In the past several months, I’ve been trying to buy a house. Just a small one, of negligible square footage, with a fenced yard that will provide a recreational area for my dog plus her future dog friends. My whole brilliant plan has been to take my little nugget of money out of the Bay Area, where I pay sickeningly high rent for a one-and-a-half-bedroom apartment — the “half” being a kind of windowless indentation off the main living space — and remove it to someplace where it’s actually worth something.

You can guess what that means. Out into the “heartland” of small towns, the vast rural and semirural breadth of America, aka flyover country, the sticks, the middle of nowhere, hicks’ corners, Bumfuck, USA. My own specific choice is a village outside Buffalo in Western New York that I’ll call Oldtown.

For many years, living in Oldtown was my humble ambition. My best friends live there, and we share a utopian vision of long evenings wandering from bar to bar on Main Street, annoying the neighbors with our raucous laughter. It’s part of this town’s charter that citizens are allowed to roam around with open liquor containers, which is the only thing Oldtown has in common with New Orleans. I looked forward with bright anticipation to the schedule of my days there: six hours of productive writing followed by a tranquil stroll through town sipping a bourbon on the rocks, waving pleasantly to the neighbors.