Category: Pointless Digressions || By

My brain is a little bit sprained right now, folks, because of a couple of side projects I've gotten myself involved in. That means there's not a lot of mental gasoline in the tank, and since mental gasoline tops four bucks a gallon and payday's still several days away, you'll have to be content with a few photos.

After all, a picture's worth a thousand words, so consider this a 5,000-word essay.

None of these pictures are anything special, but I've started carrying the digital camera around and snapping things whenever they catch my eye.

You know, when you live here most of your live, you tend to focus on the decline, and ignore the nice things. It's not a bad-looking place in a lot of ways.

I should point out that no Photoshop trickery was required on any of these pictures. No photons or electrons were harmed, either.

Over the weekend, I had a very pleasant dinner with an Almanac reader and his wife. Afterward, she asked me, point-blank, "Why are you still here?"

I don't have a good answer to that question. As a writer, I'm pretty much resigned to not making a lot of money. Writing friends of mine have moved to New York and Chicago, but the cost of living is several times higher than the cost of living here, and they're not getting paid any more for their assignments than I get paid. So there are economic considerations.

Family and friends? Well, a lot of my friends have moved away, and so have some of my family members, but those are important reasons, too.

Still, there's obviously something more than that. I could live pretty cheaply in Dubuque, Iowa, or Sidney, Ohio, and I'm not moving to either place.

Why do I stay here? I don't know. It's historic, it's parochial, it's interesting, it's frustrating, it's creative, it's maddening, it's inspiring, it's depressing, and as Tom Lehrer sang, "what the hell, it's home."