It took me a trip to Valdosta, Georgia and another one years later to New York City for me to realize that Virginia Beach was the bowl of porridge that was just right for me.

Like a lot of kids growing up, we define what we are by what we hate. I *hated* Virginia Beach when I was 18. I wanted out of here. I hated the garish tourism of the beach, I hated the overly religious nature of some parts of this town, there didn’t seem to be a job for someone my age that didn’t involve sunscreen or the wearing of a nametag, and of course I thought I knew everything. I also knew that my parents and I weren’t having the best relationship.

Ok, better to say we weren’t having a relationship.

With really nothing to hold me down, and no actual prospects at the time, I got in my heat oppess-ed brain to try and follow in my father’s footsteps and enlist. I joined the Air Force, and on December 17th 1989, I found myself being screamed at by Drill Sergeants Causey and Rodriguez at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. After a short stint in Tech School in Biloxi (and I’d like to say I did fall in a deep like with the Gulf Coast, except for it getting occasionally windy), I ended up in Valdosta.

It was one of those places where they had two churches where everybody went. The first was on Friday Night, where Valdosta took the sacrament of High School Football. The second was the usual Sunday Morning. I remembered neither Sabbath, and kept it as Unholy as humanly possible, which didn’t endear me to my co-workers.

As an aside, I always wondered how people who were born in this town, and grew up in this town, enlisted, and came BACK to that town for their duty. Here I was, an easy thousand miles from my home, and the only one who wasn’t in on the joke.

The town itself? A joke. One that spewed it’s punchline prior to 6pm, then rolled up it’s own curtain and went home. Anything else that went on was well beyond my naive 18 years, or nothing I was really that interested in. it was a rural town, with a rural lifestyle, and rural minds. No music, no art, nothing that even tried to grab my interest. But then, they weren’t trying.

I mean, really. Why would you go to Valdosta if you didn’t HAVE to?

After my experiment in the United States Air Force ended with both of us parting amicably and agreeing that they would treat the whole affair as if I had never enlisted in the first place, I came home and found something to do. After a few years, I had learned to not so much love this place but tolerate it. I worked at a couple of radio stations, and few more call centers, and one of those was for a large telephone company who assumes that you are deaf. At the time, this telephone company had started rolling out DSL, so they had kiosks where you could come up and try it. One such kiosk that had to be manned from time to time was at a Staples on 6th Avenue in New York City. I’d always wanted to go ti New York. I volunteered.

Let me tell you my lasting impression of New York after the only 24 hours I think I will ever spend there: I cannot tell you the name of the bridge, only that it isn’t named Brooklyn or George Washington. It was the bridge by which we crossed into the city from LaGuardia Airport. It was night time, and on either side of this bridge, there were high rise buildings as we came in. It felt like I had been completely swalllowed, and for that brief moment, it was complete pitch black.

There’s a moment in the Douglas Adams Hitchhikers’ Guide To The Galaxy, where Zaphod looks into a box called the Perspective Machine. It’s supposed to show you exactly your tiny, insignificant place in the universe. We already have that. It’s going to New York for the first time.

I’m not cut out for that. Nor am I cut out for some backwater holler like Valdosta. Virginia Beach is a large town that’s just on the cusp of taking it’s first steps in the direction of a larger city, but to do it on terms we can all deal with. We don’t want to look in the Perspective Machine. We don’t want to be swallowed. Nor do we want to retreat back to something more agrarian, more Southern.

At our best, we’re a forward thinking, backward compatible city. That took me years to figure that out, and the second I did, I learned to love this place, and after living here some years, was able to finally call it what it had already been for years: Home.