Swing State Syndrome and Why This Writer Guy can Piss Off

For those of you just catching up, I recently moved from Cleveland, Ohio to Wilmington, North Carolina to go back to school for creative writing. This has, therefore, been an extremely painful yet cynically entertaining  election cycle for me. One swing state to another, not much changes. I registered to vote here in NC as soon as the campus drives started, and since then I've been bombarded with fliers, phone calls, Hulu ads. I've had an Obama volunteer knocking on my door looking for me every day for the past two weeks. I live in a predominantly black neighborhood, so the Romney volunteers have been noticeably absent.

The only people who cared more about early voting than Ohio were North Carolinians. I'm one of those perverts who enjoys going to the community center on Election Day and making a whole ritual of it, and it got to the point where I was lying to the volunteers and telling them I had already voted, just so they would stop trying to give me directions to the library.

This morning I was laying in bed, contemplating my very non-political thoughts, and as I hopped on Twitter to post my deep musings about the correlation between my vibrator and my teddy bear, I saw THIS ESSAY linked to by my friend Angie. I have a lot to say about this, so you'd better go read it first, even though I absolutely hate to give this guy the page views.

First of all, fuck you. Just had to get that out there.
Alright. Let's try this again.

First of all, Ohio didn't choose to be the lynch pin of the electoral process. It's not like years ago, we somehow bid on it, somehow lobbied to be the place where every four years campaign strategists cum on our faces with 300 political ads a day and tie up our cellphones with blocked numbers just because one time we decided to sign that Move On petition. Oh yes, Ohio has email, can you believe it? No wait, actually some parts of Ohio DON'T have DSL, because not a single one of these candidates blowing their coffer loads here comes back in between elections to help us out with real issues - like accessibility of internet services, alternative energy sources, or a governor that's trying to frack us all into a giant hell pit. We are not rubes, we are very well aware of the disparity and the abuse we suffer at the hands of these invaders. There are not a bunch of Ohioans walking around going "Oh man, I'm so special and important, I'm the future of America." No, instead we're sitting in our finished basements, being pissed off that we can't watch our Black Key's youtube video without first having to sit through our 17th Romney ad of the hour.

Second, let's address this idea you posit that all human beings of vitality and vision leave Ohio as soon as they are able to crawl. It's painfully obvious that you consider yourself one of these visionaries. Let me assure you, your style is mediocre David Foster Wallace rip off at best, so tone it down a bit Chump. I mean, I sympathize, because I am obviously one of these glowing talents as well, and yes, I too ran far away from Ohio. To an even smaller town, in the Bible Belt, where grown men regularly call me honey and the job market is so slow I've been considering selling "used" underwear on Craiglist just to make rent. Look, I grew up in Revitalized Cleveland, so I'm well aware of the concept of "Ohio good", and I am not a fan of the legions of cheerleaders whose sole mission in life seems to be to convince me that Ohio is the very best place to live in the entire world because we have a restaurant with weird grilled cheese sandwiches.

But, and I'm going to go ahead and siphon off some of your ego here, I'm a good writer. The reason I am a good writer is not because I somehow had the far reaching vision to escape Ohio, but because I stayed there. I lived there for my entire formative twenties. That means I had to find jobs in Ohio, entertainment in Ohio, love in Ohio, and confidence in Ohio. In order to accomplish any of that, I was required to learn perspective.  You dismissively call Ohio "our republic in a can", and that's right. A lot of rednecks, some lone outposts of urban minorities, a thin icing of college educated professionals. That's absolutely correct, that's our country. Growing up in that microcosm, I am now able to live wherever I want in the country, even this weird little coastal town full of Republicans, and get along with people. I can even genuinely like them. I am capable of having an opinion about people with opposing viewpoints that doesn't involve degrading or vilifying  them. Those famous writers you cite, Anderson and Thurber and Crane, you know what they had that you don't have? They LIKED people. They were INTERESTED in people. They didn't just immediately dismiss anyone who didn't go to Princeton as intellectually inferior to them, or maybe if they did, they understood that intellect isn't necessarily the mark of a good man.

I was going to write a snarky little paragraph here about how you must have come from some beige little suburb town, and how the deeper subject of your essay is obviously your own unresolved bitterness towards your hometown. But then I tried googling your biography, and there wasn't much to find, except maybe you converted to Mormonism as a teenager once? Here's what being an Ohioan has done for me - I read that and immediately felt this pang of sympathy for your childhood. In my head those sugars converted to "oh, he probably just doesn't know any better" and now I've completely lost steam to make fun of you because I just feel bad that you think of your country as someplace to escape from, instead of the unending weird and interesting place it actually is. I mean, if you've made a career out of non-fiction writing, you must know this too, at least intellectually if not viscerally.

Here's what you did in this essay. You saw a week of the country crowing about the Impressive Mediocrity of Ohio, the Breadbasket of the Boring Modern Man, and you somehow felt compelled to scream against it. Nevermind that it only happens once every four years, and it isn't fooling anyone. You said to yourself "Stupid Ohio thinks it's so fucking special, it's time I remind the rest of this high school who the real cool kids are" and then you tried to pants us. So good for you, you reminded your peers that Ohio is fat and unemployed and stupid, that's awesome. We totally deserved that right? Cause god forbid, anyone pay attention to an entire section of the country that needs jobs and education and love. That isn't what politics is about at all, right? No, politics is about proving you're smarter than everyone else. Way to be a visionary there. And I hope, when Ohio goes blue tomorrow, you have a follow up essay prepared about how that doesn't really matter, because being a normal mediocre person still sucks. That will for sure help the effort to convince the "rednecks" here that they should vote with compassion towards their fellow man.

Beef Curry

Yes, I know it's cliche to take pictures of the sky all the time. But if you only knew how many times I sat in the backseat of my parents' car, wishing I could somehow make a dress those colors. I'm in awe of anyone who can convincingly paint light. And since my particular art skills will always fall under the crafty, not classical, I forgive myself. Lately my mind set has been vacillating between unthinking bland zombie dark insideness, and unthinking zombie happy outside lightness.

In case you didn't get the memo from one of your friends*, on Wednesday Popeye's Chicken had a special. 8 pieces for 4.99. Here is the resulting chaos. It was certainly an interesting way to celebrate Earth Day; chicken slaughtering and car idling. Speaking of zombies....

Those cars are not parked. That's the drive thru line.


Last night I went over Jays for Thai night, which has increasingly become a monthly thing. Instead of just me and Jay, we ended up with me and Jay and Kelly and Debra and Andrew and Lori and her son. You know, 7. Lucky for me, curry is the ultimate family style dinner. Saying curry and family in the same sentence is redundant.


I was not a big fan of the green curry dish I made a while ago, so I was a little scared about how this would turn out. Jay made coconut fried rice, which was SO good, it was practically dessert. And I'm pretty happy about how this turned out. I think I might make it a bit spicier if I was certain of my diners. But I'm getting the picture that anytime you combine coconut milk, sugar, garlic and fish sauce, it's going to be pretty fantastic. It kinda makes me feel like a kindergartner since most of Asia has known this since they were 2. But it's a happy kind of ignorance.

After dinner, we played Apples to Apples, and I got way too competitive with a very precocious 13 yr old. Wine and word games make me in it to win it people. Also, if anybody is ever interested in putting some money down....

Oh, and it's official, my phone is more ghetto than Kelly's. My monochrome screen put me over the top.

Beef Curry

note: I'm giving you the exact proportions I used, and you can see how much that made. So feel free to cut this in half. If you don't have a friend that rocks at making rice, serve it with jasmine rice. Buy yourself a rice maker. You know, half the world has one of those.

- 2 lbs lean beef cut into either chunks or strips

- 2 red bell peppers, chopped

- 1 pd sliced mushrooms

- 1/2 cup chopped basil

- 1 can coconut milk

- 2 tbsp fish sauce

- 2 tbsp red curry paste

- 2 tbsp brown sugar

- 2 tbsp minced garlic

- vegetable oil

In a wok, brown the beef in batches (fun!) using the vegetable oil and garlic, on high heat. Once cooked, but not overcooked, remove from heat.

Throw in the peppers and mushrooms. I sprinkled them with chili oil. Cook until softened.

Add the milk, sugar, paste, fish sauce, and basil. Stir to mix. Stir again just to be sure those chunks of curry paste don't end up in someones mouthful.

Then add the beef again and allow the dish to get warmed up before serving. Voila.

*No one who is your real friend would ever tell you about this.