well, i didn't play my guitar tonight, so i guess i'd better write.
upon my usual night's random internetting i came this interesting wiki entry. i wonder who wrote it. there are a couple of things in there that i already knew, but most of it i hadn't. now i have more things to say during my grand poway tour other than "and here's the wal-mart" or "there is aibertos, the greatest taco shop in the world."
poway is a very interesting place that i've written about many times before. just sitting here thinking about all the stuff i've written about my town throughout the years is entertaining enough. as with just about everything in my life, i've never really felt neutral about the place; i either wanted to raise my kids in the city in the country with its rolling brown hills and green groves or i wanted to take the first train to anywhere-the-fuck-else and burn the mother down on my way out, the varying degrees usually directly proportional to the amount of less than jake i was listening to at the time.
my freshman year of high school, i tried to write a story about a bunch of kids in my high school saving the world from something--aliens or extra-dimensional beings or something, it doesn't matter. it was supposed to be something of a comedy, a b-movie horror story about how much i loved poway. everyone from my little suburb was going to get together and show the world what happens when you mess with the city in the country. i had the plot outlined and i wrote three chapters before i realized how awful it was.
i spent my senior year in writing seminar writing about how much i hated the place. one specific piece was one of my senses; the only actual assignments we had in the class were pieces that defined a sense--the first five were sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing, but the others were abstract ideas. this particular piece was my sense of language; we were to write dialogue as it would actually be expressed by real people. i wrote a conversation between a friend and myself, a fake conversation at a real party we went to a couple weeks before. it really was one of the most bitter things i've ever written, and if you know me you know what that would mean. i was really ready to get out of poway.
of course, i only went about twenty minutes out of poway, but even a little space is enough to get a different perspective. in my sophomore year of college i wrote a paper on the south poway/north scripps ranch area and how the suburban sprawl here was the final decline of the american dream and would ultimately lead to the end of western civilization. sure, it was completely overdramatic, but that's who i am, and it's also who my professor was--she gave me an a.
a semester later all of the sudden i was a poli-sci major, and having taken a class in local politics and having a subject to analyze, i discovered what i had already suspected deep down in my heart but didn't want to admit to myself: poway is just like every other fledgling suburban city in america, flopping around in a constant state of identity crisis, trying to control growth without limiting opportunity, desperately striving to give its citizens a reason to call themselves powegians instead of san diegans.
what do i see now, now that i'm officially gone? i see my hometown, a miserable class-stratified trap, the only place i ever seem to be able to call home. there are those that would speak of leaving it forever, i know, i was one of them. after my long years of experience, however, i can say that it's not poway's fault it sucks. there are enough good people still around to make it worthwhile. the fences that we thought were holding us in are only imagined; nothing's keeping us from the rest of the world. just know that no matter where you go, poway will always be there, and it will always be home.
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