I need to preface this all by saying that I really love my neighborhood. I can walk to just about anything I need: coffee, stamps, a rockin' short haircut, soba noodles, fish tacos (wow, a lot of what I apparently need turns out to be food), second-hand clothes, library books, yoga, all within walking distance. For crying out loud, there's a frozen yogurt buffet a block from my house, and the block after that has an independent movie house where you can get a chai latté to go with your popcorn, with a video rental place attached that's organized by sections like "Spaghetti Westerns," "British Horror" and "Troubled Youth".
There's only one problem: it's like the fucking Hotel California. Some invisible force prevents you from ever being able to leave, and then whenever you do, you sort of wish you hadn't.
It's easy enough to get to work and back. But if you ever want to go anywhere recreationally, you had seriously better factor in some extra lead time. It's proportional to how far you want to go, too: whenever we undertake the drive from Virginia back to Michigan, we typically manage to vacate the 5-block radius around our apartment at whatever time we were shooting for plus an hour and a half or so. Because we suddenly remember we need to go to the bank, buy a baby gift, mail a letter and get another cup of coffee for the road, and even though it's all right here, right next to each other, that's just mysteriously how long it ends up taking. I can't explain it; I suspect it's just some kind of powerful magnetic field put in place to punish you for endeavoring to venture past the city limits by slowing down time and making simple tasks take far, far longer than they would normally take, perhaps in the hope that you'll give up and just say "fuck it" and go to the Donut Dinette, which is on the corner of your street, which half the time you do, and forget about whatever else it was you were going to do in some place that is not Ghent, if there even is such a place, which after a while you seriously begin to doubt.
For instance, this afternoon I was invited to Olde Town Portsmouth, which is approximately 2.5 miles away, for a drink with a friend (whom I was already somewhat considering demoting to acquaintance status, and now my mind is made up). In order to accomplish this I had to drive, but the hubs was parking me in, so I decided to take his car, which he reported was nearly out of gas. So I went to the BP station right up the street to fill it up (3 blocks south), but the BP station on our street was out of unleaded, so I had to go to a different gas station in the opposite direction from where I eventually needed to be (4 blocks east of that), and of course every stoplight between the two gas stations (4 of them) was ordered to turn red just as I was pulling up to it. So I filled up the car at the 2nd gas station, turned right back around and hit the same four red stoplights except in the opposite direction, and eventually made it through the Midtown Tunnel to Portsmouth only fifteen minutes later than expected, whereupon another series of stoplights delayed me another 10 minutes in arriving at my destination.*
I don't really want to talk about what happened when I got there. The restaurant was cozy and dark inside and the food was yummy, like what would happen if a bunch of hobbits decided to open a tapas restaurant. My friend patiently listened to me dork out about my research project, which turned out to be collateral against regaling me with the dizzying details of her increasingly creepy love life that involves internet-dating pretty much every configuration of sexual preferences available to us within our species, just before sticking me with more than my fair share of the check, and it occurs to me that "collateral" is perhaps not the proper term here, because when you think of collateral you think of something that you get back at the end of whatever it is you are doing, whereas there is absolutely no way I will ever get that hour and a half of my life back, nor the 75 bucks I laid out for gas, beer and taters, precious, and I will never be able to scrub my brain hard enough to unlearn that "poly" is internet-dating-speak for dudes who take their wives on dates with girls they meet on the internet. Nice.**
Thankfully all the traffic lights on my way back to Ghent were green. Gentle reader, I believe that the moral of this story is self-evident. And now you have the Eagles stuck in your head, and I'm actually kind of fine with that, because imagine how I feel.
*Side note: while I was fuming about this, I actually got honked at, because one of the stoplights I was sitting at waiting for it to turn green was not a stoplight at all, but instead a stop sign, and fyi those do not in fact turn green at all, but instead stay the same color the whole time (red with white parts that spell "stop").
**In case you're wondering, your alternative lifestyle, whatever it is, is fine with me, but if it's much more complicated than you like girls or you like boys or you like girls and boys, a heads-up before you start trying to tell me all about it would be ever so appreciated.
