This is not my beautiful Twinkie

How did I get here?



A commenter wants to know if I'm a "real redneck." Nope. The title of my blog comes from a Ray Wylie Hubbard song and pays sideways homage to the redneckier aspects of my family history and culture. I love my family dearly, not least because they taught me that you can clean tar off your skin with a gasoline-soaked rag. One of my early memories is me and my dog Sherman playing with a few Schlitz Malt Liquor* empties on the back patio while my tired dad was supposed to be keeping an eye on us. Shermy slurped out the backwash and then ate pea gravel until he puked.

I have ancestors who were literal rednecks: crop pickers who tried to avoid sunburn while doing hard jobs that paid badly. I can't claim to be a redneck because I've never had to work that hard. Due to my parents' good luck and relentless effort both before and after my birth, I grew up red-state suburban, a lifestyle that carries echoes of redneck culture but which is its own entity. And now I can't even claim that. Having jettisoned the social-Darwinist mores of the milieu in which I came of age, I'm now in territory that feels as liberating and uncharted to me as I suspect a sturdy red-brick tract home and a two-income household must have felt to my folks when they first set out.

When I was five and begging for Dolly Madison Zingers to liven up the Twinkie-and-Ding-Dong snack rotation, or when I was ten and stuffing grasshoppers into a tennis ball at my aunt's ranch to use for fishing bait, or when I was sixteen and shopping for the exact same kind of Liz Claiborne bag that every other girl at my high school had, I never would have expected to grow up and hear this sentiment expressed in my kitchen:

"Oh, god! Not hummus again!"

Thank you, Rocketboy, for showing me where I am on my journey.



*I loved those commercials with the Bull. It was the Kool-Aid Man for grownups.