{"id":448,"date":"2001-05-27T12:19:00","date_gmt":"2001-05-27T12:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/2001\/05\/27\/terrified_of_th\/"},"modified":"2024-11-28T01:13:19","modified_gmt":"2024-11-28T06:13:19","slug":"terrified_of_th","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/2001\/05\/27\/terrified_of_th\/","title":{"rendered":"Terrified of the Heartland"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am such a city kid.<\/strong> Really, I\u2019m just beyond hope. I\u2019ve always lived in big cities: I grew up in New York Fuckin\u2019 City, and spent eight years in Boston, which seemed like a charming hamlet by comparison, but an overwhelming urban nightmare to people who\u2019d come there from the sticks. It\u2019s the only way of life I know, really. Everything else just seems like…well, television.<\/p>\n

A friend\/former squeeze of mine has been forced by circumstance to take a break from the big city for a while and go back to stay with his folks in Nebraska for a bit. He sent me a postcard from his hometown of Billings, Montana, where he went for a brief visit last week. The image on the card \u2014 downtown Billings surrounded by vast, hilly open space \u2014 is a curious, alien landscape to me. Weird, open, desolate, sleepy. I shudder to think of it. A teeny little burg surrounded by emptiness like that just gives me chills. Of course, when I get e-mails like this I know that my reliance on city life is cheating me from some of the truly American, rock-n-roll experiences that can be found out in the heartland:<\/p>\n

I forget that the Montana highways make up for a lot of the other faults with this state. Nothing really beats the escape of slipping into leather pants, a muscle tee, aviators, a cowboy hat, and a pick-up truck and hitting the highway. Heavy metal is the only choice for music [well maybe some sleater-Kinney is ok]. You kind of forget where you are, who you are. Is it the speed? You can drive so fast here…but I think it\u2019s the truck.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That just sounds so cathartic to me. Maybe I should get that driver\u2019s license once and for all. (I say this willfully ignoring the horror I felt the one time I did a road trip to the Midwest and was confronted for the first time with a completely blank horizon, devoid of mountains, skyscrapers, or oceans and filled with more corn and soy than I care to remember.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am such a city kid. Really, I\u2019m just beyond hope. I\u2019ve always lived in big cities: I grew up in New York Fuckin\u2019 City, and spent eight years in Boston, which seemed like a charming hamlet by comparison, but an overwhelming urban nightmare to people who\u2019d come there from the sticks. It\u2019s the only … Continue reading “Terrified of the Heartland”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ultrapersonal"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=448"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71596,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448\/revisions\/71596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}