I watched this weird show the other night. It was part of a series on alternative lifestyles. The trailer showed a bunch of inter-racial couples, some people in polygamous relationships, and, of course, survivalists. So, kind of a mixed bag. 

Anyway, the show I caught was about these people who were living in what they called an “intentional community.”  I guess that means the rest of us are unintentional, or something, I don’t know. They probably didn’t mean it as a putdown, but I guess they just didn’t think it through.

So apparently, this is a movement (they kept saying it wasn’t like a cult or a commune) that started in, I think Sweden, or somewhere like that, probably in the seventies. Now there are a bunch of these places in the US. They said you could go visit one sometime, and I thought that it might be interesting to see one in real life, but there aren’t any near here.

I was surprised to see that the people who lived there really didn’t look much like what they used to say hippies looked like. I mean, some of the guys had beards or long hair, but that’s more common these days, anyway. There were people with short hair who looked like they worked for a law firm or financial company or something. 

It wasn’t like one big house, either, at least the one they were doing the show on. It was like a condo development. I guess the biggest difference was that people knew the people who lived by them and talked to them. 

There were a lot of dogs living there. I counted eleven different dogs, but there might have been more. Or maybe some of them were just visiting. 

It seemed like the people sometimes didn’t get along, which I guess isn’t surprising, but you kind of expect them to, somehow, if they are signing up for this “Alternative” style of living. They talked about how sometimes people would get into squabbles, even though, for the most part, they got along well. Some of the things they argued about made no sense to me, but I guess it made sense to them. 

But the ones who really had a community, who really got along great with each other, were the dogs. It was great, watching them run around and play in the big field together.