Ezra's pointless thread.

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The place I live in only has one paved road and the post office, police station, city hall and the grocery store are all located in the only building in town.

Actually it's a big town, but really small compared to where I lived before.

Looking out my window I can see the nearly full moon is beginning to set over the sea and it's quite beautiful.

The older I get, the more apathetic I become. In a casual way, rather that a dreary way. I could be bothered by a lot of mental and physical issues I've always had. Or be bothered over circumstances in my life. Or bothered by world affairs. Or you name it.

But what's the point of that? In most cases it won't change anything. I am comfortably numb.

I like the crystalline avatar better...

I have a whole series of these. In some the current cosmic cat has a colorless crystalline look. Just the eyes and background have color.

One of my special interests is fictional towns. Namely Ray Bradbury's Greentown, which was based on his hometown of Waukegan, Illinois. And Stephen King's Castle Rock, Derry and Salem's Lot, which are based on his hometowns of Durham and Bangor, Maine.

I grew up in Las Vegas, Nevada. Which was mainly developed in the 60's on up. So there's not much there that resembles what's described in the fictional towns I like. The really old neighborhoods there only date back to the late 50's. Things there to me are two dimensional and boring. The casino/hotels are more like Disneyland with fake Rome, Paris etc.

So I'm really fascinated with where I live now. The house I live in is over 100 years old, which is common there. All the houses look different. There's vary few "cookie cutters".

Downtown there's old brick buildings with fire escapes. There's a 100+ year old theater, hotel, library, courthouse and churches etc. The courthouse has a clock tower that bongs out the hours as do several of the old churches with their bell tower steeples. There's a big cemetery at the end of town with moss covered tombstones and giant trees (in Vegas they were just lawns with plaques ie boring, not the least bit spooky or gothic).

So I'm hoping I can take all of that and build a book on it. Something in the spirit of some of Bradbury's and King's books.

Another favorite fictional town is Twin Peaks, which was filmed in a town only about a half hour drive away. Although some locations were filmed in my town.

They have lots of classic downtowns in the New England states, too

And, really, come to think of it, throughout most of the US....

You can create lovely fictional places based on them.

Look up Bar Harbor, Maine; Scituate, Massachusetts; Lewisburg, Pennsylvania as a start.

Asheville, NC is a nice, classic small city.

There’s lots of problems in our country....but there’s lots of man-made and natural beauty, too.

My town reminds me of New England, based on what I've read and seen on the screen. The seaside part of it is one more aspect. The fishing and crabbing boats and tugboats. The docks and marina. The sound of fog horns. Rocky shores with a sea that's too cold to swim in, even in the summer, more like the Atlantic than the Pacific. There's even an old lighthouse.

Here's a documentary about an upcoming television series called Castle Rock, which is Stephen King's Castle Rock. One of the characters is sheriff Pangborn, who was a reoccurring character in most or all of the SK books that took place in Castle Rock. Although he's really old in this, so I imagine he's retired.

One thing I found really amusing is one of the people was talking about crows being prominent in Castle Rock / Bangor. And as he said that crows started cawing. He laughed and said, "I didn't plan that". And then right afterwards I heard crows cawing in real life, because they're also prominent where I live.

Needless to say, I'm really looking forward to this show.

Yep...it does seem more like the Atlantic than the Pacific in northern Washington State, doesn't it?

Have you been to the really western part of the state----where the sea rises dramatically into mountainous rainforest? Not many people seem to live there----especially as compared with the Seattle/Tacoma/Everett area.

Some places like Quillayute get over 100 inches of precipitation a year; whereas Seattle gets maybe 35 inches.

It seems that way to me. Certainly not like southern california beaches I've been to.

I haven't been to the Olympic Peninsula yet. My family is pretty bad at getting to things like that. In all the time I lived in Vegas, we never visited the Grand Canyon. Liam did separately once with some group though. He said, you finally get there after several hours and say, wow that's a really big hole, and that was about it as far as he was concerned.

You should get down to the Grand Canyon sometime. It's absolutely an amazing place.

Bring a jacket, though, even in midsummer. It gets cold there pretty darn fast.

<--- Lives in a Victorian seaport in the Olympic Peninsula. Lucky him.

<--- Lives 15 minutes outside of Little Rock. Not much "charm" here.