Your zip code is not a personality.
Every city or town, no matter how small, has good people, bad people, churches, bars, grocery stores, convenience stores, hospitals, doctors, lawyers, secrets, gamblers, drugs, drug addicts, philosophers, teenagers, senior citizens, pregnancies, scandals, culture, libraries, dreamers, romantics, poets, vegetarians, geniuses, cats, dogs, corruption, love, happiness, weddings, funerals, newspapers, shocking headlines, internet, hatred ,animosity, estranged relatives, liars, sinners, redemption, ice cold soda, movies, magazines, television, zealots, caregivers, people with Autism, people with Cancer, people learning to read, a nice part of town, a shady part of town, something terrible happening right now to someone who doesn't deserve it, someone experiencing their first kiss, someone making a stupid mistake they will regret tomorrow, someone who knows their life will be better if they can just get out this Godforsaken place, someone like me, someone like you.
The need to rant this out comes from purposely exploring every town, city and neighborhood I can, to find that people are the same largely oblivious lot wherever they hang their hat. Ninety percent of every human behavior I observe is based completely on what other people think of them. People fulfill the same basic archetype they chose to follow in junior high and absorb every stereotype they can get their feeble brains on. If I may revive a favorite teenage phrase of mine, "Posers" are all over the absolute map.
There are talented people everywhere, there are conformists everywhere... it is all a matter of percentages. The bigger the population, the more of each of us you get. That is all.
If you think you are interesting, tough, cool, better than others merely because of your address, you are a joke. There are those who pride themselves on living in building they consider hard to get into, without realizing that most people wouldn't want to live there anyway. If you brag about living in a "tough" or "dangerous" neighborhood, you are a clown. Even the neighborhoods with the highest crime rates in the country are full of families, decent people who happen to be poor. Most people are poor! You aren't special! If you are bragging, even if it is hidden as a complaint, you probably have the means to get out of said neighborhood. Clowns who cry that they never got to grow up with a big backyard, fools who cry that they had to grow up where there's nothing to do, it is endless, every generation repeating the same litany to justify their locale to people who don't matter. You like the country? Great! You like the city? Wonderful! Now live there, and stop worrying that someone else is living somewhere better or worse than you.
Hey-na-na-na-na.... hey-a-na-na-na...
