Kevin's Watch

Makes note to possess a redneck

*scowls* I happen to be from Georgia, so I suppose I fit into the "automatic" redneck category. I once taped my voice and sent it to my friends on the Internet in 7th grade. My AOL screen name (when I had AOL) was "ANTHackerX". Next thing you know, they're calling me "ANTHickerX".

And it seems, as much as I pride myself otherwise, I am *gasp* a redneck. Seems some things redneck-ish come with birth...or something. I can't help it! But really...I think wherever you live... the place has a humongous influence on you (big duh).

6. Most of your knives came from restaurants (and you didn't buy them - which is why they're always "hot").

that took me a good 20 seconds to get, but when I did it got a hearty laugh... with an equal hearty groan.

i spent 2.5 years in Augusta, GA, and my wife is from there. in fact, at one time i lived on Hicks st (and let me tell you, it lived up to the name).

Well, I live in a small town too, though one in the North, if that makes any difference, and a lot of farmers live here, if they are what ya'll would consider rednecks, and I've never lived with such nice people in my life! So there!!
To give an example, my older son was a victim of extreme bullying in our old place. He was tiny, smart, and white -- three bad things to be in our old school district. The bullying was one of the reasons he took up wrestling. It wasn't just being physically knocked around -- the other kids stole his books, his notes, destroyed his science projects, erased his computer projects, etc. He had two backpacks and one gym bag stolen in seventh grade alone. When we would complain we would be told "We worry about the kids who bring guns into school. Why should we worry about a kid with good grades from a traditional two parent family when we have kids who don't get enough to eat?" Well, the long and short of it is that my precious son developed clinical depression in seventh grade.
We gave up and moved.
My son was morose at his new school and would barely talk to any of the other kids. The new school was calling us daily to express concern over him. Luckily wrestling season started less than a month after we moved. I would drop in on the practices on Fridays, my day off of work. One of the dads asked me one day soon after the season started about why my son was so quiet. So I told him about the ordeal at our old middle school. A couple of the wrestlers were hanging around and got very quiet and I could tell they were really listening to what I was saying.
The next week on Friday was the first time I saw the game.
A bunch of kids, boys and girls, of all races, surrounded my son. They gave him little pokes and tickles and told joke after joke. The first person to make him smile was the winner.
The game continues to this day whenever the other kids see him get down.

God, I love those kids. Please don't knock small towns or farm kids or hicks (that's what people from our old town call the people in our new town "The Hicks") to me. You couldn't meet better people anywhere in the world than right here in Hicktown USA.

We're all something - a redneck is just one of those somethings that you can be. I'd actually consider it one of the better things on the list (having grown up in small town PA, and now living in much larger Wash DC - so I have a good range of "somthings" to compare).

Oh - one more that I thought up just after posting last night:

You know you're a redneck Raver if you have two brothers - one of them is named Darryl and the other one is also named Darryl. HAHAHAHAHAHA

Nobody's trying to knock small towns, or people from small towns, per say. I grew up in a little town called Fernley about 30 miles east of Reno, NV. It was a big deal when we got our first stoplight, then a McDonald's, then a swimming pool, etc. (now Amazon has a warehouse there and the place is really starting to grow).

Up until I was a sophomore in high school (it's amazing how popular you can be if you get some beer, throw some parties at your house, make the right contacts...) I was picked on in much the same way as your son. I was called a geek, a fag, and sometimes people would bully me up until they'd find out i'd kick their ass if they touched me. Why? Because I had the audacity to be poor, have an IQ in the 99th percentile, and wouldn't kiss ass to the jocks (one reason why I never played sports except with friends) and the preppie kids. There were a lot of f'n hicks in my town, and that's about the nicest thing I can say about most of 'em.

Granted, there were a lot of people in my town that were pretty nice, but small town life can easily lend itself to creating an a**hole mentality.

In our case it was the a**hole mentality from the small city, very nice people in the small town. Sounds like you got picked on for some of the same reasons as my son -- he's gifted, too, and refuses to back down or brown nose anybody. But in our old school district it was the cool "ghetto" kids (of the three major ethnic groups in that school) that were the popular ones.

Well, at least I don't have to worry about my son ever being a racist. He know first hand what it is to be an ethnic minority and be picked on for it. Or so I tell myself, trying to find something positive from his experience.

Perhaps the size of the small town matters, too. Our town is small for this part of the state -- but we still have around 8-10k people, with a nice ethnic mix. Our old place was a small city of around 35k.

I live in Arkansas. Not as bad as you might think, but still bad. Would you believe I got called a witch at my bus stop this morning? I don't wear all black, I don't wear black lipstick, I am pagan, but I don't see how it could show....but I'm not on the cheerleading pepsquad so now I'm a witch....so happy the dogs strowed trash all in his yard....Dogs/Me:1 Him:0 yeehaw eat that and if I catch you ridin' that godforsaken camo'd 4-wheeler anywhere near me I'm taking a crossbow to you!
I don't like large or small towns. there are stupid people everywhere. The only things that change are your access to the nonstupids. There are always some of those, too.

where did my post go? well, here goes what i can gather from memory...

sounds like you have a good kid, Duchess, though I'm sure that is due in large part to his parents. what's important in life is that you're happy where you're at.

pagans rocks. things like being called a witch by some kook at your bus stop are the kinds of things you take with you in life and tell people at parties and everyone has a good laugh.

for instance, i'm walking down the hall in my high school with my new Nine Inch Nails t-shirt on. it's from the album Fixed, so all that's on the fron is a big lower case 'n' in blue flames. this girl looks at my shirt and says, "Like, what is that supposed to mean? Are you a noun?"

I just looked at her and said, "Yyyyyeah. I'm a... noun." Thinking back, I shoulda said, "No, "you" is a pronoun. but you's also a bi-atch." lol. how come the really good comebacks don't come to you until eight years later?

...thing, life is.

Personally, I had "good" experiences in the "city" schools and "bad" experiences (cliques, bullying) in the "country" schools. (I went from "city" to "country" back to "city".)

Oddly, after four years of "gritting my teeth and going to school anyway" the kids in the "country" school and I began to overcome our differences and to realize that we liked each other more than we knew. I finished Year Four with great expectations for Year Five...and then we moved back to the "city" schools where things were ok.

In twelve years, I attended five schools. Not a record, by any means, but changing an average of every 2.4 years left me feeling alienated from my classmates and glad to be finished with my primary education (or is it secondary education??, hmmm...that would make undergrad tertiary and graduate school would be...??? ).

One thing I did learn: given enough time a situation can turn itself around. All those kids who tormented me for three-and-a-half-going-on-four years were quickly becoming my friends... and NOT because I compromised and became one of them. I think it was because we grew up (matured) finally (at least a little), and I figured out how to relax and how to honestly laugh at myself occasionally (not necessarily a bad thing).

One of the big "what if's" in my life has always been, "what if my family had not moved and I had been able to complete high school with those kids?" I would like to think it would have been a good thing...but who knows. Anyway, I am still satisfied with how my life turned out (so far anyway).

Well...that was my experience.

- Hearthcoal

bump, 1st Mark Tuvor 4!

Yeah I've probably changed schools more times than that...hardly ever more than one year at any school, sometimes less. I find that there are a lot of nice people at my current country school, even though one of the first questions you get asked here is "Do you like niggers?" and one of the few black girls who ever went here got pushed down the stairs and )according to rumor) broke a leg. They aren't all livin in the 20s, but the ones who are scare me I have a bunch of friends; I just try to pick ones that I'm reasonably sure would never lynch anyone...

BUMP! Just because alot of my crazy theories and recent quotes were pulled from this thread by....well, er...ME!

Wow, I hadn't noticed this thread before danlo's bump...
I am from West "by god" Virginia (although for only a little while longer). I often think we get a particularly unfair reputation then am quickly reminded that is not the case by this haven of troglodytic degenerates. On the whole, native West Virginians are a relatively ignorant narrow-minded group of primates. West Virginia is however an old unenlightened (for the most part) or un/undereducated place.
I, by the way have no accent to speak of, luckily

The guy I hated most of all the people had to be the preacher guy at the beginning of TPTP. He's up there speaking about being healed and Covenant, at his lowest most depressing point in the books, IMO, crawls up to him and with tears in his eyes asks to be healed, and the preacher has him thrown out. Now that was SO jacked. I hated that guy. That was also my favorite summoning, when he falls to the floor and goes through the rocks or whatever.

But yeah, that had to be TC's lowest point, never at any point in that series would he have crawled like that, so in need of human contact, understanding, and help.


man that was bad


that said


later guys!

I've only just come across this thread. It reminds me of a story I was told by a person who lived in Melbourne, Australia, in 1973, and that year happened to visit a small country town in Queensland. Melbourne is Australia's most liberal and cosmopolitan city, while (especially in the 1970s) country towns in Queensland were notorious for being anything but.

This man wore his hair long at the time, and on this particular day was wearing an ankle-length overcoat as he walked along the main street of the country town. A woman saw him coming along the street and screamed in fear. She drew the attention of her fellow shoppers to this strange and threatening phenomenon and it set off a chain reaction of people in the main street screaming at the sight of him. None of the shops in the town would serve him after that.

If people in an actual Australian redneck town in the 1970s can behave like that, it's entirely plausible to write about residents of a fictitious American redneck town in the 1970s responding to a leper in their midst the way they did in the First Chronicles.

The OP on his thread is Ali in 1969! A miracle, I tell you.

(Midnight Jan 1 1970 GMT is "the epoch" from which all computers measure time. It is, literally, represented by the number zero. So whenever software doesn't have a real date, it sticks in a zero, and humans see Jan 1 1970. Which is what happened to the old posts in this thread ... their date is zero because the dates got lost somewhere. Adjusted for the US EST timezone, you get Dec 31, 1969 7PM. You asked for a miracle ... I give you Unix Standard Time.)

Well, not to put too fine a point on it, not *all* computers mark time this way, but WF does explain accurately why those which have Unix roots think 1/1/70 is the beginning of time.

No less sensible than marking time from the circumcision (performed a week after birth) of a certain Jewish boy-child long ago, nu?