Cow-ntry Charm

As we all know, western countries have an on-going issue with young people moving to the bigger cities and leaving their rural hometowns and farmland behind to be pecked at by crows and extremist Christians. As long as there is money to be had, it will be had in a cool environment, and let’s be honest, why spend your days looking at cows in the country when you can look at coffee shop cows in the city instead?

Norway is no different in this matter, we just have less people to go around, and therefore have more farmland and nature than cities, a farmland that is quickly turning into forests and muddy hell holes we love to praise in tourist brochures, but have the sense to never seek ourselves (Christ, we’d get our wooden clogs dirty!), because nobody is there to take over the family rake when the old folks take the final toss in the hay. So the youngsters flee for their lives, taking with them their abilities to ace playstation games and post cat fight videos on You Tube, and leaving the country originals behind to roam the fields alone... with cows,,, Let’s face it, that’s a scary combination.

And with the leaving of the masses, whole communities are shut down, the politicians spend their money on prostitutes and exclusive ornamented benches carved from Chinese über-expensive stone that was probably carried from the quarry to the shipping boat on the backs of poor, poor little polio-crooked and sniffling children with splinters in their achy toes. Fitting benches for a fitting park in a fetching city.

Fine, nobody wants to live in a place where the talk of the town is a runaway goat or a lost knitting pin at the church club. I live in quite a rural place, I actually moved here from quite an urban area a few years back, and that’s probably why I see the contrast like it were poo in snow, but I’m too ignorant to care. Either that, or I’m addicted to freaks and cows, like all you others are too, but you have the sense to view it from afar, online. What I keep wondering, in between how good I would look in a cowskin cape, is what made the country such a shitty place in the first place? Did it just become shitty because everyone left and took the cake with them? Or was it just always shitty? Is the country indeed just a grander version of Mariah Carey?

I don’t care much for extensive cultural diversity or a pulsating entertainment industry where I live, like theatres, cinemas, brothels etc., but I don’t care much for the local film club at the church either. I swear the same educational black and white film about the “Hitler Jugend” has been running in a loop since 1947 every Thursday night. The post office, bank and café shut down years ago, when the local authorities decided to spend the money financing designer sofas in the main offices in the city, and I’m sure, in a few years time, they are gonna start shutting down the benches, road signs and trees that are still here, to ship them off to some third world country in dire need of rest, directions and trees to fall over them and kill them during the next hurricane.

Come, come, the stout farmers out here don’t mind shuffling the snow off the eleven mile long road to the nearest city every winter, it just makes them stronger for the annual log carrying contest in the spring. And a little odd. The shops sell nothing but coffee grains, cat food, enema’s and prunes, if you are so unfortunate to stumble upon an acquaintance, no matter how little you know them, you will be sucked into a vortex of trivial shit talk about the weather and crops, oh, and the weather, and when you start screaming hysterically after 30 minutes of meaningless sentence filling words like “well, well”, “that’s just the way it is”, “those pesky kids”, they start asking who exactly you were again.

The people left behind in the country can easily be divided into three categories: There are the old nazi-hating grannies and gramps who built the whole town with their own hands, and who now terrorise teenagers with the stench of blue mold cheese and old diapers. Their favourite past time activities are blocking the isles at the local shops on Saturdays, going to church and punishing the younger heathens and sinners still at home sleeping off Saturday night’s woo-hoo’s, with church bells, and making the sidewalks and nature paths unsafe with their electrical wheelchairs.

Then there are the poor unknowing immigrants and asylum seekers that, immediately after getting their residence permits, walk across the street from the Reception Centre for Refugees and rent the first apartment they come across. Like all the others. Still, they show quite a lot of creativity when it comes to shouting curses to native Norwegian girls in miniskirts passing by.

I believe the third, and last, kind of country dwellers may very well be the answer to why birth rates plummet, scorches and dies. They are the freaks, the originals, the cross-eyed Bob and Anne, who wear the same golf attire every day and tend to dry hump the cashier at the local shop if they go shopping alone. Noooo, it’s not right to make fun of people’s dysfunctions you may say, unless it’s obesity, but hear me out. The day the local politicians prioritised buying a new church altar in solid gold for the 10 die hard Christians still left here, instead of spending the money on chaperones for horny and hungry mental cases, I STOPPED CARING.

Notice, I will not talk about the usual teenagers that spend every night drinking classy homemade brews and go on a pissing spree on their mopeds to rebel against prices on furry review mirror dices for their cool cars, and that is because they are actually the NORMAL ones out here.

Perhaps letting the forests enclose small country towns actually is for the best, that means more time spent chopping wood, and less molesting cows. Not that I will oppose to the exotic fresh breath of genes that would introduce to Incestville...