Iguana of Germantown

So my Bike has been busted for the past few weeks. I have been feeling like a total fiend to ride and have been totally cranky without my precious Iguana in top shape. Who would have thought that my ass would be craving exercise? If only you knew.

I finally broke down and took it to a Bike Shop that my friend recommended to me, because my very eccentric and unreliable, yet very good and cheap, neighborhood Bike mechanic has been MIA. That’s the problem with Germantown, or anywhere for that matter. If you want a service that is cheap, good, and reliable, the best you can do is get 2 out of 3.

Hell, in Germantown, one out of three isn’t bad. People will usually do stuff cheap, but it will be half ass, and they will show up when they want to, or even better yet, when you don’t want them to. This usually coincides with when then they want their next fix of whatever it is that they use, from cheap Malt Liquor to Philly dirt weed to Crack Cocaine.

A lot of my neighbors tend to try and help these scrappy young pseudo entrepreneurial losers, but I tend to think that they are doing more harm than good. I think that if you allow people to walk all over you, then you will get just that, and you will teach them that that is OK. I think that there are plenty of good apples still on the tree, so why concentrate on the ones on the ground, rotten, eaten by bugs, that probably aren’t even good enough for cider? Sure the good ones may be a diamond in the rough, but they are diamonds.

It is sometimes a pain in the ass to live in an area like this, but at the same time, there is a certain character to these kinds of funky situations in Germantown that make it great. Two blocks one way, I have high-rise projects, and two blocks the other way, I have beautiful quarter million dollar Victorian houses. I’ve met greats artists and con artists, straight edges and addicts, professionals and criminals, hippies and conservatives, rich and poor, Black and White.

Let’s just say, it isn’t the best neighborhood in the world, and it isn’t the worst. It is, however, my neighborhood, and I am proud of that.