Small town

All my life I've been hearing a phrase, one that I always took to have little to no meaning. A phrase that was collective wishful thinking at best, mass halucination at worst. The phrase is "downtown community."

Now, I was born in a small town. And I live in a small town. I pray to god I don't die in a small town. And this town likes to think it has a "downtown community." The downtown community, i suppose, refers to the 8 people who live on Main Street, as opposed to the 35 thousand people (like myself) who live way out in those suburbs, and have a 3 minute bicycle commute to downtown.

The existance of this so-called downtown community has been used many a time as the justification for all kinds of rediculous city spending projects. As in "we have to have faux brick sidewalks to improve the aesthetic for the downtown community" and "we should take Main street down to one lane in each direction and add extra parking to slow traffic for the safety of the downtown community."

Give me a fucking break. Downtown Jackson is a 1/2 square mile area with 3 traffic lights, no housing to speak of, and more empty buildings than occupied ones. The sum total of downtown activities consists of an antique car show once a month during the summer, in which the same 20 antique cars show up and the same 200 toothless, flipflop-wearing, beergutted rednecks show up and spit tobacco on the sidewalks. It's dead people. Get over it.

How do I know this? With what authority do I speak? I work "downtown." I work in a convenience store. I'm not proud of this, but it is, well, convenient, and it's half-decent tax-free cash until I move to Bristol. My work in the inconvenience store (IS) consists primarily of selling pop and cigarettes to aforementioned flipflop fashionettes (how d'ya like that there alliteration, Maude?) and listening to them babble at me, sometimes for upwards of 30 minutes, about their miserable lives. And why do I do this? Because there isn't enough business to keep my busy with customers, so while I'm sitting by the til being bored, people take it as a free licence to treat me as their fucking therapist. Christ, there isn't even enough energy in the "downtown community" to keep one clerk in the only convenience store in town busy!

One of my regulars is Russ. Russ smells. He does not practice personal hygiene. He likes to tell me stories about the "nigger" he killed (his language. I never use that word), and his little daughter (someone had sex with him?!?!?). Often he cries. He likes to bring me treats. I eat nothing that man has touched. He calls me "little lady," which I'm sure he thinks is very respectful. Though if he's so concerned about being respectul to a lady, he shouldn't tell me stories about being kidnapped by "wetbacks," or "gook-hunting." I ask him to not use that language. He aplogizes, keeps on using it, and eventually starts crying.

So why am I telling you all this? There's a point, really, and I'll be there in a minute.

I was talking on the phone yesterday with my old friend, Shamrock. Shamrock and I have known each other since we were born. We grew up on the same street, played together as kids, and in high school when the other kids trash-talked me, she was the only person to publicly defend me. An act made all the more remarkable, as she was extremely popular, and was putting her own reputation in serious jeopardy by associating with me.

Shamrock is great. She's got a little girl who's teriffic, she's worked her ass off to support herself and put herself through school while raising a child, and I'm really proud of her. Included in her herculean efforts was a stint waiting tables at a downtown bar. She was describing this phase of her life and mentioned the abundance of undesireable characters that would attempt to monopolize her attention during the lunch rush or take advantage of her generosity by begging for freebees. I said to her, "You must know Russ, then."

"Oh, my god yes," she replied. And we swapped Russ stories and our mutual exasperation at the knowledge that he somehow managed to breed. (An accomplishment I've yet to achieve myself. Mystifying.) During our conversation we discovered that we knew many of the same miscreants, and I finally began to realize that there actually is a downtown community. It's not a community in the sense that I think of a community, namely, a group of people who associate with one another due to common values or interests. No, I learned that a community is actually a small collection of inbred people who are unable to escape one another's presence and so insead retreat into the safety of their own warped fantasies. And we've got one. Boy, have we got one. And thank god I'm leaving. The thought of working in that convenice store for the rest of my life is turning my stomach so fast that if you wrapped my torso in copper wire I could power the Superdome. Yep, that's my community.