Asheville, NC
1.) You will quickly learn to time your daily routine around the tourists. You will know, for example, not to bother going to a restaurant between 5pm and 7pm on a Friday or Saturday evening between May and November. You also know that if dinner at that time on those days can't be helped, you can expect, at minimum, a 45-minute wait.
2.) You will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid West Patton Avenue between the hours of five and seven.
3.) The sight of a Florida license plate will come to fill you with uncontrollable rage, particularly if the driver of the car with said license plate is creeping along at a sedate 25 miles per hour under the speed limit. If this is occurring on Hendersonville Road, and both northbound or southbound lanes are taken up with creeping Floridians, you will seriously evaluate your insurance and honestly consider whether or not it would be worth the penalty to deliberately ram them.
4.) Whether or not you even drink alcohol at all, let alone beer, you will become passionately interested in the brewing process, particularly because breweries are sprouting around the city (18 at last count) like mushrooms on the lawn after a rain.
5.) You will come to feel nonchalant about the presence of large black bears outside your residence or place of business, although you may still feel alarmed if one tumbles over the downtown fence where you're sitting and contentedly playing your saxophone. Likewise, it may be somewhat alarming to find one lurking in the hospital parking deck.
6.) You will be presented with a choice for Mexican food: Papa's and Beer, and everywhere else. Choose wisely.
7.) You will respond to the sight of a man with hairy legs and a beard, dressed as a nun, hurtling past you on a tall bike at top speed as follows: You will turn to your friend and say, "So, I was thinking Thai. Does Thai sound good to you?"
8.) You will go tubing down the French Broad River, then consider the historic industrial and sewerage uses of said river when your white t-shirt turns a shade of black-brown that won't come out in the wash.
9.) You will see strange sights in late-night haunts: drag queens tying balloon animals at Denny's; a large and hairy, bearded Hispanic man in a blond wig and a pink satin dress eating pancakes, also at Denny's; tarot readers drawing a crowd at Waffle House -- and the like. You will respond as follows: "Do I want a burger, or do I want to really go all out and get a steak?"
10.) You will play "Name that Turd" while walking through downtown, hoping that it came from a very large dog, but secretly knowing all along that it's human.
11.) You will walk through downtown, and increasingly West Asheville, with your eyes to the ground as though shrouded in secret regrets, but really because you don't want to spend half an hour scraping dog shit out of the treads of your shoes.
12.) You will become ambivalent toward Biltmore and all that it rules with its iron fist. You will feel no screaming need to visit, although you won't turn down free tickets if someone happens to have some -- especially at Christmas.
13.) The only time you will not feel ambivalent toward Biltmore is when you realize that it, along with the Grove Park Inn and the hospital, have colluded to depress wages. For this, you will curse them to boil in the lowest shitpits of hell.
14.) Speaking of wages, you will watch an exodus of your friends to places they hate, but where employment offers wages of the sort that a person can afford to live while only working one job. They will tell you of this marvelous phenomenon, but having never seen it with your own eyes in Asheville, you will remain doubtful.
15.) You will follow issues of growth and development with intense passion, and will fall into one of two camps: the NIMBY's who moved here from somewhere else and think that now that they're here everything is perfect and the city gates should be locked and barred, and those who hope that some way, somehow, growth might bring in a decent-paying job. Whichever camp you fall into, you will view the other side as your eternal, bitter enemies.
16.) You will hear wondrous rumors that someone has moved to Asheville for a job that does not involve mixing alcoholic drinks or coffee, or kissing whining tourists' entitled asses. You will dismiss these rumors as simply too farfetched to be true.
17.) The care and maintenance of dreadlocks will become a serious topic of conversation, and whether the Senegalese lady on Eagle Street really is the best you can do, or if it's worth venturing into the projects to go to someone's cousin's aunt's friend's house. If you do deign to visit the Senegalese lady, you will studiously ignore her thriving black market.
18.) Or, alternately, you can just join the crowd that elects to let 'em go on their own and hope for the best. Most people do.
19.) It's Asheville. AshEville. AshEville. AshEville. The fury you'll feel whenever someone omits the e will drive you to think of punishments that would make even the Spanish Inquisitors blanch.
20.) You'll realize that you live in a small, out-of-the-way city that most people have never heard of, despite the throngs of tourists that make downtown on the weekends so crowded that it is literally impossible to walk on the sidewalks, and you have to walk in the street if you want to go anywhere at any speed faster than "tourist mosey." That being said, you will recognize and learn to love bursts of internationalism whenever you come across them. The sight of several Sikh men snapping pictures in Biltmore Village, in sandals, plaid shorts, and as elegantly bearded and beturbanned as ever, will fill you with pride. It will be a mark of pride to know that on an average day, 72 different languages are spoken at Emma Elementary School on the west side of town. You will feel cosmopolitan when you see all the signage in English, Spanish, and Russian. You will tally up the Asian-owned businesses on the south side of town, and reaching a total of almost fifty, will wonder if the city is on the verge of developing a Chinatown. Italian food prepared by Indians will delight you, as will Greek food prepared by Mexicans, and you will know there is no better place for Latin pageantry than a Chinese buffet after Spanish Mass lets out on Sunday -- unless of course, you are attending the Miss Gay Latina pageant, in which case the pageantry puts that found anywhere else to shame.
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"To sustain the life of a large, modern city in this cloying, clinging heat is an amazing achievement. It is no wonder that the white men and women in Greenville walk with a slow, dragging pride, as if they had taken up a challenge and intended to defy it without end." -- Rebecca West for The New Yorker, 1947
Last edited by hauntedheadnc; Sep 21, 2014 at 6:17 AM.
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