I noticed today that my company does business with a company located on West Friendly Avenue in Greensboro, North Carolina.

West Friendly Avenue sounds like a nice place to live. If I lived on West Friendly Avenue, I would look forward to each day so much that I would wake up the moment the alarm rang instead of hitting the snooze button for two hours. I would get out of bed immediately and go running on sidewalks that would be perfectly flat and even so I wouldn't trip on the cracks, and no mean men would drive by in rusty pickup trucks decorated with Confederate flag stickers and yell, "Hey faggot! Nice legs you got there!"

If I lived on West Friendly Avenue, I would take a stroll every day at noon and buy a hot dog and a bag of Fritos from Mr. Peña, who's been running a hot dog stand at the corner of West Friendly Avenue and South Happy Street for years and years. Every day Mr. Peña would tell a different joke, which would always be kind of dorky but funny anyway, and I would groan and ask him where he gets all of his jokes, and he would laugh and say, "I learned them all at hot dog college!" Then Mr. Peña would wink and give me a purple sucker and say, "Oh, I know you're not too old for one of these!", and I would take it sheepishly, because I still like purple suckers.

Then I would sit down on a bench to eat my lunch, and sometimes a pretty girl in a yellow skirt would walk past, and I wouldn't feel self-conscious at all -- I would just smile at her in a relaxed, natural fashion. She would smile back, and I wouldn't have to feel like a pussy because I failed to engage her in conversation or ask for her number or otherwise hit on her. We would just be two nice people smiling in sincere greeting, because that's the way people behave on West Friendly Avenue.

Every other building on West Friendly Avenue would be a free whorehouse, each one filled with happy, sassy hookers like the ones in Pretty Woman and Moulin Rouge. These would be the kind of hookers who just happen to hold postgraduate degrees in astrophysics and microbiology but sell sex for a living because it's liberating and empowering and they want to, dammit; not the kind of hookers who have sad eyes and suspicious bruises and infected track marks marching up and down their arms. Those kind of hookers would be across town on East Angry Avenue, and nobody from West Friendly Avenue would ever have any reason to go over there.

If I lived on West Friendly Avenue, there would be a good song on every time I turned on the radio in my car. The song would always be right at the beginning, and I would turn up the volume and sing along. Whenever I would stop at a stoplight, (hypothetically speaking, because the lights would never be red on West Friendly Avenue), I wouldn't have to be scrunch down in my seat, embarrassed for singing along with the radio, because the person next to me would have the same song turned up and would be singing along as well, and we would exchange neighborly nods. The good songs would always end right about when I got to my destination, so I would never have to sit in a parking lot just to hear the second half of "King of Pain" or "Toy Soldiers".

I wish I lived on West Friendly Avenue.

+posted by Lawrence @ 1/20/2004 03:23:00 PM