Favorite Excerpt #1: The Partly Cloudy Patriot

I like my life in the East, but maybe the most western thing about me is that I feel guilty about liking it. What if I'm perfectly content that, on any given day, my only communion with the earth is watching the sun set over New jersey, or burning a "geranium jasmine oak moss" aromatherapy candle?

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I find myself talking about this on the phone one day with my friend Matt, a fiction writer who lives in Washington, D.C. Maybe writers obsess over the urban versus rural dilemma more than most because we can live anywhere. "Living in the country as opposed to living in the city," he mentions. "That's a big theme in my life. My father had grown up in Harlem. We lived in the country and we spent a lot of time smelling the air. You weren't supposed to be inside if the sun was shining. He preached to me that "The land is what we're here for, son."

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How does this jibe, I ask, with the way Matt spends his days - writing short stories about bad boyfriends in a rented office in the basement of the Uruguayan Embassy?

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Matt says, "D.C. just sucks all the way around, so anyone who lives here is always thinking about moving somewhere else. My wife would like to move to London or Los Angeles or New York City. She loves cities. But I keep coming up with reasons why we should go live near trees. We'll be walking along and I'll say something like, "'You know how your mind just unwinds when there are no cars around?'"

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He asks me if I ever go camping. "Oh, gosh, no," I answer. "I've never been camping." (That's not true. I went once with my college boyfriend. It was uncomfortable and boring. We ended up driving to the nearest town to watch the Republican National Convention on the television at a pizza place. Because who wants to stare at a bunch of stars when you can witness Dan Quayle accepting the nomination for vice president?).

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Matt continues, "An astrologer once told me, 'You suffer from what's called a geographic.' A geographic is when a person walks around thinking that where he lives will make his life better. The astrologer said, 'Let me tell you, life is about an emotional connection to people and things and it doesn't matter where you are on the globe.'"

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"So", I ask, "was that it for you? You just decided to make yourself at home then and there?"

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"Mostly, but some days I just want to move to Mexico and learn how to make clothes out of the dirt around my house."

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"I know what you mean," I say. "Only I don't want to move to Mexico and play in the dirt. It's more like I want to want that. I like how things are, so I worry that I'm not aiming high enough. I worry that I'm too complacent. I worry that I'm missing out on all the Mexican dirt in the world because I'm perfectly happy sitting in my leather chair watching HBO."

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(Sarah Vowell - The Partly Cloudy Patriot, pp 194-195)