No, No, I'm Not Bitter.

Someone, this morning, asked why I was so anti my home town.

Which of course reminded me of my miniature freak out session I had over at Mongo's blog (you are a source of controversy, my glorious friend.)

This person said, this morning, "I mean, I go to the bars there, and I love it. You just hate it because everyone else loves it."

But I had a different experience there, man. Now, of course, it's like this big deal, to go out in Naperville. People actually like it there, they want to move there, almost as badly as I wanted to leave.

I literally watched the population explosion happen. At eleven, I was aware of it. Places I rode my bike weren't there anymore. It happened over the winter, even. One summer, there was long stretch of prairie with bike paths, and the next summer it was giant houses. The forest behind the soccer fields was ripped down and replaced with crowded mansions, they even built on top of our makeshift dirt baseball diamonds. Everyone wanted to live there because it was quaint, with good schools and great things for children to do. Great things that needed to be improved upon, apparently, by snatching them away.

Did they even realize that this giant influx of young professional baby-makers would ruin the atmosphere of the town? That by closing down all of those family stores and diners and bars downtown and replacing them with a fucking Bar Louie and a Barnes and Noble and a Mongolian Barbeque and a fucking Eddie Bauer, they made me hate them? They gutted my bowling alley, ripped down my forest, mowed over my prairie, bought out my comic book store, bankrupted my video store, closed my favorite restaurants throughout all of my teenage years. How can I not despise that?

I spent a lot of time at BookZeller, this fantastic-scented used book store in a basement underneath a coffee shop(which was converted into our second Starbucks on the block). I worked at their warehouse for awhile, sorting, researching, and pricing the rare books they couldn't keep in the store. It was one of the greatest jobs I ever had. BookZeller closed a couple years after the Barnes and Noble busted open.

They choked out the stable I worked at, literally, until it was forced to shut the gates. I could see it happening, I watched them build crap so close to our paddocks that the horses wouldn't go near the fence. And the new people, the new people that purchased those houses with perfect knowledge that they were by a barn had the vicious audacity to complain about the horse smell. They took away our smell. We used to smell trees and grass and earth.

It's funny, because in my head, those people that moved there? The chains and the bullshit? They thought it was an improvement. They thought they were making it better. They thought that by upping the trend factor, adding designer stores...they thought that made the town more valuable. And according to Money magazine, it did (number two).
Looking at it now, there is a very healthy mix of small and large businesses, wonderful schools, more trees, better libraries. The people who live there, right now, are in love with everything. Sure, there are still boutiques and private businesses, antique dealers. There are some bars that I still love, with that perfect greasy, homemade bar food*, but none of them are downtown.

The changes that happened within that town stole everything that I loved, everything that connected me to the world, to my childhood, my identity, and fucking lit them on fire and laughed when it pissed me off. I mean, when you're a teenager, that's how you identify yourself. Where you go, what you like. That's what shapes your identity later on in life. That's why I'm so retarded about associating myself with things that I love...I don't want them taken away from me too soon. I want that time when they're mine to share.

Change is good. Conflict is good. It is, I love it, I love it, I love it when things are different. But when you change into a clone...that change is bad. Bad change.

I love my family and friends that still live there, and I don't look down on them for living there at all. Most of those friends moved to Naperville during the boom in the 1990's. They weren't there when it was...what I remember. I still go there every other week.

But I will never, never, never live there again. And no, I'm not bitter. Not at all.

...

* I've only found one bar here with excellent, unchallenged bar food (thank you, Gyna) Still, it's up on that designer burger trend, but the rest of the menu is fucking bar food. Dirty bar food, like homemade chili and potato skins, burgers like a hockey puck - no, a baseball. But I'm still looking for bars where everything costs five dollars and tastes like grease, but deliciously so, places where newcomers stare at their chicken and pat a napkin over it to get out the oil, where bloody marys are thick, dark, and heavily spiced, without all that frilly lemon-celery nonsense. That's one thing that Naperville's got.

...