This article is making the rounds on my newsfeed right now, and since it pertains to my new theme of “personal geography,” I thought I’d share it with y’all.

I grew up in Johnson City, New York, a suburb of Binghamton; the city was an industrial-era powerhouse, like much of the rest of upstate and the Rust Belt. We all know how this story ends, of course – in something sadly resembling a ghost town, a skeleton of its former glory, filled with forgotten factories and disadvantaged people who fell through the cracks with the rest of the ship as it sank. The area’s main saving grace at the moment is what some might call SUNY’s flagship school, Binghamton University. My parents are both alums, along with dozens of people I grew up with.

The author of this article takes the town to task here, and a number of my Facebook friends (BU alums or people otherwise tied to the area) angrily reposted it. While there’s a lot of small-minded misses in what she wrote here, there’s also at least one hit. The core of it is her description of the city’s downtown area as the bastard offspring of a zombie movie set and a college kid’s wet bar crawling dream; she also complains of how there’s little to find to do aside from that. From the perspective of an undergrad, especially one with no local family or residential ties, this is accurate. There’s a minute arts community that’s mostly home to older people who decided to retire to the crazily low housing costs of upstate – oh, and a music scene that’s just as full of nothing but straight-edge hardcore bands as it was seven years ago.

This is State Street (i.e., bar central) in Binghamton – I never saw anything this interesting when I lived there.

On the other hand, the Binghamton area was a great place to grow up and it’s a perfect fit for my parents’ lifestyles. It’s naturally gorgeous, full of wide open spaces where you can disappear into the woods and not hear or see a car (or another human being) for as long as you like. The land costs pennies, so most houses provide tons of room for pools, gardens, tree houses, and childhood exploration. If you want to grow your own produce and rear chickens, or engage in any number of other difficult-if-not-impossible-to-do-in-a-city hobbies, this is the place for you. Mix that in with a laughably low cost of living, the ability to get across town in a matter of minutes, and some of the most kickass regional food in the Northeast, and you start to see it as less of a “shithole.”

Of course, these things aren’t going to mean shit to your average 20-something. Admittedly, I didn’t go to BU, but I grew up around it and in its sphere of influence (and I was in college once myself, not so very long ago). So, though she blames the Bingaling for her [self-perceived] weight/drinking problem and passes off some of the friendliest townspeople in the United States as an unruly horde of deformed hicks, the woman who wrote this has provided a decent summary of why I’m 3,000 miles away now – and that includes the desire to distance myself from people like her.

Love/hate? For sure. But I may well go back there when I’m ready to settle someday, and I’m sure as fuck not going to be drinking at Tom and Marty’s.

This lady is incredible, as is the visual work of Annapurna Kumar. I’m stoked as hell to be seeing her perform at Rotture tonight!

When I was 19, during the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college, I embarked on what was intended to be a cross-country bicycle ride. We opted for the northern route, sticking around US 20, a quiet highway that stretches through miles of farmland and rural areas from Boston to Oregon’s part of the Pacific Coast. It took us two days to get out of upstate New York, where our trip began. The night we crossed the border into the narrow strip of Pennsylvania that separates the Empire State from Ohio, we wound up camping in a cornfield across the street from a diner that seemed too stereotypically backwoodsy to truly exist: a haggard waitress with a pound of makeup on her face, coffeepot never not in hand as she asked us “Wanna refill, hun?” over and over again; a clientele that consisted of truckers and farmers, all clad in the same mesh hats and flannel; vehicles idling outside at the town’s one intersection with a traffic light.

Google street view image around North East, PA (a rough approximation of where I’m talking about)

Was this our journey’s defining experience? Would I do it all over again just to relive this surreal small town scene? Of course not. But the trip (which, alas, terminated in Chicago, and not in Newport, now a 2 hour and 45 minute drive from where I live) was full of experiences like this: pit stops in the country’s varied nooks and crannies. As I plan for my escape to Austin at the end of the summer, I find myself relishing the thought of the three days or so we’ll spend in the car on the way down from Portland. Where will we stop to eat? What will we see, and what of it can’t be expressed on a map (last time I checked, Google’s street view had a lot more ground to cover)?

Maybe it’s the enduring rural suburbanite in me, but I’m eager to see the Nothing that awaits us in between the metropolitan areas we’re sure to drive through as we make our way to Texas. Having spent the last few years of my life in burgeoning, bustling urban areas like Somerville and Portland (and, to those of you who’d accuse me of shortsightedness, also being aware that the world’s population is well over seven billion), it’s comforting to me to know there’s still open space left in this world, and so much of it, too.

sources close to this blogger did when they were “almost busted” this weekend.

in case you’re not from portland and have no flippin’ clue what i’m on about – the MAX, our light rail system, has no ticketing turnstiles or entry gates. it’s sort of like the above-ground parts of the green line in boston, except the drivers in the MAX trains are sealed off from the passengers in little cells at the front of each train car, rendering them unable to check for proof of fare payment.

95% of the time, this means you get a free ride if you’re wily enough to not bother with the ridiculous ticket machines on the MAX platforms. every so often, though, there’ll be a few transit officers on board your train to spoil your plans of not having to pay $2.10 to get wherever it is you’re going.

of course, stealing rides does nothing to help with the trimet’s $17 million deficit, but raising fare prices to $2.50 for a fucking bus ride (twice what it was in boston while i lived there) does nothing to help people dependent on the already shitty public transportation of a city where you’re largely fucked if you don’t have a car. does society ever seem like an endless fight between pre-adolescent siblings to anyone else?

some zesty swedish-english island-style meatballs, a la tanlines. me likey.

i almost typed “metaballs.” i like this concept.

okay, so, some of you are probably like, “big deal, portland is big because it’s got a lot of park space and it’s kinda rainy – how are those legitimate reasons to leave?”

allow me to assure you that i’ve only hit the tip of the iceberg here. above, we see another humongous factor in this decision: the staggering unemployment rate.

the bureau of labor statistics recently brought that estimate down to about 8%, but an article on the portland business journal website said there’s around 100,000 people looking for work in the area and that 4,200 jobs were lost in the month of march. unemployment statistics are already notorious for being bullshit, but this 8% figure seems especially spurious.

i’m not sure what this article defines as “the area,” but the city of portland is home to less than 600,000. take out about 25% of that to account for people who are either too young or too old to be working, and that leaves us with 450,000. so, even skewing things generously puts things at more like one in every five people are unemployed. this also does not factor in that there are droves of unemployed people decamping to the city from the east coast and other areas.

now, i’m no demographer and i certainly don’t claim that any of my estimates are based on anything more than my cynical view of reality and my continuing belief that we’re in, or about to be in, a depression (hey, paul krugman said it, not me). but i don’t trust this 8% unemployment BS one bit, especially considering that among my acquaintances, the chances of them being unemployed seem to be 1 in 2, or perhaps even 2 in 3. anyway, i like me a good, clear graphical representation of facts, and this here screenshot is yet another reason to try austin instead.

ps: more food for thought from the christian science monitor: “While the economy added 115,000 net jobs in April, some 350,000 Americans gave up looking for work. That has the effect of reducing the unemployment rate because, by the federal government’s calculation, those people no longer count as part of the labor force. As a result, the share of Americans who are part of the labor force – either working or actively looking for work – has reached a 30-year low.” womp-womp.

“days move along, but nothing… ever… changes…”

so, didja hear about those californian teen slunderkinds who “wrote” and youtube-spammed that song about being “hot girls” and having “hot girl problems?” no? well, CNN called it the worst song ever written, and that’s saying a lot considering the mainstream output of the last few years. i mean, gotta have my bowl n’ my cer-ee-yulll, y’all.

anyway, the brooklyn-based gothy synth band plushgun did a righteous retake of said skanks’ shitty little ditty. check-check it for the lulz.

to give you some idea of how spread out things are, consider the following. there are about as many people in the city limits of portland (583,776 in 2010) as there are in the city limits of boston (617,594). but that’s where the similarity stops. the population density of portland is 4,288 people per square mile. in boston, it’s 12,752 per square mile. portland’s total land area is 134 square miles. boston’s is right around 48 square miles. (thank you, jimmy wales and co.)

That’s not all of it.

i know these figures tend to be a little meaningless when presented out of context, so think of it this way, bostonian friends: imagine charlestown was three times further away from jamaica plain than it actually is. that would put about 23 or so miles between these two parts of town. the orange line would basically become the commuter rail. this is what you’re up against in terms of distances in portland.

i’m not about to start some kind of crusade against the green space here. i love that there are parks in my neighborhood, and it’s nice to even see some empty lots around town – this is no somerville; no sense of sardines in a can (yet). but i would advise against moving out here under the impression that it’s going to be easy to get around. the “state of the art” light rail system is a joke; its service area is spindly and many miles away from the homes of many portlanders. as in boston, the bus system does what it can to patch these gaps, but fare is nearly twice as expensive out here (between $2.10 and $2.40 depending on where you’re headed) and service gets few and far between on weekends – not so great if you depend on it to get around. on sundays, this results in an early curfew that makes the T’s midnight-last-call look like 24-hour service.

bottom line: if you’re packing your carry-on bags in preparation for the city of roses, be sure to start saving up so you can buy a car the second you land. you might have a better time of it than i have if you do. but if multiple-hour-long, dirt-and-mud-drenched bike commutes are your thang, those are free and plentiful ’round these parts!

this song is beautiful. i don’t know that experimental ambient tracks can be called “jams.” if so, this is my new jam.

black moth super rainbow, of which ms. seven fields is a part, will be in portland next week. i saw them in boston in september and had a transcendental experience during “forever heavy.” y’all should go, even if i don’t ($15 a ticket, grumble-grumble)…