Exeter town pride!(?)

I was cruising thru our little dump of a neighborhood strip mall today—well, okay, “dump” may be a bit strong, let’s just say “shoddy, run-down-looking joint”—when it occurred to me that this single block of pus-colored buildings is all that my family (yours truly excluded, of course) ever sees of Exeter. The old, half-assed grocery store (SaveMart) is there, the equally old-and-half-assed auto parts store (AutoZone) and pharmacy (RiteAid) are too, along with the bank they use and all the fast-food joints/restaurants that we frequent. To be entirely accurate, a couple of those fast-food joints/restaurants are across the street at another little strip mall that, while newer, still somehow manages to look like a little red-headed stepbrother to the BIGGER strip mall across the road. However, that doesn’t change the fact that the only part of this city that my family ever sees is the last two blocks on the western edge of town. I always have to tell them when something new happens uptown, like a new business opens or an old one closes or they paint the water tower or build a nice, new granite sign at the cemetery. This is not quite as true of my mom as it is of my dad, because every once in a blue moon she’ll have to go to the post office to mail something or swing by the Exeter School District office to drop off an insurance payment, although generally speaking she just makes ME do it. But that’s basically it.

The only reason it occurred to me was because I was afraid that some people might begin to assume I fucking LIVED there, seeing as how I’m up there several times a day—in fact I can, with utter and complete confidence, predict that I will go up there for milk, some fucking prescription, and some shitty lunch item from Taco Bell (or possibly Mickey D’s), at least, before I even finish this blog. But after that, other things began to strike me, too: things like the very strong belief that some people have about “buying locally” and supporting the community and/or the small businessman instead of supporting the behemoth WalMart or the big-box titans like Home Depot or Costco over in Visalia, and thereby keeping those tax dollars in Exeter (or something like that—I never took economics, and can assure you I would’ve flunked for ditching class even if I HAD taken it). We actually USED to do that…run up to Coast-to-Coast for a paintbrush or the Mercantile for some shells for the .22 so we could go all fucking Iwo Jima on all the vermin squirrels running around here. Or we’d hit V.I.P. Pizza, or Video Zone to rent a flick, all that shit that you’d see in a Rockwell painting, if Rockwell were deranged and took acid. But almost everything in this house comes from Visalia nowadays, and has ever since WalMart opened up 15 or 20 years ago. This is mainly because of my mom: I firmly believe my mom would shop at a store called “WeFlogOurEnslavedChildLaborersAndSupportIslamicTerroristsMart” if she thought she could save five fucking cents on toilet paper there. My mother—the whole family really, including ME, but ESPECIALLY my mother—is basically the small businessman’s nightmare. In fact, some of the local business owners probably have pictures of her with a Hitler mustache drawn on them hanging on their office dartboard (at least I HOPE it’s drawn on, otherwise my mom has a secret life as a male and a Nazi that I know NOTHING about).

Some greasy spoon called Huckleberry’s (breakfast and lunch ONLY—what fucking sense does it make to be CLOSED FOR DINNER? I would’ve thought that restaurants made their biggest profits THEN) opened up at the smaller strip mall: after several months my family went and ate there once and loved it. They then proceeded to bitch up a storm when it closed up shop a few months later. You can’t really seem to explain to them that they have no right to bitch about a place closing down when they only bought like one fucking meal a year there; NO establishment can stay in business if all it’s customers only shopped there once a fucking year. You’ve gotta be more supportive than THAT shit, you know? Some other restaurant, called Yukon Jack’s (no relation to the whiskey that I know of), has already come and gone in the same place, and we NEVER ate there—not even ONCE. Now there’s a Perko’s in there, been there for a couple of months or so, and we haven’t eaten there yet either. It probably speaks volumes that the most successful business in that place is the fucking dialysis clinic that opened up several months ago.

It just seems weird, because my folks used to really spout off about how good a town Exeter was and how glad they were that they lived here. Of course, considering all the surrounding communities (Farmersville, Woodlake, Lindsay, Ivanhoe, etc.), it ain’t like it’s got a lot of competition—the fucking death camp at Buchenwald probably looks like Cape Cod or the Riviera compared with Goshen or Yettem. They’ve also never been a victim of crime that I can recall, although other houses on our street have been, as have I: a $90 pair of shades was stolen out of my truck during the night like 18 years ago or something. But now, every time I start the car in the morning to warm up for 5 fucking minutes while I take a leak, I have to listen to, “Stephen, one of these days that car just ain’t gonna be there anymore when you go back out to leave. You laugh at us and think we’re paranoid now, but it happened to Bobby Sue’s second cousin’s mailman’s ex-wife’s kid just a couple of weeks ago on the other side of town. Things have changed around here.” They act like they’d like to have a home security setup sort of like Will Smith’s in I AM LEGEND, but of course they’re too cheap for THAT shit—a solitary motion light is the tireless guardian of our house. Well, that and enough guns to defeat Moammar Qadhafi stashed in the old man’s closet. Personally, I’d rather LIKE it if somebody tried to break in myself—I’m most curious what it feels like to remove a person’s head with a 12-gauge, and that seems like the only way you could ever find out without going to jail for it…

It’s also rather weird that they never bother to see the town anymore because people ACTUALLY COME HERE JUST TO LOOK AT THE GODDAMNED TOWN nowadays. There’s, like, 15 or 20 murals around town, some depicting the town’s history (which ain’t much…it’s not like there was a Civil War battle here or something) and others depicting…well, whatever, y’know? I mean, there’s a pretty rad WWII one at the Ford place, with a big B-17 or B-25 or something…but most are just boring scenes of everyday life: immigrants picking oranges, Exeter’s first motorcycle pig (sorry, make that “police officer”) on his patrol, etc. But they’re still rather colorful and pleasant to look at, and so there are tours that go thru here and all kinds of shit. And they (my family) ignore all of it, never see any of it.

Christ, I hope I’m not that bored—and BORING—when I get old…okay, older (blow me)…I guess only time will tell.