Blue barchetta

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I am head­ing to San Antonio to visit some relat­ively distant …relat­ives.  To be more precise, Boerne.  I haven’t any clue what Boerne is like, only that it seems to be a rather conser­vat­ive escape conduit for upper-middle-class white people who feel the need to vacate San Antonio.  Either way, family is family, and I haven’t seen these folks in at least 5 years, maybe as long as 9 or 10 years.  That means I might shave my face for the event!  They are prob­ably used to a lovable pre-pubescent scamp that I simply no longer can claim to be.

Even though I would like to take my own car down there, I will abstain, consid­er­ing that the belt or pump or whatever that controls the A/C and power steer­ing is out and the part has not been delivered yet.

I am not sure what to say to my distant family — I’ve moved around a lot… I’m back in Austin but don’t really want to remain here… why did you move to Boerne?  My family as a whole is pretty small and spread out, so I really only keep in touch with about 6 or 7 people.  Speaking about myself to crowds is not some­thing I enjoy, but I usually manage to pull it off like a bronze-medalist at a Toastmaster’s Club speak-off.

Now that I have a car, I real­ize how much I am not a convert­ible person, or a car person for that matter.  I only keep the roof down because of the afore­men­tioned A/C issue, and I still find myself park­ing the car and walk­ing in as opposed to driv­ing thru. To be fair, I have been driv­ing around Austin a lot lately, but that’s solely because I’m getting my kicks out of driv­ing, some­thing I haven’t really done in 4 years.  But all the places I go to, or even when I feel a lovely breeze through the cowl of my blue barchetta, I wish I was else­where.   This car might last me a while, long enough for me to wonder what city I could possibly want to move to that is good for cars.

Probably nowhere, because in the long term, me and auto­mo­biles are anathema to each other.  The cities I truly feel I belong in are walk­ing cities, are subway and train cities, are cities where empty space is not wasted — I want to live in a place where land is meant for people, whether it be apart­ments or parks — any remain­ing land should be too steep, too deep or too treach­er­ous for urbanization.

Part of what annoys me about Austin (and a number of other places in America) is that the “urban” zone is not urban enough, and then the rural land/countryside is too suburb­an­ized.  The moment I visited Malmo, Sweden, I saw for the first time how a city, large or mid-sized or small, should be ideally built. After you hit the Swedish main­land from the Oresund bridge, you see flat farm­land, green, kind of boring in fact, like the flat­ter parts of Kent or Sussex. Then, a train station with a few apart­ment build­ings and a Home Depot-type place clustered around it. After you watch exactly 2 people disem­bark, it becomes flat coun­tryside again, misty and green still, placid and pleas­ant in an unpre­ten­tious, Swedish sort of way, never going to be the Schwarzwald or the chalk cliffs of Dover, and not really want­ing to be. Another 10 minutes go by, 10 minutes of coun­tryside, and you begin to wonder where Malmo actu­ally is.

A distant, flat line appears on the hori­zon, and suddenly you’re knee-deep in 5 story build­ings, 3 story build­ings, gardens, a big box shop­ping center even. Then before you can blink, your train veers dramat­ic­ally left and you are in Malmo Central, and no sooner is the train stop­ping than are the good-looking famil­ies taking their light bags with them, ready to eat lunch. That’s it, folks, that’s what a city should be — not the coun­try. None of this trailer-park, XXX video, “Homes from the 250’s”, car deal­er­ship strip boulevard nonsense that flanks Austin and most other cities in the US. Country here, city there.

But I have to temper my thoughts, at the risk of sound­ing anti-American. My mother used to get irrit­ated when I would feign disin­terest in loving America, when I would say things like “I am grate­ful that I live in a first-world coun­try like America”, imply­ing that Switzerland, New Zealand, Britain or Norway would be about the same to me. What I always wanted to tell her, but didn’t because she is the type to ground or punish simply due to tone of voice, is that I bitch about America because I want it to be better. There is noth­ing more patri­otic than saying that you have higher expect­a­tions for your nation.

Until America starts becom­ing more like Malmo, I will have to cling to the largest cities at the cost of a convert­ible and afford­able rent.