Tag Archives: essays

Critical Thinking

I posted a TikTok earlier today that was just, like, a wee little joke. It was a lighthearted joke — and not a hurtful comment or a slam.

If I had said something prejudiced or hateful, I would’ve deserved some pushback. But I know I didn’t say anything sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, ageist, or violent. I wasn’t making a personal attack, or being vicious about someone’s bad outfit, or even taking a cowardly approach to bullying by saying, “Post this on IG Reels if you’re brave.”

I didn’t do anything vile or cruel. I didn’t. But after posting this video, I received a bunch of … I don’t know how to describe these comments. Other than — and I really don’t want to go there, but I’m going to go there — a bunch of young people complaining about what I’d posted.

So what was my big mistake? I made fun of an influencer.

I understand that going after influencers might seem can be misogynistic — depending on the type of criticism you’re levying. If I’d made a comment about her body, her face/beauty, her personality, her voice, her aesthetic, or even her choice of clothing, then I understand that people take umbrage with that sort of non-constructive “criticism.”

I also think it’s crucial to note that those types of cruel comments are often directed at young influencers and BIPOC influencers. (The influencer I referenced in my video is, for the record, a white woman in her late twenties or early thirties.)

But a woman making a crack at a specific video posted by another woman is not misogynistic. It’s just … it’s just clowning on a corny post. She put it out there for a global audience and she left it up, presumably to drive up engagement.

People rushed to her defense in my comments, and because I was afraid they would snitch-tag her, I shut the whole conversation down. I made my post private, which I would say is a cowardly thing — but I don’t care.

I took the video down because of the deluge of complaints in the comments. After I thought about it some more, I realized that the influencer was complaining in her video, and I made a video about her complaint, and then my comments were full of complaints. It was all too complain-y/Karen-y for me.

In 2024, I reserve the right to protect myself from bland commentary.

That’s the difference in the influencer and myself. I put it out there — and I took it down. Maybe that makes me a coward. Maybe that makes her braver than me. Oh, well. Good for her!

I almost replied to one of the teens in my comments section — I was a teen once, and I know what it’s like to make your voice heard. I know that — sometimes — it feels good for someone to validate your comment by sending a reply.

So I almost said, “I hear what people are saying. To keep it completely real, not all ‘news’ sites are truly in the news business. They’re just content aggregators trying to push content to get clicks. I get it.”

As soon as I typed that up, I felt like … damn. This is exactly what overexplaining is. As a teenager and early twenty-something, I often overexplained concepts and theories to my parents, my grandmother, and my best friend. I cringe at all the times I lectured my best friend, and I hope she forgives me for acting like a ninth-grade history teacher when we already had a ninth-grade history teacher.

We had the same ninth-grade history teacher, now that I think about it. And he was a much, much better lecturer than I could ever be.

I cringe at all the preaching I did to my best friends. And my family! Wow! They sure put up with a lot of overexplaining about politics and things they already knew about! I should’ve overexplained things like WiFi routers and PDF rotation. That would’ve been more helpful.

Not to be the old woman who shakes her fist at the clouds — especially because I’m just a young woman shaking her fist at the clouds — but it always makes me laugh when a nineteen-year-old who just took a JMC 101 course tries to explain to me “how the media is exploitative.”

I always want to respond with something like this:

“Hell yeah, girl. Do you know why the media is exploitative? Lemme guess. Your mass comm professors have talked to you about why stories sell, and which stories will sell, and all of the business behind the business. I understand that, too, because I was exactly where you were, ten years ago. But let me tell you a little secret. Every industry is exploitative — to one degree or another.”

Here, I’d have to take a pause and collect myself. I’m not done. This is a speech.

“I’m not done, girl. This is a speech. You teach the 101 class; I teach the graduate seminar. And I appreciate the fact that you are trying to teach me something — but I live that experience every day. And so do you. And I’m glad you’re more and more aware that the world is exploitative. So now, on social media, you should realize that everything here is exploitative, too. I was trying to exploit your (underdeveloped?) sense of humor to get a laugh — but I exploited your sense of incredulity and you gave me a lecture instead. Ah, well. Let’s keep it moving. I’m giving a lecture down the hall in thirty minutes. Drop in if you finish your lecture early. Toodles, babes!”

I’d be exhausted after all of that. So I didn’t post any lectures of my own. I just bailed.

2024 is the year of picking your battles — and I’m not battling nineteen-year-old media theory students.

I would rather encourage them than to argue with them. And even though they can teach an old dog new tricks — which is a good thing! — I want them to understand that the old dogs already know the old tricks.

Woof, woof!

My Cousin Died — And It Warped My Mind

I had planned on writing a much, much longer essay on how I became a germaphobe — something I struggled with at the beginning of the 2010s, managed to overcome by 2017 or so, and then struggled with again after March of 2020. (For obvious reasons.)

But this has been a tough thing to write about — and I really wanted to explore my germaphobic tendencies on a deeper level. I may get around to that, eventually. For the time being, here are some early notes I made on how I was personally/directly affected by the pandemic.

The mental strain was enormous, to the point that it spilled over into physical pain. I could feel the tension in my body, the ache of anxiety. And the tingling tension wasn’t the only physical manifestation of my stress. For about six months, I had a wound on my hand that wouldn’t quite heal.

My cousin’s death — during the height of the pandemic — rattled me. I was shocked, I was sad, I was pained.

Some would probably say that I should link that to the “excessive” hand washing we did back in the early part of 2020, but — no. I’m glad I tried to stay hygienic. And the hand washing was only part of the process. I would cover the wound, I would change the bandages, but it never quite closed over. The wound itself would itch and itch and itch, and it seemed like it would never heal. It was a visible manifestation of the way grief lingers.

Eventually, the wound began healing. It took months, though — and even now, I can look down at my hand and my memory can retrace the borders of the pain.

Back in the fall of 2020, as the pandemic was about to enter its first big wave, my older cousin — my mom’s cousin — contracted COVID. Within a few weeks, as she thought she was recovering, she had a stroke. She went to the hospital, and then to a nursing home. From there, she came back home — but this was only because she was placed in at-home hospice care. A few days afterward, she passed away.

Several things can be true at once. She was a bit older – but she wasn’t ancient, and she was still very active. She was disabled, true, but this was because of a recent car accident. A car accident that someone else caused, I should say, lest she be accused of being “old and senile.” Old people and senile people deserve respect and protection, of course — but my cousin was not doddery. She wasn’t the type to hurt herself or anyone else. She was agile and active and alert.

She could still walk just about anywhere — and she did. She went places. She was active — and not just in an I-like-to-go-out-and-sit-in-a-corner-of-my-garden way. That’s something that I do — and I’m not quite 30.

For her, activity meant being active. Moving. Being out and about with people. Going to a major social gathering, with hundreds or even thousands of people. That’s likely how she became sick in the first place.

But because she had a stroke, and then never recovered from that, it did something to me. It snapped some synapses or something.

I became afraid of ending up in her situation, fighting off a deadly disease, fighting for my (boring, but precious) life.

And I still think about her. I think about her all the time. Whenever anyone mentions the pandemic in the past-tense, as if they’re glad that it’s all behind us now, I think about how it causes lasting trauma in my own family.

I am sorry that my family is traumatized. Not because it inconveniences or annoys those who want to minimize the impact of the pandemic — but because I’m sorry that such large-scale trauma happened in the first place.

It’s something that lingers. Just like the happier memories, grief and trauma have a way of holding on, of not letting go. Of making an invisible wound — or a spot that closes over, but leaves an unfading scar.

CBO (Chief Blogging Officer)

I was a teenager in the days before Vine — right before Vine, I should say. Vine was a big thing when I was a young college student. (I remember trying to film Vines at Bonnaroo, which was another experience that defined that stage in my life. Both of those things shaped the bulk of my personality back in 2013.)

We had Vine, sure, but we didn’t have lots of ways to watch what other people were up to. We could read blogs or Facebook posts, but the world of vlogging? That was definitely more of a niche thing. I’m sure there were vloggers, but the world hadn’t yet pivoted-to-video. At that point, we couldn’t even post videos on Instagram.

We watched MTV, if we wanted to see real-life eccentricity. (“Eccentricity” covers a lot of territory: the delightfully-eccentric good, the cringeworthy bad, and the maddeningly wild.)

MTV even came to my super-country high school to audition someone for True Life or Made, or one of those reality shows. They decided not to film at our school. I don’t know if they couldn’t find anything worth filming, or if something else happened. But we didn’t miss our turn in the spotlight. A couple years later, a television crew from another country came to our school to film a specific club, because said club won a national championship. That was a cool experience.)

There were other shows that appealed to our desire to watch people do bizarre things. We didn’t have ice cream so good, but we had trashy television. We watched things like To Catch A Predator and Jerry Springer. Two of my high school classmates even acted on appeared on an episode of Jerry.

I didn’t go with them, so I never got my beads.

We also watched a lot of YouTube skits. In the era before people filmed their beauty hauls, their skincare routines, and their video game play-throughs, people filmed annoying skits and posted them online. Two of my friends and I even got together to plan a bunch of silly YouTube skits, which we wrote scripts for, but never filmed or posted. And that’s a shame, because both of these friends are artists. One of them is a professional photographer, so the videos would’ve been high-quality. But I know I’m not a natural-born performer, so … I’m glad there isn’t video evidence of my bad acting.

The kids who visited Jerry? They were stars! They got beads!

This was back around 2010, 2011, 2012. We didn’t have Vine. We didn’t have TikTok. We didn’t have Twitch.

All of that stuff is new. And I see this evolution as a good thing, because … I’ve decided I’m going to try get ahead of the curve. I’m going to turn my focus to the Generation Alpha and Generation Beta demographics. But first, I need to convince them that ✨blogging✨ is cool. Blogging is it, baby!

When we bring back the pre-Ice Road Truckers Weather Channel, just to have something vaporwave-y vintage to vibe to, we also need to bring back Blogspot-style blogging. The general vibe of that era, from 1999 to 2009, was fascinating. Those were the original years of realizing things. And I want to revisit that era. I want to convince everyone that blogging is the next big sphere of influenceability.

I want to stumble upon a Bulgarian math teacher’s music blog. I want to scroll through an uptight Mormon woman’s recipes. And I want to read about what’s happening to a random design student in Toronto, or Berlin, or Lagos.

I don’t want memes or filters or trends. I want to read confessionals, I want to read workplace/classroom gossip, and I want to read poorly-written poetry. I just … I just want to read someone’s diary.

I want to stare into your blog, baby. Is that too much to ask?!

Elitism

I’m not an “intellectual” in the strict sense — I hate Greek mythology and I absolutely can’t stand when people drop Latin phrases into non-legal or non-medical conversations.

I like to read, but I don’t like to be smug about what I have or haven’t read. (The only thing I’m willing to be smug about is that I absolutely despise Edmund Spenser. I wish I could do to him what Twain threatened to do to Austen, shin bone and all.)

I’m certainly not an elite. I spent the first four years of my life living beside a railroad track — so the phrase wrong side of the tracks is more familiar to me than Ivory Tower, even though I have been degree’d up. I’m credentialed, I guess, but I feel like the same little girl who stood out in the yard, waving to the train conductors, begging them to honk the bellowing horn. They always did, from what I remember — and those are fond memories.

Before I digressed, I was saying that I’m not an elite. I go back and forth between two tabs on my phone — the New Yorker and r/datingoverthirty. I look at the first one when I want to make myself upset over not having written the Great American Short Story Collection, and I look at the second when I want to remind myself that being 29 and unmarried is okay, because nearly every single person is either lonely or messed up. Or both.

All of that’s to say that I balance my high-brow interests with my low-brow interests, and that I often realize that my low-brow interests are more relevant to my own tastes, my own behavior, my own lived experiences.

I will never write the Great American anything, because I enjoy reading more about literary gossip — and the bad behavior of writers — than I would enjoy trying to emulate their work. Similarly, I’ve yet to find someone I want to marry — but I feel like that’s more within my reach, and that it isn’t an elitist aspiration to find a partner.

There are two “elitist” hills I will Green Boots myself on. The first is that I don’t enjoy the show Friends. I don’t haaate it, although I understand why other people do. But I feel like the Venn diagram between “people who think Friends is the funniest TV show ever” and “people who liked playing Chubby Bunny at church youth retreats” is probably close to a circle.

I think it’s perfectly wonderful to watch that show, if you really enjoy it, because it isn’t hurting anybody. It’s a harmless show — but it’s also a toothless show. And that’s its biggest sin.

The second “elitist” hill I’ve climbed involves reality TV. As a teenager, I hated Jersey Shore, because I thought it was shallow. Guess what? It is shallow. That’s the whole point.

Most of the MTV reality shows know that they’re shallow. I don’t mind reality shows that understand and actively embrace how depthless they are. The reality TV shows I can’t stand are programs like The Bachelor, where finding love — something that should be sincere or fun — is trivialized in the form of competitive dates. The idea of competitive dating is bonkers.

That being said, dating is inherently competitive—to a certain degree. All of the eligible singles in your area are also looking to find someone, and while that doesn’t mean that everyone else is your direct competitor, it usually means that you have to find a way to make yourself seem like the Most Appealing Bachelor(ette). You want your partner to feel like they won a prize.

At the end of the day, I still have more in common with the people who watch Friends and The Bachelor. I would much rather listen to them talk about relationship journeys than to listen to anything about The Faerie Queene or dawn with her rose-red fingers.

Life is too short to be (too) pretentious. Sometimes, you have to eat ice cream for dinner — just because that’s what’s available, or just because that’s what all your friends are having.

A-Fiction

After spending the past year writing essays on Medium and newsletters on Substack, I’ve accepted that I’m more of a non-fiction writer/essayist/blogger/ex-journalist than an author of fiction.

I’ve tried writing fiction. I think anyone who enjoys writing for the sake of writing — or storytelling for the sake of storytelling — has made up a character or two. Or they’ve built a secret world, or drawn up a fake map, or imagined a new place.

And I’m not just talking about fantasy writers — I’m talking about folks who write romance, contemporary fiction, literary fiction, and dozens of other genres and sub-genres. Inventing fake people, fake colleges, fake bands, fake music festivals, fake contests, fake romances, and fake countries is pretty fun — and it’s common across the genres.

Having said that, I have such a tough time writing fiction, because I often fall back on my real life for inspiration. I can write about stuff I don’t know about. (I love doing research — and I’ve always worked in research-heavy fields, so I know where to find good sources.) But I like to write about real people and real memories and real places.

Lately, I’ve spent time working on a … short story? A novella? I don’t even know what I want it to be — I don’t want to overwrite it, so I imagine it will be fairly short.

Even though I don’t know how much I’m going to write, or how I want to end it, I know that what I’m writing is a love letter to three separate, imperfect parts of the South: the Cumberland Plateau of Tennessee, the river-lined wedge of western Kentucky, and the wide-open Llano Estacado, in western Texas.

I’ve written before about another part of the country my family hailed from — the Chesapeake and Outer Banks areas. I wrote a bit about these parts of the world in Alameda and Sabrita, two short stories I wrote back in my early twenties. That was a while ago, when I was first getting my footing as a writer. (I’m still getting my footing, all things being equal.)

But this new story — Old Granddad — has the flavors of the other places my family has called home.

Speaking broadly, I come from a part of the country that’s been a land of growth and a land of cutting-down. Black and Indigenous people, poor people, working-class folks, and women and children have faced adversity — and triumphed against it — in this place: the South.

My own family eked out a living by doing just about every typical working-class job. From the earliest colonial years, my ancestors were sharecroppers — and at least one of my ancestors was an enslaved person of Congolese descent. These early ancestors of mine certainly didn’t have an easy time here in the South. But our family remained here for generations, making a living one way or another.

My great-grandmother was a sharecropper, a clothing factory seamstress, and a caregiver for her murdered brother’s children. Her daughter, my maternal grandmother, was a maid and a hairdresser. My maternal grandfather was a veteran, a cattle farmer, and a machinist. My paternal grandfather was a coal miner, a crane operator, and a logger.

His father — my great-grandfather — was a bit more carefree. He spent all day doing nothing, and then spent all night drinking and playing cards. He once sold a box of turnips weighted down with rocks, and the grocer bought it, so I can’t say he didn’t make at least one attempt to feed the family. But my paternal great-grandfather was the direct opposite of my maternal great-grandmother, who nearly broke her back working as hard as — if not harder than — any man in her family.

At the end of the day, my maternal great-grandmother and my grandfathers were probably the three hardest working people in our family. Their toiling was brutal — and they were underpaid, under-thanked, and under-rewarded. Their effort was all worth it, and they knew love and respect and support, but they never could be thanked fully and properly for all the sacrifices they made.

These two sides, paternal and maternal, met in me. I’m three parts hard-working, one part ready to take a break. (That’s thanks to my great-grandfather, who made recreation his life’s work.) I feel like I owe them all something that I can’t quite give them.

In some small way — to record bits and pieces of their stories, and to incorporate these stories in whatever I’m writing — I hope I can preserve their memory. FI may not be able to do a lot, but I want to try to do that.

I want them to live in, in stories, in recollections, in warm memories. They live on, in the writing and the reading, in the pictures, in the words.

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.