Copy/paste from Word to Post, WP 2.5 test – it works!
People are so stuck on themselves, they make my teeth hurt.
Serious now. Some folks think ignorant is the woman at the KMart dressed in lime green polyester stretch pants twelve sizes too small, an orange tube top encasing her barn size bosoms like they was polish sausage, and flip flops what are smacking against her splayed out heels when she walks, sticking about every fifth step and then popping loose with a loud thwack who’s shoveling Coca Cola and Mars bars into the mouths of three squalling toddlers who are standing in the shopping cart on top of two fifty pound bags of dog food and a case of shotgun shells.
That’s not ignorant, that’s Mama, doing the shopping on Saturday morning.
Ignorant is folks what stand in the mall parking lot, next to their really small cars with really small tires, the kind of cars that don’t need no cardboard Christmas trees hanging from the rear view mirror smelling like Ocean Fresh Breezes, and they’re all the time saying stuff like, “Goodness, John Davidson, go and tell your sister Mary Patton to meet us at the Lexus when she’s through perusing the department store.” The bless their children with middle names like that, middle names what are last names in the wrong place. Like their mother did more for the world than their daddy and so they’ve got to make sure folks remember her name on account of it is so special because their daddy works for her family and they’ve owned the mill since after the Civil War and most of the town owes the fact that they’ve got bread on their table to that family. Ignorant is what they do for themselves and the way they treat other folks who don’t own mills or have college educations.
Ignorant is those same families who go back to their homes with more than one bathroom, homes with rumpus rooms and master bedrooms, the kind with mud rooms instead of laundry rooms, and garages instead of barns, who write long essays for NPR or Slate about how us rural yokels have grits flying out of our mouths while we grunt and point, trying to explain to those ignorants to get the hell out of the roadway on account of Larry Darnell is about to blast out of the house and tear down the road in his F-150 on account of Mama fed the deer dogs last night and they weren’t supposed to have full stomachs the morning of the hunt and he’s so mad he’s going over to Earlene’s Corner Mart for an hour long bitching session with his second-cousin twice removed who goes by the name of Snake but his Christian name is John Wayne and knowing they both slam down about a dozen country ham biscuits and a quart of coffee, all the while smoking unfiltered Camels and tapping their feet to Bosephus or Merle, and ignorant is parking on the side of the road while that’s about to happen and not listening to folks what tells you to move back away from where the gravel will be spitting up like bullets when that F-150 with over-sized tires takes the corner on its way to biscuit salvation. [That's surely the longest sentence I ever did wrote]
Maybe they ain’t as ignorant as they are confused. Confused about how they got the money to buy those cars. Confused because they don’t know history and where linen came from and how it used to be a working man’s fabric. Forgetful maybe. Forgetting all the while about folks in row houses, how those folks are the ones what put the bread on the tables of the last name in the middle children.
[taken from my "ideas" folder of April 2003]