Vagabond Condensation and Spanish Galleons

I was raised in California. In the winters it sometimes dips into the high 50s, the summers are wildly pleasant and there is no such thing as humidity. So you could imagine my shock moving to New York City, where the summer heat and humidity evaporate and condensate the vagabond’s urine right at nose level and the winters are what the less experienced to such things might call the demonic storms of a frozen hell.

Throwing myself into such new meteorological experiences got me thinking about East Coasters, why they are where they are, and what I learned in school. Apparently, hundreds of years ago groups of Europeans risked their lives to sail west, cramped on small boats for months, in hopes of making it to a new land mass that they had heard might be there, maybe. And it just might be better then where they were coming from. Have you ever been to Madrid? Or Barcelona? These are fabulous places but, apparently, not fabulous enough. These picky people were taking a big risk and making a really bold move.

So, what did they do when they finally made it to a wide-open new land and experienced the suffocating humidity and frozen death storms? Instead of continuing west, the same people who sat in place on a boat for three months and ate their uncle’s poop (because he ate the biggest meal before they left) decided they had made it. ‘We’re here!’ they said, lying to themselves. They basically quit and in doing so, they quit on America.

But as school also taught me, some continued heading west. It wasn’t easy, but at least Thanksgiving had happened and the Indians gave them turkeys for their journey. These were the types of people who fell asleep asking themselves ‘Did I just risk my life spending three months in the hull of a tiny boat suckling on Uncle Steve’s poop for this kind of weather?’ And they woke up and yelled ‘No way!’ And their confused wives said ‘What are you yelling at?’ And they said ‘Just get in the car.’

But then another curious thing happened. A good number of these even-more-adventurous people who made it across an entire ocean and then began moving across an entire continent just decided to stop, right in the middle, and lied to themselves saying ‘We made it!’ And a guy said “No we haven’t!” and they killed him. There were no geographical indicators that they had made it anywhere. So the dead guy was right. Have you seen the Midwest? It’s just flat, in all directions, and there’s nothing. In fact, if you flip to a movie and see a car driving through such an area, or even an old western and see a wagon going across the plains, you know that movie has just started or, at best, is right in the middle and you want to see where the characters in the cars and wagons eventually end up because they certainly aren’t stopping where they are. It’s an entire region that is impossible to serve as the geographical conclusion to anything. And Vitrone, I don’t want to hear your Wizard of Oz argument.

My best hypothesis for this second wave of quitters was not learned in school, but rather from the rotating headlines on Yahoo.com which seems to do a story twice a week about morbidly obesity in America, and it turns out most of these people live in the Midwest. Now it’s one thing to sail across the sucky ocean and just flat out quit, but its quite another to continue moving west, get super fat from the Indians and their never ending supply of celebratory turkeys and just get lazy. A few months ago all these guys had were a couple of ounces of Uncle poop in their bellies, now they have stoked Indians shoving a never-ending supply of rotisserie turkeys in their face. I mean you can’t really blame them. But we will anyway.

Then there are the Californians. The few that made it all the way across the ocean, through the crappy East Coast weather and past all of the turkey and meat products to a place that probably looked as beautiful as that Avatar planet (the Avatar planet before the war with the humans, when that giant tree was still up). The type of people who weren’t about to settle for snowstorms or humidity, and probably just didn’t like turkey. One would assume these people, my people, would be the winners. But another trip to Yahoo.com’s rotating headlines proves one wrong.

Yesterday Yahoo reported that the median cost of a home in my hometown of Palo Alto has gone from 1 million to 1.6 million dollars since 2008, even as the rest of the country has tanked. Meaning that to enjoy the beautiful Avatar tree of California one must spend all the money that multiple jobs could ever muster up just to rent a single Avatar leaf to sleep on. Hardly a goal the poop-eating risk takers had in mind a few hundred years back.

So, unfortunately, my people lose. And the winners aren’t the East Coasters either. They’d laugh at the Californians, but their rent is almost the same plus laughing at anything is hard when there’s 90% humidity and your lungs are half-full of evaporated hobo pee.

It turns out the Midwesterners come out on top. Their strong personal motivation coupled with their love of turkey meat has left them at the perfect quitting point. In sprawling eight bedroom homes on three acre lots with eight hundred dollar monthly mortgages and all the left over cash they need to go crazy on the dollar menus. So notch another hole in your 52-inch belt middle America, your love of slightly decent weather and rotisserie-styled anything has gotten you to a much better place than Barcelona.

-Eric Kallman