An ode to Concord

Yesterday I started off taking a walk around the block and, feeling sort of ambitious, kept on walking -- past BART, under the Highway 4 overpass and toward Port Chicago, where I turned along one of the business park roads.

This is an odd area of Concord and primo scenic grist for the novel. There's a transit bus yard, a public golf course, a homeless shelter, biomedical buildings, sign makers, carpet cleaners, pest control companies, a reservoir, a refinery, and a cemetery. Just a wonderful part of the world, if you ask me, and I'm only being partly sarcastic.

Last week my buddy Sean came up with the concept of "Concord Noir." Concord certainly is unique. It has the mostly blue collar, service economy of the exurbs like Antioch, but it's uncomfortably close to places where people really want to live, like Walnut Creek, Pleasant Hill and to an extent, Lafayette.

I came here almost seven years ago, after my ex-wife left me and moved here from Fairfield, where I had been working as a newspaper reporter. I didn't know anything about Concord except how crazy it was. For one thing, nothing fits. All the main roads through town bend, creating a patchwork of neighborhood grids that never quite line up. You're always looking toward Mt. Diablo to get your bearings.

It's also a retail heaven, or hell. Besides Sun Valley Mall, I think it has or had just about every chain store you can think of, or at least the ones I could whittle away time in: Half Price Books, Guitar Center, Best Buy, Tower Records, Rasputins, 99 Ranch, CompUSA, Fry's, etc. There is also a Chuck E. Cheese and The Jungle for the kids, and tons of Mexican restaurants for me. Also giving Concord its everything-but-the-kitchen sink feel is a mothballed Naval weapons station, an airport, Costco, the Sleep Train Pavillion, THREE bowling alleys, a real drive-in movie theater that doubles as a flea market and frequent site of random gunfire, and a creek that winds through town to the bay with a growing number of tents along its banks.

Concord is, incidentally, the land of regrettable tattoos. It also has the kind of bars I like -- ones with "normal" folks but also with bikers, losers and women of questionable intent. The novel was a short story born from a daydream, but it was in these places, like Vinny's, The Office, and Scores, where I made it into something else, downing beers and scratching away in notebooks in an increasingly indecipherable manner.

It's true I have aspirations to live somewhere else. The reasons are purely economic. If I'm able to buy property again, I will choose a neighborhood that is more in demand, probably cleaner, and has better schools for my kids, where the property values didn't crash as bad as they did in Concord. I have no illusions about "keeping it real" and staying put, nor am I in love with my city. But from an creative standpoint, it's been pretty good to me.