Category Archives: Longer Posts

I Am A Publisher

A while back, on another blog, I wrote about the Golden Age of Blogging.

Between 2004 and 2009, you could surf the web and find all sorts of blogs.

Mormon mommy blogs, with super short paragraphs and long, long photo dumps. Blogs run by German high schoolers, where they’d wax poetic about their favorite music — My Chemical Romance, Justice, Tokio Hotel. (Those were the usual suspects.) Blogs that were only created for a class project, only to be abandoned a few months later.

I actually enjoyed those the most. It was fascinating to find a three-to-six-month time frame preserved in amber like that. A digital scrapbook of sorts. I love it!

But … that was then. And this is now.

I have to say, I only got back into long(er) form writing when I started (1) posting essays on Medium, (2) blogging on WordPress again, and (3) writing a monthly Substack newsletter.

I do all of this for fun, by the way. Not for money. Although …

Where’s that Donate button? There’s got to be a Donate button or block or widget that I can insert on here and … Nah. I won’t do it.

This time.

Anyway, I’m not here to give tips on how to make money by writing short little blog posts. I’m just here to say that I only got back into long form writing because of the downfall of Twitter.

Between 2009 and 2023, I wrote roughly 21,000 tweets, most of which I didn’t delete.

I look back now and laugh at this — but when I was 19 or 20, I realized that (like many others before me) I wanted to write a novel. I figured I needed to write around 75,000 words — so I was constantly doing math. 500 words a day, and I’ll be done in just a few months! 100 words a day, and … I can spread this out over the years, right?

No book materialized. Not even a novella. I will say, I kept a 200-word schedule up for about a month or so, which is impressive. I had a 700-day language-learning streak on Drops, which I also eventually quit keeping up with. But other than the streak on Drops, I would have to say that my regular attempts at writing …

Well, it gave me something to be proud of. I was proud that I kept chipping away at it. And I did churn out a lot of words — some of them were pretty good. But there were no novels, no novellas, and no short stories.

I repurposed some of the more colorful descriptions into poems, and I compiled those into a little chapbook. It sounds pretentious — and maybe it is. 🫠 I can see how it might seem pretentious, even though I genuinely love poems and poetry. Even the ol’ epic poetry. But I digress.

I never managed to produce a novel, despite my best attempts at word-counting.

Like counting calories, which can also feel like wasted effort.

When I saw, though, that I’d posted 21,000 tweets, I felt even sillier. There they were — my 75,000 words!

If each tweet were at least six words long — and I’d say many of mine were longer— then I’d have 126,000 words under my belt. A novel and a novella.

I realized — about a month ago, actually, when they were threatening to purge inactive accounts and the accounts of deceased users — that someday, all of those tweets would probably disappear.

So I immediately downloaded my archive and uploaded everything I could to the Internet Archive. It took about a day and a half, but it’s there now. It’s preserved.

Until someone goes after THAT website — Lord, don’t let him try to acquire the Internet Archive! Millions of pages will be taken down overnight. My chest is hurting at the thought of that happening. “OhhhhhhmyyyGodddd, nowayyyeeayyeeeayyyyyyaaaay!”

But … whew. I need to calm myself down right quick. Genuine terror struck my heart. Damn.

In any case, I may never publish a novel — although I am working on writing one. Just for me. Just for fun.

But even if I never publish a novel, I have “published” things online. Forget the quotation marks — we can just drop those. I don’t need to try to qualify what I’m saying here, because this is a blog entry, and not a scholarly paper. I can just be literal, without trying to write defensively.

The Internet has enabled all of us to be publishers. With just a single click, I am my own Simon & Schuster.

Now I am become the Big 1, publisher of words.

I have published tweets. I have published blog posts. I have published newsletters. I have published poems on Wattpad and Archive of Our Own. I have published reviews on Letterboxd and Goodreads. And it only took one click to call myself a publisher.

Someone else is doing the hosting, I realize. But I am the writer, the editor, the marketing department, the sales department, and the publisher.

The sales department is being really lazy, by the way. One of them suggested adding a Donate button to the blog instead of actually trying to sell anything. Can you believe that?!

… I have to go now. I need to add publisher to my LinkedIn.

Judge of Character

For every person around here who sucks, there’s usually an explanation for their behavior. Not always — but more often than not.

I don’t mean an excuse — I just mean an explanation. I tend to consider that first, now that I’m older. I can figure out — either through recognition or through gossip — whether someone had a terrible childhood, an abusive relationship, a history of addiction, or some combination of these.

So I’ve learned to shut up — about some things. If I see racism or prejudice or some other shitty bullshit behavior, I still say something. But if I just see a miserable sadsack walking around with their crack* showing, then I try to realize that this person is probably just used to living like that.

That’s actually one of the reasons why I won’t settle in a relationship. I know that there’s a bigger, better world out there. And I know that most people around here have been beaten down by life — in a different corner of the world, their life might be much, much better.

Or worse, perhaps. That’s also possible. But the point still stands.

So I think about the folks I see around here, and I feel a degree of protectiveness for my brothers and sisters. These people are struggling. And I don’t look down on them — I look across the way at them, and I tell myself, “This is what the world has done to us, has made for us, and we can all try to be better. But we’re all just working with what we have.”

* Of the bottom variety. Not the nose candy variety.

Overthinking

I sometimes feel like I’ve put myself in a box that I’ve spent about three years building. I spent the whole pandemic working on this box. I did the woodworking — and I was meticulous. I carved the little motifs on the box and worked on decorating the trim. And then I stained the box, and then shut the door. Now I want out of this box, but I accidentally forgot to install a knob on the inside.

Before I got in, I also filed down the corners of the box – and filed off all my interesting edges – so that I’m now little more than a sentient pile of something. A trapped something.

I find that I have to warm up before I can have a good conversation. I have to get through three or four awkward sentences – or awkward pauses – before I can say something that’s actually interesting.

And I know what the right thing to do is, in plenty of situations, but … I find myself not doing it. And I don’t feel depressed at all, but I do feel frustrated and stagnant.

I feel like one of those inertia exercises – where I’ve spent so much time moving so fast that now it doesn’t look like I’m moving at all. And the reality is – yes, at some point, I may have stopped moving, because I don’t know how to keep pushing forward when I feel like I don’t know this version of myself. She’s so bad at having conversations, at shutting things down, that I can’t even have a conversation with myself – not without editing, revisions, second-guessing, and … bunches of ellipses.

Just … bunches … and bunches and bunches of them.

Shell’s Belles

I like to gas up at 5:00 on a Friday, because it gives me a few minutes to pause and think. Because, by 5:03, I’ll be back on the road, trying not to get roped into a drag race with some guy in a V8.

I’m firing on six cylinders, so there’s always some show-off who wants to race. I’ve raced some people, sure, but I’m usually too emotionally exhausted to put much effort into impressing a guy in a big truck.

I stopped at one of our local Shell stations this evening. I was enjoying my little break before the long journey home. As I was gassing up, I noticed a guy with a big trailer was trying to pull into the gas station.

Now, my dad has a son, too, but he made sure that his youngest daughter also learned how to tie up/wrap my chains whenever someone needs to hook up a trailer. You have to tie the chains a little, you see, so that they’re suspended. So that they won’t drag on the road.

The chains on this trailer weren’t just dragging across the ground. They were making music, baby! So much janglin’ that I thought I was at an Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros concert. It was wild.

I looked away, because it was almost time for me to hang up the nozzle. And that was when I noticed a cobweb on the sign over the pump. I was torn: the side of me that likes cleanliness wanted to sweep it off. But the side of me that likes spiders — I really do! — didn’t want to disturb their web-weaving.

I ended up leaving the web alone. I’m not going to evict any spiders, because I’m not a landlord. Thank goodness.

Summer Crush

This has nothing to do with Mayville — not really — but I thought I would write about it anyway. I am, after all, the boss of this blog.

Uuugggh. I don’t want to be the boss of anyone or anything. I’m a proud Type B personality. But anyway — seeing as I’m in charge here, I thought I would go ahead and post this.

I have decided, after a couple of weeks of hemming and hawing, to give up on my summer crush. After letting myself spend the business end of May focusing on a teeny-tiny crush I have on a guy I met in 2015 — and whom I’ve rarely spoken to since then — I have decided (nobly, I think!) to give up on him.

I won’t be thinking about him at all. That means that I now have a crush on exactly 0 people. It all feels very freeing — like quitting a job or dropping out of school.

I love to quit! I might take up smoking just to have something else to give up on!

In all seriousness, this is the first of June. I’m sure you’re well aware that June is Pride Month and — though I’m not making any official declarations — I’ve often suspected that I might be on the asexual side of things. I have a romantic side, but I have less interest in the other facets of that arena. It’s not that I’m completely repulsed by the act — it’s more about the fact that I have indifferent feelings about things of that nature.

So I feel like, when I do have a thing for someone, if they miraculously liked me back, then I would actually be cheating them out of the super-sexy mega-hot relationship of their dreams.

In a sense, it was a divine gift to humanity when (1) I was made to be relatively sexless and (2) no one had a crush on me in high school or college. Because of this perfectly balanced equation, zero incels were spawned. Miraculous stuff. Sometimes, though, I wish I were prettier, and that someone will tell me someday that they thought I was slightly cute.

(In my own special way, of course — it would be completely unbelievable if someone called me hot or gorgeous. I’m serving Kentucky, not serving cun—)

Oh, pardon? You don’t think I should use that word on Tipper Gore’s Internet? Hmmmm. Okay. I’ll think about it.

I’m 29 and I’ve never liked anyone. Not … deeply. I’m sure my heart has fluttered, but I’ve never been devoted to one particular person. No one has every really liked me back — or so it seems — which only hurts a little.

Not because I feel lonely, but because it makes me feel like I’m unattractive.

Or, to be perfectly on the level, I should frame it like this: I guess I’ve been liked before, but it’s never been a mutual feeling. Only men I’m not attracted to have approached me. I’ve even been chased off of some social media sites because the most regular replies I got were from persistent, unattractive dud(e)s.

On TikTok — which is my unexpected safe space — my audience is overwhelmingly femme/female. I delight in that, because I rarely get the sexualized messages I’ve seen over on Instagram and Facebook. And I hardly ever check Facebook Messenger anymore — but it always makes me feel funny when I see a handful of messages from over a year ago, from guys who look like they have poor hygiene.

Back in my schooldays, I was never the belle o’ the ball. And I know I’m not completely hideous, but I am unique-looking. I used to think most people didn’t know “what” I am, but most people have correctly guessed that I’m primarily Scottish-American.

I’m actually a blend of things, but I’ll get to that in a minute. For now, if you want to picture me as a grotesque caricature of Merida, then … feel free. It’s not far from the truth.

This is how people see me, even though I have an Irish last name. A very County Mayo sort of name, which reflects that particular bit of my background.

And I’ve got Irish, Finnish, and Andalusian ancestors — and I also have Congolese ancestors, ancestors who I managed to trace back to the colonial era. I’m the product of folks from a variety of backgrounds — and I’m especially proud of my ancestors from the Chesapeake region, ancestors who didn’t want to come here, but who survived in the face of vile mistreatment.

Although all my ancestors have influenced me, to one degree or another, my Scottish ancestors are the ones who people usually identify immediately. They gave me my particularly stereotypical quirks. My auburn-y hair. My sharp tongue. My … unique-looking face.

I really do look Pictish. I don’t mean that in a weird phrenological way. I mean that if I ran around naked, covered in painted-on pictures, people would probably say that they always expected that sort of thing out of me.

I’ve always assumed that most people thought that I was exotic or erotic or something similar, because …

Look. I’ve written about this before on this very blog: people stare at me in public, even when I’m not looking at them.

I’ll feel a pair of eyes on me and, suddenly, I’ll be met with the sharp stare of a slack-jawed local. (I’m also a local. But I’m rarely slack-jawed. I’m usually grinding my teeth in a fit of anxiety.)

Enough about me — back to my crush. I doubt he would’ve been interested, anyway, but I see him out and about from time to time and I still think that he’s a nice young man.

A nice young man who deserves better than me.

Someday, I’ll find my own better half. He’ll make me less Begbie-ish. And less Pictish.

Or more Pictish, if he’s into body paint.

A Place With Sights & Sounds

On a sunny day, I decided to take a quick drive through town. The most anxious woman in the world becomes freewheeling and relaxed behind the wheel of her car. (That’s how it works for me, I should say.)

I usually take the highway that encircles the town, rather than heading straight through the city’s center. Traffic isn’t bad in town, not really, but we don’t even have traffic lights anymore. Not since December of 2021. Because, on an unseasonably warm winter night, our town disappeared.

A massive tornado hit our town — a massive wedge tornado, a wall of debris, a tsunami wave of other peoples’ homes. The tornado carved a mile-wide scar through the area. I think a lot about the homes, the old buildings, the churches, the businesses — but I mostly think about the people. The people who died, the people who lost their relatives, their homes, their town. Our town.

The town hasn’t truly recovered since then. Hundreds of buildings — homes, businesses, churches — were ripped to pieces, splintered into shards, transformed into piles of debris. The debris has since been swept up. The lots have been cleared off. But no new buildings have replaced the old ones.

Now that I say that, I know about a couple of big buildings are currently under construction — a year and a half after the storm. A new subdivision also sprang up on the outskirts of the town. No one’s moved in yet, so far as I know.

But other than those construction projects, there’s little visible progress. The process of rebuilding is painfully slow. I heard — from a fairly reliable source — that the town’s recovery funds were almost entirely used up during the debris-clearing process. This means that there’s hardly any money left for rebuilding. This is why so many lots sit empty.

On my drive through town, I noticed some new LED signs and new branding in front of businesses, which makes it feel like we’re moving forward — even if it’s minor progress.

I kept driving, looking at everything I could take in. So many familiar sights, which made me feel like — for better or worse — I’ve made this place my home.

Sometimes I think about moving to the nearby college town — because it has more resources. But that town is (naturally) more expensive to live in. And that town has lots of traffic. And I’m just not used to living in that kind of environment.

The people who live over there wear Premier League football jerseys. The people who live here wear NFL football jerseys for teams that don’t even exist anymore. (The team from St. Louis, in particular.) The people over there wear helmets when they ride their bikes! The people here don’t even wear helmets when they ride their motorcycles. And I’m not endorsing or defending our end of things — but it’s just what I’m used to.

I also find myself getting mad whenever I visit certain places — stores and restaurants — over in the college town. I’ve decided that I’m either one of the ugliest people who’s ever lived, or one of the most attractive people to ever do it, based solely on the way I get stared at whenever I’m over there.

At a drive-thru, a relatively lovely-looking young woman kept glancing over at me, and I think she either thought I was gorgeous or hideous. I’m shy, and I generally avoid eye contact, but I couldn’t help but notice that I was being watched. Something similar happened to me in one of that town’s sit-down diners. A middle-aged couple — well, that’s being generous! An older couple kept gazing at me while I ate my breakfast. They did a full-on, turn-around-in-your-seat stare-down.

I had a hard time finishing my food. I think I got a to-go box.

A BRIEF ASIDE: I also got stared down by another older couple at a local Cracker Barrel. This is embarrassing to own up to. I don’t like the food or the ambiance of the ol’ CB — with no D 😔 — so I have no recollection of why I went there. Probably to eat a sweet potato. I love a good sweet potato.

But, for whatever reason, I stand out. And most people in that town are still kind to me — but a small number of people have given me pause. They’ve made me very aware of my status as an outsider.

(If I could marry into a family from that town, then I could probably fit in a little bit better. As it stands, I’m related to about half the people in my home county, so I need to cast a wider net anyway!)

AN ASIDE/TANGENT ABOUT THE PHRASE “HOME COUNTY”: When I was in college, I had a professor who absolutely hated the way we Kentuckians mention our home counties instead of our home towns. I can understand how it can be confusing, but that’s how many of us identify with each other. I feel a certain kinship with people from my home county — even if we grew up in two different towns, if we’ve lived in the same county, we’ve had similar experiences.

Anyway, this professor wasn’t fond of this practice. It “made more sense” to just say what “city” we were from, and then to just clarify what part of the state that “city” was in. Uh … okay.

I was willing to hear him out, until I remembered that the John Prine wrote a great song that went a little something like this: “And daddy won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County /
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay.”

I’m sorry, but if folks who are one or two generations removed from Kentucky can say things like “my folks are from McCracken County” — and if Grammy Award winners can sing songs about life in Muhlenberg County — then county-based identification should be accepted as a bona fide practice.

Leaping back off of that li’l soap box, I’d like to go back and revisit that earlier thought: the idea of marrying someone from another county. I’m afraid if I married another Kentuckian, the gravitational pull of Mayville would drag us back down here. If I could marry someone from another state or country, then I think we’d spend less time over here.

But I know I would want to come back every so often, just to check on things. Just to know what I might (or might not) be missing.

Hmmmm. Would I have anything nice to say about this place if I weren’t from here? Probably not. But I imagine that’s true of any place. It took me until my adult years to realize that just about everyone has a complicated relationship with their hometown.

Welcome to Mayville

Dispatches from the worst town on Earth.

Our lives would be better if we weren’t cursed with the misfortune of being born in southern Kentucky.

(No one says “southern Kentucky” — it’s either western, eastern, central, or northern. I’ve even heard people say southeastern Kentucky, but not southern Kentucky. For what it’s worth, I don’t live in southeastern Kentucky — I’ve just heard of it. It’s miles and miles away from me, far off on the other side of the state. Kentucky is actually a wide state with a flat bottom, so there’s not a clearly-defined southern portion. But I’m keeping this geographically vague, so that I won’t be recognized, and so I won’t get beaten up at my local Family Dollar.)

I was always convinced that I wouldn’t have acne if I hadn’t been forced to grow up in a lower middle class household in the rural south. Maybe living here has given me some good stories — and since I live here, I’m absolutely going to write about living here.

I’ve learned a lot of important stuff while living here. It’s actually been a blessing to grow up as a leftist in a conservative area, because I’ve learned that progress is possible, that we can outgrow (and not tolerate) closed-mindedness, that we can wear gumboots from Dollar General and play banjos and still be progressive.

But living here has also given me acne. I’m sure it hasn’t helped my skin look clearer, or made my hair less frizzy, or made my life any easier. Life for a young woman in this area is … far, far away from the lifestyle of a fairytale princess.

Once upon a time, I saw a ranking of the best and the worst states to live in. Kentucky was ranked 41 out of 50. Instead of making me want to roll over and die, it actually made me feel better about my life.

I realized that girls in California — the girls in Calabasas, not the rural towns and the urban centers — and the girls in Connecticut would lay down and die if they saw my neighbors’ motorcycles, ATVs, kudzu-coated single-wides, peeling-paint Camaros, noisy crotch rockets, and other trailer-trash chariots and domiciles.

(Most people here, by the way, are what you’d call house poor and car rich. It’s not unusual to see four or five cars in one driveway. And — contrary to the negative stereotypes associated hillbillies and rednecks — most of these vehicles aren’t up on blocks. Most of us take great pride in making sure our Mustangs and Dodge Rams are in good shape.)

The apocryphal girls from California — back to them. They wouldn’t know how to handle too-tall grass, roly-pollies in the mud, humidity, visible cracks, drug addicts passed out in front of the gas station, suicides and overdoses in the Dollar General parking lot.

It is a bleak, depressing place. The ditches are full of flies and mosquitoes. Mascara runs and hair frizzes in the near-constant humidity. And — in spite of all this liquid — the grass is often yellow or brown.

We also have another problem: wealthy(ish) people who cosplay as poor people. These people grew up in middle class homes, but turned to illicit-slash-criminal activity not out of desperation — which is understandable — but because they “wanted to have fun.”

From there, a demon called downward mobility grips a family and doesn’t let go — not until it’s drained them of money, time, happiness, and all of that. Dozens of riches-to-rags stories in every county.

There are good things here, too. There are lakes, rivers, deer, dew-covered cobwebs, tomato-and-mayo sandwiches — and family. Family is probably the number-one thing keeping most of us tethered to this miserable place.

I’ll be posting more as it comes to me — this is just an introductory post, you know? But I want to take you on a tour of the worst place that I know: my hometown.

An important note from your tour guide: This isn’t about a town on the northern/eastern side of the state. This is about a town that’s just a stone’s throw away from Tennessee. And I would know, because plenty of Tennesseans have tried to throw stones at me.

I also want to say that, for all of the faults that this place has, there are people here who want to make this place livable. They should be recognized as good folks, folks who want to do good.

It’s not my intention to mock or belittle my neighbors and my family and my peers. For every awful person I’ve met or known, there are two or three others who are good-hearted. People with good intentions, or people who are just trying to get by, are the people who deserve recognition instead of ridicule. So I’m not here to knock them. At the end of the day, no matter where we all go, this is our homeplace. And we — the people — are the ones who make (or break) this place we call home.