Fuck You, Alabama.

I live smack in the middle of one of our great nation's cheapest punchlines.

The state of Alabama is like a joke that isn't funny anymore, but people just keep telling it over and over. Alabama consistently lands at or near the very bottom of most any statistical list that you'd want to be on the top of. We end up at the top of lists you'd want to be on the bottom of. There's a word for that:

Backwards.

I was unfortunate enough to have been born into a poor family in one of the absolutely worst parts of America. I moved away to a large metro in another state a few years ago, but when the recession hit I lost my job and was sucked right back into this fetid black hole of a land. I'm not at all happy about being here and am working as hard as I can to escape. It hasn't been easy as this place has a way of sucking the very soul from your body and leaving you a miserable, shivering shell of a human being barely able to even comprehend that a better world exists beyond these borders.

Don't ask the locals, they'll tell you otherwise.

They'll say "Alabama is a great place to raise a family". They'll tell you all about how it has a beautiful and diverse landscape. They'll invite you in with stories of southern hospitality and down home cooking. They'll lure you here with talk of a "slow, easy pace of life" and affordable housing.

But that's because they don't any better. They've been sucked into the black hole, never to escape into the light again. They've come to think that this is the greatest place on Earth and will defend their idealistic opinion of their homeland with every bit of Skoal flavored spit and piss they can muster.

Well, fuck them. I know better.

I'm going to use my little corner of the internet to spread the truth. I'm going to see to it that people on the outside, out there in the real world, hear my words. I speak absolute, undiluted truth that comes from a few decades of living in this festering shit storm. The things I say on this blog come not from the prejudicial standpoint of an outsider who's seen too many stereotypical depictions of southerners in movies and on television. The things I say come from personal experience.

I live in the belly of the beast.

The sick, ulcerous, beer bloated, cancer-ridden belly of a lumbering, toothless beast that beats his wife with one hand and thumps a Bible with the other.

Sweet home Alabama my fucking ass.