Deep Fat Fried Southern Pride

Or: A Few Things That Absolutely, Positively ROCK About Living in the South…

1. Eye contact. On the street. In the mall. Everywhere. It’s almost disconcertingly hospitable.

2. Chick-Fil-A. Take your big cities and high fashion and “things to do” because I have the amazing Chick-Fil-A which, on a scale of 1 to 10, has more zeros than Wal-Mart has unused checkout lines.

3. Everyone freaks out when it snows, buys all the bread and milk in the grocery store, and is suddenly incapable of finding the faculties that previously allowed them to drive their motor vehicles like a sane adult.

4. Seeing stars at night. No, YOU get out. Real stars. Uh huh.

5. The concept of “cold weather” involves little more than wearing a fleece. This is opposed to a typical phone conversation with northern friends who say things like “There’s frost on my windows… ON THE INSIDE OF MY WINDOWS.” and “It was -50° today.” Shiver.

6. Sweet tea and meat-and-three restaurants. Granted, I don’t actually like sweet tea or (most) vegetables… but I somehow still manage to feel pride that we have these things and hold them in high esteem. Quizzical, yet mildly logical.

7. Camouflage is always in fashion. Grandma in camo. Baby in camo. Camo, camo, camo. It is the great unifier of our fine land. Bringing generations together so that they can be invisible while shooting Bambi… together.

8. Fried EVERYTHING. If it at one time moved or had a face, we can fry it and YOU WILL LIKE IT, BOY.

9. Any and all fashion/pop culture trends arrive here in full force approximately 361.5 days after they have utterly and completely ceased to be fashionable in the majority of the known world. It’s amazing, really, how out of touch an entire geographic area can be. It’s not as bad as say, the midwest, but dang… still humorously late to the fashion buffet. Most mountain people in Bolivia probably have better fashion sense than my neighbors. (I don’t have any paper work to back up the Bolivian mountain people crack… I don’t even know if there are Bolivian mountain people… but I felt the need to finish strong with a broad-sweeping generalization that burned the mental image into your head forever.)

10. One word: mullets.