You are over 75 and you hate every person you’ve ever met, or else you’re 14 and you’ve just seen something horrible.
Your martyrdom doesn’t go as planned.
At least one of your front teeth is missing, and you think you look marvelous.
Something dreadful happened at the rest stop.
You have two first names with an absolute maximum of four syllables.
You’re not interested in the money anyway, ma’am.
The atheist had it coming.
Ever since you returned from the North, you take enormous pride in being both unmarried and ugly.
All of your pets seem to hate you.
You’re running late for the revival.
None of the children you know have been bathed in the last week.
You are sitting on public transportation across from a total stranger. It is obvious to everyone onboard that he hates you.
Your overalls don’t fit like they once did.
You are being horrible to a blood relative. They drop dead.
It is several years into WWII. Your family has never discussed this, though you suspect some of the farmhands have.
You are indifferent to the murder you’ve just committed.
Your relationship with your adult children is fraught and unpleasant, possibly because of the Civil War.
You are trying to get to Atlanta.
In Retrospect, We Shouldn’t Have Pulled the Car Over
You suspect a Baptist is lying to you.
You can’t stop thinking about that road sign from a few miles back.
For the last several years, you have been pretending to be blind and/or deaf in order to cause pain to a woman in your life.
You are a farmer with multiple postgraduate degrees.
You examine an oozing wound on your leg with a dirty fingernail.
He Wasn’t Really a Catholic, After All.
You often find yourself fantasizing about the grisly death of your neighbors, who are of course invited over for coffee several times per week.
Your gaze is like the driving rain: hard and unyielding, chilly and bitter, and probably liable to cause consumption in young, unmarried women.
Your nephew is afraid of you.
Nobody invited the alcoholic to your baptism.
Your daughter is terrifically unattractive. You sell her to a traveling salesman and no one has a problem with it.
Someone is describing a horrific injury in immense detail, and you are delighted.
You never walk. You trudge, lumber, plod, or slog, but you never walk.
Someone’s hatlessness merits explicit reference.
You don’t drink alcohol, except as an allegory for the Last Supper.
You hear several gunshots from a nearby farm and immediately decide not to investigate.
A girl who lives down the road from you is nineteen, married, and has three children. Your mother complains to anyone who will listen that you aren’t more like her.
You don’t have any bad qualities at all, unlike some people.
You are lying about where your Bible is.
Everyone who moved to town before you is a saint.
Everyone who moved to town after you is a scourge.
A close relative was horribly disfigured in a hunting accident. Everyone agrees she had it coming.
*
(Image via)
You can also “stump” to someplace!
Huh. I am surprisingly ok with the fact that I’ve apparently been in a Flannery O’Connor story for years now. (Also ok with the fact that my phone wants to change that name to flan wry icon or.)
…may I ask which one?
In other news, it seems like my husband’s extended family all seems to be living in a Northern Gothic version of these stories…
I’ve always felt like I grew up in a Flannery O’Connor story and I am also entirely ok with it at this point of my life. There is something sturdy and reassuring about that particular brand of bleakness and resignation. I married into a Faulkner story and man, I’m here to tell you, even though no one in either of our families has lived north of Virginia for generations, those worlds could not be any more different. The Faulkners are all about fragility and brittleness.
Thank you for this. It gives me great joy!!
but does it give you great hulga?
^And the Internet Win for the Day goes to….
This is everything. A plus plus plus plus plus plus &c.
ETA minus one [plus] for no mention of hay, hay bales, hayloft, or grain in general
“Ever since you returned from the North, you take enormous pride in being both unmarried and ugly.” >>> it’s like looking into a mirror.
Okay, forgive me this, but how is “Your martyrdom doesn’t go as planned” not just *being Irish*? I’m pretty sure it is.
[Edit to say: not that the *being Irish* part is the martyrdom, but rather being Irish means that one is constantly planning ones glorious martyrdom should one be called upon for it and then circumstances fall down in reality. Of course one is pleased to still be living and that it turned out the man wandering the Church parking lot had only dropped his keys and wasn’t in the midst of a terrible fit of oncoming violence, but one wishes it to be known that one would have been prepared to die well.]
Dylan Moran’s bit on “Irish drama” was highly instructive to me. It’s been a dream of mine to expostulate “AH! It’s fierce MILD” about the weather, ever since.
https://youtu.be/QccLy8498yg?t=113
This is my favorite thing he’s done! On no, wait, I think it’s Irish Face because that’s the face I’m making on my drivers license. Hold on, then there’s the biscuits. Okay, I love just about everything he’s done.
TV cooking shows: “Who has the time to soak the duck with your elbows? No-one does these things! They just watch them on TV while dipping bread in something less solid than bread!”
Ever since you returned from the North, you take enormous pride in being both unmarried and ugly.
Fuck yeah!
I happen to suspect that many Baptists are lying to me – possibly about where their Bible is.
The overtly racist person in your life is dramatically redeemed by your own moral defect in disliking their racism and by the fact that they patted a Black child on the head. And because they drop dead shortly thereafter.
There is no injustice or justice in social systems and norms. There are only individual judgments, and the eternal lesson that you as an individual are a smug degenerate bastard.
Don’t trust the travelling salesman.
You are an atheist with a physical disability, and are punished by a person masquerading as a believer, who may also have a physical disability.
You are beaten for not believing in God. You are beaten for converting. You are beaten.
You are afraid of looking foolish in front of a person with strong religious morals, but are compelled to do a humiliating thing anyway, with disastrous consequences.
Do not question for whom the peacock crows; he crows for thee.
“Your gaze is like the driving rain: hard and unyielding, chilly and bitter, and probably liable to cause consumption in young, unmarried women.”
New life goal
You speak in parables, and sigh when your mother does not understand you.
There is great significance in gorilla suits.
No, but really, the premiere of “Gone with the Wind” really was that awful.
It actually is lupus this time.
My grandmother and great aunt were always discussing the gruesome and somehow avoidable deaths of their friends and neighbors over breakfast, "pass the biscuits, please, honey!"
Thank you, I couldn't believe they had overlooked the peacocks!
Your mother insists you get a good education. She herself believes educated people are fools. You get a good education, but it does you no good in a material sense, and prevents you from scoring salvation.
God hates you, and you agree with Him.
This is perfect.
I’m rather partial to the slog myself.
I’ve been waiting for this for SO LONG
There is a dead mule. It has Meaning.
The hatless is suspect.