A Male of Two Cities

Morgantown is a town in West Virginia that centers around one major industry: West Virginia University. Kittanning is a smaller town in Pennsylvania that centers around one major industry: failure. I've pretty much exhausted what these two booming metropolises have to offer.

For the summer, I've been spending most of my time in Kittanning living in my parents' basement like the sad little single Star Trek fan that I am. There's really not a lot to do here, but I'm living in a house for free and getting meals for free. It's hard to pass up a setup like that when one is gainfully unemployed.

However, last week I went back to Morgantown to visit. Batmite had returned from his cross-country excursion with his parents, and so I decided to stick around the old college town for a few days. I managed to have quite a lot to do. I like the general atmosphere of Morgantown in the summer. With almost all of the student population at home for the summer, the locals retake the town. The town was not designed to handle a student population of close to 30,000, so Morgantown feels like it's actually at its nominal capacity in the summertime. It's like a celebration of normalcy... if drunk, bearded, overall-clad rednecks hobbling down the streets can be considered normal. Nevertheless, the year-round Morgantownians seem so damned happy with the change of pace, so it seems like a yearly resurgence for them.

Kittanning, on the other hand, is always the same depressed little hamlet. While there are sane, rational, well-educated people in Kittanning, most of them are smart enough to remain in their own homes or travel to other places for fun. As a result, the usual bar scene in Kittanning provides a gamut of failure for the casual patron to observe. Your typical bar-townie is a friendly sort, but it doesn't take long before you realize that his or her jolly demeanor and almost religious fervor for drinking is masking the fact that this individual has no higher aspirations. A good Kittanning bar guy will not only stare at you with a glazed expression on his face when you tell him that you have a Masters degree in English, but he'll also loudly proclaim that you're a pretentious asshole for wanting to live somewhere else, and he demands to know why you're too good to just pick mushrooms in the mines or mold toilets at Eljer.

Kittanning and Morgantown aren't that different. Both towns have people with similar lifestyles and interests, but while Kittanning feels like a fountain of wasted lives, the people in Morgantown revel in their behavior. When Batmite was at the local bar in Morgantown making fun of inbreds, there was no shame in the bartender's voice when he bellowed, "You have a problem with inbreds???" This is the same bar where several old guys were reminiscing about how the Nazis get a bad rap. Batmite hesitates to go there now.

In either place, I must contend with that white trash, hill-folk lifestyle that adores NASCAR, nigger jokes, and huntin' shit. But in Morgantown, the people have no insecurities. They don't care if you don't like their ways since they have love enough for everyone!

In Kittanning, if you don't like to hunt, well they don't take too kindly to queers in these here parts.

Can y'all say, "insecure"?

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Morgantown and Kittanning: Two towns that are now hanging signs in their bars warning bartenders not to serve anyone with the initials "JP."