McCarthyisntism.
Hello. Welcome to the Weekend Gene Pool, which is now wanted by Interpol in thirteen countries on charges of being a fugitive financier. It is also the day that the feckless, spineless, neutered lickspittle, the crafty old righty Kevin McCarthy, seems poised to pitch a shutdown.
But that’s beside the point. We’re not about politics today, except for the clickbait photo and headline.
In the Weekend Gene Pool, we seek your observations and anecdotes on a subject we choose in return for entertainment, which is coming right up. Today’s request was occasioned by the last Gene Pool Gene Poll, which asked you what sort of place in the U.S. you’d most like to live if you could afford it. Choices included: elegant, big city row house, rural ranch house with lotsa land, big suburban home, beachfront or forest property, etc.
The favorite was big city, followed by beachfront. The interesting thing came in the reader’s subsequent reactions. One person chided us for not having “small town,” as an option. She basically wants to be Opie Taylor, with a fishin’ hole, and I do not disrespect that because there would probably also be a genial town drunk who speaks inadvertent truths. Another anonymous reader, who happens to be my editor, Tom the Butcher, privately whined that there’s no way he could possibly answer the poll because it was too limited: He might like a mountain or a forest retreat — which, by the way, he harrumphed, should not have been yoked together because they are very different geographical and sociological entities — but only if it was also close to a beachfront …. And that was when I wondered if he wished the poll had had 22 choices, with footnotes, cross-referencing, and Venn diagrams. He didn’t say yes, but he didn’t say no, so you just know that’s a yes. Tom was born to be an editor.
The overall point is, people care about this subject. So today’s question:
Did you ever live in a place that was simply all wrong for you? Tell us why. Be funny, if you can, but if can’t, be poignant and insightful. The More details, the better.
My offering is “Miami,” a place many people love. Dave Barry, for example. He loves it in part because it is a weird place about which he’s able to write hilariously.
I never did love it. I moved there for a job. I’d been living in Brooklyn, which I did love, but I comforted myself on the familiar theory that one big city is pretty much like another. I had been misinformed. On the first morning of the first day of my residence, I looked out the window and saw two crabs dancing, in tandem, sideways, across my front lawn.
On the first day that my friend and colleague Madeleine Blais arrived in Miami from the Northeast, she called 911 to report there was a live bat in her house. It turns out it was a variant of cockroach, an even greasier one called the palmetto bug, which can be three inches long and flies. If you stomp one, it feels like squashing a cat.
But it’s not just the fauna that made me unlove Miami.
I like change of season. And Miami, like all places, has four seasons. The summer is “hot.” The fall is “still hot.” The winter is “pretty hot.” And the spring is “hot again.” Women who have relocated from the Northeast, stylish women, women with nice wardrobes, cannot wait until the two weeks embracing the end of January and the start of February so they can break out, sadly and briefly, their leather boots, into which they sweat profusely because it is 61 degrees.
In Miami — as Dave Barry has noted — everybody drives according to the rules of their country of origin.
In Miami, the weather is nuts. It can be torrentially raining in your backyard and bright and sunny in your front yard, and then, five minutes later, this reverses. Later, as the storm pivots, in can be sunny on the left side of your house and rainy on the right.
I like old houses. The older the better. In Miami, all houses were constructed in 1952, when houses had to be built quickly to accommodate the frantic rutting of The Greatest Generation so as to create mine.
You get the idea.
Tell us your stories of places that didn’t work for you, and why. Can be a geographical location, but also a specific house or neighborhood. Send ‘em here:
Also, you can become a patron of the vulgar arts in this way:
And finally, because of a personal issue, on Tuesday I will be filing the Tuesday Gene Pool later than usual — midafternoon, I think. This also gives me an excuse to find out who is still reading and got this important message.
U.S. Navy aircraft carrier. Early 1970s. Living in a floating metal box beneath an airport runway, with 5000 people.
Of course, that beat rice paddies by miles.
I have mixed feelings about Antwerp, Belgium. On the one hand, I liked living in a 15th-century apartment that used to be a salt warehouse in the former slaughterhouse area (where the gutters ran with blood.) I likeD living across from the Zwaaterzusters (Black Sisters)!convent and St. Paul's Church. Loved being walking distance from the 15th-century Grote Markt, the Cathedral of Our Lady, Peter Paul Ruben's home, and so much more (such as great beer and easy access to Germany, Paris, Amsterdam, and London). But on the other hand, there are no trees. Trees are sacrificed for parking lots. Trees, please. Austeblifje.