Ten Things I Hate about the South:
1. Nearly 85% of the population pronounces the word “crayons” as “crowns.” Southerners really, really dislike syllables and try to say as few as possible. (See also, “prolly” for “probably” and “su’m” for “something.”)
2. Witnessing some old fart in a liquor store cursing out two innocent, non-English-speaking Latino gentleman for “fucking up his goddamn country and stealing his taxes”? Not all that unusual.
3. Nothing but Super Wal-Marts and strip malls. Makes me want to cry.
4. Little to nothing in the way of public transportation. Everybody drives. And like shit.
5. The public school system blows so hard. It’s incredibly sad.
6. Reading the NY Times in public elicits questions from folks such as, “So, what’s happening in New York?” and “Our news ain’t fit enough for ya?”
7. Country fucking music.
8. It’s so frustratingly hot in the summer–feels like being swathed in a velvet blanket fresh from the dishwasher for three solid months–that you stay indoors constantly to take advantage of air conditioning and to avoid punching strangers in the throat.
9. Everybody is a Christian, no matter what, amen. Say otherwise at your own risk.
10. People around here smile all the time. It’s fucking creepy. You cannot walk down a sidewalk (where there are some) and not avoid eye contact and a totally fake smile from every person you pass. You either fake one back or struggle to avoid their gaze, but either way, what the fuck are these people smiling about? This place sucks.
Ten Things I Love about the South:
1. Sweetened tea.
2. Church signs.
3. Fall. No one, and I mean no one, does it better. I live in a whole state full of deciduous trees that change and drop and turn the entire countryside into a breathtaking tableau. Trucks full of pumpkins and fresh squash line side streets. The crisp air of southern autumns is unmatched in its ability to comfort and remind.
4. Libraries are usually pretty empty.
5. Biscuits. Chicken and dumplings. Peach cobbler.
6. I tried and tried but I can only come up with six. Five, really. This place sucks.
38 comments ↓
3. Fall. No one, and I mean no one, does it better.
You’ve never been to Vermont, have you? the green mountains in autumn are like a big rolling carpet of color. New England reprazentin’, yo.
mr vcb and me and sklero and other fantastic people live here is your number 3.
oh, and people are much more polite than in the north. TOTALLY.
Wow. That was really wierd. Typepad repeated certain words a phrases in your post as I first viewed (i.e. the title was “Ten Things I hate and Love about the South South). I was trying extremely hard to figure out why the hell you were writing in such a style, and just as I decided that I just wasn’t hip enough to understand it, I load the comments page and the problem was fixed.
I have to admit I’m often guilty of the fake smile, but more times than not its sincere.
this probably isn’t of interest to you, but i would like to add, “girls with mississippi accents,” of which there are many in our fair city, to that list.
followed by the weather anytime but the middle of summer (have you looked outside today?) followed again by girls with georgia accents. :-)
Phrough — I’ve found typepad to be pretty glitchy so far, like maybe they should let us try it out for free until they get all the kinks worked out? Anyone listening?
Britt — all you gotta do is take some lemons, and them make lemonaide with them! Let’s see . . .
6. The frustrating, baffling nature of the Christian Far Right politics that dominate the local political debate occasionally motivates Jack and Jill American Left into action.
7. Art movies take 6-12 months to hit the theaters here, so by the time they come out, there are plenty of reviews to utilize when deciding wheter or not to go.
8. Mesh trucker caps are not just an accesory for trendy hipsters, but part and parcel of the mainstream culture, so it’ll never be uncool to wear them (or it always has been, either way)!
9. Hello, Faulkner?
10. The rest of the country expects very little from us, and it’s tons of fun to explode low expectations with excellence.
How was that?
11. Birthplace of blues.
12. Birthplace of rock and roll.
13. Birthplace of jazz.
14. Birthplace of me.
“dirty south”, “America’s cock”(florida), etc. These nicknames weren’t randomly assigned.
“I heard Son House singing [Grinning In Your Face] and it was as if someone, with a single blow of the axe, had opened up the world to me. After that, my life received meaning. I can lie in bed in the middle of the night and feel an ice-cold wind flowing through my body, which makes me start to shake uncontrollably. Then I have to get up and hear Charley Patton or Robert Johnson. The American South should be regarded as holy land by everyone. Everything which is worth anything comes from there.”
-Jack White of The White Stripes
TypePad DOES have a 90-day free trial.
Southern accents can be good. So can country music.
Also:
Barbecue
Lightning bugs
Easy availability of fireworks
The Peachoid on I-85 in Gaffney, SC
Coca-Cola
Kudzu
Porches, and sitting thereupon
Bluegrass
Banana pudding
Bourbon
The Blue Ridge Parkway
Magnolias
Spanish moss
sitting in a minor league baseball stadium on a perfect hot June night
Mahalia Jackson
Sam Cooke
(And, as others have said, Faulkner and the blues.)
(And hey, you could move. Tennessee’s loss would be New York’s gain.)
whoops, i meant to add my entries to the _good_ list, not the “what i hate” one.
Okay. Yes, the tea with the sugar does totally rule, but the tea is sweet. You sweetened the tea in the kitchen before you poured it into my glass, but now, as I am drinking it, it is sweet tea. Not sweetened tea.
However, if y’all aren’t from these parts and order tea, or if you use that pink or blue powdered cancer stuff, you don’t want sugar. THAT tea has not been sweetened. And Un-Sweet is not a word. So that tea is unsweetened tea. And nasty.
Regarding brittney’s #6 about reading the NYT and having people ask “So, what’s happening in New York?”: Sadly, now reading the Nashville Scene may soon elicit “So, who’s gay this week?”
My good list:
Mild winters
fried okra
waffle house
not as many jews (just kidding!)
My bad list:
sweaty balls for 6 months
noticing bad “southern” accents on tv
bugs
people
too much sports and churhes (as battletapes once said, “less christ, more rock”)
TypePad DOES have a 90-day free trial.
Yeah, only thirty if one’s chump (or broke) enough to pay by the month.
I guess what I’m talking about is some sort of Beta period, where they figure out why sometimes the words are invisible until you highlight them, or why things were doubling earlier. I doubt that their bug fixing period is based entirely on when I am to start paying.
Vidiot.
Man.
Oh, and what I hate about the South?
Corn Whiskey.
The histamines that fill my head with goo twice a year.
The above-mentioned ball-sweatingly hot, wet velvet blanket (brilliant!) summers.
Vols Fans (at least the ones that I don’t know and love).
Indifferent music fans (people come to Nashville from all over the world to experience what we could check out any night of the week, but never do.)
Gaylord.
I guess I’m just talking about Nashville, now. And taking up a lot of space on Brickney’s shit. Sorry.
Jon: Just out of curisosity–you ever visited below the Mason-Dixon line?
Mikro: 8. Mesh trucker caps are not just an accesory for trendy hipsters, but part and parcel of the mainstream culture, so it’ll never be uncool to wear them (or it always has been, either way)!
I am so gearing up for a big ol’ blog post about the meta-ish irony of the mesh trucker hat here in the South.
ST-L: Sweet tea is what my redneck customers call it. I bite my tongue when you do it. But “sweetened tea” tastes much better on my palette than the “sweetea” run-on word most people mutter. It makes my stomach turn.
I merely tolerate it when you say it because you make me cry. In a good way.
And, motherfucking WAFFLE HOUSE! How could I have forgotten the golden scattered, smothered and covered served up any time and by people who can whistle through their teeth? I’ll do an edit once I get in from work.
Vidiot.
Man.
Huh? *raises eyebrow*
I find that whenever I submit a bug ticket, they’re on it pretty fast. I’ve never had any kind of serious problem like that with TypePad, however. (And I’m not affiliated with them…just a fan.)
Don’t forget the Waffle House jukebox, either.
God Bless the Peachoid, the folly/foresight of my hometown’s city fathers. The ironic thing is that the peach industry is no more, instead replaced with a outlet mall.
The funny part is that the folks in Clanton, Alabama have one too. Ours was first, of course. And it’s bigger.
Also, it looks like a big ass.
(Forgive the page, the html dates from 1995 and hasn’t really ever been changed.)
Damn it, you’re making me home sick.. I’m going home ASAP..
brittney says: “Sweet tea is what my redneck customers call it.”
your redneck customers are right. google lists 40,400 hits for sweet tea and only 2,490 hits for sweetened tea.
just because “Southerners really, really dislike syllables and try to say as few as possible“, that’s no reason for extra syllables in an effort to hide your roots. southerner. just because a redneck says it doesn’t mean it is wrong. besides, sweet tea is a drink made for and by rednecks, so i think they^H^H^H^H we should get to name it.
Where are you??
Tennessee.
st-l said: not as many jews (just kidding!)
brittney says: Ha!
I’m sorry Brittney, but it IS Sweet Tea. I’m extremely happy about the fact that pretty much every Mexican restaurant here in the South serves it. And the way the heavy-accented waiters ask me if I want more “suiti.” Sometimes, when I’m feeling extra pretentious, I ask for “té dulce” which gets me a smile/WTF look.
Listen, you two can go fuck yourselves with some pound of sugar, tea leaves and a whisk.
I’ll say “sweetened tea” and drink “sweetened tea”, and you’ll both like it, and thank me for not making you do the same.
someone needs a nap
I wouldn’t give “Fall” to the south, at least not the south that I live in (some don’t count Texas as in the South either). Here, the leaves turn brown and then fall to the ground. There may be some color here and there, but it’s not the norm. I preferred the fall colors in Michigan.
And a +1 to the Faulkner suggestion.
Brittney: you forget, I lived in Miami(the foreskin on america’s cock) for 2 years. And I’ve visited Atlanta, the Carolinas, Maryland and other places.
I will say that the south has great music, bbq, and southern accents on women are always sexy. Plus I’ll second a lot of my trusty operative vidiot’s examples.
I am always at odds with Stephanie about this very subject….and my hatred of all things californian. I love the south. I guess I feed of the things I hate and revel in the things I love. The things I hate give me something to talk about. yeah, the seasons, the people, the music, whatever it is, I like it.
Garrison Keillor told me today that it is the birthday of William Faulkner and Shel Silverstein, only one of which is from the south.
(Sweet Tea.)
Yeah, it’s “Sweet Tea”, but usually it’s just “Tea”. Maybe you are confused because if you want Tea without sugar than it’s “Unsweetened Tea”, you’d get some funny looks if you asked for “Unsweet Tea”, but really you’d get some funny looks if you asked for “Unsweetened Tea” because on Freaks drink that (and by freak I mean a Yankee, or other Foreigner immigrant type).. But if you want just plain Tea then it’s Sweet Tea. Oh, and if you want a Coke, don’t forget to tell them what kind (i.e., Pepsi.. 7up.. Dr. Pepper.. Coke.. &c…)
oh my fucking lameness… you HAVE GOT to be the funniestttt person alive.
I hate San Diego, where I’m from, and could produce a similar list. SF is way better in comparison. California is a very contrasty state.
I hate San Diego, where I’m from, and could produce a similar list. SF is way better in comparison. California is a very contrasty state.
Great food, great music, great people.
You are free to leave.
Really.
You will be missed. Well, not really, but we’re polite in the south.
There’s nothing better than the south in most ways, and we love to say “git the hail out” if you don’t like it. We donlt need ya down here.
Mobile, Al
6. I tried and tried but I can only come up with six. Five, really. This place sucks.
You may be surprised to know that planes and buses leave about every half-hour.
Lookit!
I had no idea these anonymous posts were here.
re: getting out
I’m trying. Really, I am.
I’ll be sure to send a postcard.
Let me know if your Tennessee public-school educated kids can read it.
the south is by far the best region of the country. There’s nothing worse than some loud mouth northern guido with a bad accent. We’re layed back and don’t give a shit about being politically correct. You make fun of our public schools but the South has the best public schools in the Nation. UVA#1, William and MARY #2, UNC #3. I also find it funny that so many yankees come to the South to get educated.
i live in south texas and have NEVER heard ANYONE say ‘crowns’ instead of ‘crayons’
yeah summers are hott. thats why texas has the best waterpark in the contry. whats new.
“10. People around here smile all the time. It’s fucking creepy. You cannot walk down a sidewalk (where there are some) and not avoid eye contact and a totally fake smile from every person you pass. You either fake one back or struggle to avoid their gaze, but either way, what the fuck are these people smiling about? This place sucks.”
omgsh. are u serious. ever heard of “SOUTHERN HOSPITALITY”?!?!?
maybe cuz were not all fucking emos. u should try it sometime.
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