Thread by @KillerMartinis

OK y'all, mark this on your calendars because at 8PM Eastern we are beginning the reading of Hillbilly Elegy

brought to you by me, the whiskey I'll be drinking, and the people who buy the whiskey to keep me reading.

Before we get into this, a few things about me for the folk who are new here. I live in Appalachia and I write about poverty. Specifically, I write about rural poverty 'cause that's what I know. This is where I went to high school:

Here's nearby to where I live now, and note that I'm scaling the screenshots to include the cities closest, and that in this one they don't even give Charleston the dignity of bold print even though it's the capital of WV:

So just in case my drunk ass starts talking about London or DC or New York or New Haven (likely)

That's where I'm from, and where I've chosen to live my adult life.

Also, in case you didn't know, I wrote this: amazon.com/Hand-Mouth-Liv…

So when I talk about the responsibilities of writing a memoir about poverty

There's a finite number of people who understand precisely what that can or should entail.

And just so you know what we're walking into here's an interview with the author of Hillbilly Elegy on NPR: npr.org/2016/08/17/490…

Me: I've got half an hour. Let's just peruse Twitter for some funny jokes or pretty flowers before we get into why this whole red state thing isn't really

And without further ado, our evening's cultural activity:

A Reading Of Hillbilly Elegy, By An Increasingly Drunk Appalachian

We start off in the introduction with "The coolest thing I've done, at least on paper, is graduate from Yale Law School."

Which he says is quite ordinary because "two hundred people do the same thing every year."

So he's just this totally ordinary dude who went to Yale Law right, but then also:

"You see, I grew up poor, in the Rust Belt, in an Ohio steel town."

Here is a thing you should know about that tiny rust belt town in the book about hillbillies

It takes about twenty minutes to drive from the outer belt of Cincinnati to that tiny town. A fun thing about the Midwest is that there's rural places but then there's suburban sprawl between cities. Middletown, Ohio, is that sprawl.

So before we go getting our heads full of running streams with tadpoles and outdoor plumbing, here's that map:

ANYWAY. I'm just gonna screenshot this next bit for you, because an introduction is where an author really gets to frame their work and I would hate to miss some nuance:

Got that? So the odds are stacked against the guy but it's bullshit that he did anything special.

This sets up the book. "Here is this extraordinary thing that I did that I should be seen for doing, and also anyone could do it."

Now we get into the important bit: JUST WHAT KIND OF WHITE IS HE?

So, this is where I lose the thread 'cause I was kind of half adopted and I don't really know what kind of white I am. Like, I have no college degree and I'm definitely working class but who am I supposed to identify with if I DON'T KNOW WHAT KIND OF WHITE I AM

ANYWAY let's learn more about the Scots-Irish! This won't get weird at all in the sixth paragraph of the entire fucking book and not even out of the introduction yet!

I'm a couple beers and a whiskey in, and I report on white supremacy, it's one of my beats, so maybe it's just hitting my ears a bit weird to hear about how this one particular kind of white people are the group of people who haven't wholesale abandoned tradition and morality

You guys this is the sixth paragraph

this is gonna be like Ivanka where I told you I'd do the first chapter and then it was like half the book long

Anyway next we're onto geography, which hey did you know that Appalachia was like a whole region? It's a mountain range! Whole country practically, north to south!

Governors hike there! (That was my joke, not Vance's.)

Vance name-checks Hank Williams Junior because he wrote "A Country Boy Can Survive" which is weird because I feel like this whole book is going to be a hit on "Family Tradition" but hey

We all love us any of the Hanks round here

In between Cinci and Dayton

In Which Someone Nearly Gets It But Then Runs Away At The Last Second Right Before It Sinks In:

OK so I live in Appalachia now but "white people" and "hillbillies" aren't any more the same thing than "white people" and "underpaid denizens of the Inland Empire" are the same thing

like come on dude

But hey you know the real problem though? It's those shitty supportive churches and also a crisis in masculinity, and also why don't poor people just move to where the jobs are?

PARAGRAPH NINE Y'ALL

Anyway, and I am not dragging the dude for this conceit itself because we DO all hear the same shit over and over but anyway here's the straw man he sets himself up for, and the shape of it is telling:

So a fun thing about marriage and happiness: that's a Freedom Caucus talking point. Not even kidding. See, stability correlates with life satisfaction

and they like to pretend that causality and correlation are synonyms

Then there's an anecdote about this job he took the summer before Yale Law. There was one Good Coworker who was working two jobs to pursue his dream of "piloting an airplane." Then there was Bob:

Now, Bob is NINETEEN FUCKING YEARS OLD.

It seems like maybe we're pushing it to extrapolate anything here because I have lived me a life, I tell you what, and a thing I know is that anyone under twenty is an irresponsible asshole.

But anyway I never went to Yale so let's all learn what we can about America and its relative stability from Bob, the nineteen-year-old facing down a pissed-off pregnant girlfriend:

I am not debating that perhaps it's a more responsible thing to wait, as I did, until you're in your late twenties and a Marine's just come home from the war to get knocked up.

I'm just saying that teenaged pregnancy isn't, like, a new thing.

Like I don't know that Bob, who was presumably 18 at the time of his child's conception, or fuck it let's give him that spare year and say 19, not using a condom is actually a sign of social decay. Or his being a shitty worker.

I mean but again I didn't go to Yale so possibly the problem is just Bob

Also LOL who's ever heard of anyone but the Scots-Irish of the foothills between Dayton and Cincinnati feeling disenfranchised in America, that's not a thing

OK no you know what just read this, this is the next paragraph and there's like whole theses in this if you happen to be in your senior year of college

Suffice to say that the Scots-Irish guy that you have to understand the Scots-Irish culture to fully comprehend would very much like you to not think about anything in this book as, like, tied to race in any way

Surprisingly we hit the nineteenth paragraph before we got the first Charles Murray reference:

Including for fairness' sake, and with this we have closed the introduction

All of these people are great, even the murderers and the addicts and the lazy sods who won't just move to where the jobs are

OK. So. I have had I think two whiskies and a beer and we have established that the Scots-Irish hillbillies of the Greater Cincinnati-Dayton Area have superior work ethics, but also this isn't racist.

Chapter One:

Oh, see, his address might have been in Ohio but he always defined "home" as the holler in Kentucky. Now I'll give him this: Jackson, KY is about as rural as I am now.

WAIT. WAIT WAIT WAIT. I must have plumb forgot this because you're fucking telling me he's writing a memoir about the goddamned holler he spent summers in until he was TWELVE

y'all I thought it was at least until he left home, jesus

*writes memoir* OK, I'm 31, what identity best fits me? Yeah probably my childhood summers

until I was 12, so I literally mean childhood

yeah I can rep that fairly

OK listen. I ain't from a holler but I'm from the gotdamned mountains and lemme tell you whatever is behind your house is "the yard."

This kid's out here parsing the difference between a mown lawn and not but he's from the holler I ask you

Now I don't mean to be cruel and normally someone from where I'm from would never comment publicly but I feel like someone should tell you Vance is from the black-sheep side of the family clearly

The reason one would never normally comment is that one would normally be speaking to people who understood the area. So let me explain.

In any family in Appalachia, there are the ones who make good, and the ones who fuck up. That's just true.

Now there's two kinds of families: the ones who make a big deal out of it, and the ones who don't.

Methinks we're dealing with the son of a woman who got told that she didn't make weight. That'll leave an impression.

OK so here's where I'm like LOL YUP THOSE ARE MY PEOPLE but then it gets weird: see, in my mountains you might beat a dude up for insulting your mom but you don't try to actually saw him to death

like that's a bit far to take it

Anyway this makes that earlier reference to how American men are having a masculinity crisis seem a bit... je ne sais quoi

Where I live now there's a kind of weed named after my county, IDK what the hell this is, ain't nobody don't have a relative with at least one plant, WTF

No literally whole paragraphs about each of the uncles and then this:

Now here's where I go gentle, having written a memoir myself: this is the shit you throw off once in a meeting and your editors go nuts and this makes it in the book even though, like, yeah obviously this is how it is?

Only I feel like it ain't saying anything about fucking Kentucky. Like back where I'm from in Utah if someone went for a young girl you bet her family would take care of it if the law didn't. We usually let the law have its shot first.

Anyway, the men have the proper amount of country virtue, which is a real thing and usually depends on taking care of shit yourself.

OK so here we have a grown-ass man writing a memoir to represent a place that he didn't actually grow up and people that he only knew sort of on the margins but had a hero worship for

I remind you this is a book that "explains Trump's America"

Perhaps you're understanding now why people who actually live in actual Appalachia as real live grownups hate this pandering superficial simplistic bullshit

Y'all

hill people and poor people do not at all mean the same thing

Also as an Appalachian parent can I just interject here to say: literally every Appalachian kid gets told about the poor neighbor kids

we don't tell the kids about starving children in China. We tell them about the kid across the county.

like you could be a literally starving child doing that normal kid thing where you refuse your food because you want pizza, and in Appalachia your mom would start telling you about the poor people in the county and how they'd be grateful

NEWS: THE HOLLER LOOKS BUSTED WHEN YOU ARE AN ADULT THOUGH IT LOOKED FULL OF PROMISE AND ADVENTURE AS A CHILD

Have I mentioned yet in this thread that the author of this book is running for office?

Weird that I haven't done that. Anyway, I've legit never thought this worth either of our time but as he's gonna hold this up as a bona fide

OK wait, no, this can't be right

Like I live in a county with a higher child poverty rate than that by a long shot

OK so here is a sad but true fact about Appalachia for the people who live in it more frequently than most summers until they're twelve:

child poverty is far more endemic than Vance alludes to here.

LOL I SPOKE TOO SOON

like obviously when we talk about rural poverty the thing you go to first, if you're not trying to be inflammatory, is the most inflammatory news hits in a decade

clearly

Now, I would remind you that that study happened in 2009, and that Vance wrote a book in like 2015. Between those dates, I'd like to tell you a bit about rural economics and data gathering and the like.

What they call "Mountain Dew mouth" is 1. real and 2. not actually due to sugary sodas exactly

like even if you're a shit parent, if you have access to medical and dental for your kids they don't get massive dental problems

A fun reality that Vance entirely overlooks here, I assume because he was a fucking child at the time he was in actual Appalachia, is that poor kids don't get dental care

Now let's not excuse parents who serve sugar in sippy cups, and they do exist. But let's also not pretend that "poor kids have bad teeth" is "parents of poor kids are shit at parenting" because LOL you were worried about a pot plant

your granny didn't give you soda

OK so let's hear the lessons learned then I bet they're great

Now in case you'd forgotten this is the person who knew the white Welfare Queen and clearly it's this dude with eight kids

And all of this sounds fucking lovely until you look at the actual data, which would tell you (legit, try it yourself and see how long it takes) that most people on food stamps are working.

MOST PEOPLE ON FOOD STAMPS HAVE JOBS DUDE

That's just science

Like me! I wrote a whole fucking book about the ignominy of having people judge you for being on food stamps when you were working two jobs in your shitty rural town and people judged you

like that fucker who left town to go to Yale, maybe

that fucker judges you

But wait, we are nearly closing Chapter One and I gotta say this is fireworks-good

Like I get that Vance thinks he's from a place and I ain't trying to take his childhood away from him

but I think maybe he doesn't know that "-tucky" is like a thing, in the world, even more than an hour's drive from Kentucky

(and frankly this is all bullshit 'cause I love Kentucky and y'all are unfairly maligned)

but I've lived in, in under thirty-five years, in just a few years in the midwest

Grovetucky
Pennsyltucky
Athenstucky

like it's an Ohio thing

and Vance is from Ohio so that tracks

OK so I have questions

like are there virtuous fathers

how does this square with that whole Scots-Irish thing

what if, like, EVERYONE isn't doing well and it's not just the hill people

Also what if people have struggled to get out of Middletown for decades but it wasn't actually that bad because if they got a ride to Sharonville like 20 minutes south the Burger King would hire them, which I know 'cause I worked there?

Like, what if you wrote a whole book about how you couldn't leave your hometown but it intersected with this book that I wrote about how your hometown was actually pretty okay except for the clear expectation that Reagan was actually Jesus which wasn't real

Anyway that's the first chapter of Hillbilly Elegy: Read By An Increasingly Drunk Appalachian

OK so I could keep going but I feel like even though this book is written by a Bannon candidate we might be bored already so I've got twenty bucks left on y'alls whiskey and

Drunk enough to forget to close that poll before 24 hours, sober enough to read the results.

CHAPTER TWO:

Yeah so IDK what to do with the explosive information that "mawmaw" isn't strictly Appalachian

I kinda feel bad telling the dude, which is probably why I don't take bookings with him

I'd have to explain Mawmaw

WHO WAS IT

Somewhere in these mentions there's a fucking Hatfield and dear my love I'm so sorry to notify you of your ignominious kin

now for y'all outside the tri-state by which I mean Ohio Kentucky and West Virginia

You have heard of the Hatfields and McCoys. Now I married into Appalachia and so I don't follow exactly but from what I can gather

I think of it as a Bulloch coming for an Adkins. It's bloodsport for some, but it's largely lore for most of the family.

(if you understood THAT reference I will buy you a drink)

(if you understood that knowing that reference made it nearly impossible that anyone would even want a drink I give you social bonus points)

Anyway so Vance spends a bunch of time talking about how hard-core his Kentucky family was

And I would never accuse someone of anything so sure this totally happened on Parris Island, where any Marine east of the Mississippi goes, Parris is that nice Marine training depot:

But anyway, given the paragraphs we have so far, sure this tracks, why not

So I'm legit confused here

Mawmaw lived in Jackson, but Pawpaw moved to Middletown to escape Jackson

And pawpaw and mawmaw are married

OK we will wait for detail here

OK legit welcome to the fucking mountains 'cause this is some rural shit right here

"My sixteen-year-old grandpa cheated with my thirteen-year-old grandma"
Yeah I ain't even gonna judge that, that's a lot of folk born like that, but also holy shit

OK so in this historical context we're not going to talk at ALL about gender right this was all about boys coming home and not at all about manufacturing norms in their absence

I'm calling this now, and there's been enough whisky that frankly I don't remember the end of this bullshit I had to read to stay current: Pawpaw moving is EXACTLY AN ALLEGORY for what people would do now if they Cared and Meant To Do Well

OK so a few statistics here: most Americans will never live farther than 500 miles from home, and that's the generous reading

Like people driving a few hours once a month isn't actually that big an anomaly, statistically speaking

Now let me tell you a couple things about people who outgrow their britches

It can be a cutting reference to people who rise more quickly than their relatives can tolerate

Also it's about people who leave town then come home all full of tales

Like I've heard "too big for their britches" about women who dreamed too big

also I've heard it about people who went away and then came home full of the same bullshit every generation comes home full of

that dude who went to LA for five years then wanted to come back to Utah and tell me about how I just didn't understand class in America, really

that fucker outgrew his britches

I cannot think of a reason why a small-town Kentucky grandma might tell her hedge funder grandson why he might have outpaced his britches unless she honestly meant to thwart him

But hey here's a legit paragraph that I'm sure is fine

this is the book that explained poverty remember

Because really

and here's why you had to buy my drinks to make me read this

white Detroit people were JUST AS HORRID to the white rubes as the black people

so now we know that hillbilly is a race

Might be worth mentioning at this point in the white history that Kentucky was a slave state and Michigan wasn't so it's possible there's a bit of covering-over here

Anyway, the chickens are bullshit because someone got mad at chicken slaughtering in this super-rural town or some shit

like I don't know whether dude's grandma is living in the holler or in the suburbs but if you live within an half mile of people and you raise chickens, you should know you're the asshole

It's possible that it's Mawmaw's chickens and Pawpaw's house at this point, I can't follow it, but anyway this is Ohio or possibly Kentucky

Still not sure what state this is that has this family connection inherently tied to the land

You know what I do know though as a non-Appalachian woman

exactly what it's like to hear this from men

like imagine if your grandson got famous for explaining you to the wider world

and the thing he said was "I never knew why she hated seeing kids hurt, maybe she was a hurt kid"

or "she tried so hard but never really got it"

I'd smack that grandkid personally

I have two kids and lemme tell you if the best THEIR kids can come up with is "well she didn't like it when kids were molested"

honey I will salt the earth of my line

wait no mawmaw is kind of a self-righteous bitch though

Listen

I live in actual Appalachia now this instant and I'm from the rural Rockies

I hate domesticated animals but this is largely a responsibility objection

I don't hate cats or dogs out of a rural unease

I hate them because I have to pay to feed them and sometimes I have to pay a grand for a vet

that ain't "the old life" that's "being the breadwinner"

I like mousing cats.

Anyway here's the paragraph where the author distances himself from the roots he just built so hard:

In closing we quote Dwight Yoakum, in keeping with this country roots theme: Readin' Rightin' Rt. 23"

This has been Chapter One of Hillbilly Elegy

Shit y'all this ain't even been three hours

you new people won't remember that time I tried a first chapter but it was 70 pages long

We're onto Chapter Two now even, and I'm still like 50% sober

(fund this relative sobriety at if you like, this book review lasts as long as the whiskey)paypal.me/riseandbeheard

CHAPTER TWO OF HILLBILLY ELEGY:

OK so this dude learned a thing in college about how ladyparts work

Also, this is how this works. Dude has a shit mom and has to live with his grandparents.

OK BUT HERE IS THAT STORY REALLY THOUGH

Like this is a person who legit thinks that a 2k square foot house is "by jackson standards" a mansion

I'm 35, I'm a breadwinner with two kids and my house ain't 2k

Now I could accept this standard maybe if the writer had never left Ohio

this is some bullshit though

Hi have you ever wondered where "patriarchy" comes from

it's this fake hilljack talking about how women rank in his world

"literally in my world once a woman had transferred her title between father and husband it was fair game. And that was fine, I just idolized those men. I just went with it because it seemed easier at the time."

OK so some programming notes here:

god, never fucking read this book if you can help it

and also, this man is running for congress, we should know

I'm from places so rural the DSA leadership actually covets my bona fides. Ain't a whole lot about the working class happens without my note. I just usually don't comment because usually it's beneath my fucking station.

I haven't commented on Vance before now for the same reason: I consider Hillbilly Elegy worth reaction about as much as I do your average hipster crusade

But, apparently the rich people are STILL ON THIS so here we go into chapter two

I'd tell you what we were in for but it's called Chapter Two

Nah shit look at me being the asshole here there's whole parts left to chapter one and fuck I don't want to short anyone

OK Meemaw Vance was a goddamned saint

OK no just read this about Mawmaw Vance and what she tolerated and how her male grandchildren talked about her

Now I hate to be the one to say

Most Americans will never go further than 500 miles from their birthplace

Most people won't ever even leave their state, unless they're close to a state line

But imagine being the kind of woman who's had three live children outside any personal grief and here's a grandson telling you about feminity

Anyway here's how that grandson thinks of things:

And fuck that's goddamned heartwrenching right

Also maybe keep in mind that we lose more people to opiates in a year than we had Vietnam casualties in a year

We lose more people to opiates in a year than we spent in all of Vietnam

But it has to be commercial, right, before it matters

Anyway fortunately the unfortunate happened to Vance's parents and that worked well in the narrative retelling:

And that's me to bed, having learned a lot about myself as a woman from rural places and what I'm actually worth

ladies all the men are lying, you're amazing

Also? damn we're not even into this book that was published

Tune back in tomorrow.

And welcome back to this evening's continued reading of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

It turns out last night I was very drunk and skipped quite some parts, so we're going to be starting this reading a bit rewinded

I'm pretty sober now, but we'll see how later goes

Actually, we're fine. The parts I skipped are a fairly gritty retelling of how alcoholics fight a lot, and how everyone in the author's family is a major fuckup

Because you can't help it, being from the holler and all

So we have established that people from rural Appalachia have little self-control and bad parenting. Let's see what happens in Chapter Four!

First, JD Vance is born. We are in the summer of 1984 and PawPaw has just voted for Reagan, which is the only time he ever voted Republican because fuck Mondale's city slicker bullshit, apparently

Or is about to vote for Reagan, whatever. Point is fuck Mondale.

I mean I live up the road from Middleport, does that count as generic? Also, when Vance goes home can he show his face after publishing this? I really don't see anyone in Middleport being pleased with this portrait and I don't see why Middletown would be much different

OK so for those of y'all not from here, Middleport is about three and a half hours' drive from Jackson depending on traffic in Cincinnati.

People ain't gonna be a whole lot different from each other at that distance.

No really there's nothing lifelong residents of small towns love better than when some asshole moves out and then just comes home now and again to declare the place an increasing shithole

OK so, here's a paragraph for you to read, and pay attention to the point about segregation

About thirty miles south of Middletown, Ohio, there is a neighborhood of Cincinnati called Over The Rhine. That was a place you might not go after dark.

It seems real unlikely that Middletown has turned into OTR.

Yeah here's why that segregation line was important to note. Because this is a few paragraphs later.

See, the problem is "bad neighborhoods no longer plague only urban ghettoes; the bad neighborhoods have spread to the suburbs."

Fuck this beer I need a bourbon for this

So here's an interesting point: I sit in a lot of meetings about local economic development. Every small town in the whole country right now is thinking downtown revitalization.

About one in five suggestions that I've seen are...hopeful at best. Like this one.

(Also there is nothing more quintessentially small-town than bitching about whatever the city council's up to lately and complaining that it's dumb. We all do this with gusto.)

So there's a page or so about manufacturing and there's no point you reading it exactly because it's the same story of every manufacturing town ever, but it's important to note:

When the factory stops hiring, the town dies.

Vance talks about the apathy of today's teenagers and how basically every generation has just expected they can go work at the plant, which is also pretty universal. But then we come to this:

See the reason the kids aren't going to university is that the kids are lazy and the parents are too.

Not the crippling debt or the fact that a lot of kids in towns as poor as the one Vance describes have to work after school. Sheer lazy.

No REALLY it's just because people don't try.

Because the whole town is fucking lazy and doesn't value hard work, even though all the kids want to go work at manual labor and his grandparents made it into the middle class working.

Lazy. Lazy lazy lazy.

Oh, and also surveys are meaningless because people lie about how lazy they are.

Though the bullshit survey found the same outcome as the Bureau of Labor Statistics: thebalance.com/what-is-the-av…

What Vance is claiming here, that people with college educations work more, is *kind of* true in that on an average day someone with a degree is more likely to be working at all. But they work fewer hours, so it doesn't hold up in the overall.

I mean, maybe it's not laziness.

But it probably is.

Shoutout to the Scots-Irish again

who I am confused about now. Were Scots-Irish not the most hardworking of the white people in the introduction? Because now they're lazy.

Still not sure what kind of white I am or whether that's an impediment to my happiness

Actually I'm still just blown away that people are into what kind of white they are

like I hear you guys, it's a thing people talk about, I've just legit never heard it be a normal topic of conversation like this outside white supremacist spaces.

So that's a thing I learned about the world as a result of Hillbilly Elegy, so there's that

Anyway I've just had a really diverting chat about how common it is for white people to know and discuss their particular whiteness and I'm gonna be pondering this for weeks at least and here's the end of the chapter:

jesus fucking christ who tells that to a kid

Aaaaand my temporary wondering if perhaps I've been too harsh is assuaged by this next graf about his stepdad

So let's talk teeth and poverty and Appalachia a second shall we

Teeth rotting out of your head is not down to whether you drink sugary soda.

I can't yell that to the back stands loud enough.

In my part of the world - closer to the holler than to Middletown - it's rare, actually, to see a great smile on anyone who's clearly poor. I don't actually even register missing teeth when I meet a person, it's that common.

Some of that is meth. Some of it is people get so depressed they don't bother showering or brushing their teeth for actual whole years.

ALL OF IT is because of a lack of care.

You could do bags of meth, but if you have dentistry it won't show in your smile.

People who have never had bad teeth, especially if they've never had problems with what are called "the social teeth," that top front six or so, cannot possibly understand how cutting it is to mention.

If someone mentions my teeth to me - because mine are, in fact, rotting out of my head - I assume that the topic has been brought up as the ultimate below-the-belt finishing move. There's no other fucking reason to talk about it, not a one.

But let's delve into that a bit because fuck it, we're to the honesty part of the program

I'm scheduled for surgery in two months and I'm not sure if I can go because, and I'm not kidding here, I don't know if I can take the commentary.

Like I'm more afraid of some shitty technician talking about how if I'd just not done meth (I never have) or gave up the sugar drinks (I don't drink them) I wouldn't even be in here

which happens every time I've ever gone in. Ever.

I wound up in the ER last year with a jaw infection that made the left side of my face look like I'd tucked an orange between my gum and cheek.

The doctor - in this area where this is common - told me I should consider getting that looked at. With his nose wrinkled.

like, dude, don't you think I know that this is a huge thing and that people think it's disgusting and that people think I am by extension disgusting, did you really need to register that emotion with me, really man?

Dude works with the human body and infections and every gross thing in the world but when I'm in pain he can't bother to repress his disgust.

And that's a doctor.

Teeth are a thing, and people use your lack of dental care to hurt you more.

I've probably drunk ten Mountain Dews in my lifetime. I got in a car wreck a decade and a half ago, cracked teeth and never could afford to go have them fixed, and the rot spread, and that's as likely a scenario as someone just being fucking lazy.

Now with that context let's reread this paragraph with the funny joke about the dentistry that the truck driver never got as part of his benefits package at work and couldn't afford out-of-pocket:

I have just explained to the father of my kids, who is from rural Ohio, that Vance is from Middletown.

"So he's from middle class suburbia? How is this about Appalachia? I'm confused."

So there's an Ohioan on the matter.

Also, a couple programming notes:

1. definitely to tipsy, and
2. I'm not trying to slag off the dude writing about his family, I don't have the right to that. So there's gonna be some chunks missing here. Focus on the societal observations.

but still Mawmaw and Pawpaw taught this one right and damned if it ain't what I'm teaching my kids, with the exception that they can't punch anyone for insulting me and they have to punch anyone who says some racist shit.

This right here is just good life advice

um, to all my friends and family

I didn't know it wasn't allowed and I'm sorry for that thing I said when you turned on the song I hate knowing that I would tell you that

So this whole chapter is basically a retelling of how one comes to live in an abusive household, which is personal, but this graf is interesting:

So here's a thing about being poor: you could put on a suit, you're still not gonna look like the money people in town. But you don't know that, exactly.

Like when I got PR for the first time and someone took me to a real salon it was mindblowing

what do you mean, people pay you a hundred dollars plus top once every six weeks to make their hair look like that

and what the fuck is a "serum" also, and how is hair serum any different from face serum (which is also a real thing)