no, I am not moving downtown

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.

- The city does not please me aesthetically. The city is tragically unattractive. In Cincinnati, my aesthetic interest is admittedly peaked by the many wonderful well-kept public parks. Some of the architecture is also undeniably attractive. But the majority of Cincinnati is textbook urban decay. Maybe if vaguely intelligent, budding-affluent individuals like myself began moving back to the city, then some of this decay would diminish as more money would be pumped into the local economy. If I didn’t know better, I’d really think such a return to glory for the Queen City was possible, but frankly, such idealism died out for me at some point in grade school. I could do without waking up every morning, looking out my window and seeing a gravel lot full of scrap metal or a building with enough plywood on the windows to save the house from eight back-to-back category-five hurricanes. You can keep your crumbling concrete metropolis.

- I don’t like crime. Is there as much crime in the city as the media oftentimes portrays? Probably not. Is there still a lot of crime in the city? Absolutely. A short list of crimes often committed in the city that don’t happen very often where I live:

- car theft/car burglary
- home burglary
- muggings
- rapes on public sidewalks
- murders on public sidewalks
- panhandling on public sidewalks
- loitering on street corners
- drug trafficking on street corners
- prostitution on street corners

I’m not the sort of person who is afraid to walk around in the city in broad daylight. I’m not even the sort of person who is afraid to walk around in the city after dark. But I am the sort of person who doesn’t like seeing my block on the news with fresh human blood spilled on the pavement. And I’m the sort of person who doesn’t like to come out to my car in the morning to find the front driver’s side window lying in shards on the passenger seat. Call me crazy.

- I like having somewhere to park my car. Nothing is more annoying for me than trying to find a parking spot at any store around Christmas time. In the city, it’s like that every hour of every day. I don’t like doing laps around spans of blocks to find a decent spot. I don’t like parallel parking. I don’t like not having my car parked in a locked garage. I don’t like having to pay for parking. I don’t like having to constantly worry about parking tickets. I could go on for a long time. Notice I’m not even mentioning the unbearable traffic.

- It is loud. The din of the city is migraine-inducing. I hate the sound of passing cars. I hate being awakened by the ear-splitting sirens of ambulances, fire engines and police cruisers. I can very honestly say that only in the city have I been aroused from a winter’s slumber by the parishioners at the Catholic church next door reciting the Rosary through a loudspeaker so that it is audible for blocks. (I’m not joking.) I don’t want to have to hear an alarm clock go off for three hours straight in the apartment downstairs, two people fucking for four hours straight upstairs and three people arguing in the street below for five hours. If I lived in the city, I’d be suffering from boilermaker’s deafness within days.

- I like to be loud when I want to be and without repercussions. Just because I don’t like listening to other people make noise doesn’t mean I don’t like to make noise myself. In the city, I can’t play my guitar at full volume on my back porch because someone would call the police within fifteen seconds and because there aren’t any back porches in the city because there are no lawns (because there is nothing green in the city). In the city, I can’t set up my stereo in the garage and blast Dopesmoker and dance around a bonfire naked until dawn either. There are just certain things I’m unwilling to give up. Proximity to other humans can be great (I guess), but rarely do people think about how limiting it can be as well.

- I don’t want to live in a shitty apartment. If you haven’t figured it out yet, let me help you along: money takes you a lot further in the sticks than it does in the city. When you are poor (or perhaps more accurately, a tightwad) like myself, chances are, if you try to get a place in the city, it’s going to be a really horrible place. I covet space, both indoors and out. I need water that isn’t brown. I need water pressure period. I need windows that aren’t the original windows installed during the building’s construction in the 1910s. I need drywall, not crumbling plaster. I need hardwood floors that aren’t rotting and blood and jizz-stained. I guess I’m just that demanding.

- There isn’t that much to do in the city for someone like me. The only things I go to the city for are my job, record stores and rock shows. Sure, I like the museums and the parks all right and catch a few Reds games a year, but at the end of the day, there’s nothing else I give a damn about in the city. Though there are outstanding bars and restaurants in the city, all O’Charley’s locations serve the same inedible food, and bars are basically bars in that they all serve the same weak drinks, they all sell shitty PBR or Old Milwaukee in cans for $1 on Wednesday nights, and they all have vaguely attractive, passive-aggressive mid-20s female bartenders who are the apple of every man in the bars’ eye. Since I don’t mind driving and spend almost all of my “leisure money” on gas as it is, proximity to a few concert venues and a couple of decent bars isn’t really all that important to me. Solitude, however, is important. Try finding that in the city for more than two minutes at a time.

- I like free beer. Whenever I go to the city to hang out at a show or a bar (or both), there’s usually at least one amazing city-dwelling friend I run into who is either willing to buy me a beer or knows some way to acquire beer for me without even paying himself. I imagine at some point this well will run dry, and I know that the more I hang out in the city, the more quickly the drying will happen. For strategic purposes (because drinking should always be strategized about), making infrequent public appearances in the city is the best approach. Cutting the supply for Chris makes Chris more valuable because you know that the demand is always there (and, though I don’t like to brag, is constantly rising).

- I don’t like hanging out with you quite that much. City friends, I love you all dearly, but if I was around any of you much more than I already am, I would probably kill you all. But don’t think this attitude of mine towards you has anything to do with where you live. If I was around any of my friends located anywhere much more than I am currently, I would likely go insane. Hanging out and boozing once every couple of weeks is cool, but I can’t even fathom how annoyed I would get after about three consecutive days of knocks on my door at 11 PM followed by shouts on the other side of, “Hey man, going to the bar, you coming?” or simply, “Hey man, what’s going on in there?” It’d be like college all over again. I lived it once. Once was arguably one time too many. (Such arguments would be made by my various organs.)

- I don’t like being around people quite that much. Let’s face it: I’m not really a people person. I don’t think I’m unfriendly by any stretch, but I have a very take-it-or-leave-it attitude about the majority of humanity, and most of the time I’d rather leave it. In the city, people are never avoidable. Hiding in one’s room doesn’t even work because even if some drunk friend isn’t pounding on your bedroom door, there’s always some facet of humanity making its presence known to you in the city in some way: the pulsating car stereo, the creaking of the floor above under footsteps, the television program on in the next room. People. In the city, they are everywhere.

- I like where I live now. I’m sorry, but I like “the country” as you call it. It’s quiet. Relatively speaking, it’s clean. It’s freer. It’s freeing. It’s safe. It’s where I belong.

I will continue to visit you, Friends from the City, but I can assure you I won’t be joining your ranks anytime soon. I love you, and I love your city, but a small dose of your city is a longlasting dose for this old country boy.