Home Sweet Home

Looking over these first few posts, I see that I've given a pretty bad first impression of Lynnwood. Lest you think this is one big ghetto, let me say that it's actually a fine place to live. Some neighborhoods are rougher around the edges than others, but by and large Lynnwood is quite nicely livable. There's no doubt we have more hoodlums than, say, Bellevue or Kirkland, but then again we more than make up for that with our relatively affordable housing and the consequent lack of pretentious yuppie millionaires and their bimboey trophy wives driving jewel-encrusted Hummers all over the place. Lynnwood's a nice, working class town with all the wonderful things, and the challenges that come with that and I'd sooner live here, in a modest, clean, unpresumptuous neighborhood.

It's precisely because I like this town so much that I began this blog, and given that its purpose is to hold up to the light of day some of the undesirable goings-on, it's inevitably going to have a negative slant. Still, the old saying is as true today as it ever was: All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. My motive here is to avoid "doing nothing." One lone voice in the cyberwilderness may not be striking a historic blow for Truth! Justice! and the American Way! ... but it's something and we all do what we can.

In any event, there is a wonderful article about Lynnwood at HistoryLink.org that's well worth checking out if you'd like to learn a bit about our history. It's damn hard to believe that as recently as fifteen years ago parts of this town were downright rural in character. In recent years, it's seemed like there isn't a single blessed wooded patch in sight that doesn't have some developer's crosshairs leveled up against it. If there's been any good to come of this ailing economy, it's that it's slammed on the brakes to the wanton building up of trashy strip malls and cheap apartment complexes. Inevitably, Lynnwood is poorer for those trashy things in the long run. For every slip-shot, two-bit Krappy Kondo Komplex that goes up, for every chintzy, slapped-together strip mall and megaretailer and so on, we lose a little bit more of what makes this a nice place to live.