Pressdog.com

Iowa for Introverts

By Bill Zahren
(Posted 03/02/01)

Enough with the effing winter, OK? Can I just get a break here from the minus-34-degree days? I haven’t seen my frigging lawn since early November.

It’s not bad enough that I live in Iowa, a state I love but which 97% of the world considers a cultural and entertainment wasteland. On top of that, it has to be a deep friggin’ freeze.

So I’m out there representin’ for my home state: “Yeah, you should move to Iowa. No traffic. Great schools. People who give a (rhymes with “bit”), where you don’t have to worry about getting rolled in the wrong neighborhoods, ‘South Central’ means a bunch of cornfields and ‘packing heat’ refers to having a can of gas line de-icer in the trunk of your car.”

Then they hit me with the effing weather.

Them: “Yeah, what’s the temperature there today?”

Me: “Ah, 4. But we got a nice breeze.”

Again with the friggin’ weather. Right now it’s 28 degrees in Des Moines, with a southwest wind at 6 mph. It’s 16 in my former ‘hood, Sioux City. Lovely. Of course it’s friggin’ MARCH, but hey, we got no traffic. If I scoop my driveway one more time this winter, I swear, I’m going to go off on someone.

So the farging weather is El Humungo Handicap to getting people to move to the Frozen Midwest. Getting people to move here is priority ONE for movers and shakers. Need more young people. Got plenty of old ones. Need some young ones. I’m 37 and I’m a comparative spring chicken. Somewhere in time people turned into weather wussies. “Oh, it’s 47 degrees out. I’m so chilled. I can’t go out in my underwear and be comfortable. This is just so inconvenient for me.” Yada yada yada. But even I have my weather limit and we’re fixing to cross it.

Right here is where my former boss reminds me I could be sitting in sunny San Diego, home of the Perfect Life. All I can say is, ah, shut up.

On top of getting our sex organs frozen off this winter, natural gas prices have hovered at about $35 a second. The happy end result is my January heating bill was $405. Exsqueeze me? I baking powder? Four hundred and five effing dollars for heat? I’m not gassing up the Jag here. We’re talking one of the big two (food and shelter). So let me get this right -- we have to endure the weather AND empty the bank account to live here. Seems fair.

My wife, Rhonda, freaked out when she saw the gas bill. She raced to the thermostat and cranked it down to about 63 degrees. Have you ever lived in a house maintained at 63 degrees? You wear so many layers of clothes it takes you 30 minutes to undress enough to piss. My house looks like a well-vacuumed, minivan-equipped refugee camp. Blankets everywhere. I expect to see the kids huddled around a small campfire in my family room some day.

So the continuing debate in Iowa is how to keep “young people” from bolting our state for places like San Diego. The current plan is to build some huge-ass indoor “attractions” to create such excitement you won’t be able to pry kids out of here with crowbars or ice picks, depending on the season. Ah, yeah. Having a series of Brittany Spears-level concerts a year is the ticket.

Here’s the best thing we could do -- drag Iowa closer to the sun. Otherwise it will be:

Me: Yeah, and you can go see Brittany Spears at the $150 million Iowa Events Center in tony downtown Des Moines.

You: What’s the temperature there?

Me: A balmy 8.

You: Enjoy the concert.

So here’s my constructive idea: Start marketing Iowa as the Introvert State. We need my fellow introverts who like peace and quiet, don’t insist on being entertained 24-7, have no problem spending an afternoon with a book. Value the lack of traffic. Are into spending less than $359,013 for a two-bedroom house. Would like people to, no offense, leave us alone for large chunks of time.

Cave-dwellers like me don’t require things to be 78 and breezy for 10 ½ months of the year. Of course we’d like it to be warmer than minus 10 and not have to pay $23.43 a minute for heat, but those things aren’t deal breakers. We don’t get impressed with $203 million mega-plex entertainment centers because we don’t do crowds and are too tight to spend the $97 plus baby-sitter fees to go to a concert with 18,018 total strangers. Shudder.

The only catch is that marketing Iowa as the Introvert State will lower the population even more, from the current 2.2 million to somewhere around 190,091 people who don’t know each others’ names. Hmmmmm. But think of the traffic! I’ll be able to go 109 mph through downtown Des Moines, no problem. The police won’t stop me, because that would mean we would have to talk. I’d get my tickets by e-mail.

Even the panhandlers will be introverts. They’ll set their cups on the sidewalk and sit at a distance reading books. The sign on the cup will say “For a donation, I won’t talk to you.”

Then, we can have an end to the bleating about Keeping Iowa’s Youth At Home. That all comes down to weather and seven or eight layers of entertainment options. We aint got it.

Introverts don’t want it. Let me take off my gloves long enough get on the horn to Gov. Vilsack. I think I’m onto something. Hope the phone lines haven’t frozen.

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