Day 4: The indignities of growing up in small town Ohio

Apr 26, 2008 at 8:06 AM
18 comments

People used "born and raised" like it's something to be proud of. Well, it is, if where you live is cool. Small town Ohio==NOT IT
There was an hour plus long line to get into Starbucks when the first one opened... in 1997. What the heck do you people think this is... Krispy Kreme?
Woman walks into police station screaming help. Policemen tell her to wait outside in the parking lot. That's where they find her murdered a few hours later.
While on this subject, high ranking cop got caught banging his underage cousin
The california roll place is considered very exotic
Due to the lack of lodging (who the hell wants to visit here and doesn't have a place to stay???) it was more than a common occurrence when a guy in high school would rent a storage unit, put a mattress in it, and use it as is funky sex chamber.
Lots of sudden pregnancies after every school dance...
Overheard frequency: "He's a good kid, he went local for college, knows what's important."
I honestly thought a civil war was going to break out when the town next to ours stole our minor league baseball team
They call it "pop". Hey backwoods bumpkin, it's soda, or soda pop, or Coke, or the name of the product in the container. Why don't you marinate over that while you cruise along in your horseless buggy?
Nothing but the most generic blockbuster movies would ever show at the theaters. There was no point.
I knew no fewer that three couples with His and Hers Camaros (nothing against Camaros, even though I'm a Ford man, but wtf)
When I had sex with an Asian classmate junior year in high school, that meant that 40% of the school's nonwhite population was fucking each other at that moment. High school population==1600.
When people found out I was going to Duke after high school, I got three questions:

Where's Duke?
Where's North Carolina?
You don't play basketball. Why are you going there?

Next to every onramp there's a sign that says NO TRACTORS. ... ... ... ...AND a sign with PICTURES OF TRACTORS in case you're too stupid to figure it out
Olive Garden was fine dining max. If you were there it meant you were either celebrating something or about to propose to your girlfriend.
Trucks with confederate flags > Trucks with current registration
Plenty of people in my hometown have never left the county, much less state
Every other person was in the Army Reserves thinking it was easy money... you know, rather than being THE ARMY (enjoy the free vacation in the desert)
The NYT sent a reporter to my hometown to do a series of stories about middle America, something about how except for once, our district had correctly picked the president every time. Of course, the article that ends up making the FRONT PAGE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES is about how my school district is the lily white one in a pool of ghetto schools and contains a choice quote from the captain of our basketball team discussing how black kids love kicking "white ass"

edit: Fixed typos so BA and IG don't make fun of my farmboy English.

18 comments

Tags:

30 days of miserable childhood

Comments

[this is good]

Heyyyy! Don't you be dissing the Olive Garden. I would totally propose to my girlfriend over their lemon cream cake.

Otherwise another tearjerking jewel of a post. Hard to pick a fave, but I'm going with "He's a good kid, he went local for college, knows what's important." My people like to give that one a special twist: "Came back to serve her homeland after college, knows what's important." :-P

OG is getting smarter about what they serve. They've started adding beef short rib meat to dishes. Short rib is remarkably resilient to the sous-vide in a factory, pouch, ship, reheat, serve cycle, which is why you see it all over business and first class airline meals.

And I've heard from a lot of people that the lemon cake is great. The cake robot at the OG factory must be very proud of his work :P

Sounds like the Ohio indignities and the Illinois indignities should get together and go bowling ;-)

[this is good]

it all sounds a lot like my home town, where I have been born and raised. Haha!

[this is good]

lol - I grew up in a small town in Mississippi...too many similarities. The phone book was thin..there were about 4 last names total in the town. I go back now and the people look like mutants. Too much inbreeding. ;)

[this is good]

I was pretty embarrassed when I left the Midwest and found out that the Olive Garden really wasn't considered a fancy dining establishment.

OMG, I can`t believe you made it to [culture is good]. You're going to have ecery pro-Ohio cheerleader flaming you now.

You're going to have ecery pro-Ohio cheerleader flaming you now.

Are there any? Not that I won't notice the mob dressed in bright red Ohio State gear.

[this is good]

I hate when people say "pop".
you're exactly right, its soda, or the NAME of whateveritis you're drinking.

when people would move to nevada and say POP we would give'em hell for it.

now that Im in colorado ppl say POP but not as much. they go more along the lines of Pepsi or Dew or Orange Fanta! less to argue about.

[this is good]

I'm having a little [TIG] envy over here :( Who are you sleeping with at 6A?!?!

Who are you sleeping with at 6A?!?!

It's Bryan. He wrote me this awesome little custom API. After I post my usual incomprehensible drivel on Vox, the API cleans it up and makes it semi interesting. Then it inserts the f-word a few times to make it sound like it wasn't written by robots.

This entire blog is actually a very complicated automated content-generating system housed on some blade servers at 6A. I estimate that about 10% of Voxers are like me, complicated writing and chatting algorithms pretending to be humans. I only exist as a remote 6A employee to type "f0m89gfh89q23hg9q3ghh9eghh83" into the fields and hit the post button. That way 6A can claim that their content is human generated.

Gotta go. Have to meet up with Jack from JACK-FM.

[this is good]

Wow. By comparison, this almost makes Cincinnati feel cosmopolitan. I didn't think that was possible.

OK, it's not possible. Never mind. ;-)

[this is good]

Damn - your High School had 1600 people in it? I always thought of that as large. Mine was just over 400. Of course one of my bestest buds back in my Navy days had a senior class of 9.

[this is good]

Are we fron the same small town in Ohio? I chuckled with every single one.

[this is good]

This is hilarious! I grew up in a small town in northern Ohio and I couldn't agree with you more. I moved to Vegas about four years ago and it wasn't until then that I realized how small my hometown was. Thank you for making me giggle!

[this is good]

I'm from Australia but still found this entertaining. There are plenty of places like that in Australia too (my in-laws actually live on an island with a population of 2000 so "small town" doesn't even begin to describe it!).