ENNNNNNNGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH.
(That's the Grego buzzer.)
A road trip — and a lesson in regional stereotypes
The two go hand in hand. It will be interesting to see which stereotypes you discuss. Racial? Political? Cultural? Such possibilities!
I always thought St. Louis was a real city until I went to school near Chicago. Invariably, after telling anyone where I was from, I got the same reaction: "St. Louis? Whaddaya got, that big arc, right? You gotta farm in the backyard? Geez, Mike, this guy wouldn't last a day on the Southside. Get me a pop, wouldya?"
Oh. This is going to make me mad, isn't it?
After pausing briefly to wonder what pop was, I resolved to label everyone from Chicago an obnoxious moron. Yes, this was very mature of me, but hey, they started it.
Marc Kozak, pausing, thinking, pondering stereotypes: "Wait. What the fuck is pop???" If you're on a lucrative television quiz show, and you have one lifeline left, and it's a moderately tough question and the answer is just teetering, tantalizing you on the very tippiest tip of your tongue... don't use your phone-a-friend to call Marc Kozak. Just go with your gut instinct. Or a wild, flying hunch. Marc will be fucking stumped.
The pop vs. soda debate was funny freshman year. Marc, you'd better be a freshman.
A few months later, someone tricked me into actually visiting the Windy City for the first time, and I was overwhelmed. There I was in the middle of a sprawl of impossibly tall buildings, absurd traffic pile-ups and incomprehensible train schedules. I felt lost. I felt insignificant. I felt like I was in the Jetsons.
Gawsh! Lesson #2 in regional stereotypes: frumpy St. Louis bumpkins are flabbergasted by tall buildings. And trains? What are those?!
I could see how somehow who grew up in the middle of that kind of madness would see me as a country mouse to his city mouse. So they weren't morons at all; they obviously just had not been to St. Louis or anywhere else south of Interstate 80.
Guarantee you Marc looked on Mapquest to find a good reference-point highway to use in this column. After all, this is the guy who finds train schedules "incomprehensible."
I thought about it and had to admit that I, too, had preconceived notions about people from parts of the country where I've never been. That changed after I spent a few weeks traveling around the country with my band, Bottle of Justus.
AH. Let the understanding begin! A voyage of musical discovery with Marc's Bottle of Crap.
(Incidentally, Marc's name doesn't appear anywhere on the band's Web site. I'm pretty sure it's the right one, as both Marc and this particular Bottle of Justus claim to hail from Illinois State University.)
But let's continue. I have to practice with my band, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, in about 45 minutes.
The mountain states were beautiful, as expected. What wasn't expected were the other six guys in the van stopping to take pictures of every other canyon. Their photo albums must be riveting.
Anti-regional stereotype lesson #3: Canyons are pretty, but boring?
(Did I read the headline wrong? Maybe instead of a "lesson" in overcoming regional stereotypes, this is more of a rundown of possible... things you can believe about several different areas of the U.S. OK, let's think of it that way. I'll try anything.)
Sometimes I think everyone my age feels obliged to move to Los Angeles. I thought I'd understand it once I got there, but I didn't at all. Everyone you meet immediately asks you what you do and then tells you how they are vaguely associated with a celebrity. I was actually talking to a guy when he stopped dead and said, "Hey, isn't that the drummer from Foreigner?"
"No. Back to me. Over here. So like I said, I'm the lead singer for this band, Bottle of Justus, and we just finished touring with Van Halen. Yeah, my name's not on the Web site yet because I have to clear some things with my agent. Anyway, do you know of any place where rock musicians can party in this town? And, like, stay overnight for free? And eat? Hey, where are you going?"
When I said anything about home, the people I was talking to instantly assumed that I'd come to L.A. to escape the boredom of the Midwest; they assured me it was "so much better out here."
They assumed this because I told them I was overwhelmed by tall buildings and couldn't understand the subway system.
If you've never been to Las Vegas, it's exactly what you think it's like. When I mentioned St. Louis, it instantly made some people happy, as they "won a ton of money on them in the World Series." I'd love to tell you more about Vegas, but my mom reads these things.
Allow me to point out something here:
I'd love to tell you more about Vegas, but my mom reads these things.
What this tells us is that Marc is accustomed to writing cutesy columns that his mom can read; presumably he's written for his college newspaper. Furthermore, when he says she reads "these things," we deduce that this is one in a series of columns that he's published. Marc Kozak: submitting crap he wrote for a college paper to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
This column is not good enough for the Post-Dispatch. Did I really just say that? Not good enough for the Post-Dispatch.
The desert states were as I had envisioned them: hot and barren for the most part. The only signs of life we saw in New Mexico were at scattered gas stations, and at one, strangely enough, we met some very lost people from Alton.
You are really broadening my fucking horizons with this anti-stereotypical column, Marc! Why don't you write a paragraph about Mormons in Utah?
Some of my stereotypes of Texas were confirmed, as our crossing of the border was followed closely by the appearance of Longhorns, Outbacks, Lonestars and Riley's Bar-B-Q & Rockin' Steakhouse. Kids my age tend to make a lot of jokes about the South, but I found that it's really no different from anywhere else, except that when I asked for a Coke, I was asked "What kind?"
This is getting dumber and dumber. Please stop. Who decided to print this? Does Marc's dad know someone on the P-D editorial board? PEOPLE ARE, LIKE, READING THIS SHIT.
If you're writing about regional stereotypes, or whatever the fuck it is that you're writing about, you should actually address some of the more interesting ones. Not "Texas has lots of steakhouses."
20 bucks says when the waitress asked Marc what kind of Coke he wanted, he just stared ahead blankly -- as if reading a subway map -- and muttered incomprehensibly. Give him a break, he just learned what "pop" means.
I still haven't made it to the East Coast; I'm hoping to get there this summer. In the meantime, you don't want to know how I picture New York.
Probably like some magical land with escalating skyscrapers and flying school buses and secret, undecodable bus schedules.
Here's my point: If you ever find yourself out of town in a conversation about St. Louis with someone who hasn't been here, your reaction may be just as revealing as theirs.
Yeah, and you've been such a wonderful fucking ambassador thus far. Please, move to Iowa.
*Iowa crinkles nose*
Wait, though. Here's MY point. You just wrote an entire fucking pointless column about traipsing around the country, peppered it with "humorous" little anecdotes about meaningless, insignificant stereotypes and then tacked on a little "moral to the story" at the end, à
Seriously, how did you get this published? Who reads something like this and thinks, "Ah. Journalism."?
No one does. No one. Except... well... oh, yeah. I forgot.
Your mom reads these things.
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