I took a trip to Colorado this summer and it was the first time in my life I ever really left the south. It just blew my fucking mind. I love where I’m from, but there’s just so much fucked up shit that I just thought was how it was. I’m a white cishet, so I’m not vulnerable to the worst of the south, but it absolutely blew my mind seeing somewhere that you didn’t just have a background level of distressing shit in view at all times. The most striking thing was how there weren’t any ruins around. You get used to seeing overgrown, dilapidated buildings dotting the side of the road pretty much everywhere you go. It was wild to me how rare that was, comparatively, once you get to the other side of Texas. There’s a million other things, but honestly I didn’t spend enough time there to really know if all of them are the norm or if I’m just making shit up. As shitty as I feel saying it, it would also be nice to try dating somewhere there weren’t quite so many ““country”” girls.
My only regret would be leaving behind all my friends and family. That’s just such an insane leap to me, and I have no faith that I’d be able to find new friends elsewhere now that I’m out of college. I know I’m experiencing a massively cliche impulse and all that, and that there’s lots of problems that will follow you wherever you move, but how do I know if I’m insane or not? Does anybody have advice for trying to find a job somewhere you don’t live? I’m sick of all these damn pine trees.
Yeah I feel such a reprieve whenever I leave the south. Even getting into Tennessee feels like a static fog has lifted. I don’t know how to describe it. It’s like in the south people are very concerned with getting in your business. The south has a very ambient threat to it: everyone’s walking around wanting to shoot someone. Someone the south invented an oppressive feeling of being both ignored and singled out.
I know accents and aesthetics are not politics, but I also can’t stand this “country” persona people have. And it’s absolutely a conscious persona they’ve adopted. It’s not simply being a rural person who drives a truck and speaks with an accent. There are normal people like that and that’s not what I mean. There’s a distinction.
Being “country” consciously monitoring oneself and others in a horribly petty and judgemental way, combining the worst excesses of toxic masculinity with confused American evangelicalism. It’s a costume adopted by the worst assholes imaginable as a shield. It’s a game they’re playing. Willful ignorance, scathing racism, and goofy masculine pride gender performance. I don’t know how else to describe it.