On the Corner of Main Street and Kennedy Memorial Drive

We've just moved into our new apartment, a two bedroomed flat in St Bonifacius. St. Boni is Minnesota's version of Tatooine, as far from the bright centre of the universe as it's possible to get without being able to see Russia from your house, and it is gorgeously, ridiculously wonderful. Our house is a purple-brown pastel shade straight out of the '50s suburbia of Edward Scissorhands, with white wooden window frames, and a screen door. It is, in all honesty, an unlovely edifice, a squatting hump at the top of the hill, raised at the back over a slope but with the rooms spread only over a single floor. Yet there is a curious personal splendour to it; it's our first apartment, and thus it receives the kind of attention and love which it would never get from those less enamoured by the freshness of the experience.

Plus, it's on the corner of 'Main Street' and 'Kennedy Memorial Drive', an address as American as Sam Eagle, the Muppety embodiment of Americanism.

'Merica

Main Street and Kennedy Memorial Drive; it doesn't get more American than that. It's as American as remembering the Alamo, hearting New York, celebrating the 4th of July, or forgetting all about Canada. As American as root beer floats and warm apple pies at a diner, saluting the flag before a Superbowl game, and drone strikes on Pakistani children.

Even more American than that, maybe, because on the other corners of the cross roads stand a launderette, a whiteboard church and a cemetery. St Boni. has everything an American town needs; seven bars and liquor stores, two churches, a gunshop and a laundromat. Standing out front gives me a great view of the local water tower. It is so quintessentially, stereotypically American that I sometimes suspect that I'm in some weird, cross continental version of the Truman Show. Everything is too perfectly Americana, to the extent that it appears inauthentic.

Wednesday was our first day in the apartment, and also the day they tested the St Boni. tornado warning system, which is just a 5 minute siren. Presumably, in the event of an actual tornado, it would be just a five minute siren and then the sound of a cow being hurled through your house, because I've seen Twister, and this is what happens, you guys.

Seems legit.

Because I'm at home whilst Jalyss works long hours in two jobs, I've been responsible for setting everything up, by which I mean I arranged all my books on the shelf and then threw all of the clothes on the floors of the closets. Closets, plural. Walk in ones. Ridiculously American.

I've set up a work space, and a book case next to it. I've got it into my head that as I'm unemployed and currently unable to even look for work I may as well enjoy the life of dilettante writer; getting up for a coffee and a pastry at noon, drinking wine and eating cheese in the evening, and every now and then writing an incisive, witty and humorous article that earns me enough to continue buying myself coffee, pastries, cheese and wine.

Instead I get up around noon, eat a stale doughnut, look at Buzzfeed, wait for Jalyss to get home and write a weekly review of Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D for GeekBinge that's rarely funny and never insightful, and for the kind of money that makes awful American cheese look pricey.

But, if you're going to be just married, without a job, and failing to succeed as a writer anywhere, St Boni. sure isn't the worst place in the world for it.

And guys, I'm fairly certain that could be the town motto; "St Boni. Not quite as bad as you would think to look at it."