The Blue and the Grey

I've lamented in the past on this site about my not really belonging anywhere. Raised by Bostonians in a small Southern town that accepts you only if you cruised up the Rappahannock with Captain John Smith, I've never felt like I belonged in the South or the North. Not Southern enough, not Northern enough, stuck in that mid-Atlantic purgatory of not liking collard greens and hating clam chowder. Living in the biggest city in the country but not a native, all while feeling more and more isolated from a hometown that I never really felt a part of. But while sometimes I like to give myself an outsider pity-party about this, you do get a certain perspective from this corner. You listen to your friends and you can see all sides. There's people that grew up in big cities and desperately try to connect themselves to small-town South, via music, literature, being a student of its eccentricities and claiming to love cornbread and collards ( a la the people I railed against in my Dirty Bird post), all for wanting some "realness", "authenticness" etc. Why? I wonder. There's some great things, sure, but there's everything else. The tendency towards narrow-mindedness, the heat, the vagueness of culture and choking lack of certain opportunities. Mostly the heat. Glorification leads to dreams of Saturday Night juke joint magic, with no thought to the other cotton-picking 6 days of the week. When you live outside of something, I guess you can pick out the good bits you want and leave the rest. Same with people from the small towns I speak of, who spend their youth snarling and bitching about getting out of this town there were born to. Get to the big city, show everyone they're better than this hick fucking town. Why? I wonder. You'll become the equal of a piece of sand on a beach, lost and unnoticed. You'll long for those cool evenings on the porch drinking iced tea. You picture art shows and important discussions with worldly folks, with no thought to having to work 2 jobs to afford your tiny place, fighting on the train all day so you can get home to fall asleep to "Seinfeld", all the time cursing how you're wasting all the opportunities a city presents. Damed if you do, damned if you don't, the grass is always greener, how do you solve a problem like Maria?

Stuck in the middle, I've seen everything, wanted everything, turned my nose up at everything and been back for round after round. The only solace being that for the most part people are generally the same - there are plenty of racists in the North, there are plenty of rude dickheads in the South etc. Not belonging gets worse somehow when you age; the pitiful longing gives way to rage, so you just hate everybody. Always angry and never at home.

"This year was the worst I can remember, except when I was five years old. Pushed open the front door, got lost in the snow." - Husker Du