Top Ten Reasons to NOT be a remote worker in a small town.

 Dear Dad,

I'm sure you are thinking, 'I told you so.'  I realize when I squint angrily down the street, smoking a cigarette and drinking terrible coffee, I am doing my best Bob Carrico impression.  Yes, we regret moving here.  I know I used to brag about low price of beer, the fresh, clean, cheap, stigma-free tobacco, but that's about all this town has going for it.  

NPR featured a quaintly written, inoffensive article about younger remote workers moving to small towns to avoid the high cost of housing in big cities: Remote workers.   They failed to point out a third of noir movies from the 1940s start out with this very premise.  I have compiled a top ten list of reasons not to move to a small town:

1.  You are still the same asshole you were in the big city.  I think alcoholics anonymous call moving often, 'Going Geographic.'  Moving wont fix your problems, in fact it makes most of them worse.  As light as you pack, you still bring with the the same cunt to look at in the mirror.  And that cunt represents most of your worst enemies.  So you've escaped nothing.

photo credit:  Mike 'Chinatown' De Maria

2.  There is a reason people left the small town you are now squatting in.  Frankfort Kentucky is the birthplace of many intriguing historical figures.  All of them left.  Cities and towns are very much defined by who left.  The empty theaters, the patinaed statues all represent makers who threw up their hands in disgust and left.  Who remains are the complacent.  Good people, but people just fine with the old status quo.  People who are used to everyone with any ambition leaving, thus when you sit next to them at the bar, they assume they'll never see you again and therefore don't speak to you.  Day after day, week after week, month after month.  Also, assume any house you rent or buy in a small town  was the scene of a horrible murder suicide, because it's probably true. 

3.  It's boring.  It's so boring here, I am starting a blog.  No one will ever read this.  Hell I've addressed it to a dead man.

4.  Any money you save on rent or mortgage, you spend going the nearest big city.  I constantly am going to Lexington.  As an artist, there are NO opportunities to show art here.  I have no trouble participating in the arts in bigger towns, I recently showed at the LexArts gallery Here Now meanwhile one of the bars I drink at here has had the same terrible art on their walls for a year.  Fuck you Capitol Cellars.  

5.  The food is awful.  Nightly my wife and I have the anxious stand off where we ask each other what we want to eat.  Our options are burgers, terrible Mexican or Johnny Carinos where the nice bartender drinks heavily with us and barely charges us for anything we order.  We have gained considerable weight.  

6.  Your family forgets who you are.  I have no family, however I married into one.  Dez's families group chat is weirdly important to me.  I desperately love her mother as she is exactly who I would have been had I been born a woman in Portland in the 60s, only not addicted to heroin.  I think you dodged a bullet, dad.  She would have loved you up, taken your bobbles and left you weeping in a downtown Portland bar.  A lovely lady.  

7.  You become isolated, angry and begin to speak out loud to yourself.  Since you are so lonely, the social stigma of common taboos leave you.  I often urinate outside now.  Not behind dumpsters or in alleys, but in doorways.  Maybe that's just a Portland thing.  I find people leave me alone when I do it if I am muttering curses to various religious figures.  

8.  No one cares about their own history.   In Frankfort in 1900, the governor was assassinated for his progressive views on race.  The murder is listed as unsolved though it's FUCKING OBVIOUS he was murdered for encouraging blacks to vote.  No one here seems to care.  Or vote.  If you try to talk about historical events, people often walk away mid conversation, leaving you to urinate in peace on the Mitch McConnel building on Capitol Avenue. 

9.  If you own a home, you will pay twice the listed price in interest and be liable to replace every appliance in it.  The furnace, the AC, the stove, the fucking mailbox are all jointly owned by you, your wife and the bank.  And you wife is retired from the roofing industry and no one from the bank will come over and help you replace your roof, especially after you urinated on their ATMs repeatedly.  

10.  If you haven't accomplished anything by 40, you may as well define yourself as someone who moves around a lot.  I think as you lay dying, dad, you had amazing cringey memories flashing before your eyes.  I don't think I have enough yet.  

So, if you have any personality at all, avoid small towns.  Avoid stable housing.   Drop by, check out the statue of Gobel in Frankfort and tell a local how he died.  Their icy bored response, mixed with their mazing plentiful Bourbon may cause you to urinate in the historical society doorway.  At least that's where you'll find me for the next few days, dick in hand, muttering about the Torah... until we load our RV and hit the road again.