Tag Archives: lower middle class life

Cable “News” & Church Pews

I think about this all the time, because I have relatives and peers who were — at one time — (seemingly) normal people.

But after years of exposure to Fox News and QAnon, and other things of that odious nature, their brains have rotted.

You may be thinking, That’s extreme. You don’t need to exaggerate, or be mean, or be judgmental. Be a little kinder!

No. I don’t think I will. People have already spent too much time mincing their words about a pretty serious situation. This is something that’s poisoned minds and hearts. We may as well call Fox News and QAnon Jupiter, because these folks have gone there to get more stupider.

And — in addition to acting more ignorant by the hour — these people are suffering from other diminished faculties. They’re more fearful than ever. They’re angry all of the time.

They’re also convinced that all Christians in America are secretly spied upon and persecuted, even though there are dozens of Baptist, Methodist, Church of Christ, Catholic, Episcopal, and non-denominational churches around here. None of those churches are boarded up, and they’re constantly holding events for new members. They send out postcards begging young families to bring their kids to game nights and car shows. They really try to make it a family affair.

Truthfully — and even the brainwashed folks, if they were being rational, would acknowledge this — the biggest “enemy” working against “the faith” is apathy. Many of these people have kids and grandkids who don’t have an interest in the church. Many young people also won’t go to church because they can find faith-based information and/or community in a judgment-free zone. The church is not — generally speaking — a judgment-free zone. The young people are tired of being bullied by people who think church is a competition or a fashion show. That is why they have no interest in attending a “more traditional” church. It feels too much like high school.

But the concept of “traditional values” has given these (usually older) folks something to rally around. They think that, if they could just convince their kids and grandkids to go back to church, that suddenly everything would fall into place. Lots of cherubic babies, little ones with soft curls and dimpled cheeks, would spill out of us, the young women, like lace unspooled from a slender filature.

With a Gunne-Sax dress covering my body from shoulder to ankle, and a beautiful (but silenced) baby on my hip, and a young man with an unfortunate face expression standing in front of me, I would be the model of perfect femininity. I would bend to my husband’s will, as the perfect helpmeet, and listen to whatever tidbits of nothingness he’d managed to collect from a busy day of listening to Ben Shapiro’s podcasts while he either (1) drove an air-conditioned tractor up and down the field or (2) dumped numbers into Google Sheets.

My husband and I would pretend to smile from sunup to sundown, and we would only get a break while we cried ourselves to sleep, miserable at having been paired off to meet the church’s No Husband Left Behind policy.

But on Sunday morning, with Cherubleigh on my hip, we’ll walk into church with our heads held high — but not too high, because the preacher’s daughter will inevitably be there, too. And she will expect us to know our place, as slow-witted peons who can’t afford designer clothing. She — and her peers and her daughters — will glide in wearing matching Coco Chanel and pearls, while I’m stuck in a cheap-o prairie dress that came from a virtual vanity boutique.

The boutique, of course, is run by the preacher’s wife or daughter. And that’s yet another way they expect us to tithe. I’m starting to wonder whether this money is funding the house of the Lord or the House of Chanel.

Anyway — as bleak as that sounds, I think that some people think this “return to traditional values” sounds nice and normal, simply because people are given a place to be in the world. That’s true — so long as everyone knows their place.

Nobody expects to be at the bottom of the ladder — except for me. I know that I would be placed on a bottom rung, and that I would be given a philanderer or an abuser, and that I would be expected to straighten him out or be a good little SAHM Soldier. I would be expected to tame the dishes, the mistresses, the laundry, and the insatiable libido. And I know I couldn’t do it, because my spirit would be broken.

Surprisingly — to many people — I am actually a straight woman. But I would prefer to choose things for myself, just as every living being does. Even children and the elderly like to choose things for themselves, because they are people, too.

And while it’s true that some children and some elderly folks need extra assistance, they still have the autonomy to refuse things — or to ask for an alternative option. If our ability to even have preferences is taken away from us, then I’m at a loss for what to do.

Suppose I do decide to marry a Godly young man, but I would prefer for us to attend a different church — for one reason or another. If I don’t have a say in the matter, how is that fair to me? Similarly, how is that fair to my husband and/or family, to have a sulking mother who’s on the path to becoming an apostate, all because they wouldn’t allow me to have my own thoughts and feelings?

Ah, well. They don’t care about that. These are the same people who leave “F**k your feelings!” in the comments on every Facebook posts — from the poorly-generated AI art to the AT&T ads.

While I know they don’t care about confining people to a lifetime of unhappiness, I find it odd that they think their sons and daughters, or grandsons and granddaughters, would find being a Trad Spouse Content Creator exciting. Besides, that market is beyond oversaturated by now. I can’t compete with the Ballerina Farms lady, because I’m not a ballerina and I don’t own my own farm.

I’m certainly not opposed to spirituality and faith — and I find a lot of folks find strength in their faith. But making faith a commodity and/or fodder for influencers, and making church feel like a country club, and making people feel that any Outsiders — even other Protestants — are not to be trusted?

Those are the things that have made me feel uncomfortable and unwelcome in the various churches I’ve attended or visited.

Yet there’s still this lingering idea that, if we could get every American soul — to say nothing of the bodies! — into a pew on Sunday morning, that the country would experience a complete reversal of fortunes. Everyone would have a stately, ornate dining room. Everyone would have a solid gold toilet. Everyone would drive a freshly-waxed Maserati.

“Well, everyone except for the people I hate!”

But enough about that.

Anyway, the folks at that terrible cable “news” network — a channel that focuses on punditry and opinion shows, a channel that rarely broadcasts actually news content — have landed on a gold mine. They know that they can pay someone to ramble about highly-emotional topics — faith, bravery, veterans, children — and that they’ll entice millions of Boomers to sweat issues that …

Frankly, these issues are best handled on a family-by-family basis. Not every family has kids — some are childless, some are childfree, some are TTC, and some have stepchildren who are only in the home half of the month, or half of the year, or only during summers. Not every family goes to the Baptist church — though some are Methodists, some are Catholics, some are not religious, and some are happily living in interfaith families. Because of this variety, there’s no one prescription to “save” all the “families” of America.

For the people who are all about states’ rights, or taking away federal power, it seems that they’d be able to understand the need to make less centralized decisions, or to give the power to choose back to the individual.

But these are the same people who ignore the “well-regulated” in front of “militia,” so I can’t be too certain they’d appreciate the irony of this situation.

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t spend a lot of time drafting this post — simply because I spend most of my time living this post. The South is, of course, where America buckles its Bible Belt. I’m used to hearing people (of all backgrounds, ages, economic classes, denominations) speak about their faith, their church, their volunteer group, or their Bible study class.

I don’t flinch. I certainly don’t insult people. I’ve even taken people up on their offers to visit their churches, because I am admittedly quite nosy, and because I have family members who’ve affiliated with nearly every denomination.

So perhaps it’s shocking when I say that church can still be isolating — and that the biggest “offenders” who have lectured people for not attending church are usually people who are themselves unchurched.

These are the people who have had their names read at a packed Sunday service, or who have argued with a preacher, or who got hopping mad when they saw that a gay couple is now “allowed” to attend services.

It’s hard not to judge the judgmental person who wants to “ban gays” from coming to church. On the other hand, it’s hard not to feel sorry for the woman who quit going to church because she had her name read — a form of public shaming — after divorcing an abusive spouse. There are all kinds of people who have left church — from the judgmental to the unfairly judged.

Through careful planning or dumb luck, the folks at Fox News — and Conservative commentators and podcasters — have landed on the magic formula: make people afraid and get them screaming-mad about feeling persecuted. The delicious irony of this, considering that their own enemies are “snowflakes.”

In fact, that was my original reason for writing this post. After seeing pushback in the wake of the Opening Ceremony — pushback to “mocking religion,” to Greek gods, to pagan priestesses — I realized we were fighting a losing battle against willful ignorance. And after calmly explaining the allusions to Greek mythology at an Olympic celebration, I realized that they didn’t even want an explanation. They’re just as bad as a playground bully who wants to fight. How childish and weirdly unnecessary. Get a better hobby than arguing on Facebook!

Now that I’ve thought about it, Rupert Murdoch has made me a more devout person. Not because I’ve bought into any of their programming. Not at all.

Instead, this wellspring of faith has come about for another reason. I hope and pray that there is a just God watching all of this nonsensical, mean-spirited programming. And I hope that God shows mercy to every person who’s suffered at the hands of someone who’s weaponized the hateful rhetoric on that channel.

I also hope that the same God who shows mercy to others smites dishonest CEOs. If that’s not too much to ask, then I will — as they say — pray on it.

Thoughts and prayers, prayers and thoughts. Pardon me for not having kind thoughts about any of the media moghuls who are trying to deliver us to evil.

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?!

“Jamais Mayville”: Explaining The Name

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.

Authenticity

I’m making a list — and I’ve already checked it twice. Earlier this month, I mentioned that there are some people obsessed with proving that they’re “authentically country” or “authentically Appalachian” or “authentically Southern.”

If you’re authentically doing your thing, then you probably don’t need to take great pains prove yourself. I don’t feel like I have to flash my credentials, but if you’d like to see them:

  1. My mom’s mom’s mom’s family — the folks on my maternal side — were sharecroppers. They picked tobacco and corn under the blanket of humidity that smothers western Kentucky every spring and every summer.
  2. My mom’s dad was a cattle farmer. He wasn’t a rancher — he was a farmer, with a small-ish farm and a wood lot and a pond for the cows and the snakes.
  3. My mom’s dad’s dad and his family were sorghum farmers.
  4. My dad’s mom’s brother and his family were cattle dairy farmers. They had cattle, but they mostly did dairy operations. They milked cows all the time and all of that. My dad would go over to the farm and bale hay. My dad’s cousin — one of his favorite cousins, a man whom we all remember fondly — would muck the stalls and sing “It’s Such A Pretty World Today” while he was … tidying up.
  5. My dad’s dad had a tobacco patch, but he never planted again after coming up a nickel short on his crop. (He didn’t make a profit. He lost money on that enterprise, is what I’m trying to say — and he never planted another tobacco patch.)
  6. My dad’s dad was a miner. He ran a dragline and did above-ground strip mining in the Western Coal Fields.
  7. My dad’s dad’s dad could sharpen an ax finer than anyone else in the county. (I’d noticed that this was the kind of job you could do while sitting down, which suited him. He was a pretty … casual man. He would always weigh down his bushels of turnips with rocks before going to the market. That’s just … that’s just how he was.)
  8. My dad’s dad mended and tarred his own fishing nets. He loved to go fishing out on the Tennessee River.
  9. My dad’s dad’s dad was a bona fide alcoholic. He would get … a little bit happy and float down the river — mostly for fun, but also because he didn’t have a license or a vehicle.
  10. My dad’s dad was good friends with the local bootlegger.
  11. My dad’s dad’s dad’s uncle was the oldest living Union Army veteran in Kentucky.
  12. My dad’s mom’s brothers played the violin and the mandolin. The mandolin-player put out an album when he moved down to Arkansas. (He was also a long-haul truck driver. He was a cool guy.)
  13. My mom’s dad’s mom played the guitar. She was a tiny little woman — unlike me, a big-built gal — but she was apparently quite the entertainer.
  14. My mom’s mom — my beloved grandmother — was a hairdresser and a laundress and a housecleaner.
  15. My mom’s mom’s mom ran a hamburger stand and worked in a munitions factory and a clothing factory. She was the real deal. She was hard-working and objectively beautiful. I only inherited the first part, but … I’m glad to be like her, in some small way.
  16. My dad’s mom’s brother was a long-distance trucker. I only found this out years and years after he’d retired. (I guess I mentioned this earlier — but it deserves a separate mention!)
  17. My dad used to drive a dump truck, while we’re talking about big trucks.
  18. My dad’s mom’s brother was blinded in a spar mining accident.
  19. My mom’s mom’s mom’s brother’s wife was blinded when she got chemicals in her eyes while sharecropping.
  20. My mom’s mom’s mom’s brother was shot and killed on his own brother-in-law’s front porch.

The guy who wrote Hillbilly Elegy has nothing on me.

If I Were A Rich Girl

I listened to a podcast the other day, where they said that J.D. Vance — a particularly loathsome fellow — is an elitist who still pretends to be an “aw, shucks” country boy.

As someone who’s an “aw, shucks” country girl from Kentucky — Authentically Country, because I’m descended from coal miners, sorghum farmers, sharecroppers, and maids — I can tell you that I don’t try to act like I’m impressed by silverware, senators, or Vetements.

None of it phases me. I can watch children in dirty diapers run out into the street in front of the trailer park, chasing Meemaw’s boyfriend’s pit bull. I could also watch a member of Congress snort cocaína off a $50,000 dinner plate without batting an eye.

None of it would shock me. Not because I know everything — but because I know that just about anything, good or horrible or funny, is possible in this world.

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.

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.

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.