"Who would want to move there?! It's in the middle of nowhere! There's nothing there! No shopping, no restaurants, no culture! Who in their right mind would live there?!?!"
That was Donna Sue, on the TeeVee.
I hear 'ya sister. Tell me something I don't know. I feel your pain.
But the amazing thing was that Donna Sue wasn't talking about moving TO Bakersfield. She was complaining about having to leave... for Barstow.
It seems that the Burlington Northern Sante Fe railroad, commonly referred to as B.N.S.F. and pronounced "Bieneseff" by the locals , has decided to move their substantial local operations to Barstow. And the Bako employees has been told to move it or lose it, as in their jobs.
They aren't happy.
There have been protests outside the local headquarters for the past two nights, not by the actual employees (who are prohibited from doing so by their union contract) but by their families and loved ones. Like Donna Sue.
She railed on about the injustice of the whole situation, basically calling poor little Barstow a hellhole.
Pot. Kettle. Black.
Donna Sue seems convinced Bakersfield is some sort of cosmopolitan utopia. Has she ever been on the other side of the mountains? It just goes to show you that one person's assbackward cow town is another's shining city on the hill. It's the metropolitan food chain.
When I lived in LA, all the transplanted New Yorkers bitched and moaned about how nothing in the City of Angels measured up to the infinitely higher standards of the Big Apple. And here I am, a transplanted Angleleno, bitching and moaning about the relative lack of sophistication of Bako. And now we have Donna Sue, having a cow about Barstow. It's a devolutionary death spiral.
At least we aren't at the bottom. Not yet, at any rate. As long as there are the Barstows of the world, we'll always be better than someone. That's something, I guess.
