Some more mushrooms —fungi, whatever—for my fans.
Oh, yay.
I open my eyes on yet another day of fear, anxiety, and pain, or as I lovingly call it, “consciousness.” I’ll probably spend some time today thinking I have a tumor in my neck (it’s my Adam’s apple) or worrying that I’m having a heart attack. Hypochondria takes up a lot of my time.
Just about the only thing that doesn’t give me anxiety is living in Ohio, a.k.a The Most Boring Place On Earth.
Ohio was founded by pioneers headed to the Golden West who gave up a quarter of the way there and said, “Fuck it, let’s just live here.”
We’re a state of underachievers. Our motto should be “Ohio: It’s good enough.”
Ohio doesn’t really have natural disasters, although growing up in the ‘70s all anybody ever talked about was the tornado that basically wiped Xenia off the map in 1974. We worry a lot about tornadoes here, even though they almost never happen.
A lot.
I can’t imagine how people in Kansas and… whatever the other states are in that area. South Dakota? Missouri?… how the folks who live in “Tornado Alley” get any sleep at all. I would basically just go to bed fully dressed, sit upright for eight hours with a suitcase in my hand, and then get up again and go about my day. Sleep would not be an option.
Even after 54 years, I have only a vague grasp of Ohio’s history. I feel like we could be safely absorbed into Pennsylvania and Indiana and no one would really notice.
I know that Ohio was scraped flat by a glacier at some point in the distant past, which meant I had to learn about something called the “terminal moraine.”
The terminal moraine in the State of Ohio…effectively serves to bisect the state along a line running on a west to east axis across the south by southeastern third of Ohio thereby contributing to certain distinctive topographical, socio-economic, and cultural attributes on either side of this feature. —Wikipedia
I mean, if you say so. I think the only reason I’ve remembered the phrase “terminal moraine” all these years is because it sounds like a death metal band.
All I know is that if you drive south, first it’s hilly, and then approaching Columbus everything becomes as flat as a table. Which freaks me out. I need my visible terrain to be pretty much what I’ve grown up with, which is to say slightly hilly with nothing dramatic going on like mountains, or valleys, or big holes in the ground.
Ohio is like a snack pack of vanilla pudding. Technically it’s food, but what is it really accomplishing?
And I still don’t know what a buckeye is. Is it a chestnut? It is even a nut?
The glacier did bestow upon us some great caves and really big rocks, which is great if you’re into those things. I’m as big a fan of rocks as the next person.
Caves, not so much.
I went to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky once where a member of the group who was mentally ill usurped the guide’s lectern several hundred feet under the ground.
Everything turned out okay, and yes, the formations are cool, but I personally want to stay above ground as much as humanly possible. If I want to go caving, I’ll do it from the safety of my bed. That’s what YouTube is for.
And as far as buckeyes go, they’re made from chocolate and peanut butter, and that’s all I need to know.
It's not all boring. The Isley Brothers and The Ohio Players came out of there, and James Brown cut a lot of his best songs for the King label in Cincinnati. Their music is hardly boring.
So Ohio is where people go to take a break from life in general. Rhetorical only, but do Ohioans know they are living in some non-drescript matix?