Yakimemories

Well, you know how the old saying goes; vicious mockery is the sincerest form of flattery. And if that's true, then my home town of Yakima, Washington is about to get sincerely flattered.

I was born at Memorial Hospital on Tieton Drive the morning of November 23rd, 1979. It was a Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. And while I would like to say that I was born into a region of fantastic culture and amazing opportunity, I can't. Well, that's not really fair. There are some good things about Yakima, but it's way more fun to ignore them and pretend the whole place sucks. It will always be uber-cool (ha! I used the word uber, which hasn't been a cool thing to do since 2003, and paired it with the word cool! Oh my, how my self-consciousness and self-deprecating desire to be cool is not at all obvious. Umm, now I don't know how to end this parenthetical comment....sooooo.....ummmmmm.....) to be from a small town, live in the big-city and pretend that everything there was retarded and everyone from your hometown is some kind of liberal-hating, truck-driving, homophobic, fundamentalist lunatic. But all y'all know that a part of you kind of, maybe just a little bit, wants to go back there someday. Maybe your family is still there. Maybe you still have friends there. Maybe there's a certain time of year where something in you just longs for the air of your hometown. Whoa. This is getting sappy. Let's just cut to the mockery.

Let's start with the low hanging fruit: There is a sign on the freeway as you approach "downtown" that reads, "Yakima, the Palm Springs of Washington." Based on the fact that if you Google that phrase, in quotation marks mind you, you get 732 results, I am definitely not the first to point out that the sign is kind of stupid. Let's just say that Yakima has an average high temperature of below 60 F and an average low of below freezing for 5 months out of the year. Palm Springs' average high never dips below 70.

In other news, Yakima recently landed an Applebee's! This was front-page news in the Yak. That should give you an idea of what it's like there.

When I was a kid, you had to drive to the Tri-cities (Richland, Pasco and Kennewick) to do any good shopping. And by good I just mean "not sucky."

And don't even get me started on all the fruit that they grow around there. Oh, wait. The apples are actually really good. You can even buy them back here on the east coast, though believe me, they are way better when they haven't been shipped all the way across the country.

In high school, the best thing to do on the weekends is drive around. That's it. Just drive around. You can usually find groups of hooligan kids all up and down Nob Hill Ave at car washes, empty lots, and even the Burger King parking lot. At least that's the way it was circa 1997.

Yakima has the highest ratio of very poor to very rich in the whole state of Washington. Way to go fruit growers. Keep those migrant Mexican workers in poverty with your low wages, and if they speak up, call INS and ship their asses back to Mexico (Note: this actually happens. Growers actually do call INS on their own illegal employees).

I still don't understand how a town as small as Yakima has a gang problem. What turf is there to fight over? Yo, vato, we totally claim all land South of the 5th Ave Safeway and North of Front Street between Yakima Ave and Lincoln as property of the Surrenos!

Stupid Yakima Brewing Company went out of business. The company that opened the first post-prohibition brew pub in the country ran itself into the ground. Probably because they're from Yakima and everyone that didn't leave after high school at least for college is an idiot.

The white people that live there (about half the population) thinks that the North and East sides of town are "the ghetto." You want the ghetto? I can show you the ghetto. Go drive down M-53 through Detroit. Go hang out in Anacostia. That, my friends, is the ghetto.

Well, there's so much more to complain about, and I don't have the time, so I'll stop here. But as a final piece of advice, if you ever find yourself in Yakima, make sure you check out as many random taco busses as you can. You may not always know what the meat is, but those are some good burritos.