of songs and stories to tell me that I wasn't alone in wanting to leave. If I were born in a real city, maybe I would have wanted to stay. But instead I'm stuck in this weird twilight world that isn't even suburbia, really, even though it looks like it.
The point? I don't really have one. This hasn't been a summer of deep introspection by any means, but having left and then coming back again has made a few things clear to me about this city and my love/hate relationship with it. Because sometimes I really do love it- but not that often anymore.