Scranton

Scranton, Pennsylvania is my home. Just saying the sentence makes me chuckle. Because, you know, Scranton is kind of a ridiculous town, with many frustrating quirks, which can be charming depending on how you look at it. One example is the overhead thingermabob hanging over Lackawanna Avenue, seemingly connecting the Steamtown Mall to some business that I am told used to be awesome, but now is a vacant dingy struggling indie band practice room. If you thought that Brooklyn had an overabundance of pizza joints, you are wrong. I went to Brooklyn a few months ago and walked around for an hour, or as my friend would say "minutes and minutes....and minutes", and did not find a pizza place not named "Papa John's". In Scranton, there is no such thing as "Papa Johns". It has been replaced by "Ellen Kay's Diner" which this morning gave me the biggest egg and cheese sandwich on a bagel I have ever seen, approximately 1,000,000 and a half nanometers in diameter. In Scranton, there has to be the most pizza joints per capita of any place anywhere, ever. Literally there is a pizza place on average on every other block, sometimes three on one block. And one of every two pizza joints in Scranton sport the famous "Old Forge Style Pizza", named after a quaint little town just south of Scranton apparently full of cheap Italian (not that Italians are cheap)restaurant owners who one day came upon the revelation that American cheese was much cheaper than mozzerella, and then packaged it as a "style". American cheese on pizza is like Budweiser on an open wound. It will do the job, but it shouldn't. In Scranton there are many, many pizza places.
In Scranton, everyone is in the mafia, whether they know it or not.
In Scranton, in the early weeks of July, you can find numerous little "legitimate" fireworks stands on the side of the road, and then you can hear them shooting into the summer evening every night of your life until November. You are then free to spend your evenings in peace until January, when fireworks warm the cool New Year's sky. And then you will have three months, but that's it, because the local Yankees start in April, and they win every game so fireworks happen all the time and often happen pre-game and even if they lose, because we the mafia have paid way too much for them to go to waste.
If it sounds like I am complaining, it is because I am. But that puts me right into the spirit of this city which I inexplicably love, and am irrevocably attached to, like an annoying girlfriend you keep around for the drama and free meals a la mozzerella cheese.