A lot of people have asked me over the past six months why I don’t move to the city. All of these people asking such questions of me live in the city. No one in the country asks someone else in the country when he/she is moving to the city. People from the country simply know better. Urban America is hell in all of its forms: actual urban areas, the exurbs, the suburbs, it’s all the same. But because I rarely have the opportunity to explain fully to an inquiring party why I don’t want to live in the city, namely downtown Cincinnati, I figured I’d make my argument here in the form of a dozen brief statements that serve to answer fully why I’m not moving into that great empty apartment upstairs.
- The city really smells. Maybe one notices it less after living in the city for awhile, but the city smells awful. It does not smell like Earth should smell. It smells of car exhaust, industrial fallout, human decay and decaying humans [sic]. No amount of trees planted in three inches of soil in concrete medians in a half-hearted effort to”go green” (which is some horseshit that only means anything to the people in the city who are doing the bulk of the destruction to the previously green world) could freshen the air enough to make my lungs not try to crawl northward up my esophagus, projectile themselves out of my mouth and scurry away along with the Thanksgiving-turkey-sized rats already scurrying across my feet and my nose fall off like a skid-row coke addict’s. Every breath a person takes in the city is equivalent to smoking three cartons of Camel unfiltereds dipped in human waste, a substance which can conveniently enough usually be found flowing through the street-side gutters of any major metropolitan area. As noble as the “Don’t Trash the ‘Nati” campaign was (or is? is it still going on?), it hasn’t worked enough for my liking.
Read more »
