I was reading Yahoo's "Oddly Enough" news section yesterday morning, as I do every few days or so. I like the really fucked up stories. Truly, I think they reflect the world better than do those articles about things like "policy" and "revenue," and "international incidents." I like the ones where the lady gets her head stuck in the toilet in Berlin, or Singapore stages a protest against the no-gum-chewing laws, or some freaky British dude rolls a nut across London with his nose. THAT, my friends, is reality. In any case, it's far more real to me than are wars and hostages and unions and computer viruses and what Arnold Schwartzenegger had for breakfast...
So, yesterday, there was an article about a man who had accidentally set a mall on fire while trying to kill a spider. Evidently, the young man had doused the spider in "something flammable" and then lit it. Somehow, a spider-sized flame became a blazing inferno, caught the store on fire, and did some damage to a couple of other stores as well.
This wouldn't be half as amusing as it is, except for the fact that Yahoo had borrowed it from The Press & Sun-Sulletin, the local paper in Binghamton.
My hometown is now internationally recognized for a moronic spider-killer.
During the time Jake and I were together, he frequently called me a "snob," when I talked about Binghamton. I still haven't been able to figure that out. I firmly stand by my assertion that you can't get a good pizza from a restaurant that doesn't have actual Italian people working there, and that Denny's is NOT a freaking diner. And that old buildings are more ambient than new ones, especially the kind with wooden floors and high ceilings. And bricks. Furthermore, the best coffee I have ever had is still the Coyote Blend from Java Joe's in Binghamton... but they imported that from New Mexico, so it doesn't really count. Oh yeah, and the words "cot" and "caught" are NOT pronounced the same way. Not even close. If you can't say them the New York way, you're not doing it right.
But I really don't see how that makes me a snob.
And really... I come from a place that's known for spider-arson. It's not known (anymore) for its old buildings or its carousels. It's not known for the largest number of Greek/Italian restaurants anywhere outside of Greece, Italy, and Downstate. It's not known for having had -- for a very short time -- the largest grocery store in the nation. Presently, it's known for mutant catfish in its rivers, cancer clusters in Hillcrest, a toxic waste dump next to a sweet little public park, murders on the west side, a burned-out shell that used to be my beloved Art Theater, a strip-mall called Vestal, a shitload of poor-but-pretentious Downstaters being graduated every year with social work and engineering degrees, and... a kid who set the mall on fire trying to kill a spider.
Yeah, I'm a snob. Whatever. Where I'm from, it's really, really hard to be a real snob.
When people think of New York -- people who haven't been there anyway -- they tend to think of very tall buildings with lots of glass on them, à la World Trade Center. They think of bagels and eccentric old women who wear Saks clothes every day and carry chihuahuas in their purses. They think of theaters and the changing of the leaves in the fall. They think of a temperate climate that gets actual snow in the winter. They think of people who talk like Fran Drescher, or that guy from "The Commish." They think most New Yorkers are Jewish, and hence, all of the stereotypical things they think of in association with Jews. Most of this is completely wrong. The leaves do change. New York does have a good share of bagels, although New Yorkers do not call them "beggels" and they're not ANYTHING like the wimpy little "New York style" bagels you get anywhere else. And it does snow. New York goes from blizzards to blistering heat waves in minutes with no warning. But yeah, there is snow. I have had ninety-degree birthdays (May 28th), and snowy birthdays.
I don't know where the hell people get these ideas...
The truth is, I lived the first six months of my life in a trailer in a town called Harpursville. Yes, a trailer. In a field. There was a horse that lived next door. And no skyscrapers. I spent the next ten years in a little old creaky house living among old, old Polish and Ukrainian people. And then I spent the next eight years living in a house out past a cow field. On days when the temperature surpassed 85 and the humidity was 90%, you could smell that rotten-dairy-product smell for over a mile. In that house, one of our neighbors beat his kids in the front yard, and another, who was some sort of a cop, didn't mow his lawn for fear of harming the muskrat population that had taken up residence in his drainage ditch. Our neighbors didn't much like us because we didn't have guns. On the school bus (which picked up no fewer than ELEVEN mentally handicapped children per day -- chronic inbreeding was suspected in a number of those cases), my family was suspected of being "liberal." Especially since I knew actual homosexual people.
...And that was living pretty high class. We haven't made mention of places like Whitney Point, Cortland, or *gulp* Apalachin...
According to what I heard growing up, people only went grocery shopping once a month in Whitney Point when their WIC checks and welfare benefits came in. This was because of the ridiculously high number of teen parents in Whitney Point. The number of teen parents had to do with the fact that, once you were done fishing, mowing the lawn, and riding your bike to the ice cream stand (which was inside somebody's house), there was nothing to do but each other. Cortland... well... Cortland was just ugly and depressing. And home to many ugly and depressing people. Supposedly, Cortland is the Incest Capital of the World. That may or may not be true. I'll tell you about Apalachin some other time...
Now, the thing is, all of this sounds sort of bad... Teen parents, fishing for your dinner, ice cream stands in people's houses, trailers, dairy farms... But actually, I grew up with it, and I figure I turned out fine. Eccentric, but fine. I never knew any other way until I moved to Santa Fe, and I didn't particularly like the pretenses Santa Fe put up. If somebody in Santa Fe had half-destroyed a mall while killing sweet little arachnids, he would have said it was some means of cosmic communication with his spirit animal. They drop the arson charges in Santa Fe if it's a matter of communing with something nobody else can see... And anyway, ice cream that gets handed to you out somebody's kitchen window tastes a MILLION times better than this Baskin-Robbins crap. I always sort of enjoyed hick-dom. I used to go to NASCAR races, too, and watch the old drunk men pee off the stands. THAT is New York.
New York is kind of like two worlds that have collided unsuccessfully... It's the farmers who never realized the twentieth-century happened and has ended... And it's the sexy old buildings with the local art and the coffee and the jazz music. In one evening, you can get ice cream from a house, and you can argue about Kierkegaard in a coffeehouse. I contend that I could not POSSIBLY be a snob, simply because to be a snob, I would have to deny the parts of my background that have dairy farms and mutant catfish in it. I would have to pretend that I grew up in a place where we didn't have actual cornstalks growing in our unpaved driveway. And I'm not gonna do that. I never have done that. That's where I came from, and I'm proud of it. Reluctant to ever return, but proud nonetheless. I could not be a snob. I just couldn't.
Meanwhile, spider-tormentors from Binghamton, New York, are making international news. When I read it, I had to drop my head into my hands and sort of shake my head for a couple of minutes... I couldn't decide whether to laugh or to cry. The beautiful old carousels never make the news. Nothing EVER really makes the news from that little section of the world, and so people go on thinking that New Yorkers are all a bunch of rich bitches who talk funny. Meanwhile, the ice cream houses get ignored, and nobody knows what the hell the Chenango is... But... but do we REALLY have to publicly admit to a dumb-assed SPIDER KILLER?
~Helena*