#6 I hope you got air conditioning
Dash and Beck discuss a variety of topics ranging from personal experiences with pets during Independence Day celebrations to the complexities of liberalism and racism in America. They share personal anecdotes about their educational journeys, the importance of community spaces, and the beauty of summer memories, including the magic of lightning bugs. The conversation also touches on the role of allies in anti-racism efforts and the need for support in communities facing crises.
Donate to support Appalachia flood relief:
https://www.appalachianky.org/flood/
https://appvoices.org/helene-relief/
https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/kentucky-and-appalachia-flood-relief-fund/
https://www.arh.org/floods
https://mtnways.org/
Takeaways
Pets react differently to fireworks than humans do.
Local events can be a mix of fun and frustration.
Social gatherings often reflect community dynamics.
Online interactions can lead to misunderstandings.
Liberalism can be complex and often misinterpreted.
Racism is a pervasive issue that requires active engagement.
White privilege complicates discussions about class and race.
Allies play a crucial role in anti-racism efforts.
Community support is vital during crises and disasters.
Education shapes our identities and experiences.
Chapters
00:00 Fireworks and Furry Friends: Celebrating the Fourth
04:28 Street Parties and Small Town Shenanigans
08:17 Online Drama: Navigating Social Media Discourse
11:55 The Complexities of Liberalism and Class
15:51 Supporting Communities: Action Beyond Words
19:26 Navigating Identity: Coming Out and Family Dynamics
21:58 Education: From Struggles to Success in Grad School
22:44 The Impact of School Experiences on Identity
27:03 Creating Community: The Need for Non-Bar Spaces
31:07 The Role of Creativity in Education
35:57 Career Aspirations and Friendships
42:41 Summer Adventures and Fond Memories
51:03 New Chapter
tags:
Independence Day, pets, community events, online drama, liberalism, racism, white privilege, anti-racism, education, personal growth, summer memories, lightning bugs
Transcript
Did have a good fourth?
Beck (:Well, we did. We hung out here. We have three dogs, so we couldn't really go anywhere. had to, you know, it was, the people had fireworks all around us.
Vern Cooper (:you
Vern Cooper (:Did you done 'em
Beck (:No, we just, when we went to bed, we play a thunderstorm at night and it's really good white noise for covering over firework noises because you know, the thunder's boom and stuff. And so even my Chihuahua ignored it. So that worked pretty well. No, we just, we just rode out the storm. It was fine.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah, my cats were I don't it's hard to compare cats and dogs really in terms of how they react to stuff because they process totally differently. But that I've got such a variety of personalities with them and I think also like intelligence levels. And so two of them were chill and two of them have been in a an existential crisis for like 72 hours.
Beck (:Mm-hmm.
Vern Cooper (:have not left the bed. So and here too, I, maybe this is everywhere, people can't wait until dark. And so they're just setting stuff off during the day, but you can't see it. So you're just letting off a bomb.
Beck (:Right. Right.
Vern Cooper (:What are you getting out of it? I mean, I don't know. know what people get out of it. Lighting stuff on fire is fun.
Beck (:And we're kind of isolated where we are. We're right up against a highway and there's really nothing but like a new housing complex behind us. So it was people here in the apartment complex that were setting off the fireworks and I just wanted to go out and whoop them at one point because they just went on forever, forever and ever and ever.
Vern Cooper (:I if there was fireworks here, well there were fireworks here, but they were not Friday. They were Thursday night, which I thought was strange. Friday got rained out, and maybe they knew that was gonna happen. It was thunderstorming Friday, so there wasn't much going on. Last night though, they called it a street dance. And this town is so goddamn small that they just block off the whole street, the street that goes through it.
with like some construction cones, charge you $10 to walk inside the construction cones. And there's a shitty band playing covers of Lynyrd Skynyrd wearing American flag, like clothing. I think that again, they're kind of cosplaying. Like I think they think this is what we do. They think we block off Main Street and charge $10 to come to a shitty cover band.
Beck (:Ha
Beck (:So you found the red days.
Beck (:Yeah, right.
Beck (:hahahahah
Vern Cooper (:Like, I've never seen anything like that in my life.
Beck (:They're basing it off that song, The Watermelon Crawl.
Vern Cooper (:I don't know where they're getting I mean and maybe it was a fundraiser or something I'm trying to come up with a reason why they would do something like that, and I maybe they're bored also there's nothing to do here and so every single one of them just turned out and Gave their $10 to walk inside the orange cones to listen to the band Meanwhile, I'm trying to go to sleep at midnight and the band is still playing and I can hear every word They're saying I heard their shitty cover of sweet Caroline. I heard their
Beck (:Hehehehehe
Vern Cooper (:the tone-deaf cover of Hotel California. And to be honest, I enjoyed all of it, but I would not have paid to experience it, especially as somebody who don't drink.
Beck (:Right? Right.
Vern Cooper (:And I saw a couple of tents, like maybe vendors, maybe there was food, which I'm sure you also had to pay for. And so I was like, even if I did have disposable income right now, I don't think that's what I would do with it.
Vern Cooper (:And it just felt, it was kind of cute in one sense, right? It's almost like a little playdate that they all had and charged each other money to come to.
Beck (:That's true.
Beck (:Yeah!
Vern Cooper (:And somebody's drunk niece is up there singing covers of of Lynyrd Skynyrd And it did sound a lot like karaoke because the band was actually good and she was awful. And, know, so was like, okay, you guys are having a great time and that's whatever. It's good, clean, fun. You're standing around. There's there was, you know, safety, you know, paramedics around and because these folks drink like Minnesotans, they fucking tear it up.
Beck (:Karaoke.
Vern Cooper (:and I was like, they're not driving anywhere though. So whatever have you party, but I shan't be attending.
Beck (:Yeah, I can't get into those kind of street parties, that kind of thing. It's just not my... I've never been much of a drinker, so it's never been my forte. My friends like doing that kind of stuff when I'm around because I can be their designated driver. I'm well known to be a designated driver. We went to... One time we went to Chicago. We went to Pride in Chicago, but the night before there was a street party kind of thing, like you're describing. There was like a town festival.
Vern Cooper (:and they're only fun if that's what you do.
Beck (:And we went to that and everybody was so drunk. It was wild. Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:I went for my run about... It was late, so it was probably 8pm. I went for my run. And it says light really late here because it's so fucking flat. Like, the sun has to fully go behind the horizon, almost to the other side of the planet before the light's gone. And so I'm like, okay, whatever. I'm bored. I'll go for a run. And that's how I saw it. They were setting up for it. And I was just running by, listening to them get set up.
Beck (:Mm-hmm.
Vern Cooper (:But it really did strike me as like almost like a function. You know, this was not a party. This was not a yee-haw. This is not a hoedown. It was a function. Started at 9 p.m. sharp, ended at 1 a.m. sharp and just they had the fun they specifically set out to have. if that and maybe if I had had somebody to go with who could act a fool and on, you know, in my stead.
That would have been more fun, but I don't know any of these folks. And they gave me dirty looks when I ran by.
Beck (:Alright.
Vern Cooper (:They all know me now. They know I'm the tranny that lives on third street. I try normally nobody's out when I'm out of my run, but they hear that all were and already been day drunk. I'm just like, hello.
Beck (:Don't mind me.
Hehehehehe
Vern Cooper (:And I just certainly wore more clothes. It's just like trying to cover up.
Beck (:Hehehehehe
Beck (:Hahaha!
Vern Cooper (:but I also have a case of the don't give a fuck lately. I don't know about you.
Beck (:Yeah, it's summer right now, so I have it real bad. I'm sleeping so much, it's ridiculous.
sleeping a lot and I'm spending a lot of time on my class that I'm teaching for online. This is the first week of the second one that I'm teaching so there's a lot of discussion boards and that kind of thing that you have to deal with. So I've been dealing with that and at least gives me something to structure my week, you know, because otherwise I'm not really doing much of anything besides working on this some, you know, writing the the nouns of interest and that kind of thing.
Vern Cooper (:Mm-hmm.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah.
Yeah, well, and I also have, I'm giving fewer and fewer fucks about what other people think. and I am a state employee, so that's not good.
Beck (:So, so am I right now. And I'm over 40, I'm approaching 50. And when you hit 40, your give-a-fucks fly out the window. And as you approach 50, like you just... I went to McDonald's this morning for breakfast with bed head, no bra on. Like, nobody has seen you look worse than the people that work in the convenience store in the McDonald's closest to your house. You know?
Vern Cooper (:Yeah.
Beck (:I don't care what those children that work at McDonald's think of my bedhead. Before I would have at least brushed it, you know, or put a hat on or something. So, I don't give a fuck.
Vern Cooper (:Can I tell you about some online drama I got into on our account, the Queernecks account? It was bound to happen because a lot of folks really aren't adept at recognizing tongue in cheek or the of thing we're doing here. It's just not for everybody.
Beck (:yeah, sure.
Beck (:no.
Beck (:Right.
Vern Cooper (:And so it was a matter of time before someone would mistake us for like this hardcore MAGA. You know, I just with, you know, the way the the Hill Jack or whatever thing is set up and, but, you know, these the Texas flood has been trending as it should because it's terrible. And
There's a phenomenon happening on threads where self-described liberals are gloating about, and I know we see this all the time, about natural disasters or just generally bad things that happen to its southern states. They pretend it's red states, but it's southern and central Appalachian states.
The info that I responded, I finally on one of them, I pointed out that I can't find my own.
Vern Cooper (:Someone posted the MAGA down there in South Texas where they're flooding, are crying and waiting for FEMA to arrive with a bunch of like laughing emojis. And if you don't know, dozens of people, predominantly children, have been killed by this flood. And so this just annoyed me and I took a break from my stressful, disartating writing.
And I said, replied, I never see ghoulish shit like this about any non southern or Appalachian red states. We all saw that map in November. I'm old enough to remember this shit from before MAGA. White liberals have always thought poor people deserve death. And,
I think a lot of folks were confused about why I said white liberals. I think they just read the liberals part and not knowing that the white feminist critiques and like that we're talking about a particular kind of liberalism that only values certain appropriate lives. And boy, they came for me. It was, and some of them, a lot of them were just clearly going through it and they thought that I was what they, know, and I'm like, yeah, I mean, if you think that that's what I am, say your truth. That's whatever.
Beck (:I'm
Vern Cooper (:cause they were like, you and your orange fuhrer somebody was really, really coming at me for being a Trump supporter. And I was like, that's fair. Flame me. If that's what you think I am, go for it. Get them licks in. but other folks wanted to sort of argue.
Vern Cooper (:And one of them in particular, there were two in particular that really got me.
Vern Cooper (:The first one is... This is really out of order.
Vern Cooper (:Okay, so this person said, No, you didn't the people wanting living wages, assistance for housing and food, affordable health care and children are not the ones wishing death on the poor. And I replied in all caps, the person we're all replying to is
Vern Cooper (:And then, but this one said, make this make sense. Liberals can't possibly live on both sides of the fence. Either we're bleeding hearts who want to help and save everyone, or we think poor people deserve to die, which is it? Last I checked, liberals are the party that supports social services and feeding the poor.
And so was like, that's when I realized they thought that I was some MAGA person.
Beck (:Let's make that clear to our listeners. We are not MAGA people.
Vern Cooper (:No, it's so yeah, the first I replied, I was like, I just realized you think I'm MAGA FTD, ACAB abolish ice and stay in school kids reading is fundamental. And I said, but since you seem kind of simple here, I'll make it make sense. A certain type of liberal that are usually white and middle class only hates or thinks deserves to die in this case, the MAGA in insert politically agreeable region, not the ones who are their neighbor.
Beck (:Hahaha!
Vern Cooper (:And so that made them even Madder It was, it was wild. And so they said, I still agree with your statement. I disagree with your statement. I think the white liberals you were referring to are probably not as liberal as you'd make them out to be. And so I said, wow, I haven't seen the no true Scotsman in a while. And I said, may I direct you to exhibit a the reason for the season, the very thread upon which we tread the person identifies as a liberal and is laughing about dead children. came here to gather and you came here to defend them. Not only is everything I said accurate, you won't be able to wiggle out of being associated with them for the rest of your mark.
even with them, even if you were more artful with logical fallacy.
Vern Cooper (:First of all,
Beck (:See, I go, I've given up arguing with people like that on Facebook because one time I was arguing with a guy and he said something about our forefathers and I wrote back something and he really meant our four F-O-U-R fathers that are on Mount Rushmore. He thought he, and I was like, wow, you cannot argue with strangers because you don't even know it's not worth it. So I go for like the jugular on stuff.
Vern Cooper (:You
Vern Cooper (:Hmm.
Vern Cooper (:goodness!
Vern Cooper (:yeah.
Beck (:Like there was a guy named Ethan Hunt and I said a better name for you would be Mike. Like I go through and make comments like that.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah, I was really tired of a lot of them after a while. this, he said, well, I'm not replying to your comment about White liberals. I'm saying you claim you saw evidence of this rhetoric before MAGA. So this person thinks MAGA thinks Trump invented the phenomenon we're talking about here.
Beck (:Oh!
Vern Cooper (:And I said, yes, you might say I stumbled upon the roots of America's oldest class war while earning my master's in rhetoric and PhD in American cultural studies. If you're interested in a book to help the healing journey, give Nancy Isenberg's white trash ago. it's so fucking good listeners. you want to, if you want a tale about, really just, it isn't only about white trash, although that is, you know, she's, she's sort of examining that construct.
Beck (:I bought that and have not gotten around to reading it yet.
Vern Cooper (:it's, literally an almost like a reparative history of America. you know, the one that we just weren't taught. And the last one I was like, I'm tapping out. Somebody said, last I checked liberal blue states fund the third world countries that are the South. And I said, darling, wake me up. And somebody mentions blue States. You elitist fucks can sit on your Thrones and pat yourselves on the backs quietly. This is between the red state liberals.
Beck (:Hehehehehe
Vern Cooper (:Everybody that actually nobody else replied to me Like I didn't block anybody I didn't do anything I didn't mute the thread and that was the end of that
Beck (:That's funny
Vern Cooper (:Like, okay, we need to clear this up because no, you're not going to catch. mean, and I understand what it's like to. To. To be angry that something bad happened to someone who. It doesn't, I don't know who doesn't. It's like they they want to. How would you describe what is going on here? Like you know what I'm talking about?
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:I think sometimes they, that people think that people in the red states are holier than now because of the Bible Belt and things like that. think that they believe that the so-called liberal people believe that people in red states deserve what happens to them, like you said, because
They are so high and mighty and they do try to stay claim the moral high ground on a lot of things, even though if you look at things ethically, they clearly aren't. the
Yeah, I think, I don't know what I'm trying, I'm like you, it's difficult to put into words exactly what we're trying to say. But I think it's definitely a phenomenon where...
Beck (:I don't know what I'm trying to say. I'm sorry.
Vern Cooper (:It's like they're frustrated. They think we let the team down, right? They're frustrated with red states in general, but there's something about the, cause it goes along with this rhetoric of like you voted against your interests or something.
Beck (:Yeah, the the leopard won't eat my face party, right? Have you heard about that? The yeah, but then the you know, the leopards eat their face and they are completely in all of it and.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah. And I it's instead of.
I really don't know and listeners if you know if you know why these like capital L white middle class liberals cannot stop.
Vern Cooper (:celebrating the bad things that happen to poor people. There's no other way to phrase that.
Beck (:Do you think it's an us versus them kind of thing? when you're like, there's a lot of times this happens like with different high schools, like we were talking about local areas having grudges with each other, you know what I mean? There's really no beef there, but it's a cultural thing because they think that it's us against them and there must be something wrong with them or they must be bad or something or they would join us. And I think it's the fact that
red state people claim a different identity and they claim different morals and they claim different everything really different mores different
Vern Cooper (:Well, America, America is so fucking huge that the regional differences between, you know, one to another, because, you know, for instance, the state I'm in is fucking empty. It's enormous. So the difference between me in the next town, like the, the, goes on in this town and the next town, which is, could be hours away. It could, it's huge. so yeah, it could be a cultural thing.
Beck (:Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:And I think there's something even more complicated here, which is actually kind of Nancy Isenberg talks about this in the book a little bit, the history of this rhetoric, which is that like what I call capital W whiteness, right? That, that proper white middle-class liberal, they used to call it the bleeding heart liberal, right? There's a level of privilege in that.
Beck (:Mm-hmm.
Vern Cooper (:They also don't, as long as white trash exists, those folks don't have to be the bad white person. They don't have to be associated with racism. They don't have to be associated with the history of the Civil War, right? These people here, they don't know, they don't have to live places where something like the Civil War happened.
And so like, it's kind of, they kind of need white trash to own the sins of all of America's history so that they themselves don't. Yeah. So they themselves don't have to be associated with it they don't have to do any anti-racist work on themselves.
Beck (:to be good white people.
Beck (:Right. There's a Ted talk and I can't think of the guy's name right now, but he talks about, there any good white people in the room? And it's, the fallacy that many people believe that because they don't tell racist jokes or something like that, then they certainly could never be a racist person. They wouldn't have a racist bone in their body. Right. But like, like I describe it to my students, when we talk about race, if you think about American culture as a swimming pool, right. And the water is the culture. Racism is like the pee in the pool.
When you jump in, you're going to get a little on you no matter what you do. And if you swim in American cultural waters, you're going to get some racism on you. You're going to, you're going to internalize that and there's, there's no way to do it. So that's when you have to acknowledge that most white people have some racism in them based on the way that we were socialized and the way that we viewed media, the way that, you know, our culture is structured. Racism becomes a part of that fabric. It's been.
generationally handed down for centuries now. And, you know, there's not much you can do. So once you realize that you are part of the problem, you have to start doing the work of being anti-racist and start calling out, you know, when you see racist ideology at work or when you see racist practices at work, you have to work on
breaking down the structures. if black people could solve racism, it would have been solved already. That problem would have been taken care of. But since they can't, we need white people to get in there and help because we are the ones creating the problem. We can't solve it without actual white people doing the work.
Vern Cooper (:Absolutely.
Vern Cooper (:and
Vern Cooper (:And don't tell me about what you haven't done. I've never used a racial slur. I've never, I've never, you know, there's a bunch of people, another thing is people bragging about not knowing anybody who's bragging about what's happening in Texas. And I'm like, I don't, shut the fuck up.
Beck (:Right.
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:Sorry.
Vern Cooper (:Cause you know, it doesn't matter what you haven't done. I need to know what you have done and does it, does it add up to anything? So in the, that spirit, have gathered some resources for supporting Texans in, the flood relief. And a lot of our listeners are also not from Appalachia. I've noticed on the analytics that it's a lot of people who, and
Beck (:Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Vern Cooper (:Who live in in the wider you know America and it could be those folks are part of that queer Appalachian diaspora we were talking about or they're just they find this interesting or they hate listen either or. But you folks may not know that Appalachia is pretty is currently also destroyed by natural disasters and that happens pretty regularly so.
In the show notes for this episode, I'm going to put some resources for supporting efforts to help as much as we can in those regions. There's nothing to do for folks who have lost their lives, but people have lost things that can be fixed, like homes and cars and jobs.
Vern Cooper (:Put your money where your mouth is or shut the fuck up.
Beck (:Amen. Amen to that. I find myself giving all my money to animal shelters. It's who I give my money to.
Vern Cooper (:Now we're done preaching.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah, yeah, it's time to give some to some people, I think.
Beck (:I'm also part of an Appalachian, it's rooted in where I'm from, in that part of Appalachia, mutual aid group. Yeah, I help with that sometimes too. But I find myself doing more with the animal shelters, because those babies can't help it.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah, yeah, there's there's the Eastern Kentucky chapter. I was just talking to them.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah, that's one of the ones that I looked up. Timmy Tyler Childers also has started one with some folks called Hickam Holler. It's kind of newer and they're actually doing a lot right now. yeah, that's we try to be proud of the ones that that don't, you know, for the record, JD Vance is not Appalachian. Rot in hell.
Beck (:neat.
Beck (:Hehehehe
Beck (:Nope, he's not and he can kiss my ass. Yeah, I hated his book when I first read it. It's garbage.
Vern Cooper (:Yet do not read Hibliy Elegy. Read.
Beck (:Yeah, don't if you do go to a library and get it don't buy it if you have to hate read it. Yeah
Vern Cooper (:Yeah, pirate that shit. Pirate that shit. Read Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingslover.
Beck (:Yeah, that's really good. Except the last page, and we won't talk about that because it... Yeah. Or can we talk about that? There's that spoiler alert. Talk about the ending of that book. Okay.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah, let's not spoil it. was, all, just even what it was, I found out like what she was doing with it kind of spoiled it for me. I would love to have found that out for myself. So, yeah.
Beck (:Yeah, I went in totally blind and I loved the book until the last page.
Vern Cooper (:Hmm. Yep, read Dorothy Allison.
Beck (:That's what I haven't read either. I've read a of bell hooks though. Audre Lorde.
Vern Cooper (:Hell yeah.
Vern Cooper (:I've read a bunch about monsters lately.
Beck (:Yeah, I bet.
Vern Cooper (:It has made me miss teaching. Well, I still got to revise it and defend it, but.
Beck (:I'm so proud of you. I'm so proud of you.
Beck (:Yeah, but you're 95%. You got over the hump, man. And that's that's freaking amazing. The rest of it's downhill from here. You know, you're coasting. So good on you.
Vern Cooper (:It was terrible, but yeah, thanks. I'll be a doctor hillbilly.
Beck (:I'm almost one, so that kind of counts.
Vern Cooper (:Doctor. We're going be Doctor Hill Jack soon. I have a new drag name.
Beck (:What is it?
Vern Cooper (:A bela hey.
Beck (:eheheheh...
Vern Cooper (:Totally stolen. Kind of.
Beck (:My favorite, my favorite drag name of all time is Ivana Hump.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah. Yeah, it's stolen from someone on TikTok posted something that wasn't. She said she was a, you know, a hibli girl. I don't remember her name. Mia the Goth was her name. And she said she's a Goth lady. And she said a woman told me that she liked her style. But when she started talking, she sounds like a Bela Hay.
Vern Cooper (:like motherfucker that's pretty funny
Beck (:That's funny.
Vern Cooper (:What would your drag name be? Not Avon- not Ivann Hump
Beck (:No, god. So I'd be in drag as a boy. Ugh.
Vern Cooper (:Not necessarily, mean, it's drag has thrown gender out the window, the binary anyway, out the window. Like whatever it is, the performance is the performance.
Beck (:laugh the whole time trying to be a man. I would. Like, I would be terrible at that.
I don't know, I'd try to talk like this or something, I don't know. When I get a cold, I'm like, baby turn them lights off and...
Vern Cooper (:I
You
Beck (:The years of smoking did damage and I know I'm almost a baritone. No, I'm still an alto. But yeah.
Vern Cooper (:When, when I started, testosterone, I didn't tell anybody. didn't tell my family anyway, cause I only seen them, you know, every few months only talk to them very, you know, not that often. And, it started to, my voice started to change and I would, for a long time, I would do voice vocal exercises to raise it back up, on the way down to Kentucky and that stopped working. And so finally I was like,
And I still hadn't told anybody that I was on testosterone and so anytime somebody would ask Are you got a cold or something? If it's visually I would say yeah, yeah, I'm sick. I got allergies and I was like no, can't be sick forever And so I started going no, this is just what I sound like and I refused to explain further Until everybody got so frustrated with me they stopped asking and then like 18 months later
I texted my parents in a group chat and I said, I'm getting a top surgery tomorrow. By the way, I'm trans and I've been on testosterone for 18 months. I just like info dumped on them.
Beck (:Well, God, how did they take that?
Vern Cooper (:my dad had figured it out. I don't know. And mom was like, they were supportive, I guess. Mom was surprised though, hadn't figured it out somehow. My dad is not a fool and pays very close attention. Not that my mom is a fool, but I think she would take things at face value sometimes. And so just leave it alone. But yeah, he, figured it out. And so he was like, yeah, I figured something was going on.
And he went, I don't, I will try, but I don't know if I'll ever figure out the pronoun thing. And I was like, okay. He goes, but what do you want to be called? And, at first I, it was just the name I had always been going by. Cause I had that name before I transitioned because transing transitioning wasn't a thing before I, when I just decided to live differently because I didn't like the experience I was having living as a woman. And so I.
I chose a nickname that was a version of my birth name and then just did gender however I felt. then 10, 15 years later I learned about transitioning and so I just kept the same name. And so I told him, well, I'm just gonna keep that nickname I've had. But now, do you know what they call me? His name.
My family calls me my dad's name.
Beck (:Well, that's different.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah, which, so they wanted a boy, I was the oldest, they wanted a boy, they had planned to name me after him. And then they chose a sort of female version of his name, which is not, to me, didn't see the, but the nickname of that was the same as his. Yeah, so I'm like, God damn it, I should have just changed my name to yours. I know, that was.
Beck (:That's neat.
Beck (:You're a junior now!
Vern Cooper (:I still consider actually doing the paperwork and just, but then I would have to rebrand again and I'm told for that shit.
Beck (:Changing your name is difficult. I did it when I was a kid between my junior, between junior high and senior high. I changed my, from my birth name to my adopted last name. And it's even just your last name is to change it is ridiculous. People have to get, have to get, people have to know you all again. And then I've added my birth name back to my name, back to my email signature and put it on my door to my office and things like that. And people get really confused if you have two last names.
But I feel like for mine at least, both of my fathers had some influence on me and they both deserve recognition of me as their daughter. So that's why I use both last names.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah, and I think that that, I mean, for someone with a sort of a dual family experience like that, that makes total sense.
Beck (:Did you add animals to the wheel of what have you?
Vern Cooper (:Well...
no not yet, but right now I can't find the wheel of what have you. Again.
Vern Cooper (:It's like every time I close it, forgets it's here.
Vern Cooper (:That's not good.
Beck (:There's a new Donkey Kong coming out next week.
Vern Cooper (:I know nothing of this Kong of which you speak.
Beck (:I have the old one and I've been working on it. I'm kind of interested in the new one. It's just something to do. It could be heroin. I'd rather do Donkey Kong.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah.
Beck (:That's when I get addicted to like, like I have a 200 day wordle thing going on, streak going on. And I tell Shannon, it could be worse. I could be addicted to heroin or something, you know, at least it's just a game on the New York times.
Vern Cooper (:Okay, I think this thing has uninstalled itself.
Vern Cooper (:doesn't make any sense.
Vern Cooper (:All right, let's do a random word generator instead.
Vern Cooper (:All right, let me mark this so I know where to.
Vern Cooper (:start editing.
Vern Cooper (:Man, I gotta pee, hang on.
Beck (:Okay.
Vern Cooper (:Hey
Vern Cooper (:Glad I did that, brisket was locked in there.
Beck (:no!
Vern Cooper (:He doesn't panic, all right.
Beck (:Goodness.
Beck (:We had fresh corn for the first time this summer.
Vern Cooper (:Okay, Silver Queen.
Beck (:I don't know, we got it from the farmers market out in Grand Rapids. It was super sweet and delicious. All we leave it in the husk and bake it in the oven for 45, 30, 45 minutes. It's perfect.
Vern Cooper (:Mm-hmm. All right, I'm gonna spin.
Vern Cooper (:Have we had this one before? It landed on school.
Beck (:I don't think so.
Vern Cooper (:Interesting. Well, school it is.
Beck (:School is how we met.
Vern Cooper (:That's true. A place that I never thought I would go to grad school. I honestly thought I would never finish my bachelor's. It took me 10 fucking years.
Beck (:same.
I got kicked out of school the first time I tried to, I went five semesters and it ended up getting kicked out because I never went to class, never. And then I waited 10 years and went back and I killed it. Absolutely killed it.
Vern Cooper (:Right. Yeah. Yeah. When I struggled like hell for a decade to get out of undergrad with a 2.8 GPA and
Vern Cooper (:I've been just fortunate with people who wouldn't give up on me, I guess. It's somebody that was one of those folks who was a faculty member at this graduate school there at EKU. She saw me at work one day. I was a mechanic at a bowling alley. And she was like, you need to apply to grad school. I'll write you a letter. And I was like, I don't understand the words you're saying.
I kind of did though, I was like, I just got out of school. And then I was like, and what for? What am I doing? And so I looked into it and you had to have a 2.75 to apply. So I was like, But she wrote me a letter and some other folks who remembered me wrote letters and I took the GRE and just murdered it.
I don't know why I can take tests when I can't there's the things that I can't do are pretty acute. But when I can do something, it is shocking. And so I scored like 98 percentile on the GRE. And so they gave me they funded me even though I had a 2.8 GPA coming in just on the strength of the letters and then my scores. And then I. Excelled in grad school in a way that.
Beck (:Wow.
Vern Cooper (:I never would have guessed based on how undergrad was for me.
Beck (:undergrad and grad school are so different. The way that it's set up, the requirements, the expectations, the community that you build is all so different that it really is a different, yeah, it's a different experience.
Vern Cooper (:Mm-hmm.
The cohort.
The cohort model is a really strong support. It's a really strong retention engine. And then the mentorship component of sort of almost you're like, you know, six degrees of Kevin Bacon removed from Peership with people who are doing the work you want to do. And that's just a, it's a more inspiring or motivating type of thing. So yeah, I've had a 4.0 in grad school.
Beck (:I didn't manage that, but I've done okay. I did well enough to stay in the program. But I got hazed by one particular professor. That's one of the beasts that I got. That was not a fun experience. I had to sit next to him or near him the other day in a faculty meeting and that was kind of weird, but yeah.
Vern Cooper (:that's the worst man. Like yeah, when you become co-workers with somebody who bullied you.
Beck (:Yeah. And he's been through a lot since that time, so I doubt he even remembers me. Like his spouse died and then he had a pretty major medical emergency. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yep.
Vern Cooper (:it was him.
I know who you're talking about. Dang.
Beck (:Basically, he heard me say that somebody was like, I have to get an A in this class. And I was like, you're in grad school, honey. As long as you get, you know, past the class, you don't need an A. Grades aren't that important. If you can graduate with your PhD, nobody's going to be looking at what your GPA was, right? That was the point I was making. He overheard me say that. And let's just say he made sure that I understood how important a grade was. So yeah. Yeah. Big time.
Vern Cooper (:Damn. Fuck him.
Vern Cooper (:I mean, post, is it post-secondary? Is that what higher ed is?
Beck (:Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:That was one thing. The school school that I think of is the like elementary school. And I don't know if it's because that's when I was the most miserable. Like am I the kind of person that thinks of the worst version of something if you say it to me, but somebody says school, I'm having flashbacks like Vietnam flashbacks to being hunted for sport.
Beck (:Right.
Vern Cooper (:I maybe there is something, I mean, maybe I should ask myself, like, it can't only be PTSD or whatever that makes me.
that influences how I reflect on the experiences I've had in all of learning.
Beck (:Do you feel like that carried into grad school or?
Vern Cooper (:think that.
Vern Cooper (:You know means like specifically with being bullied for being queer or just. I don't think so I think that so for me like.
Beck (:Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:That kinda stops when I went to college, weirdly. Or maybe I cared less. People still called me shit when I went to college, but I didn't feel trapped with them.
Beck (:I feel like people got more pissed off at me for being a feminist than for being queer.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah, it was the stuff I was saying and doing that made people mad, not like, you know, fucking their wives.
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:Though when I participated in my first National Coming Out Day thing, we all put our names in a paper at the school paper at Miami. And there were like 12 of us that did it. And now it's become a tradition. They do it every year. And now it's two pages of names. But when we did it, yeah, when we did it, there was very few. I felt very brave for doing that. So I've still got a copy of that in my hope chest.
Vern Cooper (:Wow.
Vern Cooper (:bit.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah, in college, I went to my first gay club, like a not bar club, like a school club. They couldn't be official back then. Like you still had to, they were still meeting in secret. You still had to call the information desk, like the police officer there to ask them where it was meeting and give the code word or whatever. And sometimes we would write notes in the back of library books and that's, you know, where
Beck (:Stay.
Vern Cooper (:we would be meeting that kind of eased up. Of course I was an undergrad for 10 years, but, but also I, once I found out that, that those kinds of social clubs were just meat markets, that stopped going.
Beck (:Yeah, yeah, I learned that too. That's the only time that I went to a gay bar in college. Like, I went to the Stonewall in Huntington, West Virginia, maybe a million times. And that was while I was in college. But Miami was like four hours away from there. Miami of Ohio, not Florida. And so we would go, we went to a bar in Cincinnati once and me and my friend Jonas, he's passed now so I can talk about him.
He, we went to, we, was before Google was a thing and we heard tell of a gay bar in Cincinnati and we went there and it turned out to be like a leather bar. And it was me and Jonas, two preps, two preppy looking kids just plastered against the side of the wall. And then I went to a, one of the, the gay club meeting things. And afterwards I went to the dining hall and I ran into some girl that had been at that meeting and she was like, do you want to go to the bar? And I was like, sure.
Vern Cooper (:Mm-hmm.
Beck (:So we took off and we went to Dayton and we went to some gay bar in Dayton.
Vern Cooper (:You had to travel to find gay bars.
Beck (:There was nothing in Oxford. Oxford is smaller than BG.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah, my cousin went to school there. Yeah, where I was.
Beck (:It's a party school for sure. It's a Greek centered. I found the other five hippies on campus and made friends with them.
Vern Cooper (:went to the party school of Kentucky. And it was 20 miles south of the oldest and most famous queer bar in the state. It's actually a national. Yeah, it's a national historical marker now. And so we and of course, there were many, many others. This is Lexington, Kentucky. And so I've been trying to explain to people here, they think the the Twin Cities is a is big here in Minneapolis. And I'm like,
Beck (:wow.
Vern Cooper (:This is really small. is barely half a million people. Like, please, you're just used to places that have 35 people in them. And so this seems enormous. But not only are the Twin Cities, you know, they're just normal sized cities. They are definitely it's it's metropolitan. It's a city, but there's not that much interesting stuff to do in them. Like there's not nasty places to go. And so but yeah, we went up to Lexington all the time and to go to the gay bar.
Beck (:Right, right.
Vern Cooper (:because back then clubs were 18 and up.
Beck (:Yeah, I lived in Lexington for a short period of time. So I got to know the gay bars there for a while. I was single when I lived there. Yes, I sure did. Yep, I sure did. The girl, I was seeing a girl that was her favorite place. So we went there several times. And yeah, yeah, I remember that very well. My time in Lexington was tumultuous. The world, the universe was telling me to move back home.
Vern Cooper (:Did you go to Mia's? The lesbian bar? Monday night karaoke.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah, all the lesbians went to me as...
Beck (:Like everything that could happen that was bad happened to me in that short time that I lived there and I ended up back in West Virginia. but I liked Lexington. It just didn't like me.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah, Lexington, it is a place of occurrences. there are time, there are places, think, times and places to be in Lexington that are simply just best left to, to in the rear view mirror It's interesting to have, I've had epics of, of Lexington gayness and it's kind of a scene.
Beck (:Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:But I also used to, I told this story before, I used to sneak out of the house in high school and go down to the gay bars in Knoxville. So there was a gay bar down there called the Underground. It may still be there. And it was literally under train tracks in Knoxville by the Norfolk Southern Trainyard there, not too far from the Greyhound station. like, it was pretty easy. Knoxville.
Beck (:Do you mean Knoxville or Lexington? You said Lexington, sorry. I was confused.
Vern Cooper (:yeah, Knoxville and Lexington were the same distance apart from where I lived in high school. Yeah, so Knoxville was actually a bit closer. So yeah, we would go down there and just go dancing. Wasn't really trying to get anything into anything, just trying to be around people who weren't going to think I was a freak. Or at least if they did, they would find it attractive. They would find that
Beck (:Got ya. Got ya.
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:Right?
Vern Cooper (:They would find sameness in that.
Beck (:You know, I think that's why gay people are so drawn to gay bars. Not just that we are looking for ass or whatever. It really is the place of community that you can go and be normal and not be the weirdo walking down the street or, you know, the token gay friend or whatever it is. I just wish there were, and this is a common lament, I just wish there were more places that were gay and lesbian themed that weren't bars.
For like people are like me and you that don't drink very much. What are we supposed to do? Like, why can't we have a library group where we all meet at the bookstore and mingle over smoothies or something? That would be much more enjoyable.
Vern Cooper (:And that's a question for the ages because I know of times and places and people who've tried various things. And I think it is the self-sustaining factor of a bar is that it is a business. And it will make money off of people. So it'll always be there. Something like a group.
I think so like a straight person might not know what this feels like to wish you could talk to somebody who knew what you were going through or had experienced what you were going through and also only have access to that if you put in a ton of emotional labor and a lot of time and effort.
creating it and sustaining it yourself. so queer spaces are labors of fatigue and extreme emotional expense. It's not weird to me at all that they can't weather all of the things that come for them, I guess. And this is...
why we need allies, but that's one reason why the business model works. Because if nothing else, that will always be there in all, it'll be run on something other than your effort and your labor.
Beck (:Yeah, that makes total sense. We can still wish for it though. Yeah, wouldn't that be great? Wouldn't that be great? With nothing but rainbow sprinkles?
Vern Cooper (:or an ice cream shop. A queer ice cream shop.
Coffee shops have got potential. I mean, I coffee shops are it in a lot of locations. What's something else they don't do here?
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:Yeah. We're here. Not in Toledo anyway. They do have coffee shops all over BG, but not in Toledo. Unless you want Tim Hortons or... I think college towns are known for having coffee shops and stuff like that. And Toledo isn't so much a college town. They probably have them near campus.
Vern Cooper (:It's so weird.
Vern Cooper (:There's one in this college town I work in here and it closes at noon.
Beck (:wow.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah, if you are the person who manages to think of the business first, because there's no competition here, because there's so few people, there's one of everything, you set your own rules. There's a restaurant nearby here on the door, the stenciled on hours, say 11 to close whenever we decide that is. They will not say what time they close because it's just whenever they feel like it. Okay.
Beck (:Yeah, okay.
Vern Cooper (:If you're the only version of a thing, then you get to run the game.
Beck (:Yeah, I guess so.
Vern Cooper (:What was your favorite subject in school?
Beck (:English for sure. English for sure. I loved writing and I loved poetry and I loved reading and I loved language. I loved all that kind of stuff so the English arts classes for sure. I also liked shop class lot but that was you know in lieu of physics so yeah we had we had it we were lucky to have my senior year
Vern Cooper (:We didn't have shop at my school.
Beck (:You could take as an elective, you could take like pre-calc and physics. And I already knew I'd already gotten into Miami. So I was like, fuck that. I'm taking an easy year. And so I took the like two required classes. And then I took, I dropped out of choir. So I took shop class and I took whole mech my senior year. It was really fun. I made a door hanging that hung on the door until we moved. It was still hanging there when we said goodbye to my mom's house.
eight months ago. said our last name on it and had a sheep on it. It hung right by the door and I made that with my very own two hands when I was in high school. I used a router thing to cut out the little letters and made a sheep and my mom was like, of all things, why a sheep? And I said, it represents that nobody gets any sleep in this house. And she loved it. She put it up on the porch and it stayed there for 30 years.
Yeah, what was your favorite class?
Vern Cooper (:Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:choir.
Beck (:See, that would have been mine, but I had a hag for a teacher and she hated me, so...
Vern Cooper (:That was my first year in choir, eighth grade, but she retired that year. And the next year we got one of the most like sweetest and encouraging teachers I have ever had who happened to retire from, it was called Cumberland College at the time now it's University of the Cumberland. She had been their chamber choir director for like 30 years and she retired and then I guess couldn't stay away. And so she took the job at the high school there. She was awesome. And so I,
Beck (:Yeah, no.
Vern Cooper (:I was like, it was the first time I was in a club that felt safe. Like I knew my job, I was good at it, I was a soprano one. So I was untouchable. Like everybody needed me.
Beck (:Yeah, I was just an old alto. I mostly was in choir because you had to take either art or choir and I can't draw to save my life. I'm a little bit better after taking three drawing classes in undergrad. I had to take those for my major. I can at least draw you a basic representation of the thing in front of me, you know, which is something that I couldn't do before. It's a skill that you can learn. really is. Drawing is a skill that you can learn.
Vern Cooper (:Not me.
Vern Cooper (:I think I might not have the patience for it because there have been times where I've wanted to, I took it in undergrad too for an elective or something. you know, when forced in a structured setting, right, because studio classes for three hours long, to sit down and actually do it and pay attention to technique, I was like, okay, I can put together something that is not terrible. But on my own, I didn't feel that spark of...
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:Yeah. Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:I just can't rest until I draw this apple.
Beck (:That's where I'm with cameras. That's how I feel about cameras. For a long time I couldn't put down my camera. And I miss that. Yeah, it really is. Because a lot of people are like, well, you have a good camera so you can take good pictures. You can take good pictures with one of the disposable cameras. can take... Yeah, that's how I do most of my... Have you ever seen any of my flower pictures? They're all on my cell phone. All of them.
Vern Cooper (:feel like that is creativity.
Vern Cooper (:with your phone.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah, I love your flower pictures.
Yeah, whole movies have been shot on cell phones.
Beck (:Yeah. And I don't even have an Apple. I have an Android. So yeah, well, it's cheaper and I'm not a, I'm a poor. So.
Vern Cooper (:infidel
Vern Cooper (:The other photography, like I just loved hanging around the art building. like in school, something I remember about school, it was more than just like being in classes and learning. was spaces. It was having access to things that I, I was very aware that I would never have access to that shit again.
Beck (:Yeah, me too.
Vern Cooper (:and just wanting to have it all.
Beck (:felt so lucky to be there because Miami's campus is so beautiful and I was the first one in my family to graduate from high school. You know what I mean? So going to college, especially a fancy one was my wildest dreams come true. And then I screwed it all up by not going to class, but I still, would sit, I wrote a lot of poetry when I was there, just about how I felt and how the red brick made me feel and how beautiful that was. And, you know, that kind of thing.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah.
Beck (:It's still a gorgeous campus to go visit. You'll, Robert Frost said there was never a more beautiful place.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah, when I worked for, I ran McNair program there. Yeah, I ran it actually before, before you, the year you worked there. And so I took the summer research kids to visit Miami and yeah, yeah. And it is gorgeous.
Beck (:I worked for them.
Beck (:yeah, so you've been there? Yeah, it's beautiful. I lived, I don't know if you remember anything about it, but they have what they call Western Campus, which is on the east side of campus. Why they call it Western, I still don't know. But it's where all of the art kids lived and all of the theater kids, everybody like that lived over on Western Campus. yeah. that's, except for my freshman year where we were put in assigned dorms and I lived on East Quad.
Vern Cooper (:You
Vern Cooper (:Mm-hmm. That's why. Because it's queer.
Beck (:I lived in Western, I lived in West dorm the other year and a half that I was there at Western campus. It's a beautiful place. I never lived off campus in Oxford. So.
When we went back to do our undergrad, we lived in Hamilton because it was a lot cheaper.
Vern Cooper (:What clubs were you in? In school.
Beck (:Like high school? In high school, high school I was in all of them. I was a junior and senior class vice president. I was in the drama club. I was the president of the drama club. was, no, the person that read your book didn't like me. So I didn't get in on that small schools. Yeah, well really was. I was in French club. I was in Japanese club. I was in business club. You name it. The only one that I refused to join was Bible club.
Vern Cooper (:Well, whenever.
Vern Cooper (:Yearbook.
That's always a politics game.
Beck (:I refused to pretend that I was a Bible thumper.
Vern Cooper (:There was, yeah, was a Christian, well, there was more than one, but Fellowship of Christian Athletes was at my school and all the athletes were in it. And it was, you know, of course we were expected to, and I never would join it. And I'm sure that wasn't why everybody hated me on my sports teams. I'm sure it was a lot. There's plenty about me not to like, right, from a high schooler perspective.
But yeah, I was never gonna be a part of the cool, the in-crowd of athletes because I just could not. What is the point? What is a fucking Christian athlete? Talk to me about the crossover there.
Beck (:Yeah.
Do you want to know the real, the history of it? When the Spanish flu came around, it was the first epidemic in America, right? And they, they realized that to have healthy white women, to have healthy white babies, they needed to bring exercise into the culture. And that's one of the reasons we do high school sports and young youth sports and things like that was to bring exercise into the lives of American people, especially the white ones so that we don't.
get outnumbered. It's the replacement theory. That's racism. Yeah. That's one thing.
Vern Cooper (:Jesus Christ. And that's why the fellowship of Christian athletes exists.
Beck (:Well, I mean, I'm sure it's related. You know what I mean? Because it's based in... Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Vern Cooper (:the right kind of athlete.
Disgusting.
Beck (:Did you have to go to school at like 730 in the morning? That was so that the football team could practice after school. That's the only reason because places like France, they don't start school till nine. Studies show that teenagers work better later in the day.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:Hmm.
Vern Cooper (:Well, you know-
Weirdly, almost every year of high school, we were on a different schedule.
my high school was so small. Yeah, they changed it. They went from block to the one where you do seven classes a day. And then they tried the multiple lunch thing and that didn't work. so yeah, I don't know if they ever did settle on something. But yeah, there was one year.
Beck (:That's different.
Beck (:That's what we were on.
Beck (:We had two lunches and seven or eight periods through that today. I think there was eight, eighth period was, yeah, there were eight periods.
Vern Cooper (:The block schedule, the block schedule is a nightmare because it's only four classes a day and they are hours long. And it's, and then you, it's, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and then Tuesday, Thursday. And so that's how you get all your classes in a week. And it was dreadful. I hated it. I fell asleep in almost every class.
Beck (:Yeah, that's the schedule. That's the schedule I'm on teaching this coming semester. I have two Monday, Wednesday, Friday classes and two Tuesday, Thursday classes, which I would rather have two day a week classes because you can get more, more accomplished in my opinion, in an hour and 15 minutes and trying to break it into three 50 minute classes. because you can let out early when things are slow, but then you have a whole nother class to deal with. There's just a lot more.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah.
Beck (:There's a lot more class time when it comes to having the three a day or three a week.
Vern Cooper (:Did you ever, when you were in school, would you have ever thought that you would be a teacher?
Beck (:You know, I was the kind of kid that would come home and play school after school. So yeah, I, I never really put, I wanted to be a lawyer when I was a kid, because that's what my dad wanted me to do. So I never really thought about it, but if I would have taken two seconds to think about what I could actually do, it would have been teacher. My best friend from high school is a middle school teacher now. so we both, and then there's a lawyer. My other best friend is a lawyer.
Vern Cooper (:You
Beck (:That's one thing I'm proud of that I came from a, we both come from a place where there's a lot of drugs and a lot of junkies and not one of my friends turned out to be a junkie, not one.
So we did all right. Yeah. There's a nurse anesthesiologist in there. One girl works in project management for train, like the heating and air conditioning corporate thing. My friends have done well for themselves.
Vern Cooper (:That is impressive.
Vern Cooper (:Every. Yeah, somehow my brother, think me and my brother were the only junkies that came out of our family, like the whole extended family, all of my cousins. I know, I know, I know. It's just that none of the rest of my cousins had that phase, right? And they also all went to college, literally all of them. Yeah, like.
Beck (:Honey, you're about to be a doctor like
Beck (:Very few of mine did.
Vern Cooper (:I think one might have been a trade school, you know, they all did some sort of post-secondary learning. And that's just like, the shift between generations there is wild.
Beck (:My s- My most-
Yeah. My most successful cousin went to DeVry.
Vern Cooper (:I saw a job post at DeVry earlier and I was like y'all are still kicking it around.
Beck (:Yeah, he's got a great job. He, just moved him to New Jersey right out of outside of New York City and he's got a beautiful home. He's, he's, he's a wonderful guy on top of it. So I have, I have over 40 cousins. So to have one that I really love, he's great. The rest of them, meh.
Vern Cooper (:Well, speaking of school, our sponsor this week is somewhat on on that topic, which so, you know, just kind of fortuitous. This week's episode is sponsored by Summer. As in that for which school hath been let out. No more pencils darn near worn down to the nub. No more 40 year old textbooks. No more bullies treeing you on the playground. No more teachers asking, are you a boy or a girl?
Summer is the time to live free or die, or perhaps both. A small death to the self, so wretched and confusing for the rest of the three months. And for us, that's a lifetime. In summer, we tempt fate for adventure. We build all what we can imagine, even if it starts out as a castle and winds up more of a dilapidated fort situation. We draw deep, reflective breaths, the first in what feels like years. We feel the reality of ourselves in brief, crashing waves.
Will I ever be normal? Will I ever be happy? We inhabit the minds of our future selves, wondering whether we will ever be them. Summer is for sneaking into the house during the day when you're not allowed until dinner time and out of the house at night. Summer is for play of the solitary variety and of the tense and necessary communal variety. In summer, we are the best left unseen and heard of our kin. Our ventures are our own with no ruling thumb of law to judge our fate.
No matter what you say, you face only your peers, so judge your deeds and words accordingly. In summer, with such freedoms, when someone calls you a faggot, you can fight them or fuck them. Whichever they are asking for.
Beck (:hahahahah
Vern Cooper (:Summer is a time for replenishing your reserves before returning to the war. And summer is a time for pride. Long live summer. This week's sponsor of Queernecks.
Beck (:Nice. Well, the Nouns of Interest are related to that. So let's go ahead. We are. Okay, all right. Well, hey there, y'all, and welcome back to Queernecks, where we open a mason jar full of Appalachian culture and let it fly around the yard. Today's episode of Nouns of Appalachian Interest is glowing, literally, because we're talking about lightning bugs or fireflies if you were raised on a porch without sweet tea, I guess.
Vern Cooper (:We're just on theme today. Why don't we just launch right in? Let's do it.
Beck (:Now, some people out there will try to tell you that lightning bugs are just bioluminescent beetles. First of all, rude. Second of all, technically true, but I don't go around reducing your grandma to an elderly biped with strong opinions and an apron full of hot grease, now do I? Now, lightning bugs are pure Appalachian magic. Every summer evening, just as the cicadas start their nightly scream therapy and the air gets thick enough to chew, the lightning bugs rise from the grass like tiny glowing miracles.
Some folks catch them in jars, others just watch them blink around like they're spelling out the Morse code for bless your heart. If you grew up and if you grew up queer in the hills, well, let's be honest, those lightning bugs weren't just bugs, they were a vibe. They were tiny glowing signs that beauty can show up in the most unexpected places, even in your own backyard where everything else felt a little too loud, a little too hot, or a little too hard to explain. Now it's important to note that no two Appalachian families agree on what to call them. You say lightning bug, your cousin says firefly and mammal,
Well, she calls them God's little porch-lanters and said they show up just in time to remind us we forgot to bring in the laundry. But whatever you call them, they belong to summer and to us. And let's not forget about the Appalachian science lesson that gets handed down from generation to generation. The kid asks, why do they light up? And the adult says, because God gave them a little flashlight in their butt. Now go catch one and don't smash it this time.
Vern Cooper (:you
Beck (:Of course these days people want to know if it's ethical to catch lightning bugs in jars. Look, I don't know much about ethics, but I do know that if the lid has holes in it and you let them go after supper, you're still doing better than half the people running for office in this country. So here's to the lightning bug and the bug that blinks, the memory that glows, and a little natural reminder that sometimes the quietest things in the world still know how to shine. Join us next time on Nouns of Appalachian Interest when we ask the hard-hitting questions like why do all of our uncle...
uncles owned deer antlers, and where exactly did that yard couch come from? Until then, keep it queer, keep it weird, and keep chasing the light.
Vern Cooper (:Yard couch.
Beck (:That's a West Virginia thing if there ever was one.
Vern Cooper (:We god, this is pretty brutal, but I'm just gonna tell the truth and shame the devil We used to play what my mom called lightning bug baseball which You know at dusk the lightning bugs will hover about strike zone height and we would get our wiffle ball bats and just Until they were covered in the biolupinescent butt goo
and then run around the yard with our bats covered in the goo.
Beck (:poor bugs.
Vern Cooper (:I know, I still feel bad about it.
Beck (:I think there was one night, you know how Facebook Memories reminds you of things, of different posts. Well, I had one where I'd gone to mom's after bingo one night and I was the first one to get there. And there are no streetlights at mom's house. It's out in the middle of nowhere. And I pulled in the driveway and even the porch light was off and I looked up in the sky and there were maybe 10 million stars out and just as many fireflies in the trees. And one of her dogs came up and rested its head on my leg. It was a perfect little hallmark moment, the whole thing.
Like, nature was putting on a show just for me, and I was so glad I was there to watch it. You know, it was beautiful. Fireflies.
Vern Cooper (:That is something that, yeah, they're... So my girlfriend is from the Pacific Northwest and they don't have lightning bugs there. And I thought lightning bugs were everywhere. And so she moved here and sees them for the first time. And she's like, I have heard about these things, but never like...
I just, don't know, it didn't click or it didn't, you know, I'm not sure what her experience was, but what she seemed to be saying was that like she knew about them, but it like wasn't prepared for what it actually would look like to see lit up bugs flying everywhere. And then one night we were hanging out at, you remember Andy? Yeah. You know how, you know which plant got consumed the most over at Andy's? Well.
Beck (:Right?
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:I do, I do.
Vern Cooper (:We were over there and neither of us partake that often but we did and I was like hmm I would like to leave now because it was just a party and I don't even really do those that well and I was and I was like no I'm not feeling this I want to I want to go to a second location and she was like yeah okay she was feeling it she was having a great time right she was like we were in two different levels and so we walk outside and the lightning bugs are everywhere and she's just in raptures freaking out.
Beck (:Awwww.
Vern Cooper (:chasing them everywhere and I was like, I need you to calm down. I have to get us somewhere and you're acting like you're only here because somebody left the door unlocked. But I was trying not to like crush her joy because she was really having one of the, I mean, that was a one in a lifetime experience, but that was rough for me.
Beck (:hahahahah
Beck (:Hahaha!
Beck (:You
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:Yeah, I like driving this time of year at dusk because when you look out over the fields, the cornfields and things, there's just millions of them. They're everywhere here. It's my favorite.
Vern Cooper (:I will say that like summer is responsible for some of the most beautiful single visuals that you can, that I remember experiencing like, yes, fall is beautiful in Appalachia. Winter is striking and interesting in Appalachia, but summer has the most opportunities to see really interesting things, especially if you are getting up to shit. Like, because the most beautiful stuff happens when you're a-
like not entirely sober and it's in the sun's coming up or something, you know, and you're on top of a ridge you're not supposed to be on. And so summer is that perfect combination of fucking around and doing stuff you probably ought not to be doing and having the full like nature be on full display.
Beck (:Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:think there's a lot of reasons why a lot of my fondest memories come from summer.
Beck (:Yeah, swimming pools and boats and firecrackers and marshmallows and... We always had a pool. My mom, she always kept a pool. So... Except I can... When we moved to Lucasville, we didn't get one till after I moved out. That took a few years. But the last... After I moved out, they got one. They built a deck on the outback and they put up a pool for the grandkids.
Vern Cooper (:Wow. I knew somebody with a pool.
Beck (:And so it was just an above the ground, you know, four foot pool or whatever. growing up at the house that I grew up in, we had an in-ground pool with a diving board and the whole thing. Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:Holy shit. We sometimes would get those little plastic pools and put them in the trailer park, but we had to take them up at end of the day or they'd kill the grass.
Beck (:Yeah, we were the only house on the block that had that pool though, so we were pretty popular. Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:I bet.
Vern Cooper (:Well, I reckon we ought to get to wrapping this yarn up.
Beck (:Ahem.
Vern Cooper (:It has been wonderful to talk with you after the week I've had and just in general.
Beck (:I'm so proud of you. Keep kicking ass, my friend. You're doing it for both of us, so good for you.
Vern Cooper (:We're gonna get there. And listeners, God knows what you might hear from me as the months progress through this dissertation process. And keep a lookout for the show notes. I'll put some links on ways to help out Texas and the floods and Appalachia and their various natural disasters. And just keep an eye on our space and follow us on Instagram at Queernecks.
Beck (:Hahaha
Beck (:We sure appreciate it.
Vern Cooper (:And share this with somebody. Let the folks know that we're halfway between bitching and halfway between telling jokes.
Alright, well say howdy mom and them.
Beck (:Alright, thanks you, bye!
