By Killer Montone
For years now I’ve heard the same tired, old lament: There’s nothing to do in Richmond ... wahhhh ... The band scene sucks ... There are no cool places to hang out ...
Grow up, children. At what point in the 80s did you discover a stone monolith with holy inscriptions stating that perpetual entertainment was your birthright? Yours is the most affluent generation in the history of the world. Each of you has had enough toys in your lives to entertain the entire adolescent population of a third-world nation for a decade. And so you sit in your coffee shop and whine, “Mom, I’m bored. There’s nothing to do!”
It begs some obvious questions. For starters: You are all adults, right? Chronologically, at any rate. I take it you have traveled and found places that are better than Richmond. Marvelous. Move out. Go there. Stop complaining.
Secondly, let’s give you credit for having thought about leaving but deciding against it for the time being. For some reason, you have not left this “turd of a town,” as a recent Caffeine letter writer called Richmond. Fine. Then you at least owe it to yourselves to dissect some of your semantics. What constitutes “something to do” that Richmond is lacking? Having 25 coffee shops in which to be a vagrant instead of just a half dozen? Live sex shows? A few hundred more bars in former ghetto neighborhoods and burned-out industrial districts? Major league opera? Alternative theatre?
Be specific about what you want. Then do something about it. You’re too old for this snotty-nosed whining. Your parents will not leave everything under the Christmas tree. You have three choices: 1) Take the initiative to change the city to your liking; 2) Shut up and like it; or 3) Get the hell out. Are you afraid to confront your feelings of inadequacy? After all, you’ve had the world served to you on a silver platter—are you really capable of doing anything? Are you even capable of getting off your ass and going to where others are doing things?
Finally, how about a definition of “cool.” Yes, I’m serious. What makes a person or place “cool” enough to meet with your approval? I assume that if enough of these people and places existed in Richmond, it would become cool? And everything would be peachy-keen ...
Many of you grew up here. I’m willing to bet money that in your late teens, when you began venturing into the big, wide world, there were plenty of places in Richmond that you thought were “cool.” Now it’s different. Been there, done that. So you travel to other cities and stop here for an hour and there for an hour, then you come home thinking, “Minneapolis is so cool.” Sorry, kiddo, but I betcha there is a group of your look-alikes in their native Minneapolis picking their spoiled noses in some coffee shop and muttering, “Minneapolis is so boring.”
Any place is what you make it. Richmond is only boring because you are boring.
