Waking up

How many times have you read some sophisticated writer calling a town sleepy? Having lived in a couple of places somebody called a sleepy little town I have to wonder who decides that. Why is one town sleepy and one isn’t? Literally, anyway, what actually defines a sleepy little town? Are the residents always asleep? Do they take siestas? Do they walk around with droopy eyelids? Or, is it that the infinitely wise writer hasn’t taken any time at all to know a place before he writes about it? Just about every writer who goes there calls Cordova, Alaska, a sleepy little town. That is not the Cordova I know. Maybe those writers should wander into a bar on the waterfront some night during the commercial salmon fishing season and see if he can fall asleep. Or better yet tell the partying fishermen they live in a sleepy little town. It is arrogance; it is ignorance; it is cliche. And in the end, the phrase holds no meaning whatsoever.

So, what brought that on? Catching up with my peeps after waking up this morning I came across this video, It seems Newsweek magazine called Grand Rapids, Michigan, a dying town. That didn’t go over well in Grand Rapids. In response they produced a dirge for themselves defying Newsweek’s assessment. It now has more hits on YouTube than Newsweek has subscribers and the magazine is for sale. It doesn’t look like Grand Rapids is. That could lead into what is happening to print media in general but who is calling whom dying, anyway, I have never liked that arrogant bunch of supposed journalists ever since they plagiarized my book without credit, lifting whole quotes from it and when I called them on it they said they could take their information from wherever they wanted and I as a minor regional author could just suffer their superiority.

So now they went and told a town it was dying. Maybe it is only sleepy. Have to wonder if a sleepy little Newsweek writer could tell the difference.