I finally made it to L.A. No, not the Los Angeles L.A. -- the other L.A. -- the Lewiston-Auburn area of Maine.

I’m looking for a new place to live. Something cheap, that a wage-slave like myself can barely afford. I did a lot of research. My first stop was what is called, by some, the L-A. area, which is the Lewiston-Auburn area of Maine, located in what is called Central Maine, though, as you can see in the map below, it seems to be more southern than central Maine. (I guess no one actually lives in the northern part of Maine.)

(Lewiston marked by the red A pin)

I stayed at the Motel 6 in Lewiston. Walking towards my room, I got hit hard by the nauseating moldy odor in the hallways. Everything about this motel felt not-too-clean, though I didn’t see any visible grime, and they bother to vacuum under the bed, unlike many much more expensive motels. This motel allows pets. I woke at 6 a.m. to a dog – not barking, but moaning. This is at least better than waking up to the itch of bed bug bites, but not so hot. The motel probably gave the poor dog the creeps. The motel is located in a more rural and nicer part of Lewiston. The staff was friendly. This motel will make your skin crawl, but at $53 a night with a AAA discount, this is the budget traveler’s best bet, as you will pay at least $30 dollars more for other hotels in the area, which receive similarly poor ratings on Expedia and Orbitz.

I would tell you that this motel is only really good for hiring sex workers to sex it up with; however, since the motel doesn’t allow guests after 9:00 p.m., it’s not even good for paid sex – even unpaid sex. I was deeply disappointed that they would not allow in after 9:00 p.m. the 6’6 transsexual body builder and sex worker whom I had hired to arm wrestle me and slap me till I was black and blue with the 10 inch penis she advertised herself as having. What has this world come to when one can’t even get a good beat down by a transsexual sex worker in a cheap motel?

Lewiston and Auburn are sister cities, separated by a river – sort of like Boston and Cambridge, only they are much smaller and crappier. Auburn is richer (though not rich) and has big corporate chains – there is even a Starbucks there, a nice one too with hyper-friendly young baristas. You will see the only yuppies in the entire Lewiston-Auburn area in this Starbucks.

Lewiston is a former mill town. It looks like Lowell, MA (where Kerouac is from), though not nearly as crappy and congested and ugly and depressing as Lowell. I cannot imagine anyplace as depressing and horrible as Lowell.

(I stole this photo of Lewiston from Wikipedia. I don’t think this photo sufficiently captures the ugliness of the city. I did not have time to photograph Lewiston, as there was no convenient place to park, where I could get a good view of everything.)

Lewiston is not great, but not awful. There are places that are far worse and far more expensive than Lewiston. I did not have time to check out the Lewiston library. The Auburn library was large for such a small city and was modern. They had computers, Wi-Fi, the works.

What I was struck by was the racial harmony of Lewiston. I have never seen blacks and whites living together – even socializing together in poor neighborhoods. I was awed by this. I did not think it was possible in the United States. I saw so many interracial couples with interracial children walking down the street together. Haven’t these people ever heard of racism and racial segregation? Don’t these people understand that there is an impenetrable barrier between the races? Why aren’t they living in the 17th century like everyone else in the United States? What’s with these people?

(View of Auburn from the Burger King parking lot.)

These people are poor. They don’t smile too much. They don’t yap away on their cell phones too much. They seem a little hardened. They are often fat and dress poorly. The men often drive pickup trucks, and the older men often have hillbilly beards. Some of the women, who are probably immigrants from Africa, wear headscarves. I do not get the sense, as an outside observer, that there is any backwardness to these people, only poverty.

(A house, perhaps even a farmhouse, on the outskirts of Auburn.)

The Lewiston-Auburn area, while somewhat depressing and awful, is okay and probably doable. The big problem with Maine is that there is an asshole governor, Paul LePage, who hates the poor, who has already kicked many of the poor off Medicaid, and opposes Obama’s Medicaid expansion. All I would need is one visit to the emergency room, and it would financially break me. But that’s the point. In the fascist belief system, which we now call libertarianism and republicanism, the strong survive and the weak perish; it’s in the natural order of things. My getting sick and dying is nature’s way of weeding out those who are not assholes.

(Governor Paul LePage, gonadsucker, holding up a Declaration of Independence. Ho Chi Minh modeled the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence after ours, and copied much of it, word for word. (This one of the many things they don’t tell you in school.) This document should be respected, yet it is often used by godadsuckers as a license to be an asshole.)

The next stops on my tour of the backwaters of America are Pittsfield and North Adams, MA. I’ll probably go in November. Hopefully gas prices will go down by then, and there will be less traffic. The next stop after that is Wheeling, WV.