So Effing Pretentious

As a sidetrip on the way back from the Festival of the Leaves, we stopped in to a small town in West Virginia called Shepherdstown. There is a cool general store we thought we'd visit.

After driving way out of our way, (my mad map reading skillz were a little off that day), we found the town. It's all very historic, and very quaint, with the nice restored row homes, and cute little shoppes along the Main Street. "Aww, how niiice" we both said as we parked our car near the coffee shoppe.

We strolled up the street to the weekly farmers market. A nice lady sold us a scone and a macaroon, and we perused the various stalls selling flowers, home made salsa, produce and farm raised, free range meats. All very nice, and very expensive. We went up the main street, and checked out a couple of the nice shoppes (one couple opened a store that sells items from France. Lovely ceramics, beautiful paintings, hand turned wooden bowls, all very nice) and the local New Age store. There was jewelry, incense, paintings, rocks (my fav, I love rocks) CDs, DVDs, and loads of self-help books. Somewhere between "Unleashing The Inner Wolf Within" and "Getting In Touch With Your Warrior Woman", I felt the urge to puke. I was incensed (ha.) at the idea of someone telling ME how to free what is within. Not to mention charging me thirty or forty bucks for it. I do not have the time to sit down with my twenty dollar Whole Womyn Workbook and write about my feelings. Who are these people and where do I get in on this gravy train? Then there are the store owners who are selling this stuff at a 100% + markup. Jewelry infuriates me, now that I have entered the wonderful world of wholesale. Those 60 buck bracelets at the mall are manufactured en masse, and cost about 2 bucks to make. They're sold for about 50 bucks a dozen. It makes me nuts.

We left there, and continued down the street. Me, grumbling under my breath about Capitalist hippie swine mudderfarkers. We made our way down the other side of the street, first ducking into a 'discount' clothing store (120 clogs anyone) and then into the whine and cheese shoppe. That place was pretty cool, but I had hoped for more whine and cheese and less Giftes, but alas, the Giftes rule. I did find a cute metal votive holder in a Halloween theme. We left shortly after I discovered it was $39.99.

By that time, the hordes were descending, so before we were trampled by the Farkle Family Upscale, we got out of town.

I did manage to pick up the town's weekly freebie paper. They're very informative, and you can get to know a little about a town pretty quickly.

Oh boy, and did we. We found out that some developer has bought a big parcel outside of town, and is building a large townhouse complex. Nothing unusual, right? But wait, there's more....
The local artists, it seems, are in need of housing, so the developer is offering a block of townhouse shells for $125,000, that the 'lower income' artists of the area can buy and customize to their liking. It was mentioned that people in the $40,000-$60,000 income range could use their skills to make these shells exactly as they wish. Also at this Artist's Nirvana, they might be making a Community Area, with a communal kitchen so everyone can SHARE!

We went off on a huge tangent mocking the communal kitchen concept ("Do we have to have squid ink risotto again? Gawd, I'm soooo tired of tofu burgers" and so on) Poor Obbie was laughing so hard he was crying, and nearly drove off the road into a ditch. He calmed down enough to drive, but as we were leaving this shangri-la of the arts, we passed a man who obviously had been nipping at the bottle, as his toupee was on crooked, and he was weaving across the sidewalk. That sent us into another round of hysterics, and we drove onto the highway with tears streaming down our cheeks.

After all that, I couldn't wait to get home and reconnect with my inner redneck. We watched some football and ordered a pizza to purge ourselves of the evil that is pretention. Oh my.