Sweet Home Alabama, for both obvious reasons, as well as reasons I can’t bring myself to understand, somehow reaches into that deeply buried Southern spirit of mine.
There are three things that will inevitably bring to the surface my ossified masculine Southern pride: 1) Seeing anyone wear a snap shirt ironically, which makes me want to kick them in the neck 2) The calling of the Hogs (that’s a sports thing, for the unfamiliar) and 3) that goddamn Lynyrd Skynyrd song and those clean Southern licks, which make me want to buy an old rusty pick-up, slap on a pair of shit-kickers and Wranglers, listen to Charlie Daniels, and go motherfucking line dancing. Invariably, however, I occasionally feel nostalgic in ways an abused partner probably feels the occasional flicker of nostalgia for an old flame. And when I do return, I don’t venture outside of my college town. I loathed it in ways that I’ll never be able to properly explain.
You don’t got to get all uppity about it.” I hated that place. I lived much of that time in a crappy one-strip Arkansas town dominated by used car lots, trucks with gun racks, quite a few mobile home parks (one of which belongs to my mother), and confederate flags in windows, where the black families actually lived on “Ni**er Hill,” up “on the other side of the tracks,” and where people used “ni**er” and “fa**ot” like prepositions and would actually chide you if you took offense. I spent the first 23 years of my life there.