These are interesting questions, but earlier today, I was copying a file to disk and the computer ate it. Now the computer will neither open the file nor read the disk. How can Charlottesville expect you to write encomiums to its greatness when your computer files are being eaten? Not that you care. No one in Charlottesville cares about my lost file. You want to hear about Charlottesville instead. Fine. Charlottesville is the best city of its size in central Virginia. Charlottesville is the longest one-word city name in America. Charlottesville means trees, nice people and a decent quality of life. Charlottesville means red bricks and white columns, which remind us of red bricks and white columns.
We’re here because Charlottesville is a place where we can work and live and date and have friends and theoretically copy our files to computer disks without the computer eating them. In most places you have two areas of operation: you and your intimate associates—lovers, friends, family—and a nebulous “society” out there in the distance—the stuff on TV, the stuff in newspapers. In New York, there’s your intimate circle and the untouchable myth of New York beyond. In Richmond, there’s your intimate circle and the untouchable myth of America beyond.
But in a town of this size with a public space like the Mall, a middle ground opens up. A space where you’re not on intimate terms but still influential, a space between the near and the far. That means Charlottesville isn’t starkly divided between the Somebodies and the Nobodies. Everybody is sort of a Somebody, and nobody is entirely a Nobody. (The down side is that nobody is entirely a Somebody and everybody is something of a Nobody.) The Mall has grown so much in popularity it’s becoming more like a vague outer circle (You should have been here back before people like you showed up!), but you can still learn things about group behavior you can’t learn watching TV. You can even write what you’ve learned if the computer you’re using doesn’t eat the goddamned file.
Anyway, it’s part of American culture to complain about where you live. “There’s nothing to do.” “The people are stupid.” Here is never as cool or good or rich or cultural as There. The people you know can’t possibly matter as much as the people out there in the vague beyond. It’s also part of American culture to say all places are the same—it’s what you make of them—or that you should be loyal to the place you live. There’s truth in all these statements, meaning that they’re all basically bullshit. People may be the same everywhere, but they’re organized very differently and that means a lot. Yet, no matter where you go they use pretty much the same file-eating computers.
We say we leave Charlottesville because life is too comfortable here or because we want a bigger challenge. But I think the truth is, we move to Charlottesville (or move back to Charlottesville) because we want the comforts and challenges of Charlottesville. We move to other places because we want the comforts and challenges offered by those places. We leave here to escape having to deal with the bad aspects of the middle ground and return to enjoy the good aspects of the middle ground. We leave for better paying jobs and come back for the trees. We leave to learn and come back to learn, and learning is harmless enough if done in moderation.
Charlottesville is no longer a cheap place to live, but it’s not yet an expensive place to live. It’s no longer as funky or unique as it was, but it’s certainly not yet homogenized, Republican America. And as long as our token Republican City Councilman keeps his Yanni haircut and Village People mustache, there’s hope. We may be overly pretentious and proud of our home, but we’re not yet entirely lost in booster myth. The glass is half full. It just might not be half full of the drink you want.
Lately I haven’t much liked Charlottesville. First, what’s with the rain? It didn’t rain last year. Second, if this were such a great city, why are my computer files being eaten? What’s with computers? They can send a shuttle into orbit and almost bring it home, but they can’t make a damn computer that works.
Charlottesville is not a monkey on our backs. Charlottesville is a caged gorilla trained in rudimentary sign language. We stay because we keeping hoping it will assemble a sentence of more than three words. Even if it did, the way things are going, the computer of America would probably eat it.
Joel Jones is an actor, director and playwright who covers theater for C-VILLE Weekly.