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Didn't work that way for me. Although I was born and raised in Dallas, I went to junior high and high school in a small East Texas city, and you can best believe I got the hell out as quickly as I could. Everyone with any kind of dream or desire to live in the real world did. That town was a stultifying, uncultured, mind-numbing hive of small-minded, materialistic peckerwoods with no ambition beyond getting a lifetime job on the line at the pipe plant or at the "tar facktry". Brrrrr.

And suburbia? A totally artificial environment, where isolation from humanity is the goal, a theme park for autostic living built on the scale of cars instead of people? Nein danke.

Give me the city. The city — civitas — is the foundation of civilization. It is where art, commerce, and the exchange of ideas happens. Those who enjoy life among the bugs, reptiles, beady-eyed hillbillies, and bored, tweaked-out, alienated teenagers that populate farm and fringe are of course welcome to their own ways of life — but it's not for me.

As one who populates a small corner of farm and fringe, I appreciated your post, and I do understand your point. But where we've got our bugs, reptiles, and beady-eyed hillbillies, you've got your rodents, pigeons, and crack-heads. As for our hillbillies, they are distinctly ours. As for alienated teenagers, call it a wash. Part of the attraction for me is the degree to which we are immersed fully into the community in which we live. It seems to me that a city allows for its citizens to isolate themselves from those they differ from, simply by virtue of the number of individuals to choose from. Out here your neighbors are those you must depend on, and whom are dependent upon you. There is, I think, a deeper sense of community when they are more like family, by which I mean they are forced upon you, you are forced upon them, and we are forced of necessity to make do.

“Although I was born and raised in Dallas’

This explains a lot about your attitudes toward cities. People usually have a soft spot for where they were born and raised.

Still, it makes no sense to preserve the prejudices from your less than ideal adolescent years and project them upon the people who do not live in the city today.

I find cities suffocating and sterile places, but I don't characterize all the people there as atrophied industrialized zombies who lack all connection to the natural world.

There are a lot of people who prefer to live in cities. I applaud them. It leaves much more of the type of country that I enjoy for me.

Unlike yourself, I grew up in near wilderness. My family farm is now part of a National Park. I have no desire to live in a City.