I've taken an apartment in the Mohawk Valley for a few days -- the view outside my window is spectacular.

For the last three days, I have not seen the sun, and the valley has been draped in an endless gloomy fog. The town itself is a hollowed vestige of the gilded age, long since gone to ruin. Granite spires and buttresses decorate the broken windows; every other Main Street building is empty. Vultures roost over the SMOKER'S CHOICE vape store -- a somber-looking contractor squeezes a whore's bottom in front of the Sunoco gas station, coughing a croupy smoker's cough and cackling over her blank, rouge-smeared face.

If one blurs their vision a bit, takes a few strong tipples of pink gin, and lets the WMAC oldies hour on the radio play rather loudly -- there's a splendor here, a luxurious feeling that makes a fellow want to don his sport jacket and loafers and go footloose on the town. Practically every building is for sale; some of them are quite grand, all listed for bargain-bin rates -- for a man with a mind for real estate, the town feels like a candy store of alluring (yet dangerous) baronial dreams.

The people here are utterly inscrutable. An anxious, fumbling homosexual runs the liquor store; a presumably Puerto Rican fellow zips around on a scooter in Manhattan-esque gear, "chiefing cheeba" -- a Dodge Ram 2500 piloted by a shirtless rapscallion "rolls coal" on the Puerto Rican. Outside the bar, old drunks who look to be of German or Dutch descent, long-since removed from the homeland, are all lolling about in paint-stained jeans, bleary-eyed, apparently startled at the fact that they are still here after all these years, still alive, still making ample use of the happy hour at the same old tavern...

In the background, the train noise from the CSX mainline is constant. The fog oscillates between being light and airy and thickly impenetrable. Humidity has not dipped below 90%. The lamp posts appear to be originals from the 1900's, on which shrewd-looking crows perch. Everywhere, the valley is whispering a funereal hymn, recalling the long-buried bones of the Mohawks and the Hessians and the Palatines -- all long-gone forgotten peoples in a forgotten land full of forgetful people.

I cannot imagine the property tax bills the people here pay for the privilege of living within such a dismal (yet weirdly charming) tableau. Or, actually, I can imagine -- because I grew up not far from here. I am a "leatherstocking" man, a child of the Mohawk Valley, and I have always preferred the earnest, rusty gloom of our crumbling 'robber-baron-esque' ruins to anything else. The way the misty rain falls like tears into the indifferent Erie Canal has always comforted me -- and for this comfort, I would and will gladly pay the deliriously high tax bill.

Perhaps I am sick... from here, a healthy man moves to Texas, makes "big boy money," shudders to think of returning, shakes off the joint-pain-inducing humidity and chill of his squalid homeland... not me. I can't do it. This place is like the Hotel California to me; I cannot leave here. Even if I leave I am still here in my mind, forever.