Microblog Memes

When I was in my 20s I took a couple trips clear across the states on the Greyhound, seeing 35 different states and countless famous US cities.

There were so many times I would be staring out the bus window though and Tim Armstrong from Rancid's voice would pop into by head to sing this one piece of a line from the song Travie Bickle that I think of all the time when I'm away from home, because in all my personal travels so far, he has never not been right. It's simply:

"...every city looks the fucking same."

And it sure does.

Like this one time...I'd been on the road 3 straight days when I looked outside and...we hadn't even left the PNW yet? Oh no wait, those vintage, dark-colored exterior brick walls that I thought were screaming 'craft brew', were actually going 'choo choo'. This isnt Portland goddammit. We made it all the way to Pittsburgh!

Or my first time in LA, I started to feel weirdly at home just after nightfall. Did I actually portal home somehow, I wondered? No. Venice Beach and English Bay (Vancouver) were in fact always the exact same place. I just couldn't see it until the smog stopped blocking the view.

Another time, I went for a quick wander through Seattle during a layover on the bus, to find a bank and exchange more CAD into USD. I'm trying to think of where I've seen them around here on earlier trips except...wait...I'm not familiar with this part of Seattle because we are in Nashville and I've never been to Nashville before today.

Or the time I got to walk around Chicago for a couple hours. At first I'm bracing for strangers to stop me and share all their racist/anti LGBTQIA+ opinions and stuff with me, then I thankfully remember...that's the L train up there, not the absolutely fucking identical raised LRT track in Edmonton.

Oh and Fargo! Fargo looks like...it looks like I broke a promise to myself because I'm somehow back in ND again?! How did I get here when I swore...NEVER. NEVER again! Er, I mean Fargo looks a little like Olympia, WA, but a LOT like a town south of me growing up on Vancouver Island; a town called Nanaimo. Famous for a dessert square and nothing else.

So yeah, every city looks the fucking same. That's the apathetic harumph of my exhausted, jaded inner traveler who still kinda wishes they were going places, but they're also just kinda over a lot of them.

My 'every city looks the fucking same' seemed very similar, in the moment to your "...yeah. That place...exists." 😂 That's the whole reason I rambled on to the ridiculous length of this comment, just to relate the experience of my line to the feel of that line of yours.

I sooo get it.