More Adventures in Selfimportantville, Part 1

Recounting the story of the yeast purchase at Grocery Pit brought to mind other Selfimportantville adventures I've had over the years. The most vivid memories date from my first months here, when I was still learning my way around, and getting used to ideas like:

• The more heavily traveled a street is, and the more likely you are to need to get to it, the less likely it is to be labeled with any signs telling you what it's called.
• Just because there aren't any lines painted on the road doesn't mean it isn’t meant to legally accommodate four lanes of traffic.
• Just because a national chain drug store is located in a major metropolitan area, in the United States, in the 21st century, doesn’t mean it can’t close at 8 p.m., nor that it must stock such luxury items as Chap-Stick(tm).
• Moving house to a town two miles away is an atrocity second only to cannibalizing your own children.
• Right of way is for Philistines.

Etc. This is Selfimportantville. The learning curve is steep, and the roads are never salted (another cause for annoyance).

I met several of my early adventures during the process of looking for a church to join. I happen to adhere to a denomination that is much less common in the Gravel Region (of which Selfimportantville is the principal metropolis) than it is in other parts of the country, so getting settled in that respect took some research and effort, and I did a lot of visiting around before I was done.

On one occasion, I was searching for a church in TownC, and couldn’t find the street on which it was supposed to be located, naturally, for dearth of signage. I stopped at a gas station and asked the attendant for help finding Blubber Drive. He was apologetic. “I’m sorry, I don’t know – I’m not from this area myself.” Fine, obviously I sympathize with that. But he went on. “I grew up in VillageB.” Well, foreigner though I was, I did know that VillageB is located immediately adjacent to TownC, and that we were standing ten minutes' walk from the B/C border. I hadn’t yet encountered the widely accepted local notion that “this area” signifies “within half a city block of here.” So I was puzzled. And he continued, apparently still trying to excuse his ignorance, “I’ve only lived in TownC for eleven years.” Er…right. Let me see a map.

At the time, I wrote it off as a cultural experience in small town provinciality. After five years of hearing near-identical sentiments from most of the urbanite Selfimportantvillains I’ve encountered, the quaintness factor is pretty much gone.

To be continued...