Where I'm at

St. Charles County, Missouri (aka the State of Misery) is a hellish vision of suburbia gone mad. But the town of St. Charles was originally built by the French, and the old part reminds me a little bit (I said a LITTLE bit) of New Orleans. Or at least, it's visually attractive and it kinda feels like a real town.

I took a walk down there tonight and smoked some Sherman MCDs, the pretentious cigarette of my tragic youth. No, I don't really smoke, but I'm regressing. Now I have a cigarette hangover and I smell unpleasantly like stale cigarette smoke.

While walking, I saw an odd, shaggy-looking rat run down an alley. It looked like a nutria--made me feel right at home--but nutria haven't made it this far north, have they?

I was going to have a cocktail to go with my cigarettes, but all the bars seemed to be sports oriented and filled with lathered-up Cardinals fans watching the game.

So, I don't know if there's any culture down there to speak of, but still that's where you'd want to live if you had to live around here. And it's surrounded by rings and layers of strip malls and tacky-looking subdivisions.

About ten years or so, the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers flooded badly around here and some areas were under several feet of water for months. It would have been a New Orleans-scale disaster, except that not much had been built in the flood plains. But now, development has sprung up all over the place in those areas that were badly flooded a decade ago. Since I've been here, they approved another mall to be built in a flood plain here in St. Charles County. Of course they're going to prevent it from flooding again by building new, bigger, higher levees. And you wonder if these people are aware of recent events a few hundred miles south on this same river, or if they can't connect the dots. Anyway, it's not like this place needs another fucking mall, strip mall or big box development. I don't think there's anyplace in the Greater St. Louis area where you're more than two miles from a Target, a Wal-Mart, a Steak n Shake (not a bad thing), a Home Depot, a Best Buy, a Circuit City, an Olive Garden, etc, etc. Real estate developers = Satan.

On another subject, I wasn't going to brag about my car but... I really, really love it. It's a ten-year-old 318is--an aged starter BMW, so it's not quite the height of decadent luxury. It's a "luxury compact" with a 5-speed manual transmission and a 1.8 liter 4-cylinder engine, which is not a terrifically fast accelerator. But that's about the only bad thing I have to say about it--and anyway, my last car was a 1972 Beetle, so what do I know about acceleration? And if you give it a couple minutes it can get pretty fast. It's great at high speeds, very solid and smooth, with a little bit of that European-car engine whine. It handles like you think a BMW oughta, I definitely have gained an understanding of what the hype is about. The interior is clean tan leather, the exterior is dark green and at first glance looks pretty cherry, though closer inspection reveals that the clearcoat is rubbing off the back bumper and the baseboard on the driver's side is cracked from an accident. Still, it's the best car I've ever owned. It almost seems like a life-changer. People do think of you differently if you're driving a BMW--they think you're a bitch. (But that's just cause they're jealous or intimidated, of course.) I don't think I'll be able to get any slacker hipster boys in that car, but that's probably for the best.

Speaking of boys, men, dating, sex, etc.--I had a chance to see 9 1/2 Weeks a few days ago (don't ask). I was really creeped out by Mickey Rourke (as well as Kim Basinger's "acting" and 80s fashions)--but it was a relief, a feeling of great freedom, to feel turned off by him. The good thing about the debacle with the Insane Republican Med Student is that it cured me of my perverse attraction to creepy misogynistic control freaks. That night I had a very pleasant dream about being in my bed in my house in New Orleans with sweet, likeable John Cusack. I didn't want to wake up.

I still think romance is a crock of shit, but if I again find myself all tangled up over someone, I hope it will be someone more like the typical John Cusack character (unless we're talking Grosse Pointe Blank)(Being John Malkovich wasn't typical) and less like the typical cocky, creepy Mickey Rourke character--not even Mickey Rourke in Diner, which was the closest he ever came to being likeable.

I can hear you all laughing at me, but I don't care.