two steps forward, one step back

let's get one thing straight. no one has ever said to
me, "hey, you know who always seem to be on the cutting edge of technology? you."

i was easily one of the last five people i know to get a cell phone (and that includes a slew of folks at least a decade younger than me), we didn't have internet access at my parents' house until i was in high school, and while my friends milked their parents for the newest video game craze every christmas during our childhood, mine could not be milked, so i saved some of my spending money from an eighth grade trip and some allowance and bought my own nintendo 64 only to promptly sell it to a friend's younger brother about a year later.

i even prefer to write with a pen and paper, though i fully realize that were i to write this blog with pen and paper it would a) not be a blog, b) take an immense amount of postage and stationery to deliver to you, the readers, and c) give you one less thing to read during your "breaks" from work. for all my slowness (you may read: unwillingness) to incorporate technology into my life, it is clear that certain changes are inevitable, even beneficial to life in the twenty-first century.

it is also clear that the more rural parts of our world have yet to incorporate the totality of twenty-first century technology. in some cases this happens willingly and in others it stems from being ignored by those of the urban persuasion.

where it happens willingly, it is surprisingly refreshing.

there's a man here in town who swears by his blackberry, a worn out and warped pocket notebook that holds all his contacts, upcoming meetings, and notes in a space smaller, cheaper, and a lot less radioactive than its electronic namesake.

the best source of local information remains the local paper, still available only in print form and only delivered weekly. that's right, one paper per week. on the brightside it's better than the deal my parents have in the mountains of north carolina. their paper prints monday, wednesday, and friday, but gets delivered tuesday, thursday, and friday. logic abounds.

people even use phonebooks, and not as paperweights or props for feats of strength. they actually use them to find numbers, because a lot of people in rural america still have something called a "land line."

whatever that is.

maybe the most endearing, though somewhat financially confusing, case of the willing indifference to technological advances is the use of the postal service for in-town correspondence. while no one this side of scrooge can complain about getting something in the mail that is not a bill, credit card application, or catalogue, it is mildly troubling to think someone went to the trouble to stamp a number of envelopes, hand them to the postmistress, and have her walk twelve feet to put them in everyone's post office box. at nearly 3 2/3 cents per foot, it doesn't seem like a great deal, but somehow it actually is.

however, where the failure to embrace technology happens out of omission, it's depressing at best.

the most recent episode of radio lab, reminded me that for the last two years, we've been living in unprecedented territory: more than half of all people in the world live in cities and not in rural communities. we now live in a decidedly urban world. instead of living in a world dominated by the minority who live in cities, we now live in a world dominated by a majority who call the "metro-area" home. while this is not news to anyone, it does pose some interesting questions. especially ones about how we get our news.

jon stewart said it well at the rally to restore sanity and/or fear when he remarked that the news media are based in cities across the nation and that they reflect back to americans a world that is not always true to every viewer's life experience. it's almost as if we live in one world all day and, if it turns out that we don't actually live at cnn, fox, or msnbc, we see a different one on the television when we come home.

in smaller cities and larger towns this might not necessarily be the case since the chances of having a reputable local news channel is greater, but out in the middle of nowhere where most folks rely on satellite tv which provides them with roughly 8 bravos, 9 discovery channels, 10 qvcs, and perhaps even a channel looping images of a partridge in a pear tree, local programming is virtually non-existent or inaccessible. (when it is accessible it's reminiscent of that attempt your high school made at doing the news: grainy, slightly entertaining, and less than informative.) so, the world that comes through the wire is in fact not reflective of the life lived by those of us in middle-of-nowhere america.

furthermore, great efforts like the one laptop per child program, led by nicholas negroponte, try to connect every child in the world living in a rural place with a laptop computer so that they can get up to speed with their more privileged, urban peers. every child, that is, except poor, undereducated ones in rural america. apparently, they aren't in need of catching up to those with more opportunities, especially those in their own country.

so while, it's refreshing to know that out here some folks still carry a pen and a notebook around, and prefer a face-to-face meeting to an email chain on a smartphone, it's only refreshing when we have the choice to remain several steps behind everyone else. there's little refreshing about being left several steps behind or kept out of the discussion entirely.

we all know what happens when we get left behind. we start listening for the loudest familiar noise, and when we hear it, we start following. and not because it's telling us the truth, but simply because its noise and it could lead us somewhere, despite the fact that while "somewhere" might be the nearest town, it might also be a campsite full of crazies smoking peyote and getting ready to drink some kool-aid under the spell of the snuggie.



photos from here, boone, and here.

dudes do things dudes do

there are lots of elements at work in transitioning from living in a city of millions to town of several hundred. there's the size adjustment, the time it takes to get somewhere to eat or drink adjustment, and the actually getting to know and like your neighbors adjustment (both of which we have done) to name a few. but there's one i'd forgotten about.

more so than anywhere else, i think men in rural places live into masculine stereotypes. i'd even argue that they set the curve. i mean, who sets that curve better than this guy? no one.

for those that know me, i'm not exactly the most macho dude. sure i love sports, meat and (thanks to elizabeth and terry at the woodshop) i'm developing a woodworking habit, but after that my macho quotient takes a serious dive, at least comparatively to my perception of men in rural america. here's an assessment:

- i think i've shot one gun in my entire life. hunting is the sport of choice out here.
- i don't exactly have a demonstrative personality nor do i think only wives should submit to their husbands.
- i learned how to drive a stick not because it was macho, but because it saves gas, or so i was told.
- oh, and i can operate a washing machine and an iron with relative ease.

however, in addition to my love of sports and meat and my aspirations to be norm from the new yankee workshop, i do have one other thing going for me. i own a truck.

trucks are masculinity shaped in metal and put on wheels. as you might imagine, that's not the reason i got mine, but i'll embrace it. i got mine so i could move my stuff easily. emphasis on my.
so it came as a big surprise to me that as we were driving home the other day, i told elizabeth how glad i was to have a truck. there have been roughly zero days in the last few years that i have been glad to have a truck.

you see, i made a firm decision about a year ago, that i would only offer my moving services to others in the most dire of situations after a friend asked for some help and proceeded to show up late and completely unprepared for the impending rain. it was somewhere between lifting his desk, complete with his snot storage area, and having a tarp tossed to me to cover his belongings while he got inside another car and left, that i told myself i would never do this out of the sheer goodness of my heart ever again. i consider myself a giving a person, but i have to draw a line somewhere. i only wish I had done so before picking up a handful of dried boogers.

but here in the land of stereotypical masculinity, i am thankful that i have a truck because even though i work with my hands, there's a keyboard at the end of them, not a backhoe. it's easy to remain on the outside in rural america if you've just moved in (or out depending how you look at it). there's a culture in a rural america that emphasizes one's history in the community, but that's a different topic for a different time. owning a truck just might be my first correct answer on my insider's application.

so i drive proudly to the fire station in my beat-up, little truck and know that at least i'm not that guy writes for a living and drives a miata. i enjoy the first part, but if the second were true, i'd walk around town knowing that, in the spirit of stereotypical masculinity, they'd be thinking there's a little something off about that new guy, isn't there?

on the other hand, it might be a fun experiment...in time.

dog the bounty hunter from here, truck by boone.

rural grammar, part ii: pronunciation

i think everyone has an embarassing story about mispronouncing a word in front of a bunch of know-it-alls at one point or another in their life. in my family there are tales about fat-i-gue and ep-i-tome.

in eighth grade i was given the the word diphthong in a late round of the annual spelling bee. being the confident speller i was and having heard mrs. avant (pronounced as southern as possible with emphasis clearly on the first syllable) clearly say dip thong, i thought to myself, "nailed it," even before the office was a glint in ricky gervais's eye. "dipthong. d-i-p-t-h-o-n-g. dipthong," i said confidently. no need for it to be used in a sentence or to wonder about its language of origin.

i started to give myself a pat on the back and make my way to the final group when i heard mrs. a-vant apologetically tell me that i was wrong and would continue my streak of never winning anything academically, athletically, or socially. well, i told myself the last part. she just told me to have a seat.

if she'd wanted me to spell diph-thong, why didn't she just say so? i spelled what she said, and since when is the h in ph silent? we don't talk on the pone or get lit listening to pish! oh that's right, it's not silent, mrs. ay-vant, eighth grade english teacher. and yes, i will take the title you stole from me even if vince young won't take the heisman he got jobbed out of.

thank you gary larson for summing up my pain.

here's the thing. i'm not sure she knew what a diphthong was, and i sure didn't. (i thought it was the kind of garment will ferrell thought that olive garden waitress was wearing in old school.) but if i had corrected her and said, "actually mrs. av-aunt, you pronounce both h's in the word," two things would have happened. first she would have told me what a pretentious little brat i was and then she would have given me some lecture about how it actually is dip-thong and who was i to question her on pronunciation. she would have been right on both accounts.

when it comes to pronunciation, beauty and everything else is in the eye of the beholder, especially in rural america. towns and counties across this fine country of ours are pronounced in ways foreign even to the foreigners for whom they are named.





that's ball-i-ver county to you, my friend. no
offense simon, but your revolutionary success in south america won't get you very far here.








i think pronunciation is part local accent and part our quest to incorporate all languages into english. for example:

el dor-ay-do, kansas...
think if they'd just translated it. welcome to the golden one, kansas. who wouldn't want to
go there?

buena (byoo-na) vista, virginia...
lovely view, incomprehensible pronunciation.

kosciusko (ka-zee-es-ko), mississippi...
sorry george washington's polish engineer friend, thaddeus ko-shoos-ko, but can you blame
us? the colonies weren't exactly teeming with poles back then.

we rural americans even tinker with the pronunciation of english words. i mean, why wouldn't we? there's a small town in north carolina where the thing to do on a friday night is cruise through downtown. when you look at the town's name on paper, there are four distinct syllables. when you pronounce like everyone who lives there does, there are two: rutherfordton becomes ruv-ton. don't ask me how. it just does. you can ask any sixteen year old you see on main street on a friday night provided he or she is willing to interrupt the cruise.

then there are places like belzoni, mississippi. named for italian explorer giovanni belzoni. unlike other places, locals and anyone seeking to elude ridicule says bel-zo-na. this makes no sense. english is my first language and i took 12 credits of italian in college and in neither language does an i make an uh sound.

there are also places like, oh, the state of arkansas. arkansas is a french pronunciation of a native american word that we americans decided sounded alright with us, so we kept it.

none of these, however, top what some small folks are willing to do to ensure that you spell their town's name correctly. i give you exhibit a: lurand, missisippi. exhibit b, guin, alabama, to follow after my next trip through the yellowhammer state.















there's another town i recently drove through called durant, and while there's no sign to tell me how to pronounce it, i now know it doesn't sound anything like the way nba stud kevin durant pronounces his name. i applaud these towns for their willingness to help folks like me, the son of a speech pathologist, to avoid making the embarassing mistake of mispronouncing their town's name and bringing shame upon myself and my family.

before you hop on the train and start railing on these places and these people for the "incorrectness" of their pronunciation, think about those news reporters that friend you have who just decided after spanish class one day to start trilling all his r's or that friend who took french and subsequently thought jimmy buffett was a boob for mispronouncing and misspelling his own name and that formula one needed to choose between grand priks and grahn pree and quit splitting the difference.

once you remember how annoying they were, you'll realize shakespeare was right when he talked about the rose. the v in "bolivar" might not sound like a b here, but the honoring of ol' simon is still there, so who really cares? sure things might be accented differently and syllables might be muddled together, but it gives a little character to the places we call home and is a welcome reprieve from the other places that continue to look like you could be anywhere. chances are ruvton, durant, and buena vista have something you can't find in a target, a starbucks, or a pep boys.

photos by boone, cartoon by gary larson found here

rural grammar, part i: the apostrophe

colloquial language. it's a beautiful thing. it brings life to our various parts of the world and is perhaps the single greatest factor in determining someone's whereabouts. an accent here, an elongated syllable there, and voila! you know where someone is from...or in the case of george w. bush where they pretend to be from. (bush scholar john william ferrell will back me up on this one.)

just think how boring it would be if we all sounded like me, monotone and with no recognizable accent. there's no need to keep thinking. it would be terrible.

but colloquial language doesn't stop with accents. there are idioms and reference points that also play a part. some make their way into mainstream american english. one can cut off, cut out, turn off, or flip off the lights, and depending upon where this person is from they will do only one of the above despite the fact that there is no cutting or turning involved in making a room dark, and generally that jerk that just cut you off going 70 down the highway gets flipped off, not a light.

that being said, i have been astounded at the use of apostrophe in rural America. it's truly baffling at times. i cannot tell you how many businesses i have driven by here in the mississippi delta that buck all grammatical trends when it comes to naming. you would not believe some of the names I have seen written down if i introduced the people to you. some uses are passable, a plural that could could possibly be construed as a possessive, a made up word, or one that's just misspelled in which case the problem goes a lot deeper than possession.

take for instance, this lovely restaurant in cleveland.

at first blush there's nothing wrong with it, right? wrong.

well, i guess you're kind of right. it would be more awful if it were possessive. the crustaceans would then be marketing their crawfish, a member of their very own family, for your enjoyment. no one wants to eat crawfish served to them by an actual red lobster. it's just weird. that's why chik-fil-a uses cows to sell chicken. they get this distinction.

but then again, it might actually make more sense for it to be possessive seeing as crawfish are a member of the crustacean family so ipso facto the crawfish do belong to the crustaceans.

seeing as no arthropods actually own businesses (yet) the name for this establishment is all the more confusing. if they'd just call it "Crustaceans" there would be no problem. i would know that when i walk in the door i will be offered any number of exoskeletal creatures soaked in butter, and not simply crawfish. there would be tanks full of rubberbanded crustaceans waiting for consumption. anyone could get behind that...well almost anyone. sorry to those who keep kosher and anyone who's actually adheres to being a vegetarian. (fish is just as much a meat as anything else that comes of a bone.)

it wasn't until i drove through cleveland and clarksdale, ms one afternoon that i realized the problem is being compounded by national chains like walgreens and americas best value inn.

according to a walgreen company stock holder, "Walgreens dropped the comma years ago. Yes, that makes it incorrect, but that’s what they did. Look at your Sunday sale insert or a Walgreens building. No apostrophe. Sad, but true."

sad indeed. since when do companies get to mess with grammar at will? there's no poetic license in acknowledging that mr. walgreen is now responsible for thousands of convenience stores/pharmacies. it probably had something to do with the cost of the signs.

americas best value inn is no better. granted they do operate in Canada, the US, and Mexico, but the last time i took world geography those three made up north america, a single unified continent. so really they only serve one america until they open a cozy little inn down in Rio for the 2016 summer olympics.

really, they're just lazy.

and probably canadian. i'm just saying.


in addition to the blatant misuse of apostrophes by businesses in rural america, there is the over abundant use of apostrophes in names. the name "Leroy" is no longer a single five letter name, but now can be written any number of ways given the introduction of the apostrophe into child naming: Le'roy, Le'Roy, L'roy and so on and so forth.

really the only proper use of the apostrophe in that last example is the last one because it replaces the e. but who will be stopped by such logical thinking? not walgreens, and certainly not any expectant mother who thinks "Le'roy" has a certain je ne sais quoi that "Leroy" does not.

don't get me wrong. i would love to have a name with some flavor. when your name means "from britain," there's really no way but up to go when it comes to adding flair. but i don't think randomly placing an apostrophe at the syllable break gets it done. look at where it takes you.

i'm sure as i continue to live in rural parts of america, i'll continue to confront this and other grammatical misappropriations, so check back for more.

for now i leave you with this actual name and hope you can guess how to pronounce it. it is a real name of a real person and i can get someone who knows this person on the phone if you don't believe me. there are no apostrophes in it. i'm done with them for now.

Le-a

i can't wait to read your attempts.

coming soon: pronunciation.

am radio

one of the truly remarkable things about living in front of a soybean field and across the street from a bayou is the seeming void of space and time. a car that seems only a hundred yards away on the highway is actually four miles away. a trip to check the mail means not only opening and closing the post office box, but having a fifteen minute (on the low end) conversation with the post mistress and local gossip columnist. the attempt to gain internet and television access, while only a phone call away in more metropolitan pockets of america, is in fact a ten day process calling providers, holding, price calculating, holding, home visits by technicians, appointment scheduling, holding, and installation. did i mention wasp stings? sorry, elder.

despite what was my version of the never-ending story, the nothing didn't capture us. we have been reconnected to all things sports, news, and true blood. but, there is one mode of technology that rises above the inconveniences of rural life: am radio. email can be iffy out here, but brian fisher's rants about all things anti-america come through crystal clear on the radio dial. both of three dog night's hits can be heard on repeat any time day or night. pure am gold. and you can decide if you'd like to trade your old kitchen cabinets for someone's riding mower when they offer it up on the swap shop (or whatever call it where you probably don't live). take that craigslist.

i experienced the glory that is am radio not too long ago. and while this wasn't my first rodeo with fm's little brother, it was the most remarkable radio encounter i've ever had. it wasn't a "war of the worlds" remarkable. i didn't drive my car all the way to the coast to avoid the alien invasion in orson welles' head, but i did hang on every sound from the spanish language broadcast of the 2010 world cup final despite the fact that i only understood proper names like "David Villa," "Iniesta," more obvious words like "gol," and guttural noises.

i was making the drive back from louisville and had begun listening to the game in english on espn radio. needless to say this broadcast made soccer as boring as most americans think it is, but that all soon changed. as i neared the tennessee-mississippi border and the last minutes of regulation, i lost the station. i couldn't find another for about ten minutes, but i stumbled upon a spanish language station, and it was obvious that they were covering the game. i thought to myself, "self, you can either listen to the game in another language, call biz and see if she'll record it, but you'll know the outcome by the time you watch it, or listen to brian fisher." i took door number one.

i'm not sure if the announcers were actually at the game, in the middle of a street brawl, or somewhere making up the story as they went along, but wherever they were, it sounded like they were on a roller coaster made of vuvuzelas. if they were in fact at the game, they did were most certainly not in a booth nor in a seat. i think they were wandering the stadium with a handheld mic and a satellite.

in addition to the noise, the announcers were the odd couple of radio. one announcer was actually explaining the events of the game while the other offered the wanderings of his brain in a stream of consciousness. for all i know he was spewing profanity-laced tirades about misplaced crosses or lazy defense, but despite my lack of fluency in spanish, i am certain, however, that he was not positively contributing to his partner's work, only furthering my assumption that they were actually in the crowd while broadcasting.

even though it was incoherent and not the least be cohesive, these men let their passion for the game through with every breath. their broadcast was hands down the most entertaining and engaging radio program i have ever heard. absolutely nothing happened in the game except a lot of tripping, fouling, nervous playing, and one goal nearly two hours in to the game. i honestly thought they had seen a dinosaur eating a woolly mammoth while riding a sabertooth tiger wearing ice skates, jesus, or that barack obama had been elected for the first time again when iniesta scored. the speakers in my car are old and sometimes ineffective, but the noise they carried was deafening. pure unadulterated joy. you know that moment in every cheesy sports movie when the team wins the big game and everyone hugs to a john williams score? this was not that. this was that dinosaur situation on that rollercoaster of vuvuzelas.

and because of these two men, i was reminded of the power of am radio. it so often gets lost and forgotten. it's now the primary home for conservative talk radio and church broadcasts, but when you live farther away from a grocery store than you've ever lived from a college campus, you'll take whatever you can get.

thank you, rural america for keeping am radio alive.

photo from momento24