The Trip to the Big Burb

In Eastern Kentucky, a trip to the "big city" means getting on Interstate 64 to Lexington, KY, the home of the University of Kentucky, Keenland Race Track, and Hamburg Place, an enormous, bizarrely ugly, and spectacularly successful shopping plaza.

Not really a city at all, Lexington is a suburban area of about 200,000 that has no urban center--in other words the quintessential "suburb of nowhere."

Indeed, if Lexington has a spiritual center, it's Hamburg Place where the money cascades like waterfalls from the credit cards of customers before flowing out to the world headquarters of the various chains.

It's all very pleasant and easy 21st century Americana. Indeed, there's something almost natural about Lexington to me. It's like I'm comfortable with the artifice of it all.

That's one of the reasons why I go to Lexington for therapy in relation to growing up in an abusive family. It has an odd kind of healthiness about it.