“You can never go home again,” is something they say. Ok, but if home is where the heart is, we go home every day. No, they’re saying, you can’t go back to your childhood home ever again. I lived in my dad’s house for twenty years, and then I moved somewhere else a bunch of times for the next twenty years. After my dad passed on, I moved back into my dad’s home, and I went home again. It’s a different home now, but it’s still home, and it’s the same home I grew up in. 

“How can you stand it there?” the theys ask when they find out what city you call home. “It must be so boring.” Ok, but I view home as the place we return to after we go out. I don’t think time at home should be exciting. The definition of home should be home base, or place we return to after our exciting adventures.  

“That’s kind of the point,” they say. “Where do you go in your small city/big town to have exciting adventures?” 

“I realize you live in a bigger city with more people in it,” we say to them, “but what are you doing outside your home that is so much more exciting?”   

“I’m saying you don’t have as many options as we do.” Ok, but anytime we put a bunch of people together, they develop things to do. They post about functions and get-togethers, they build buildings to do things in, and they pay people to come to our city to entertain us. What are you doing that’s so much better? What’s the difference between Big City entertainment and Big Town/Small City entertainment?” No one has even been able to answer those latter two questions in a way that made me rethink my relative definitions of home, boring, and things to do. 

When residents of big towns, and small cities want to go out and have big adventures, they travel to “exciting” locales with their “exotic” sights, and when they’re done, they can’t wait to return to their boring home in their boring hometown.  

The big city, city slicker cannot imagine living in a city as small as small as ours, because they’re just too exciting, and they have to constantly have exciting things to do. That’s the headline, the thesis statement, and the takeaway we’re supposed to have in this conversation. Once we become friends with the city slicker, he concedes, “We don’t go out much. We’re pretty much homebodies.” We’re not supposed to catch the inconsistency, but when we do, and we call them out on it, we can tell that they didn’t catch their own inconsistency. Are they dumb? As a small city resident, I don’t believe we’re allowed to ask that question if we live in a smaller, less populated city, because we’re required to assume that size matters when it comes to intelligence, and I think we’re supposed to naturally assume that size matters when it comes to how exciting an individual is too. It genuinely surprises most city slickers to consider that they fell prey to their own big city fallacies. “I think I’ve heard that people question small city/big town residents on the excitement in their town so often that I never considered realities of it.”

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All my people were boring, and I was born and raised in a boring house in a boring hometown. As a result, I’ve been boring most of my life. There were times when I went crazy with the boredom, and I made friends who said things like, “What are we doing here fellas, let’s do something.” They were boring guys who knew they were boring, from boring homes in a boring hometown, but that didn’t mean that they couldn’t fill their lives with constant excitement. They, like me, were the literal definition of home boys, but that didn’t mean we had to sit around watching Who’s the Boss reruns, or chat in the boring manner my people did. I hung out with these friends separately, for the most part, and they kept me on the go, constantly, until we branched out to other boring fellas doing other boring things all the time in our boring hometown. We did so many ‘things to do’ that a lot of these things began to run together, until we didn’t appreciate most of the things we were doing. At some point, we just wanted to go back our boring home with our boring people, until we finally got back home, and we couldn’t wait to go out and do something again. 

There’s the rub, I’ve had blocks of my life with people like me who never wanted to go home after a shift, and we’ve partied so hard and so often that the parties started to lose their edge. What is “that edge”? That edge is a thrilling, momentary escape from the mundane activities of the every day. Yet, if you’ve ever had a block of life where you had so many friends, wanting to do so many things, we reach a point where we party so often and so much that we’re no longer escaping the mundane. We reach a point where we want to return to the boring side of life, so that the next parties are more exciting. The Big City, city-slickers purport to live exciting lives that the rest of us would never understand, but my experience with this fast-paced lifestyle is that if we don’t return to a base norm it starts to become more commonplace and it loses its edge?    

The “How do you continue to live in such a boring place with nothing to offer?” question reminds me of the old “Mean People Suck!” bumper sticker. One of the latter’s primary purposes was to inform those of us who see the bumper sticker that its owner is NICE!, as in all caps with an exclamation point nice. We don’t see this self-serving bumper sticker any more, but I would’ve to ask them to define the difference between mean and nice. I’m quite sure their reply would be just as self-serving, to which I would say, “Doesn’t this bumper sticker imply that you’re nice, and isn’t that a characterization you’re required to allow others make of you?” I have the same question for the The Big City, city-slickers who want to leave us with the impression that they’re movers-and-shakers, cosmopolitan types with so much culture in their system that it’s now bubbling up and out of their pores. They can’t identify with country bumpkins who don’t mind being bored. That’s their headline and their takeaway impression of themselves, but after listening to their bio, I often find them just as boring and unsophisticated as I am, you are, and the rest of the 50% of the planet that they just assumed they were better than.