Following an 18-year career with the icky, disingenuous types on Wall Street, I can’t begin to tell you how grateful I am to be back home. To be back on Main Street.

Main Street. Where none of the thousands of local appraisers, real estate agents and mortgage brokers fully compliant in the housing debacle a few years back actually reside.

Where local radio stations aren’t polluted with ads from every get-rich-quick charlatan in town peddling debt reduction services, shady home-based businesses, dietary supplements, self-help tapes, fat loss pills and hundreds of other sketchy endeavors.

Main Street. Where none of the millions of ordinary folk who stole billions of copyrighted songs via Napster actually plant their gardens and tend to their kin, and whose collective, insatiable desire to get rich hasn’t culminated in the concoction of at least 30 cable programs dedicated to the almighty buck and all the goodies it can garner. Heck, it used to be just “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.”

Where local courtrooms aren’t bursting with the he-said-she-said and I-want-more crowd. Who? What? Me?

Main Street. Where it doesn’t take me 25 minutes to pick up my Little Debbie cupcakes at Cumby’s because the seven jabroneys in front of me can’t decide how many of the 50 lottery tickets they’ll purchase that day. And where the thousands of small businesses that only take cash report every last dime to the IRS. Every last dime. Every time.

Ah yes, Main Street. Land of the virtuous, the genuine and the real. Mostly, the real.

Occupy Wall Street? Whatever. It’s just good to be home!

C. McLane Smith is a resident of Portland.