Yearning for a tight-knit community? You may be a big city person

Here's the thing: for centuries, people fled remote rural places for the freedoms of the city.

Germans even have saying for that, which is "Stadtluft macht frei" ("urban air shall set you free").

Unlike a much more famous, much more recent saying that includes "macht frei", the urban air thing was real. Serfs or indentured servants who made it into a city (a very specific legal construct from the Middle Ages), would gain their freedom after one year and one day.

The correlation with standard Silicon Valley stock option vesting schedules is sheer coincidence.

While the world's population continues to mass in cities, creating double-digit million mega cities, there are some humans who continue to live in small places and many more who yearn for a simple life in such places.

If you want to live far away from the bustle of the city, do it in a country with lots of space, like Russia, the US, or something equally big and empty. Oh, Canada.

Because in Europe, you will almost always be moving into a "tight knit" community. Don't fool yourself: you may think you are invisible to your neighbors, but you are not.

The blogster has learned a bunch of hilarious and sad facts about others, even though it* does not "belong".

For example, the one about the cultured educated wife of the important city man giving in to a lustful romp in the barn with a country guy - only to be surprised in the act.

Or the divorced middle aged man who had been scraping by on basic mean tested Hartz IV (the modern version of work shall set you free) until he couldn't take it anymore and rammed a knife into the carotid artery of his neck, bleeding to death right there, where they used to slaughter pigs when people still farmed.

Another fun one, the catalyst for this post, is the ongoing - and possibly - doomed effort to get one of the old guys off drunk driving.

The first step undertaken by his grown son who lives nearby was "the talk". A few days later, the old man took the car to drive half a kilometer to the town bar and got hammered again.

So, the son took the car keys. Of course, the old man had a duplicate.

The next step was to chain the vehicle to a concrete post. Both chains and concrete posts are found in abundance on old German farms.

The son hid the angle grinder, too, but someone loaned one to the dad. The chain lasted less than a week.

Removing the car battery, well, another largely symbolic exercise.

The current debate, at the bar, centers on more radical measures, with some arguing for removing the wheels, while others advocate dismembering the electronics.

And no, the blogster doesn't know what stories they tell about "the Americans". You do get used to the mailman reading postcards, really.

* Gender neutrality, folks.