#10 Corn Sweat and Candlelight Vigils
This conversation explores a variety of themes, including the quirky culture of Toledo, food safety perceptions, unique funeral customs, driving experiences in the Appalachian region, the impact of weather on daily life, childhood memories, media sensationalism, health remedies, and the cultural significance of Dolly Parton. The hosts share personal anecdotes and reflections, creating a rich tapestry of Appalachian life and community.
Takeaways
There's always redneckery going on in Toledo.
Candlelight vigils for closed restaurants show community spirit.
Health department violations don't always indicate poor food quality.
Cultural differences in funeral customs can be striking.
Appalachian funerals often lack traditional pageantry.
Driving in the mountains can be a unique experience.
Weather can significantly impact daily life and activities.
Childhood experiences shape our perceptions of weather.
Media sensationalism has evolved with the 24-hour news cycle.
Home remedies often reflect cultural practices.
Chapters
00:00 Redneckery in Toledo
03:49 Community and Mourning
07:33 Funeral Traditions and Personal Stories
12:13 Driving and Vehicle Anecdotes
15:37 Weather and Corn Sweat
16:20 Exploring Local Water Bodies
18:23 Body Image and Vulnerability
20:11 Childhood Memories and Weather Experiences
23:16 Impact of News on Childhood
25:47 Sensationalism in Media and Its Effects
32:11 Military Medicine and Home Remedies
33:35 Dental Health and Insurance Issues
35:06 Childhood Injuries and Remedies
35:45 Redneck Injuries and Survival Stories
42:08 Dolly Parton: A Cultural Icon
47:00 Local Culture and Community Connections
49:20 New Chapter
tags
Toledo, redneck culture, food safety, funeral customs, Appalachian culture, driving stories, weather phenomena, childhood memories, media sensationalism, health remedies, Dolly Parton
Transcript
around the lake last night and I was just coming up with, cause I was like, I should have been making lists of things, you know, to always have in my back pocket. And so I was just walking around the lake, listening to this other podcast that I like, kind of free associating, thinking about things.
Dash (he/him) (:one day we'll be able to build out work ahead of us.
Have you, has there been any Toledo area redneck activity recently that you've seen? What kind of redneckery?
Beck (:There's always redneckery going on in Toledo. I follow this page on Facebook called the Nosy Asses of Toledo, Ohio, and they post all the drama. There's tens of thousands of people in this group, they... people post the craziest stories. Like, there's a drag queen that got accosted at a gas station a couple of weeks ago.
Dash (he/him) (:The mace thing, yeah.
Beck (:Yeah, yeah, that was that. My favorite story about Toledo ever was when the three different Steak and Shakes got shut down and they held a candlelight vigil in the parking lot.
Dash (he/him) (:That's we would do if a Waffle House went down. Or three Waffle Houses.
Beck (:Yeah.
I passed one of those taking shakes the other day and it made me laugh.
Dash (he/him) (:Is it still closed?
Beck (:No, they're open again, believe it or not, but I still wouldn't eat there.
Dash (he/him) (:Maybe somebody performed a ritual at the candlelight vigil and it raised from the dead.
Beck (:Maybe.
I wish we had the rating system that like New York City and places like that have where they have to post it in the window.
Dash (he/him) (:they don't do that there? they had to. Well, and I don't know if it's law or anything, but everybody does it in Kentucky. The health inspector report.
Beck (:No.
Beck (:Nope. I've never seen anything like that in an Ohio window.
Dash (he/him) (:Well, hot damn, that's disgusting.
Beck (:Yeah, you never know what's going on. And my grandmother, was the doctor that she was a nanny for. Small town doctors do a lot and she was like the county coroner and she also did some of the health department activities. She wouldn't let her kids eat at the local Chinese restaurant is the point I'm trying to make. My grandmother wouldn't let me eat there either. I did anyway.
because it was delicious. What are you going to do? Not let me have my sweet and sour chicken? Whatever.
Dash (he/him) (:Was, did she know something or was this a kind of like orientalist she assumed that it was dirtier than others?
Beck (:I think it's both. think that they probably had some health code violations, which is very easy to do when you have a restaurant, you know, have a knife in the wrong place or leave a bin in the warmth for too long.
Dash (he/him) (:or you can get them for, because I've worked in a shit-ton restaurants, those things, you sit something on the floor that doesn't have anything to do with food and you can get dinged, right? You sit a bin on the floor.
Beck (:Yeah, or if you use a cup to get ice out of the machine instead of the scoop, or there's all kinds of little things. So, just because they had a report from the health department doesn't necessarily mean they were dirty. But I believe my grandmother was definitely some Orientalism for sure. Because she lived through World War II and things like that. I say those words a lot, things like that. I wonder if anybody has caught on to that. I noticed it the last episode.
Dash (he/him) (:Mm-hmm.
Dash (he/him) (:Mm-hmm.
Dash (he/him) (:yeah.
Beck (:So I'll try to quit doing that.
Dash (he/him) (:What? Say what?
Beck (:things like that.
Dash (he/him) (:as the phrase, things like that. You have no idea how many ums I have to cut out. I mean, I'm definitely like the most, I'm the biggest offender, but we both, think that's just how people talk though. I think any more that's a big feature of our speech are those kind of placeholders.
Beck (:Yes.
Beck (:Right.
Dash (he/him) (:I knew a guy in college who he didn't say, he didn't say like, he didn't say nothing. said, fucking every, you know, anybody that does that.
Beck (:Heheheheh! Heheheheh!
I want to say my sister, but she's not that bad.
Dash (he/him) (:So he'd be trying to come up with something, he'd be like, fucking, fucking, you know, it's like, where in God's name did a habit like that come from?
Beck (:hahahahah
Dash (he/him) (:It was almost, well, actually I don't know what it is.
Beck (:Are you sure he wasn't Appalachian? My sister and her kids have the worst mouths you have ever heard. I have one of my nephews, well two of my nephews are autistic, but Jacob is my sister's. And he was very mild-mannered, very polite, wouldn't say shit, wouldn't say all kinds of words. And now they've got him flipping the bird and saying, you, and just not being himself whatsoever.
Dash (he/him) (:Beck (05:14.301)
I think it's unbecoming. I mean, it's kind of funny, but then again, he's going to get in the wrong situation and say the wrong thing to somebody. And it just worries me.
Dash (he/him) (:Right. Well, yeah, because like people of color, like neurodivergent people are subject to just reactions from authority figures, not equivalent to whatever it is they're doing.
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:Yeah. And Jacob is, is, is pretty, he'll never live on his own. Let's put it that way. he'll always need some supervision and that, and that kind of thing.
Dash (he/him) (:Well, we did something. There was something pretty redneck. did here this past week. that it was, it was cool to see, the first thing since I moved here, seeing something that kind of reminded me of the kind of shit that we'd do back home. the custodian or team facilities, team leader for our student union passed away suddenly. just.
Beck (:I'm sorry to hear that.
Dash (he/him) (:It's real sad, right? And he was not a young man, but certainly not an old one. He was, think, low sixties and we saw him on Tuesday and then Wednesday morning. He had passed in the night. so I came into work and, I work in the building. this, was the student center. And so that's, I went in and my, director of.
Our office was on the phone and normally, you know, I just walk in and wait for him to finish. But he, he did something uncharacteristic. he held up a finger and wagged it at me as silently and made very meaningful con eye contact. And I was like, this must be serious. Cause I'd kick your ass for doing shit like that. Normally wag your finger at me, but he needed, he needed me to understand, please don't come in here. So was like, okay, this is something's going on.
Beck (:Right?
Dash (he/him) (:And so afterwards he was like, I'm, sorry about that. our, our, facilities team lead passed in the night and that was his son and they, so they didn't, his kids, none of his family lived near here. And so they had to jump on a plane. And something I noticed about this, this area that is another difference between where I'm from is that there are not many funeral homes. I don't know if, if where you're from is like this,
but there's a funeral home on pretty much every block where I'm in Jellico I don't know why.
Beck (:There's usually one in every town and then in the county seat there's several.
Dash (he/him) (:Oh yeah, hell Jellico there was six or seven and I didn't know that that was weird until I went somewhere else. Of course, this place is also a lot younger than Jellico was. But anyway, all I have to say is that they needed a place to, they couldn't find anywhere to host a serp, like a receiving friends. You know, they were going to do the, just the graveside interment and they
It's there's not event locations here. There's not a place to do shit like that. And so we offered them the big ballroom in the student center to bring the family and stuff. And they invited the, they said any staff or at the college that, you know, wanting to come and pay respects were welcome too. And so I went by and apparently they had sent, they had decided that it was a Hawaiian shirt themed.
affair. Because I was worried about being underdressed because I wasn't I wasn't staying. was just going to go by. So I had on, you know, just a normal shirt and I walked in and it was the whole extended family. But half the school was there too. Like the vice chancellor, right? The people who the public safety office, like faculty, staffs. It was it was really
Interesting. First of all, it's kind of redneck to host a receiving friends at the person's workplace. You know, that to me is very like, that is very blue collar. and then to just, just the way that the whole thing was right. There wasn't any, nobody was, there weren't sermons, right? There wasn't, you know, and, and fire and brimstone and that kind of things. Cause we have to kind of tolerate that just about every.
Beck (:Right.
Dash (he/him) (:service back home.
Beck (:Yeah, Appalachian funerals are a whole other. I went to a non-Appalachian funeral when COVID basically started. It was the wildest thing that I've ever been to in my life, and it was in Chicago.
Dash (he/him) (:Mm-hmm.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah, they, they had the features of a, of it. They, you know, I think it's, it's become customary to do the slideshow with music behind it now. So they did that. And I knew this guy and he was a very, very cool guy. he, he does, he did something that a lot of folks here aren't very good at, which is he made fun of me.
Beck (:Thank
Dash (he/him) (:he joked with me when I told him I bought this house and I was describing it and he said, somebody gave me money to buy that thing. and I was like, yeah, it's garbage, but it's my garbage. but just, guess, seeing, seeing everybody turn out like that then doing something just really weird. This is a, this is a very like not proper thing to do. It is, it just seemed really redneck to me, right? This is what we have available. This is what we have at our disposal and we're going to make this work.
We made a little taco buffet out of, we got catering, right? You know what it's like to get catering at a university in the summertime on short notice. And they showed up with some, with a taco bar. They were like, they were like, this is what we found. Is this okay? And they had pulled out, the family had, I guess, got together and gotten all this memorabilia of his life. And they had put a little, like a.
Beck (:wow.
hahahahah
Dash (he/him) (:those eight foot tables, bunch of them end to end and just put this kind of like collage of his life out. And it was really cool. And I learned stuff about him too, because I was like, okay, I knew his ex-military, because I saw like a, what I thought was police uniform. I guess it was technically. And I was like, okay, I knew his ex-military, because I believe he was drafted, but, and it's common for them to become cops later. And then I looked at it I was like, what kind of badge is that?
And he was not just a cop, he was a hostage negotiator. And so I'm going through this thing and I'm like, it's not like I thought I knew him really well because I haven't been here that long, but it's like just, I was just really struck by how deep people's histories can be. And to have that experience in this place, it just felt very familiar.
Beck (:wow!
Beck (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:And I'm so also just relieved to find out that this is a place that can do that kind of thing for people who are in need, you know, like, okay, we need something quick. We need something weird. All right, we'll see what we got. want to have the, you want to have it in the ballroom?
Beck (:Right.
Beck (:Have you ever been to any, like, really weird funerals or anything like that, like Appalachian?
Dash (he/him) (:Weird funerals. Well, I guess kind of we alluded to this already, but they're all a little bit off. but by most of the funerals I have been to for, for my family anyway, have been strange because my grandmother owns the, the cemetery and it's on the mountainside that we lived on.
that has the gas mine on it. We lived there for a while and we used to play soccer in that. We would use the headstones as people. This is horrible. I know it's wrong now. I didn't at the time. And so since then we've buried multiple people there and my brother is one of them because you don't, we didn't have anywhere to bury a 25 year old. You have to buy that shit.
Beck (:Right? Yeah, that's my brother's. Yeah, my brother's in what's called the Big Run Cemetery, which is way up on a hill and it's filled with the my my great grandparents and people like that all the same last name that I have. My family tree is more of a two by four instead of any branching or anything like that. So that whole cemetery up there, the whole road I'm related to. So, yeah, I get it.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:I think, military funerals do bother me. the, the just weighty significance and pageantry of them. and unfortunately, since every male in my family served, they're all like that so far. but in the end, the...
Beck (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:21 gun salute is so unnecessary. Have you been in one of them?
Beck (:my God, yeah, my dad was also a veteran.
Dash (he/him) (:It is. It's... What is that for?
Beck (:Like you said, it's pageantry, 100%.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah.
Beck (:The weirdest funeral I went to was on a day. It was a guy he used to be a softball coach and he had his funeral on the softball field in West Virginia in West Virginia. Yeah, that's what he wanted. This is what his wife did.
Dash (he/him) (:Okay
I mean, talk about being buried at work. mean...
Beck (:Well, then his funeral, where we actually buried him, was way out in a holler. And you had to cross like a, I had to cross a creek. It pulled out something on the bottom of my car. I don't remember now what it was, like the muffler maybe. But yeah, I was driving a Hyundai Accident at the time. It was small, but it still shouldn't have bottomed out just trying to drive down the road. But it did.
Dash (he/him) (:shit.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah, getting up to that mountainside to bury somebody was interesting too.
Beck (:Imagine driving a five- did you ever drive a five-speed in the mountains? well then you and it's a I was so glad to get a regular automatic car I drove a I drove a five-speed for ten years and was done That's long enough. bless your love and heart. I love I love cruise control too much
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah, that's all I drove.
Dash (he/him) (:I still have a five speed. I prefer them. no, no, I got cruise control. can't, they're fancier now. You can't get automatic start because it just doesn't work. Yeah. But I go out of my way to get a five, this is actually a six speed. Cause it's got overdrive, but I just, think it is because I have obsessive compulsive disorder.
Beck (:Obviously, right?
Dash (he/him) (:I have, I have this fear, I actually have nightmares about driving automatics because in my, because I have this fear that they're going to do something I didn't tell them to do. I don't like that feeling of taking your foot off of the brake and the thing starts driving. Like I didn't say start driving. I said, no more brake. I don't, I don't, that feeling just creeps me out a little bit.
Beck (:I think I drove your car one time. You had left it parked at my house for somewhere for some reason. And I think I drove your car, the little green cube one. Yeah, I drove it. That's the last time I drove a five speed.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah, that was, that was Green Lantern. Yeah. I had still drove that car when I moved to Carbondale and it got swiped in a, I got, I got hit in a flash flood. Yeah. That car, it had, it didn't even have 50,000 miles on it. I fuck, was, I had still been driving that thing.
Beck (:That's crazy.
Beck (:No.
Beck (:I like that we bought my car with 94,000 miles on it.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah, I bought I got one Now I got it 80 something. Do you name your vehicles?
Beck (:We're still looking, yeah, there's been Carla, my purple holly, my purple Hyundai accent was Hollywood. I had one named Chico Ray, Chico because it was little and Ray was the license plate. And we're looking for the right name for the car that we have now, but we haven't found it yet. So if you have suggestions, I'm open.
Dash (he/him) (:Okay.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah. Well, I named me mine. It has to, I guess, come to you. I named my, my Subi, on the drive up here. Cause I drove from Kentucky to, to, Western Minnesota with four cats in the car. took four days. Yeah. We, we just, camped with them. It was, it was pretty incredible. and so.
Beck (:wow.
Dash (he/him) (:The, says Subaru on the window, but from, but from on the inside backwards, says you're a bus. and so I named, I stared at that for four days. and so I named the car buster after that. we, I have some, we had need to ask some help from the listeners. we need some, some assistance replenishing the wheel of what have you. I have been.
Beck (:Hehehe
Beck (:that's cute.
Dash (he/him) (:perhaps a little too laissez faire with throwing stuff on there that turns out to not really be a thing. And we need to, I take things off after we hit on them. So if you have an idea for a topic of discussion to go on the wheel of what have you, why don't you, comment, you can comment on the episode on Spotify. You can do that now or leave us a, leave us a five star review on Apple podcasts and comment with what,
tell us who your first gay TV crush was, and then give us a suggestion to put on the wheel of what have you. And if you do that, we'll shout you out. But I'm gonna give this thing a spin now and see what we land on, see what's left.
Dash (he/him) (:have we done it before? It's work.
Beck (:I think so.
Dash (he/him) (:Alright, yeah, I think that one needs to come out.
Dash (he/him) (:Dang, I think we did this one. Well, either either we've done this one or we just already talked about it a lot. It's ghosts.
Beck (:We definitely have talked about that one a lot. I don't know how many more ghost stories I have.
Dash (he/him) (:You already told yours. Okay, we're getting low here. Try it again. The weather.
Hehehehehe
Beck (:Is that like a it's a reigning men situation or? That just sounds messy to me.
Dash (he/him) (:It can be. So in many ways too, like the messy it could be is pretty, that's pretty varied, right? It could be for somebody who likes the idea, it's fun kind of messy, but for somebody with my imaginations, it's gore.
Beck (:Great.
Beck (:Yeah, exactly. You'd have people like, have fence posts through their bellies and have them gored all over the place.
Dash (he/him) (:you
Dash (he/him) (:laying like splay legged on the roof, the spine of the house. Well, so where we will be saying Kentucky is that if you don't like the weather, wait five minutes.
Beck (:Yeah, that's definitely true.
Dash (he/him) (:And so it may be, I know a lot of places think that they have unpredictable weather. And so for instance, here in Minnesota, they believe that they have unpredictable weather and I find it very predictable. It's just predictably awful. know, like there's no mystery involved in the weather here. You know, it's going to be awful.
So I don't find that.
Beck (:Like, you know it's gonna be cold here.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah, right. Same thing with in Northwest Ohio. It's like, okay, what season is it? Okay. I know what temperature it's going to be outside. It'll vary a little bit here. They had an adorable little, heat warning the other day. Again, I believe it was 93. I, know, and I know, I don't mean to just fully mock them because I know why they do it. It's because they're not used to humidity here. And we had the corn sweat. So.
Beck (:for how I
hahahaha
Beck (:That I- we're dealing with the corn sweat now.
Dash (he/him) (:This is my first time ever learning about corn sweat.
Beck (:My apartment complex butts up right against a cornfield. Like, the corn sweats are real.
Dash (he/him) (:Is it every year or is this the first year? Okay. Yeah, that's, mean, and I've lived around corn, but it like down in Tennessee and Kentucky, it's already humid. So I don't think maybe, maybe that short circuits it, but yeah, listeners, if you don't know about the corn sweat, it is a phenomenon around large farms, agribusiness generally that produces corn.
Beck (:no, it's every year!
Beck (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:And a certain time of the year, if it reaches a certain temperature, the moisture in the corn sweats and causes a massive humidity spike. that it, yes, it was, it was pretty, cause it's, you know, I've, I've experienced humidity before, but this was, it was real interesting. It was like, it's suddenly for a place that is not humid, cause it's not very humid here, to have that difference. And.
Beck (:It's like trying to breathe through a straw.
Dash (he/him) (:I can tell you too, like the buildings, they're not used to humidity. And so it gets inside them and it can't go anywhere and my house was like a pressure cooker. So, you know, it wasn't that hot, but I think that that probably coincided with whatever the humidity, the corn sweat was.
Beck (:Great.
It'll getcha.
Dash (he/him) (:It about did. It was disgusting.
Dash (he/him) (:But I have also people, I don't know, have you ever lived somewhere dry? I guess it's kind of dry up in Northwest Ohio.
Beck (:Um, we're in a, we're literally in a place with water in the name. Um, I'm surrounded by it.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah, swamp. Are you in the swamp? Is that Toledo?
Beck (:Yeah, well, yeah, it's the Black Swamp, the Black Swamp area.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah. Yeah.
Beck (:the fire lands.
Dash (he/him) (:Well, yeah, Minnesota's the land of a thousand, what is it, 10,000 ponds. Some of them are lakes, most of them are ponds. This one outside my house is not even a mile across.
Beck (:Hahaha!
Beck (:Hey, that's a good lake.
Dash (he/him) (:It's, yeah, I mean it's picturesque I suppose.
Beck (:Not every lake is meant to be boated.
Dash (he/him) (:Now they do though, they get out on it, it's nine foot at the deepest, but they be out on it. I was like, what's gonna happen?
Beck (:My wife wanted to go to a quarry to go swimming and so I did some research and apparently quarries have a lot of water snakes and I was like, nope, ain't doing that. Did you know that you can rent people's pools at their houses? That's a thing.
Dash (he/him) (:I'll do it.
Dash (he/him) (:Is it like Airbnb but for pools?
Beck (:Yeah, you can rent it by the hour.
Dash (he/him) (:Holy shit.
Beck (:So we're gonna do that and rent somebody's pool for a couple of hours and go swimming. Yeah, it's amazing.
Dash (he/him) (:That's incredible. What will they think of next?
I mean, that's gigging, you know? What do I have that somebody else might want?
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:Yep. Well, they're right. I don't want to take my big ass in front of, you know, everybody. I'm not, yeah, I'm just not comfortable, you know, parading around. I'm a very cover me up kind of person. I don't ever show my cleavage or anything like that. So to be in a bathing suit makes me feel very vulnerable.
Dash (he/him) (:Give me that pride.
Dash (he/him) (:I was like that until very recently and now like this morning I just about went outside to take the trash out with darn near nothing on and I had to stop and be like put a shirt on.
Beck (:I think it's so weird that guys are allowed to walk around with no shirts on, but girls are not.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah, it does. It takes some getting used to though. Like, cause after top surgery, I remember being, cause I know guys, especially like young guys after they get top surgery, like they, you can't pay them to put a shirt on. And I was not like that. I was very much like, I don't know if it was self-consciousness or just habit, but now though, if it gets hot, I'm like, fuck it.
Beck (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:I mean, not, I mean, not if I'm around somebody, but that's the thing is I live in the middle of nowhere, but the, like, I guess whether, in, in Appalachia, something that like, there's not like a lot of elevation there, but if you go up a hill, it could be 20 degree difference between the bottom of it.
Beck (:It's like, I only live like 200 miles from West Virginia, but we are consistently 15 to 20 degrees cooler than they are. Summer, fall, yeah, always. And it's, you know, I know it's the difference in latitude and elevation or longitude or whichever.
Dash (he/him) (:Really?
Dash (he/him) (:It doesn't seem like it would be that much,
Beck (:No, I mean 15, like it'll be 85 here and it'll be 93 there or anywhere from 10 to 15 is what it usually is. I've been watching that for 13 years now, you know, that's...
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:I remember loving going outside in the rain. Like rain in general is, it's, I think a lot of people or it could be cultures for all I know, romanticize like the rain, especially.
think there's something.
Beck (:yeah, for sure. I mean, there's even a country song called, I love a rainy night, you know, you know, that song by Eddie, ed, eddy rabbit.
Dash (he/him) (:I don't know a lot about country, but there's a lot of, know there's a lot of songs about rain though, right? Don't think Eurythmics have one. Here comes the rain again. Missy Elliott has one.
Beck (:Yeah.
Probably. Oh yes.
Dash (he/him) (:But it's like, it's a little like being undercover if you go out in the rain. But it's, it also, think it feels very rebellious because rain is pretty dangerous to people whose body temperature can't change, like really shouldn't be changing. we could die of hypothermia just being out in the rain at the wrong time of day.
What did say the name of it was?
Beck (:You're right about that. Of what?
Dash (he/him) (:of the song.
Beck (:I Love a Rainy Night by Eddie Rabbit. You've probably heard it on the radio.
Dash (he/him) (:Okay.
Dash (he/him) (:That's it.
Beck (:That song has come up several times in the last couple of months. I wonder what significance it has in my life.
Dash (he/him) (:you
Beck (:I remember my dad singing it.
Dash (he/him) (:Well, mean, do do are there country songs about other weather phenomena, though? Like other songs about hurricanes or derecho's.
Beck (:I'm sure.
what's the one,
Garth Brooks has one where it's storming and the rain keeps closing in.
Beck (:and the Thunder Rolls by Garth Brooks.
Dash (he/him) (:yeah yeah yeah, I know what you're talking about.
Beck (:Yeah, I had to sing the whole song in my head to get to the title.
Dash (he/him) (:It's like trying to alphabetize something you have to do the whole alphabet.
Beck (:Yeah.
Definitely.
Dash (he/him) (:I think the biggest struggle with the weather for me as a kid and a lot of my, every time I'm like, when I think back on, or when I try to put things in the context of Appalachia, most of the time it goes back to childhood experiences because that was when that experience was most acute for me because of where I lived was so isolated. And so like, I guess the most extreme version of anything I think of along those lines is going to be from living in
in down in Jellico, but there's other places I've lived in Appalachia, not many, but, but the thing with the weather is that it really limited your movements. So because the, like adults, they put us outside all day long for our own good. And so if we were trapped inside, something was going down, some shit was going to happen.
Beck (:I was a reader, so I would voluntarily go in a corner and spend my day reading as much as possible. That was my whole life when I was a kid. My mom was fine with that because my brother was very rough. My brother was of the mind, he would do things like, you talked about breaking into a house with your brother. My brother would make me go first through the window so that I would get in trouble too if I told mom. Like that's the way my brother thought. Like if I went along with him, I couldn't get him in trouble. So
Dash (he/him) (:Hmm.
Dash (he/him) (:Wow.
Beck (:So we did some of those kinds of activities and that kind of thing. And then after some really bad stuff went down, I basically moved in with my grandmother and I stayed there with her all the time and I got to watch a lot of TV and order a lot of Domino's Pizza.
Dash (he/him) (:You
Beck (:The most weather related scar that I have from Appalachia is definitely the snow because we lived on a run, not a holler. A run is a holler with a body of water attached to it, like a creek. And to get up on our hill, you had to go over a bridge, up a hill, and then make a sharp left at the top and then go further out. And anytime, my parents didn't get four wheel drive until well after I left home.
They didn't have a four-wheeler or anything like that. So anytime it would snow and the way the water would roll down, because we lived right on the side of a hill, and so the water, when it would rain or it would snow and then free and then, you melt, that water would come running down. It would go straight down the driveway and a patch of ice would form at the very top of the driveway where it would pool there. So you, even if there was no snow, sometimes you couldn't get up the driveway because you couldn't get over the ice patch.
so I have walked that hill more times than I would ever care to count. And it really scarred me against snow because you'd have to carry the groceries up. You know what I mean? Heaven forbid you make two trips.
Dash (he/him) (:I know. That has to be avoided at all costs.
Beck (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:I remember learning about global warming. That's what they called it when we were kids. I used to be scared of the news. still, you know, I mean, there's not a lot of reasons to love the news these days, but this has always been a thing for me. The nightly news would come on and I would go hide in my room and to try not to hear it because of how scary everything was on it. Cause it was the melting ice caps.
the hole in the ozone layer. It was AIDS. It was, was it? The first, was the cold war, like, you know, the Berlin Wall coming down and shit like that. And then we're right back into a fucking war with Iraq in 91. And so it was just like nonstop tension for me. And I became obsessed with wetter, with...
with rain and I was, I had this OCD is crazy y'all because you will know something like with down deep down in your bones, you will know something and you will also know that that thing is bullshit and knowing those two things at the same time will drive you nuts. So I knew that any day a big wave was going to come crashing over the mountains into my holler and drown us all. And so anytime it would
Beck (:Dash (he/him) (33:58.094)
Anytime it would rain, I would just sit there and wait. Like that's it. The ice caps have melted. It's coming. And I would take, I made a broom handle. put a nail on the end of it and I would go out and pick up all the trash I could find. Cause I was trying to stop the, I guess in my mind, it was a moral issue. If you didn't, if you picked up trash, might spare me. So like that was, that was, think the first like,
Beck (:Aww.
Dash (he/him) (:real obsession compulsion that ruled my life. And I was so young. I was like four.
Beck (:What's the first news story that you remember?
Dash (he/him) (:Um, the challenger exploding. Yeah, we were, that was the day we, my dad had been stationed in South Carolina. Um, or the not, uh, yeah, South Carolina. can't remember. It might've been Georgia actually, but it was right on that border. So we spent a lot of our time in, in whichever state we didn't actually live in. I believe it was South Carolina. Wait, no, it was Georgia. Cause that's where, that's where the youngest was born. Um, but he, he was getting.
Beck (:yeah?
Dash (he/him) (:Uh, I guess his time in the military was up and we were moving back to Jellico. And I remember that day we were selling, uh, or either returning something we had rented or selling, uh, an appliance to a store. And I remember wheeling it in there and you know, those big displays of all the TVs in the, in the, in the windows. It was showing that explosion over and over again. And so it was like a wall of 20.
Beck (:Right.
Dash (he/him) (:Challengers exploding on the loop and I just remember standing there staring at it. So that would have been 86 And yeah that one that's the very first mass media or media, you know thing I remember what about you?
Beck (:Baby Jessica in the well
Dash (he/him) (:Oh yeah, I remember that one too. That was after we moved back to Jellico.
Beck (:Yeah, which I find surprising that I don't remember anything earlier than that because I have an excellent memory. I have memories that happened in my personal life of like three years old, very vivid, but of the world. Maybe I was just shielded from it. I don't know, but I don't have, cause I think baby Jessica was around the same time, 86, 87 in that general timeframe.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:it would have, yeah, if it could be, it was after, it might not have been. Okay. I'm just going to Google it.
Beck (:Some of our listeners might not know who Baby Jessica... What happened was a baby was... not a baby. How old was she? Like... Yeah, she was a toddler. Was playing in her backyard and she fell down in a hole that was a well. And it took, I think, two days and a lot of earth moving equipment to get her out safely.
Dash (he/him) (:Dash (he/him) (36:42.168)
Just two.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah, in Texas, an 18 month old named Jessica fell down into a well in 1987. It was October 14th in her aunt's backyard in Texas.
I'm trying to find how long it took them
Dash (he/him) (:doesn't say...
Dash (he/him) (:But yeah, I took, mean, had oilers, drillers, like scientists, like rescue teams and stuff, like all these people.
spent days at least. And this, think, was also like maybe an early instance of a 24-hour news cycle. It was like you turn it on and it's there.
Beck (:Right.
Dash (he/him) (:But yeah, I remember when they pulled her out.
Beck (:And it was really the beginning, I think, of sensationalism. Not that the news wasn't always sensationalized, you know, from the time that we had news media. But like you said, we had the 24-hour news cycle, new with like CNN and things like that. So they would take the simplest story and really blow it out of proportion. And I think you're right. I think Baby Jessica was one of the first ones to really suffer because of that.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah, and there's a section here called Aftermath that I'm just gonna just, I'm just not gonna read that because I don't wanna know what happened to this poor woman when she became grown up like Jessica. Yeah, that was also terrifying, right? This baby is stuck down in the well. I don't, I mean, I'm not a proponent of not letting your kids be exposed to anything.
Beck (:Yeah!
Dash (he/him) (:I know that there's some folks that go real overboard out there with limiting screen time and stuff and you do you, right? Parent however you want.
Beck (:But if you have a gaping hole in your area, maybe don't let your toddler toddle around it.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah.
Beck (:I mean, I've never had kids, so maybe I'm not an expert on this, but you know.
Dash (he/him) (:But also just with letting them be exposed to the news, the way the news is presented, it is sensationalized now.
Beck (:Yeah, and half of it's advertising anyway.
Dash (he/him) (:Or just, well now it's all, it can be flat out lies because somebody discovered a loophole that is actually genius, which is that it doesn't have to be news to be called news. You can simply name it news and now it's the news. But he, so like Fox news is the, the FCC classification is entertainment because they don't meet that. They don't meet that minimum fact checking threshold.
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:Yeah.
They said in their own filing that basically you'd have to be great like nobody they don't expect anyone to take them seriously That's what they said
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah, Murdoch said that under oath. Well, you'd have to be a fool to believe anything on Fox News is true. So yeah, that's where we are now.
Beck (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah, don't have anything else to say about the weather. Maybe it's time to hear from our sponsor.
Beck (:Hahaha!
Beck (:okay, I've got a good one this week. Let me pull it up here. Sorry, I had it already and then we had to shut it down.
Dash (he/him) (:wait, you did sponsor this week? okay. Got it.
Beck (:No, I didn't, Alan.
Beck (:I just have to open up, I have a running document here. I just have to open it up and get to where I'm going.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah, I'm using the notes app on my, on my phone and my laptop. I should probably get something similar anyway.
Beck (:I'm just using a Word document that I've actually put in a table of contents for so that can skim it easily.
Dash (he/him) (:that's genius. Well, anyway, our sponsor this week is Pleather Cigarette Pouch with fake brass clasp on top. Few things signify consistency, security, and confidence like these indispensable accoutrements. These items boast a functionally ornamental faux brass clasp.
Beck (:Ahem.
Dash (he/him) (:and are contractually obligated to contain at least one Virginia Slim at all times. The air of mystique commanded by the owner of a pleather cigarette pouch is immeasurable. The favorite signature piece of every woman of a certain age in the holler, this unconvincing clutch whispers, I've never had a checking account and I absolutely will light up in the middle of this food lion.
It's perfect for when you hope people think you have a motorcycle or at least a mood ring. Fake leather cigarette pouch is dependable, voluminous, full of loose change and sprinkles flakes of its coating on the arm of whatever chair you sit in like fancy dandruff. As an heirloom, this illegitimate illusion is a queer Appalachian starter kit, unasked for but wired so deep into our memories of home and... Ugh.
Beck (:You
Dash (he/him) (:Unasked for, but wired so deep into our memories of home, the sight of it can calm the nerves, no need to even light up. My own mother's was handed down to her through her mother's side. No one is sure who did the hot gluing though. Act now in our end of summer sale and get the item that says, I've never paid retail and I never will. Use the promo code Queernecks for a free bingo dauber attachment. This episode of Queernecks is sponsored by Pleather Cigarette Pouch.
Beck (:Hehehehehe
Beck (:My mom had one, not Pleather. Hers was not bedazzled. It was like this chainmail kind of material. They were kind of like sequins. Yeah. Kinda, yeah. Mom always had the black with the gold reverse side.
Dash (he/him) (:You bet.
Dash (he/him) (:yeah, I know what you're talking about. Beans.
Dash (he/him) (:My mom, hers was, I think it was real leather and it was embroidered, but it was hot glued together. I loved that thing.
Beck (:That's hilarious.
Dash (he/him) (:It's no wonder we all became smokers. They made it look so damn cool.
Beck (:right? I literally started smoking when I was 16 because everybody else got a smoke break at work and I didn't.
Dash (he/him) (:Yes, I know me too. I was working at McDonald's and you didn't get a break if you didn't smoke.
Beck (:Yeah, I worked at a place called Fazoli's
I had one friend that was smarter than me, apparently, and she would take a cheesecake break every night. But she was a tiny little thing, so she could do it. But instead of taking a smoke break, she would take a 10-minute cheesecake break. And they let her do it, so...
Dash (he/him) (:Because you're by law, actually, I don't know back then if it was what the labor laws were. Actually, I don't know if I was allowed to be working, but I had already started, I told this story already about how I started smoking way too young.
Beck (:Yeah, I was 16. The first time I ever tried a cigarette though, had a paper route and a girl that I had class with, I was probably 10, you know. This girl that was in my class was on the paper route and I came into her house that day and she was like, do you want to try a cigarette? And I was like, yes. So we tried a cigarette and it was gross. And then I thought the genius that I was as a child thought,
that my mom would smell it on me even though she smoked two packs a day herself, you know, and she would never have noticed the smell of me, smell of a cigarette on me. I decided that I needed to brush my teeth and I used somebody at her house's toothbrush.
Dash (he/him) (:and aren't you allergic to mint?
Beck (:That didn't start until I was in my 20s. Like I was around 28 when that started. So it was a later in life acquisition.
Dash (he/him) (:I don't
Dash (he/him) (:That terrifies me about allergies. They can do that. They can just show up.
Beck (:Yeah, yeah. My mom was allergic to it too, so it wasn't really out of the blue. But my mom's allergic to some really weird things, or she was. My brother, his weirdest allergy, he couldn't go, like if he would on a really hot summer day, if he were sweating and would jump into an ice cold pool, he would break out in hives. He couldn't go from hot to cold or cold to hot without breaking out in hives.
Dash (he/him) (:yeah.
There's a name for that. Yeah. Well, talk about, mean, my brother was also allergic to everything. He had pneumonia many times before he was a year old. He just was allergic to the earth. And mom, she tells us a story of she would sleep in the hallway with him in his car seat to try to keep him from drowning in his phlegm.
Beck (:Aww.
Dash (he/him) (:and he stayed real sickly and small for a long time. And then he would get, he was highly reactive to things that normal people might be reactive to. like poison ivy, right? The average person is likely to get the blisters from poison ivy, but he didn't have to touch it. He could walk past it. Like, and the, the error, right? It would be aerosolized because it, does, it perspires into the air.
And he, don't know, I've never, but he was, was allergic. So for a long time, he was just real sick. And then they started, I don't know if they actually, maybe these were invented at this time. I don't know how far back this treatment goes, but, allergy shots, he had to, he started getting allergy shots because they did one of those scratch tests and, and he was so skinny. had to.
He had, they do it all on your back and then they had to move to the back of his thighs and go down his legs to get the whole test done. And he come up like 90 % reactive. I mean, that's a guess, but you know, the story that we were told was that it was a terrifying level of allergic to the entire world. And so he got these allergy shots two times a week for years, I think, but he still struggled. He still struggled with it. And so he has a story talking to smoking.
Beck (:wow.
Beck (:Wow.
Dash (he/him) (:When he was in AIT, before he shipped outside Iraq for the first time, they do two weeks in the field, I guess. And so they, you know, somebody was on fire duty and didn't know what poison ivy was. they, this dumb ass threw poison ivy on the fire and it, it aerosolized the, the oil and he breathed it in and he had poison ivy in his lungs.
Beck (:man.
Dash (he/him) (:And he said that the military doctor was like, I have never seen such, and I don't know what to do. And he prescribed him menthol cigarettes. It was like, maybe it'll help. Like that just sounds, I don't know. mean, you never know. He's a real redneck. mean, and to think that there's not an actual treatment, you know, today they'd probably give you a vaporizer or something.
Beck (:Well, Lord?
Beck (:That's about as redneck as it gets.
Beck (:or breathing treatment or something.
Dash (he/him) (:Like just try mental
Beck (:Wow. Well, that's no, I guess no different than my grandpa. used to keep a quart of whiskey beside his chair for when he had heart pains.
Dash (he/him) (:well, I guess it would, it does thin the blood.
Beck (:Yep, that's what he said. And it's the only time he ever took a swig.
Dash (he/him) (:yeah. Well, my papaw he survived his first heart attack because he thought he had like a muscle spasm. And so he took a bunch of aspirin and it thinned his blood. so that one would have took him out, but he survived it.
Beck (:Yeah, that's what ended up taking my papaw too.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah, the heart disease, you know, there's this there's data that Poor teeth health causes heart disease
Beck (:You mean your luxury bones?
Dash (he/him) (:The bonus bones.
Beck (:Yeah, somebody's someday going to have to really sit me down and explain it like I'm five, why we need different insurance for our teeth and our eyes.
Dash (he/him) (:They don't belong to somebody else, right? It's not like it's my pet, it's the same body.
Beck (:Exactly!
g dental insurance since like: Dash (he/him) (:Mm-hmm.
Dash (he/him) (:Wow. What a weird thing to just throw up our hands and not give a shit about.
Beck (:Yeah. Well, because rich people can afford it.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah, they can just go and pay to get new teeth. I am just a privileged motherfucker when it comes to teeth. I inherited. Yeah, I inherited a good set and I really abused that privilege. So it has been years since I've gone to the dentist. I, I brushed once a day. never floss. she.
Beck (:I am not.
Beck (:I've had two root canals this summer.
Beck (:When I was a kid, I had seizures. They were febrile seizures. And I was on phenobarbital, which they won't give to kids under the age of 13 now because of what it will do. Well, it left calcium deposits in my teeth. I had big brown stains on my permanent teeth when they grew in from the phenobarbital. So I had to get veneers to cover it. And I've had veneers since I was like seven or eight years old. Yep.
Dash (he/him) (:because they shouldn't.
Dash (he/him) (:I didn't know you had veneers.
Beck (:The three front teeth are all fake.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah, it was just the wild west of parenting back then. And doctors too, like we're not talking about the shit parents would do just because they were trying their best.
Beck (:Yeah, putting a medallion with earthworms in it or something around your neck.
Dash (he/him) (:Um, yeah, I had warts. Yeah. I had warts, um, for a while. I planar warts on my feet and, um, my mom would wet an aspirin and tape it to the wart and the aspirin was supposed to like, to eat the wart. Um, and it did, I mean, it ate the whole, it just ate a hole in the toe.
Beck (:leeches.
Dash (he/him) (:and then the wart grew back.
Beck (:That sounds painful.
Dash (he/him) (:I remember it being unpleasant, yeah.
I had a lot of mobility issues. God, what was the dumbest injury you got? Like just redneck shit injury.
Beck (:that's probably when I almost had my arm ripped off by a boat. We were on a lake on my parents' pontoon boat. It was July 4th weekend, and we had a canvas covered inner tube that we were dragging behind the boat where you just get on it and they try to flop you off of it or whatever. And in a move now called the Becky, in my honor, was before they passed. My dad would slow down a lot and then kind of turn and then he would floor it and that would like
Dash (he/him) (:It sounds pretty weird.
Beck (:make the rope really taught and like almost toss you off of it. So he tried that with me and the, this was at my thinnest, so it wasn't a weight issue. But the material for the canvas covered inner tube came loose. And when I hit the water, I basically got my arm wrapped up in the ropes and I got drugged down the lake about 40 feet by my arm.
Dash (he/him) (:god. Dang.
Beck (:I do not recommend that, like, at all. Zero stars.
Dash (he/him) (:Did it, mean, did you have a serious injury or was it like a miraculous escape?
Beck (:My miraculous escape. You can still see the line where the ropes were on my arm. I it tors like I've got some saggy skin under there. There's some like drooping where there were some muscles torn. But for the most part, my arm was green and black for a year. It took a full year for it to heal. There was really nothing that I would when it happened, we went immediately to the emergency room and they put me in a sling. There wasn't really much else that could be done.
Dash (he/him) (:Wow.
Dash (he/him) (:and you didn't go to the doctor or anything.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah.
Beck (:without insurance. That's when I was working at the photo studio and I certainly didn't have insurance then. The next day I went to work and I worked at a photo studio and I did family portraits and baby portraits and kids and all that kind of stuff. And had a toddler come in and I almost tripped over her that day and I had to catch myself on the wall and I stowed my arm again carrying around. Because this was the digital transition years and the cameras were like 25 pounds.
the professional digital cameras and yep, the day after.
Dash (he/him) (:You do that the day after?
Beck (:I was driving a stick when that happened and it was my right arm. That sucked.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:think, I I had a lot of dumb ones, but I remember we were tearing down a barn. And I this is when I was a kid. And I was walking around, do you know those like little white canvas shoes that girls were wearing all back in the 80s? And well, you know, mine were knockoffs, but they didn't really have it was just a thin rubber sole. And then a canvas top. So that's what I was wearing.
Beck (:Yeah, that's mine.
Beck (:Kids.
Beck (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:out there tearing down this barn. And so naturally I stepped on a board, a plank that had a, wasn't an, it was probably a carpenter nail. So those are about three, what are they? Three, four inches. I stepped on it with those shoes on. And so it went all the way through. came out the top of that shoe and it was white.
Beck (:Right?
Dash (he/him) (:So like the blood started just soaking this white canvas shoe. And I remember like just standing there and I'm sure I started screaming or something, but I don't remember this, but I remember somebody, I think it was Kathy, the, the mom of these kids we were hanging out with coming in. She was trying to tell me not to do what I was about to do, which was rip the thing out. And so I pulled it out of my foot and blood literally squirted.
Beck (:man.
Dash (he/him) (:But you know what they did is they took me inside and they poured winter green alcohol on it.
Dash (he/him) (:Cause I don't think there was, well there certainly wasn't a doctor in that holler. But I don't, maybe we went to the doctor later, maybe I got some tetanus shots at some point, but all I remember is that winter green alcohol being poured on that. This is a puncture wound straight through my foot.
Beck (:man.
Dash (he/him) (:And it was like 98 % guaranteed to happen. So what was I even doing out there wearing those shoes? I probably snuck out there. I don't think anybody would have let me. I just, I ruined somebody's day.
Beck (:Hehehehehe
Beck (:Right? One time.
One time, was babysitting my niece. She was probably seven or eight at the time. And I was with my girlfriend at the time and we were going to go to the movies. So we go out on the porch and this feral, tiny baby kitten, you didn't see cats or anything like that on the hill ever because of the dogs. But this baby kitten was on the porch. And when I opened the door, it ran in the house. And so I was like, y'all go ahead. I'll grab the kitten. And so I did. And I grabbed it by the scruff of the neck.
So every cat I've ever had has been fairly domesticated. So when you would grab it by the scruff of the neck, it would basically become docile. Wild cats don't necessarily do that. They freak out and try to bite you. And this cat like flipped around and it bit me in the hand square right between my index and my middle finger, got both teeth in me. And we ended up getting the cat out and I went to the hospital and they basically wiped it off with alcohol and sent me on my way.
Dash (he/him) (:Mm-hmm.
Beck (:And so we went to the movies and my hand kept turning, like started hurting more and swelling. And then it started turning black and I ended up going to the emergency room because I didn't have insurance. They had me come back every day for a week to get an IV drip. it was St. Mary's and in Huntington, West Virginia, because they were religious based, I guess, I don't know. I don't know if another ER would have done that for me, but they did. I came in every day for a week and they didn't even charge me. I didn't have Medicaid or anything.
Dash (he/him) (:Mm-hmm.
Beck (:And that's how we saved my hand.
Dash (he/him) (:That is basically what happened to my hand back in April. One of my cats though, so this house, I don't know how fancy shit works. And so these are real windows and they have these ropes and you raise them up and the ropes are on a pulley system and they keep the thing suspended, right? It's like, it's a kind of, so that it can stand, you can open it and it doesn't need to be propped up. It'll stay up that way.
Well, these windows in here in the, in the dining room, those ropes are cut and I didn't know. I mean, I knew they were cut, but I didn't know that that's what they did. And so I just, I opened the window and I guess, and it was, it had swelled or something. And so it just kind of stuck. so it stayed there on its own for a minute. I thought that was it. And I, I left and I was getting ready to go to work and I came downstairs and I hear.
this like really loud slapping sound. And then my cat Ziggy just screeching for her life. And I look over and it has fallen and she had been in the window and she almost got away, but it got her back, one of her back legs. So she was hanging from this foot that I thought, God, it's broken. This thing has to be broken.
Beck (:Aww.
Dash (he/him) (:I went to, for whatever reason, I tried to grab the handle of the thing instead of the window and raise it up instead of get the top of it. And she latched onto me and she bit straight through my hand twice. And one of them was on the like meaty part of the thumb. So it wasn't as bad, but she got one bite on the, she got her teeth under the veins and the, we were just like putting somebody into hysterics right now with these stories.
Beck (:wow.
Beck (:hahahahah
Dash (he/him) (:If you're not an Appalachian, this is what we do, right? We, we trade war stories every so often. And I don't know, I don't even know how we got here, but, well, I'll cut that short, but just suffice it to say, I also had to, I was in the hospital for two days getting IV antibiotics. got antibiotics in my, in my butt cheeks. I had to take them orally and it was, it was dreadful.
Beck (:Yeah, it's the last time I had to get a tetanus shot, knock on wood.
Dash (he/him) (:I think he's supposed to get a booster every 10 years.
Beck (:Yeah, well, no thank you.
Dash (he/him) (:You don't like shots?
Beck (:I'm not a big fan of, yeah, of extra things like that. I'll get my boosters, like my flu shot and my COVID boosters and things like that. have no problem with that. But to go for extra shots, I don't know. It's not my thing.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah.
I was real nervous about having to give myself an intramuscular injection every week. I thought, okay, this is really it. Like if I, I know that I really want to transition if I can do this. And I got used to it. I still don't love it, but it's every how many years later.
Beck (:Yeah, I give myself an insulin shot every night, but it's from a pen. It's a lot different. It's not like with a, it has a little needle cap that goes on top and then you dial out the right amount of medicine and then you put the needle in and push it down, push the plunger down and it all comes out. so you really don't see anything and the needles are so thin that it doesn't, you don't really feel anything. So.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah, no, not these. Well, after we have made everybody with a needle phobia turn off, let's, how about we hear about this week's noun of Appalachian interest.
Beck (:Alright.
Beck (:Alright, welcome back to Nouns of Appalachian Interest, the segment where nouns are usually simple, but the meanings are layered like a good 7 bean casserole. Today's noun, Dolly freaking Parton. That's it, that's the noun. Born in a one room cabin in Sevier County, Tennessee, with a tin roof and no running water, Dolly Parton came from what she lovingly calls dirt poor roots.
Dash (he/him) (:You
Beck (:And somehow, without ever giving up the twang, the glitter, or the acrylic nails, she became a global legend, a philanthropist, and a queer Appalachian North Star. Now let's be clear, Dolly is more than rhinestones and big hair, though let's be honest, those rhinestones could guide a lost coal train home on a foggy night. She's a master songwriter, a savvy businesswoman, and a quiet revolutionary.
Dash (he/him) (:You
Beck (:She snuck feminist theory into nine to five, built a literacy empire with Imagination Library, and funded vaccine research while the rest of us were just trying not to cry in the Kroger parking lot. And Dolly's queerness? No, she's not queer herself, though I wouldn't rule out a spectacularly queer past life, but she's queer kin She's what you call camp and comfort, sparkle and sanctuary. She exists somewhere between a drag persona and a Pentecostal hymn.
Dolly walks into a room and every closeted kid within a three mile radius suddenly breathes easier like, maybe I can shine like that too. In Appalachia, she's our proof that you can come from a holler and still be heavenly, that you can love your people and want more, that you can wear sequins in the daylight and still know how to fry cornbread in the bacon grease. And perhaps most importantly, she's a reminder that radical kindness isn't weakness, it's strategy, it's survival, it's sparkle with substance.
So today's noun, Dolly Parton, isn't just a person. She's a verb, a light, a glittery compass pointing us all towards something freer, funnier, and fiercely rooted in love.
Dash (he/him) (:Yes. give Dolly all of the flowers and props.
Beck (:She's like a sacred being.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah, she is. you know, you're talking about nine to five and it's feminist messaging. It was also a very anti-capitalist, like, film. I mean, I wouldn't say very anti-capitalist, but it was a, like, I guess, subtle but very clear critique of capitalism.
Beck (:Right. Yeah, she's always been, she got, for a long time, she was the butt of a lot of cultural jokes because she had big boobs and a big blonde wig. But she owned that in a way that I don't think anybody else could have. And all the while she was letting people have their fun, she was collecting her coins. like she, has, I read something one time about how she paid for a bunch of black high schools their band marching uniforms.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:Mm-hmm.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah, yeah, I'm sure. And I know that a lot of people who have funds to dispense with have strategies for their philanthropy, but hers...
Beck (:Like her Dolly wood
Dash (he/him) (:What about Dollywood?
Beck (:She basically made that theme park so that her hometown would have jobs.
Dash (he/him) (:yeah, and income, like this is an economy. And Dollywood and Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg, that whole little trifecta there, that has to be a huge amount of Tennessee's economy.
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:Everybody I know has been to Gatlinburg at least once.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah, I went before I moved up to go to the PhD program. Actually, I went down there into the cabin, in the Smokies and listeners, if you have that opportunity, listen, Tennessee has its problems. There's plenty of shit to criticize and not enjoy about Tennessee, but the Hills, the Smokies, you will never see anything else like it. and, and there's a f**k.
weirdly affordable cabins in nooks and crannies all up and down those mountains that you can rent out, I think even on Airbnb for just a weekend. And just at night, you won't believe what happens in those mountains. I've tried to describe it before and it's just indescribable.
Beck (:Right? Some of the noises you hear, you mean like the frogs and the cicadas and...
Dash (he/him) (:the noises and what happens to your spatial awareness because they're on the side of a mountain, but because it's of the way the Appalachians are shaped and the way, you know, the Smokies anyway are shaped, that you're on a cliffside, but there's kind of a cascade to it. And so there are levels. And so you're up in the middle of the clouds, but then there is another...
place across from you. And so if, if like, say a light shines on you, it projects a 500 foot tall shadow of you onto the opposing ridge. And I every, was like, this is weird. This cabin has a weird feature. Every time I've been there, it's been like that because just of how, how far apart things are there and how the light travels or the way, you know, they're called the smokies because of the moisture in the air. does things to the light.
And so it really felt like I was on another planet and I was like, I felt like a God. It was so cool.
brisket has come to say hello everybody.
Beck (:As has Wenda.
Dash (he/him) (:Well, maybe it's time to wrap up this episode. What should we say to the folks before we go?
Beck (:Be good or be good at it.
Dash (he/him) (:Right. And if you can't do that, don't get caught. Help us, help us replenish the wheel of what have you. Help us, you know, be a little more, we didn't really know that this was going to become a thing. So I wasn't super serious about the stuff I put on that wheel. So now that people are listening, maybe we should try a little harder. So yeah, give us a, give us a five star review on wherever you listen and leave us a comment and tell us something to put on the wheel.
Beck (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:and was Bill and Ted say be excellent to each other?
Beck (:Yes, be excellent to each other. There's something strange afoot at the Circle K.
Dash (he/him) (:That's almost true. And yeah, and when I heard that I was like, that is almost always true though. You could say that at any given time.
Beck (:Every time I see a circle K, I think of that.
Beck (:Yeah, yeah, that's that's one of the lines from Bill and Ted though. There's something strange afoot at the Circle K. I had never even heard of Circle K when I first saw that movie.
Dash (he/him) (:soon.
it's a Kentucky thing. Well, I won't say it's a Kentucky thing, but that is...
Beck (:They're everywhere up here. Does the K stand for Kentucky?
Dash (he/him) (:No, I don't think so. But you know, in my mind it did in Kentucky, it was circle K and Speedway here. It's Casey's.
Beck (:Yeah, we, it's a circle case and they're getting a lot of sheets up here.
Beck (:Oh, you don't know about Sheetz? Sheetz isn't just a gas station. It is basically a full to order restaurant. You can get all kinds of, you can get cheeseburgers, you can get hot dogs, you can get all that kind of stuff made to order. Gas is usually cheaper at Sheetz than anywhere else around, like by a lot. Gas was $3.29 at Kroger the other day and it was $2.37 at Sheetz.
Dash (he/him) (:So this is kind of like a Buccees
Beck (:but not not as as as the same. Not that not as big. Yeah. Yeah, there's no t-shirts inside of that I know of. I've never seen t-shirts. But you see people wearing Buccees t-shirts and things like that. There's no Sheetz nuggets, anything like that. There's no brisket being cooked. It's all, they have kiosks where you go up and you order it. You can get like a cheeseburger and some mozzarella sticks or you know that kind of thing.
Dash (he/him) (:Merchandise-y.
Dash (he/him) (:have several.
Dash (he/him) (:Well, hell, that sounds awesome. Well, if you can't think of anything to put on the wheel of what have you, tell us what your favorite local restaurant or gas station is. We just want to hear about y'all's weird corners of the world too.
Beck (:Hehehehehe
Beck (:Amen.
Dash (he/him) (:Well, let me let you go.
Say hi to your mom and them
Beck (:Don't rush off.
Alright, well have a good week my friend.
