Monday, October 03, 2005
Let me give you an idea of the hell that is Northern Virginia. Let's start with my experience tonight. I'm rather happy about getting to leave behind my boring proposal work for the rest of the week and I'm going to a nearby restaurant for a free dinner with the other FTL folks. First, I drive to the wrong restaurant. My fault. No big deal since I'm one of those people who likes to be early. I call the office and find out that the actual restaurant is about 2 miles away. My coworker gives me directions and I set off.
Ten minutes later and I'm still sitting at the same red light trying to get out of the first restaurant. Ten more minutes pass by and I make it to the next red light about a tenth of a mile down the road. Ten minutes after that I finally make it to where the restaurant is supposed to be, but IT ISN'T THERE! I drive up and down the road for about ten minutes and decide to call 411. I get ahold of the restaurant and the hostess give me directions from where I currently parked. I take off, relieved that I will soon be arriving, only to find out the hostess' directions have put me on the effing TOLL ROAD. So not only am I stuck getting on the freeway, I have to pay 50 cents. Then I have to get off, turn around, get back on the toll road and pay another 50 cents to get to the restaurant's exit. By this time I'm already 40 minutes late to dinner and I chalk it up as a loss. After 20 more minutes of claustrophobic driving, I finally get back to the hotel.
This isn't a fluke incident, either. Driving in the DC/Norther Virginia area is pure hell all the time. Don't bother trying it yourself. If you ever come here, make sure you're near a Metro stop. If the Metro can't get you there, it ain't worth the trouble to get there.
The traffic isn't the only thing shitty about Northern Virginia. The whole place reeks of Upper Middle Class Homogenized Suburbia. There's strip mall on top of strip mall on top of shopping malls on top of chain restaraunts on top of condominium complexes. Not even all the trees and nature around the area can compensate for the ugliness that is Fairfax County. This place represents almost all of what is destroying America today. People are not friendly, they only seemed concerned with themselves and how fast they can get home and what new, fancy stuff they can buy for cheap at Target. There's no personable aspect to anything here. It's ugly.
What really scares me is that this is what is happening to my hometown back in Kentucky. The reason my parents moved when I was four to the house they still live in was to escape exactly this. They saw the suburban expansion coming and made a preemptive strike, moving 10-15 further from dowtown Louisville. The expansion is catching up to them now, though. Oldham County is slowly turning into Upper Middle Class Homogenized Suburbia. Craig's Pharmacy (where Craig knew every customer by name, pretty much) finally sold their business to CVS. The IGA is lucky no other grocery store has come into town, or else it would be out of business quickly, I'm sure. While it annoyed me at first when Wal-Mart took away the store in Crestwood for a bigger store in LaGrange, I'm thankful they didn't install a Super Wal-Mart monstrosity. One of my favorite things about Los Angeles is that most of the towns won't let Wal-Mart build a store there. It's stores like Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Lowe's, Target, etc, that are really the root of all this. They're taking the local markets right out from underneath the entrepreneurs and small business owners and killing the small-town feel of America.
Let me qualify all this by saying I don't mind big cities. In fact, I think I would enjoy living in downtown DC. Everytime I'm down there I have a blast. Plus it feels real, not fake like Suburbia. But I can promise you this, I will not live in Northern Virginia on my own accord. If my boss wants me to do a rotation here, I will tell him that it has to be accessible by Metro or I will find a better job somewhere else.
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