1. a by-the-Book Protestant who never dances — but needs to learn an entire dance routine after being invited to participate in a Hindi friend’s wedding
2. a British person whose favorite Beyoncé song is “Partition”
3. a vampire who likes to eat at Subway, but the only type of bread they have ready is the Italian Herb loaf
4. a Crip who’s also a beekeeper
5. a Church of Christ member who’s secretly a super talented multi-instrumentalist
I’ve written before about how — after tracing a branch of my family tree back to colonial Virginia — I found out that I had Congolese ancestors.
After years of researching this side of our tree, I learned quite a bit about Chesapeake Creole folks and Melungeon people.
After hearing about Prince King Charles’s (alleged) fears about multiethnic/multiracial families, I wondered: What would that bloke think of Melungeons?
It’s not that I actually care what he thinks. I just think that he’d be secretly a little bit afraid to meet anyone from Kentucky, Tennessee, and that particular corner of Virginia. The not knowing who is “what” would completely confuse him.
I doubt he’s coming to this part of the country. And that’s … that’s fine by me.
It’s more than fine, actually.
This is my attempt at writing an Atticus-y poem.
the good thing about having the knife
you stuck in my back is that
I can pull it back out and
stab you right in the feelings
In this part of the country, we’re no strangers to big storms. We’ve survived thunderstorms, wildfires, and tornados.
I personally also survived doing tornado drills in too-tight low-rise jeans. I had to cover my backside with both hands, just to make sure I didn’t give away too many of my secrets. None of which were endorsed by Ms. Victoria.
Anyway, we live right alongside an earthquake zone. The last time we had a big earthquake, we were given — by the miracles of plate tectonics — an inland sea, otherwise known as a sag pond.
Next time, I hope we get a geyser. I want to have a mini-Yellowstone. Not like the TV show — more like the national park.
I’d prefer a geyser to a volcano. I don’t think I’m ready to try to handle any kind of lava, besides a chocolate lava cake.
I sometimes wonder if I wasted my prime diary-keeping years on Twitter. 21,500 ridiculous posts on my little public diary.
I was prolific in the birdsong genre — but ASCAP won’t pay me for any of that.
We need a website that’s a cross between Topix and LinkedIn.
I’m thirsty for some workplace gossip about people I don’t know IRL. (This is probably why many of us read Ask A Manager, TBH.)
I can’t believe it, but I actually want to read about what it’s really like to work for the people who write those just-keep-hustling essays. I would read any/all of the anti-hustle exposés.
Now, for those who don’t remember Topix, it was this great terrible controversial website where people gathered to talk smack about their hometowns.
In my hometown — which is in Kentucky — we would often get hate messages from as far away as New York and California, which shows that our sphere of influence is … wide. Wide-ish? It extends beyond the seemingly endless fields of burley tobacco, to places where people actually care about things like propriety and having a decent reputation.
LinkedOut would be a site for calling out the folks in the C-suite. And it wouldn’t be organized around locations — it would be organized around the corporations themselves. I want to know which CEOs (allegedly) have secret second (and third) families.
Does Glassdoor have a section for gossip and blind items? If not, that’s a missed opportunity.
Have you ever heard of Peter Mayle? He wrote a bunch of books about living in Provence, which is a beautiful place that smells of lavender and sunshine and dreams.
Have you ever heard of Sally? She writes a blog about living in a Kentucky town that’s been anonymized with a fake name — a town called Mayville, which is a comme ci, comme ça place that doesn’t smell like lavender. It smells like vape clouds.
One of the wonderful Peter Mayle books is called Toujours Provence. For this blog, Sally turned that on its head and Googled toujours antonyme, to double-check her high school French. She decided that Jamais Mayville would be an appropriate name to convey … whatever it is that she wanted to convey.
And that’s how this blog was born.
I’d rather play jai alai without a helmet than to play two minutes of pickleball.
Living in this part of the country is for people who can’t leave the scab alone — there’s something that makes you feel like you have to touch the wound to acknowledge the hurting.
Here are some notes I made about an imaginary rom-com. This is my attempt at coming up with a believably unbelievable premise for a film:
• A woman marries a tuxedo cat because he’s already wearing a tux. This is an excellent method for saving money — and she posts about it on her Financial Management TikTok account. Or her Financial Management YouTube channel. Or both, because she’s all about cross-platform monetization.
• She does it for publicity. She hopes to meet and marry a millionaire — a local millionaire? A well-known animal-loving celebrity? (Must figure this angle out.)
• She ultimately falls in love with a magazine editor who can’t decide whether the article should be called “Cat marries woman” or “Woman marries cat” — but since the film is called Woman Marries Cat, we’ll probably go with that one.
If anyone wants to turn this into a film, then I’ll gladly accept an executive producer credit. TIA.
Jamais Mayville