Life in the local squawk and squabble

You know, living in Small Town America is about as interesting a galactic puzzle as one can find. I have spent most of my adult life in a county twice as large as the state of Rhode Island, but with about 15,000 residents. When I first moved to this little perplexing piece of the planet, we were under 10,000 warm bodies. Growth is a bitch!

But I digress…

Those of you who have spent the majority of your lives safely ensconced in the anonymity of The Big City – and you know who you are! – really don’t know what a three-ring circus you’re missing. I, on the other hand, do. We have all the ringmasters and Bozos that can be mustered per square centimeter.

My favorite thing to tell people is that I live in the Greater XXX Metropolitan Area. Now that’s a hoot, because – for openers – we aren’t an incorporated city. We are basically “everything east of the pass.” And the area we’re talking about isn’t exactly small.

And, although people move up here because they want to “get away” from the city, they have a tendency to bring their city attitudes along with them. To wit: “I don’t want anyone to know anything about me. But man, oh man: I want to know everything about my neighbors.”

It is the height of paradox, to say the least. Maybe people are so nosy up here because of the lack of oxygen. Inquiring minds and all that stuff…

Oddly enough, I have always found getting to know your neighbors – and through more than an occasional glance – to be a requirement of life at high altitude. After all, you never know when a hungry black bear is going to rip your front door off its hinges in search of a pre-hibernation feast. Really…

But perhaps the most endearing, if not completely annoying, aspect of interpersonal relationships is the ability of 10 people gathered in a single room to not be able to agree on a single thing. I.E: “The sky is blue.” “No, it’s aqua.” “Huh? It’s cerulean.” “Get glasses, dude. It’s turquoise.” “You’re all wrong. It’s overcast and gray and about to rain.” “Pinhead, those are snow clouds, not rain clouds.”

If you’ve ever read the book or seen the movie, “The Milagro Beanfield War,” you know what I’m talking about.

This is the phenomenon I call “Life in the Local Squawk and Squabble.”

Focus, or the lack thereof, is another critical tell-tale sign. You know you’re there when a group starts to talk/debate Topic A, only to get deflected to Topic Z with little discussion in between. By the time the conversation is done, no one knows what the original discussion/decision-making was actually about. Predictably, no one is taking notes.

Participants, who generally know each other or will by the time the session is over, get all balled up in adjectives and adverbs. They don’t have much appreciation for nouns, the subject and meat of the coconut.

And somehow verbs, the seat of our state of being, get overlooked. Here’s the biggie: Whatever action needs to be taken, it needs to be taken by someone else. As in: “You know, it pisses me off that X-Y-Z is happening. It needs to be fixed, and fixed right now. It affects everyone in huge ways, and all this has got to stop and stop now. But, oh so sadly, I don’t have time to help.”

I really love that one. When you join a civic group up here, for example, you find few doers but many followers. And when the doers tell the followers they’re done doing, the followers criticize the doers for not doing what needs to be done. It’s enough to give you a migraine.

Community blogs are fantastic here. They are full of rogues and renegades and a few critical thinkers. This is where “squawk and squabble” truly thrives.

And “they” say theater of the absurd is dead. I dunno. I have a pretty big punch card, and this is definitely worth the price of admission…