Boston, Massachusetts

Boston is a city located on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. Cambridge, MA is a northern suburb of Boston. It is a central location for learning and education with over 200 colleges.

Boston is also known for many historical events of the Revolutionary War, such as the Boston Tea Party, Paul Revere's Ride, and the Boston Massacre.

The hometown of the Bare Naked Ladies. Also the location of the greatest shrine to baseball, Fenway Park.

The college scene that others have alluded to is, indeed, quite lively and vibrant - and isolated. If you try to venture outside this particular spread of locales and bars, you find a city of tight, old, and in many cases quite bigoted neighborhoods that look with automatic scorn upon twenty-somethings trying to make their own lives there, since they're probably some of those darn students.

Also mentioned earlier, Boston rolls up the sidewalks at around 10:00 pm. Most bars close by midnight or one a.m. This is the legacy of some of the most restrictive set of blue laws that existed in the U.S. Mostly now repealed, their vanishing doesn't really affect much - because the T (our so-called mass transit) doesn't run after 12:30am or so, and cabs cost more than in New York City (!), there's no point in staying out after that, unless you really like driving drunk to get home.

The racism problem in Boston is another story, and probably deserves its own node.

Boston, Massachusetts
Population (1998 estimate): 555,447
Density: 11,476 people per square mile
Population change (1990-1998): -3.3%
Land Area: 48.4 square miles
Jobs: 286,126
Unemployment: 3.3%
Per Capita Income: $34,127

Sources: Bureau of the Census, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bureau of Economic Analysis

Let's see. Among other things, Boston is known for:

• a multi generational grudge match between insane city planners, extremely hostile drivers, and even more dangerously psychotic pedestrians
• being the location of the Kingdom of Molasses' first strike against humanity (21 dead in the streets of the North End as ten foot waves of the stuff boiled people alive)
• smugly sucking up a hugely disproportionate share of federal highway funds to build the most expensive and over budget highway project in the world
• a #1 ranking in the PPI's New Economy Index resulting in part from a horrifying number of grad students and venture capitalists per capita
• pride in a local rebel group that instructed its members to look right into the eyes of the enemy before shooting them dead
• the most frantic pace of life of any North American city and proud of it
• OEM for Franklin, Hancock, Adams, Adams, Revere, Kennedy, and Bush. Well, actually maybe we'll pass on the latter two...
• and a reputation for general surliness that has enabled me to get double takes and suspicious looks around the world at my admission that

I
  AM
         BOSTONIAN...

I'd been out of Boston for a few days, visiting friends-of-a-friend in Boulder, Colorado, and the first thing I noticed, after I managed to usher George off the plane without a whole lot of fuss, was that everything was quiet. Nobody talks to you in Boston -- in Boulder people were friendly, asked you where you were from, where you were going. It was unbearable.

One really strange thing has happened to me recently and I'm patently ignoring it. I realized a very long time ago that I was delusional, everybody else knows it too -- when this sort of thing happens, this sort of time-travel-bullshit thing, I just assume it has a deeper meaning and go with the flow. So here I am. Walking with George.

I get on the Blue Line and he briefly puts his head up to look at the names of subway stops. He runs his finger over "Revere Beach," over "Quincy Center." The train ushers us along and thirty minutes later we're home in Malden -- we stay only a moment, to pick up the car, then down Route Sixty to meet up with the turnpike.

He hasn't spoken since we got on the plane -- part of the agreement, which he Thank God kept to -- and has to clear his throat. "How can this place be so different from what I remember?"

"It's been two hundred years." Words are dry in my mouth. "We've built one hell of a city, even if it has some problems. You remember the hills and the forts, I remember the skyscrapers. There's a subway. There's a culture."

"True." He mulls over it. He takes off his hat, his wig -- the baldness and the liver spots that I wasn't prepared for. He doesn't ask me about the names on the sign and I don't tell him that he'll win the war. You can't get cocky. I have learned this. I have glorified my struggles as a member of the working class -- I've spent my whole life doing that and didn't know why -- and what I learned is that the moment you get comfortable, you'll slip. We are both struggling, and it is all a big secret. I want to explain everything, the history of every single town we pass by (I know them all) but I can't. It's not like I would have imagined it.

I moved to Boston and my whole life changed. It wasn't entirely into something surreal. It certainly wasn't into something bad. This is the place where things happen. Sometimes they don't make sense.

He doesn't look sick as we get on the freeway. In Worcester the scientists will help us. One of us can go home.