Have you ever had the experience of falling in love (lust, infatuation, momentary attention) with someone, only to wake up, several months to years later, realizing that somewhere within that euphoria you've quit your career, sold your house and moved into the upper story of an M Night Shayamalan movie? You know, your living in a house, surrounded by crop circles, green aliens are jumping up and down on your roof in the middle of the night and your dog is dead?
Okay, maybe not that extreme, maybe more like a scene out of Deliverance, a old-man-boy playing the banjo while looking funny at your sister, or maybe more like Footloose,"dancin? We don't allow no dancin' in this town.."
Whatever your scenario, mine was bad enough to be a combination of all three! I didn't know what I was headed for. It was love for goodness sake. Love isn't rational, love isn't predictable, love also doesn't have eyes, ears or an anus for dumping out the "S***t"that someone tells you about the "quaint, village life" of their home town. I'd like to say my youth and inexperience played into it, but I had owned my "house on the hill", the one with cathedral ceilings, skylights and a view of the lake and rocky mountains for 18 years. Not a ton of youth there unless you think I bought the place simultaneously as the obstetrician was spanking my naked butt on the day that I was born. Not so, of course. I was a full-fledged adult when I bought my cosmopolitan dream-home, in my cosmopolitan dream-town. I built a career where my hours were 3-6 every day and two months off in the summer. I had a dog or two, a child or two and a car or two. I had a swimming pool and a Madame X who, while not a red-hot fling, was fun to watch movies and go to bookstores with.
Then along comes a temptress, a siren, (okay, a round gal who looks somewhat like the chick on the old Nestle Coco ads) and crash! I've fallen. This woman lives states away. "States away will never work long term" I reason. We talk on the phone and meet up once or twice. I begin driving...weekends....all weekend. Once I stayed for 45 minutes only to turn around and drive home again in order to make it to an Easter Egg Hunt for my kids. I am insane. I am certifiably insane and not able to make rational decisions when I am offered the deal of a lifetime: "Move to my quaint hometown, buy a house and live here forever."
"OKAY!" I jump without even so much as checking into the school system. I begin house-hunting, not even noticing that every other person in the town has no chin. I start negotiations with a Real Estate agent, paying no attention to the fact that a vortex is beginning to open right in the middle of town square. I put money into a local bank, not realizing that the Jr. CEO of that bank is Nathan from Children of the Corn or that all of the children have blond hair, red eyes and no expression.
I did try to rethink things for a minute or two while I was trapped in my car by a giant rabid dog, but once the Hitchhiker came by and shot him with a concealed weapon and a few local zombies dragged the carcass off to eat it, well, I forgot all about it. As a matter of fact, I reveled in the idea of small-town life. I loved the way all of the straight women wore aprons, smiles and big hair- of course, I never saw a live lesbian, only a sign burned into someone's lawn that said "GIT OUT DIKES" but I didn't think it pertained to lesbians as "dyke" was spelled incorrectly- I actually was so insane that I thought the sign was a protest to the idea of impinging Dutch water systems.
So, I sold my house, packed up the kids, and moved to a quaint duplex. It was located just down the street from the Alzheimer's retirement center and overlooked a mom and pop auto-wrecking lot. The Real Estate agent (his name was Jason or Freddy or something like that) assured me that it was in a nicer part of town, several miles away from that crazed, chainsaw-welding guy I may have read about. Thank heaven's for that!
Soon after, I bought a nice little coffee shop downtown. As the former proprietor (not from this town) caught her tires on fire as she was speeding out of the parking lot after throwing the shop keys at me while leaving my final payment for the shop on the counter, I began to question the wisdom of this move.
I had started to notice things. Things like, how come most people in this town were never seen during the day but the Walmart was packed at night? How come the town seemed to be enclosed perpetually in a gruesome fog and there were no health food stores nearby? How come everyone had signs in their yard that said "Bush for 4 more years"? And finally, how come bats keep circling my neighborhood and what the hell were Nutrias?! I could have tortured myself with these thoughts and others- but instead I just decided to move. I rented the house to a nice man who claimed he was the servant of some kind of Doctor from Germany. I sold the coffee shop to someone planning to turn it into a coffin shop (which was a good thing considering I never had a customer come in for coffee in the six months I was there) and finally, I left my infatuation in San Fransisco (along with my heart, as the song goes) during a Rockabilly concert she forced me to go to along with 157 of her cousins, all with blond hair and red eyes.
Call me a prude and stuck up- but as the saying goes, you can take the goul out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the goul.
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