God save the small town

Growing up I lived in a major city, but after high school I started living in smaller and smaller places. These days I live in a small town. There are a lot of downsides to a small town, such as the lack of a dating pool, cultural diversity and just having something to do on the weekends. My current location is three times bigger than the last one so I will survive (just like Gloria Gaynor) However, living in a small town isn’t all bad. There are also many some a few advantages. People are generally friendlier, and everybody knows your name. It’s like Cheers all over the place. Traffic is practically nonexistent, and I can typically get from one end of town to the other in 15 minutes. That never happened in my hometown.

Perhaps my favorite part of living in a small town is knowing that if a robot, alien, whatever apocalypse happens we will not be instantly affected. Stay with me on this one. This thought occurred to me one day while watching Transformers: Dark of the Moon (a good year after it came out) – Major attacks happen in major cities. The Decepticons were not thinking about some Podunk town an hour away from Chicago when deciding to take over the planet. No, they were going to start with the big boys. My theory is if you take out the biggest places first, the smaller ones will follow suit just out of sheer fear and terror. But we all know it’s not going to be an overnight process. My guess was it would have been a good week before the Decepticons started thinking about putting small areas under their rule.

What, you’re still not convinced? You probably live in a big city. No one thinks about a small town when setting up their base of operations for evil doing, at least not in the movies. It’s typically New York, Chicago, DC and so forth who get hit in the U.S. Tokyo, London or Paris will get hit way before wherever I leave. Let’s say the Fruitocalypse I’ve predicted really did happen and started in the state of Florida. I am positive it will begin somewhere like Miami, Orlando or Jacksonville. No one is staging a hostile takeover in Fort White (ten cool points if you know where that is). Therefore I will gladly live in a small town and avoid the chaos – at least for awhile.