December 5, 2007 12:09 AM
WHY I'M MOVING TO ARKHAM AND BECOMING LAME
Holy crap, making a blog shouldn't be this hard.
Anyone reading this? I'm quite aware that it's lame to do another -ist site - Gothamist has already added too many city names that don't match the suffix (I see they gave up on San Franciscist and went with SFist instead, which sounds like some kind of Mario 3 item [p-wing? s-fist? Wow, gave away my nerd credentials in the first entry]). But whatever. It works with Arkham, and frankly, maybe it'll help bring a bit of interest from the ist-crowd (crowdists?) to reading about the oft-forgotten city of Arkham, Massachusetts.
My name is Dave. I'm originally from Boston, Massachusetts. I went to NYU, studied journalism, graduated, and quickly found out that NYC newspapers really don't give a shit about someone who went to NYU, studied journalism, and graduated. After a few months waitering at a cafe on the upper west side, I realized that, though I was no closer to becoming a Pulitzer-prize winning reporter, I had nearly mastered the concept of regular right, decaf left.
Which depressed the hell out of me.
So I decided that I'd have to give up New York, the best pizza in the world, my friends, my closet-sized room, my non-existent girlfriend, great movie theaters, my favorite Turkish place on Houston, excellent public transit, the annoying hipsters in Williamsburg, the annoying bankers in Murray Hill, the fake punks on St. Marks...and move to a smaller city or town with a paper willing to hire a useless college graduate like myself. Hence, why I'm moving to Arkham at the end of the week.
It's weird - I've been all over Massachusetts, from Martha's Vineyard to the Berkshires, and I've never really visited Arkham. I've driven through occasionally on my way to Salem or Newburyport, but for whatever reason, I never felt the urge to stop. In high school, friends would go down to frat parties at Miskatonic (Arkham's Harvard, for you non-New Englanders), but my parents were pretty strict about that sort of thing. Really lame too, as I missed out on some crazy stuff.
In other words, Arkham's not really at the top of my list for places to live, especially when it means leaving New York, but it's pretty much the only decent job offer I got east of the Mississippi (yeah, there's no fucking way I'm writing about cattle in Nebraska). Arkham has a pretty decent newspaper, the Arkham Advertiser, which sort of sounds like it's a store catalog, but it covers as far as Innsmouth, so that's a lot of range. And they're willing to put me on as a local guy in a town where I'm not a local, which is sweet.
So I'm going to keep a blog of my new life there. Partly because there's no good Arkham blogs, partly to keep my friends in NYC aware of my thrilling life in an old New England seaport town (go to hell, Jeremy), but mainly to get picked up by the Gothamist for a zillion dollars once Arkham becomes more popular. Over the next few months, I'm going to try to keep posting about life in Arkham, dirty secrets and all. It's taken a fucking while to get everything on this blog working right, but I'm leaving in a couple days, so we're done fighting, Movable Type.
Uh yeah, so an underwhelming first entry. I'll be leaving for Arkham in my UHaul van on Friday. More soon.
Posted by The Arkhamist on December 5, 2007 12:09 AM
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