Hick-a-dee-doo-dah
10:03 a.m. on 2005-09-18
My neighbors are gods among hicks, pillars of white trash society. We were invited to one of their bonfires the other day. We wove our way through the many old cars, up on blocks and in various states of repair, parts of them littered everywhere in the driveway, a vast monument garden dedicated to the virtues of the crank binge; to find at the end of our treck a bunch of intensely drunk folks glugging gasoline onto a pile of broken-up flats, igniting it with a grand Whoosh! to a chorus of many yelps, human and canine.
The first time we saw them have one of these bonfires, we thought their goddamn house was on fire, and almost called the cops. Luckilly, we went over to investigate first.
Throughout the evening, our hosts threw more scrap wood, empty half-rack boxes, and various refuse on the pile. The wood, it wasn't wood that needed burning, that they had gathered up from around the property in order to clean things up. No. This was wood that they had scrounged from around town just for the purpose of having a bonfire, just to feed their insatiable lust for BURNING.
I understand that the white-trash chic thing is very rampant among the college crowd. One friend of mine actually is collecting junker cars in the yard of her rental house, and refusing to pay her garbage bill, just because she likes to, as she says, "keep it real". This is a statement that could only come from a person solidly upper-middle-class upbringing. Any of us that were actually raised in the white trash manner, or exposed to the true hick lifestyle in any meaningful way, know that living in filth and wallowing in our own laziness, revelling in our emotional wasteland, is not "keeping it real" in any rational sense. This is, in fact, running away from, actively avoiding, things that could reasonably be called "real". Things like the responsibility of paying for your own food and shelter, and the threat of diseases that breed in puddles of filth on the kitchen floor. The white trash lifestyle has been glorified extensively in the media, but it is not all hilarious drunken mishaps, funny haircuts, and garishly decorated trailer homes. A person wakes up after one of those drunken debacles in jail, perhaps having accidentally killed someone while driving drunk in one's muscle car. And there is no hot white trash girlfriend that is going to somehow spring one from the slammer by a series of ill-concieved plans that somehow jumble together to spell success. No. At best, you return to your dilapidated trailer after five-to-twenty and drink yourself slowly to death in a smelly, boring and lonesome manner.
So, when I go out to my porch to look at the moon and listen to the crickets singing in the canyon bottom, I hear the sound of the neighbors endlessly and fruitlessly trying to start up one or another of their many vehicles, and I do not envy them. When I go on a walk with the baby, and the neighbor almost runs me over in his '94 Ford Aerostar, and then stops to say "Jee-zus, I almost ran ya' over," and then sips from a 20 ounce can of Bud Light, I don't look up to him as an example of stellar manhood.
Call me uncool. I don't care.
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