Bowling, Baseball, and Backrubs
Summary
In this engaging conversation, the hosts explore various themes including the spontaneity of their podcast format, listener engagement, academic journeys, gender dynamics in sports, cultural reflections through baseball, childhood outdoor experiences, and valuable life lessons learned from driving. The discussion is rich with personal anecdotes and insights, creating a relatable and thought-provoking dialogue. In this engaging conversation, Beck and Dash explore themes of personal reflection, cultural significance, and the emotional weight of memories tied to holidays and family traditions. They discuss Labor Day and Memorial Day, sharing personal anecdotes that highlight the complexities of grief and trauma. The conversation shifts to the significance of yard sales as a form of community and resourcefulness, before delving into the cultural symbolism of mason jars in Appalachian life. The episode concludes with reflections on family, communication, and the legacies we leave behind.
Takeaways
The show lacks a preview format, leading to spontaneous discussions.
Listener feedback is appreciated and incorporated into the show.
The evolution of language reflects changes in technology and culture.
Academic journeys can be challenging but rewarding.
Gender dynamics in sports highlight ongoing issues of representation.
Baseball serves as a cultural mirror for American society.
Outdoor experiences shape childhood memories and personal growth.
Driving experiences teach valuable life lessons about safety and responsibility.
Personal stories reveal the complexities of identity and upbringing.
Engagement with listeners fosters a sense of community. Labor Day is a celebration of workers' rights and personal milestones.
Memorial Day can evoke strong emotional responses due to personal loss.
Triggers can come from unexpected places, impacting our emotional state.
Yard sales serve as a means of community support and resourcefulness.
Mason jars symbolize tradition, practicality, and Appalachian culture.
Cleaning out a parent's house can lead to a minimalist lifestyle.
Cultural phrases can vary significantly and may confuse others.
The importance of making connections across generations is highlighted.
Humor and storytelling are vital in sharing personal experiences.
The conversation emphasizes the significance of family and shared memories.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Show Philosophy
04:32 Listener Engagement and Suggestions
07:36 Academic Journeys and Challenges
13:21 Representation in Sports and Gender Dynamics
18:14 Cultural Reflections in Baseball
22:10 Outdoor Experiences and Childhood Memories
32:48 Driving Experiences and Lessons Learned
42:13 Celebrating Labor Day and Personal Reflections
43:20 Memorial Day: Personal Trauma and Collective Memory
46:18 Triggers and Unexpected Memories
48:51 The Significance of Yard Sales
01:00:35 Mason Jars: A Symbol of Appalachian Culture
01:14:15 Closing Thoughts and Reflections on Family
tags:
podcast, conversation, academic journeys, sports representation, gender dynamics, outdoor experiences, driving lessons, cultural reflections, listener engagement, personal stories, Labor Day, Memorial Day, trauma, yard sales, Appalachian culture, mason jars, personal stories, family, memories, triggers
Transcript
Someone pointed out that at the beginning of our show, we don't really do any preview stuff. So a lot of people will go like, this is the show where on this episode we'll do this. And I was like, because we never know what we're going to do. That's really fair feedback. I suppose you can introduce us. We could preview the show by saying we will.
Beck (:Right?
Dash (he/him) (:Shake a magic eight ball to tell us what to talk about.
and
Dash (he/him) (:just bullshit a lot. I think different shows have different philosophies about how they choose their titles. And we haven't had a singular philosophy yet, which is like whatever comes out whenever it's time to pick a title.
Beck (:Isn't that what the title's for?
Beck (:Right?
Dash (he/him) (:Well, and thank you to several people have given us ratings on iTunes and they don't call it that anymore. It's Apple podcasts. and we've got a couple of reviews now from, nice listeners and some people have given us five star ratings on Spotify as well. So thank you. If you're one of those folks, we really appreciate it.
Beck (:I read a thing the other day, it might have been a meme, talking about how just to even understand the word podcast, how you have to understand where it came from with iPods and standalone music players and all that kind of thing. It's becoming the language of old times, like saving a file or hanging up the phone or rolling down a window, all things we don't do anymore.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah, I remember the first time I saw a student write in their paper the word googled as a verb. This was, I think, probably 2005.
And I was like, what in the world is that? I understood it immediately because I was familiar with Google, but I was like, that's a new one on me. I'd never heard anybody use this as a verb before.
Beck (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:Pretty cool, absolutely descriptive. I knew exactly what she meant.
Beck (:It's better than the name that Google had before Google. They were backrub. I back rubbed that.
Dash (he/him) (:I traded a physical favor to the internet for this information.
Beck (:You
Beck (:I lightly massaged for this information.
Dash (he/him) (:It's a good thing that one didn't stick. Although, it is kind of a missed opportunity.
Beck (:There would have been a lot of subcategories probably.
Dash (he/him) (:What do I get for a foot rub?
Beck (:That's Google Scholar.
Dash (he/him) (:That's where the real weirdos hang out.
Beck (:Yeah. I love me a good foot rub.
Dash (he/him) (:In exchange for information.
Beck (:You
Dash (he/him) (:Geez. Well, another thing folks helped us out with is we put out a call to the internet. We didn't promise any backgrubs in return though, for some new slides or slices on the wheel, what have you. And several of y'all have given us some things to add on here. One person.
Beck (:Hehehehehe
Dash (he/him) (:left us a YouTube comment that said that they suggest vandalism for the wheel of what have you. It was almost a hobby where I grew up in southern Kentucky. And I think that's an excellent one, so I'm gonna put that on here.
We will not be incriminating ourselves or others when we tell these stories, but they, you know, this is a, you know, just a more of a non, this isn't relevant to, Americans or North Americans, but Vandal is actually a racial slur. I believe for, hang on.
Beck (:Yeah, make sure the statute of limitations is run out before we cover these.
Dash (he/him) (:It's time for a Dash's deep dive on Google really, really early in the episode for this kind of.
Beck (:Don't you mean back rub?
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah.
Beck (:It almost feels dirty sometimes, depending on what you're searching.
Dash (he/him) (:It absolutely does.
Yeah, there's a Germanic people in the fifth century.
along in the Roman Empire, also Iberian peninsula, Mediterranean and North Africa.
Dash (he/him) (:I'm not going to read this whole article, what's what do call Wikipedia?
Beck (:I don't think I can say that on air.
Dash (he/him) (:You don't have to bleep it out. And then there was a couple of folks on Facebook gave us suggestions.
Beck (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:friend of the show Starlit Hill suggested... yeah, hello Starlit suggested wildlife, as differentiated from pets or other animals.
Beck (:Woohoo!
Dash (he/him) (:and Clint, an EKU buddy, suggested...
an interesting topic, queer films versus queers in films. I think that this is also can be applicable to Appalachian representations. So I'm just gonna put queer representation here, because there's limited space on the wheel.
Dash (he/him) (:And...
Beck (:We're wearing the same color shirt today.
Dash (he/him) (:What's yours say? Is there yours saying anything? Mine's actually an EKU shirt.
Beck (:mine's plain. Mine's just a plain Tina V-neck t-shirt from Old Navy. As I saw that.
Dash (he/him) (:All right. Yeah. So that's, that's got us quite a few more options on the wheel here. So thank you to you folks and we will need those on a rolling basis. So anytime something strikes you, you can on threads, you can messages at Queernecks You can find us. hell that probably goes along with vandalism.
Beck (:inebriation might be a good one.
Beck (:Well.
Beck (:Thank
Dash (he/him) (:So we'll give that a spin here in a minute.
Beck (:How's your week been?
Dash (he/him) (:Um, I, it's been busy. I have been trying to catch up on all of the things I was not able to do earlier this summer that actually are my job. Um, and I got some comments on my dissertation back. So, you know, I'm going to address those and send them on to the committee and start scheduling a defense.
Beck (:That's fantastic.
Beck (:That's crazy cool, man. I'm so proud of you. Yeah. I'm almost Dr. Queerneck. That was good enough for me.
Dash (he/him) (:be Dr. Queerneck
Dash (he/him) (:I believe you. mean, it is all in, what a person wishes to do. plenty of people don't finish their, the higher education or the postgraduate work they set out to do. there that's absolutely okay. But it would be, is it that bad? But it would be within your reach to do so. So it's.
Beck (:50 % of people don't finish. Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:I have a coworker who's in a similar position, done coursework and done, you know, the beginning stages of prepping the proposal and the research and things. And that stage right there is.
Beck (:I'm ABD. I've done the proposal. I've done all that stuff. I've defended my proposal. I passed all my exams. I did everything except write the damn thing.
Dash (he/him) (:It is, I don't know. It's, and if for someone who has to work, finding the time to, to consistently sit down and do something like schoolwork. It's dreadful. And it's even if it's fun, cause I really enjoyed writing mine, but it was like, I have it sit down. I would have time to sit down and kind of like.
Beck (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:really, really let go a lot of thoughts I was having, but I would have to spend a half hour rereading everything I had said last time I got to do that.
Beck (:Yeah. I'm so proud of you, man. That's awesome.
Dash (he/him) (:you
Yeah, my, I had told my parents today, cause I hadn't been telling them that I was getting re-enrolled cause I, I didn't want to get their hopes up that because I also was afraid I think of the possibility that they were disappointed in me, flunking out. or just I stopped out, I think is what they call it. And I know that's
Beck (:You didn't flunk out.
Dash (he/him) (:that I'm sure disappointment is not how they would characterize it, but just knowing that I had gone 90 % of the way and then just kind of halted. So I just, I didn't want to reopen that topic until I had some actual news to give. So I told them this morning, they're excited. Yeah, they're just.
Beck (:What'd say? That's awesome.
Dash (he/him) (:I guess proud and probably also happy for me that I'm picking up on something that I did regret not being able to follow through with at the time. But even though, and if you are someone who is thinking about post-secondary education or post-graduate education, guess, pursuing that after you finish your bachelor's, if you do that, it is, there are a lot of things about grad work.
Beck (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:that makes it more doable. There's a lot of things that it does that undergraduate models aren't capable of doing because of the size of those cohorts that they admit. But it is a, and they also, there's a possibility to do it with more financial support. A lot of grad programs fund their students. You get a stipend that you work for for the most part.
but it is not a lot of money. And so people still wind up needing family support or student loans to help pay for that. And I didn't have either of those things, cause, cause I was an adult and fucking poor white trash. So somebody dangled a job in front of me, which happens if you're someone who's willing to work and you stand still long enough, this has happened to me over and over again. And I'm sure it's happened to you as well.
Beck (:Yeah, me neither.
Dash (he/him) (:you're somewhere you exhibit interest in knowledge and the ability to learn and somebody says, Hey, do you want a job?
Beck (:That's how got into Trio.
Dash (he/him) (:Uh-huh. Yeah. That was actually one of the assistantships I had. And so they did. And I said, yeah, I'll, I'll triple my yearly income. As I started my professional journey before I had finished my academic one. And it just stayed that way for 10 years now.
Beck (:Yeah. My story was a little different. was, I was actively working on it and then I got kicked in the teeth. Not literally. Um, I lost my dad and then I lost my mom and then I lost my adopted father just in 18 months. And then I had to move away from what I consider home now to back down to Appalachia for 14 months, um, to clear out the property and to close my dad's business and to do all that kind of stuff.
Real life just got in the way and I feel so far away from mentally where I was, you know, with academics and things like that. You have to be in the right mind frame for that. And I'm just not, I just, I wouldn't even know where to start again.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah. And that might be what you winded up doing too is starting with a fresh project.
Beck (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:And that happened to me. That was something else that happened. was ashamed of what I was interested in researching. It didn't feel scholarly. And so I tried to come up with something. was, I was thinking I was doing that thing where I was trying to speak the way other people who are also likely.
insecure and not like in tune with what they really want to do either. I was trying to parrot some, ways of doing academia that just weren't authentic to me. And so I put together this convoluted ass project and hated it. The only good thing to come out of that project was the, the mentor I, I gained was this chair that's been working with me the rest of the way through it.
But we scrapped the whole project and we, wrote a new proposal and had to redefine, had to do the paperwork over again, but it really wasn't that bad. And I loved the second project. And so was able to force myself to work on it. Even when I could, in fact, I couldn't force myself to do anything else, right? I wasn't taking out the trash or doing the laundry, but I would force myself to work on that just cause I actually liked it.
Dash (he/him) (:That could be the difference sometimes.
Beck (:Yeah.
My dissertation was about women and the way they are treated playing baseball in American culture. And big news in that front, this weekend today, actually, the first female umpire is going to be calling a game. She's going to call the bases today and she's going to call behind the plate tomorrow. This is years after Major League Soccer, after NFL, after NBA, they all have female umpires and referees. So Major League Baseball was definitely behind the curve on this.
And if you see any articles about it online, like on Facebook or social media, I recommend taking a look at the comment section. Yeah, just to see how bad it is. Like it's crazy.
Dash (he/him) (:That was...
Dash (he/him) (:Do you, so, cause I was going to ask, is there, is it your, as a baseball scholar, is the misogyny in like that much worse for baseball than other male dominated sports?
Beck (:You know, I don't follow other sports, so I can't really speak to that. But I do know that people feel that baseball is definitely a male-coded sport. And they're there because they keep talking about how can a person call a game if they've never played baseball. Jen Powell is the name of the woman who's going to be the umpire today. She played on the U.S. baseball team, the women's baseball team, the national team.
There are all kinds of leagues out there for women to play in, but it doesn't get any kind of recognition because they're not men. You know?
Dash (he/him) (:And so this doesn't, this doesn't count as when, people make that criticism, they don't actually mean hasn't played the game. They mean hasn't played in the, in the MLB.
Beck (:Right, and whoever's gonna do that job is gonna have to be a phenomenal talent, whether they're male or female. But it's just fair that women get a chance. There's nothing about having a penis that makes you inherently better at calling balls and strikes.
Dash (he/him) (:No, it might be a hindrance.
Beck (:Yeah. Yeah. But people were even talking about stuff like that, like to excuse my language. but one of them said he hopes he, she got a ball right in the beaver. Like, and then they were calling women gashes and some like, there was all the typical go make me a sandwich and it's going to be interesting that time of the month. And, you know, she's going to be arguing all the balls and strikes and you know, all the bullshit things that you can imagine that they would say about women. but some of them got real nasty.
Dash (he/him) (:Goodness.
Dash (he/him) (:It's, it's, it's so eye-opening that those people are real.
Beck (:Yeah, 90 % of the time they're men. Sometimes you get women doing it too.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah. But those people are going to work in the morning. They're going to their kids PTA meeting. Yeah, these people are out here doing... Well, I don't think they should stop doing that, but I would love for there to be a bit more or a lot more. Think before you speak. Do you remember?
Beck (:They're voting.
Beck (:Breathing.
Dash (he/him) (:all of these little things we learned in elementary school or in kindergarten about how to interact successfully with each other.
Beck (:Some of these people lost their thinking caps a long time ago.
Dash (he/him) (:Count to 10. Get a back rub.
Beck (:Hahaha!
Hehehehehe
Beck (:So yeah, it's really wild.
Dash (he/him) (:Well, we, what's her name, Jen?
Beck (:Yes, Pawel. P-A-W-O-L.
Dash (he/him) (:Wish you the best, Jen. You're gonna do great. Show those assholes that you...
Beck (:I'm so excited today that it's the Braves and I'm blanking on who they're playing, but it's a Braves game. Braves Brewers, Braves Mariners, one of those. The Braves for sure. The Atlanta Braves are the team that she's calling. I can't wait to see how it goes. And like what's going to happen when one of the umpires come out screaming at her?
Dash (he/him) (:Mm-hmm.
Beck (:You know what I mean? That's going to be an interesting because, but that's a lot less since they have instituted, baseball has changed quite a bit over the last few years. They have instant replay now and you can challenge calls on the fields. and it's going to be coming that you can even challenge balls and strikes coming soon. that's going to be probably in the next couple of seasons. but there's a lot less of the arguing against, I'm not going to say it's non-existence, but there's a lot less arguing with the umpires because you can just have the play recalled. You can have them review it. So.
Dash (he/him) (:The NFL and college football did that. That was probably decade ago, if not more. So baseball is kind of a purist. They're kind of traditional. We don't want to change kind of.
Beck (:Yeah. Yeah.
Beck (:Yeah, that's why we didn't get Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier until 1947, you know? Baseball is a really good reflection of American culture and the values that it holds, which is one of the reasons I was using it as a mirror to talk about American culture. Whatever's happening in American culture is also happening in baseball. You can almost guarantee it.
Dash (he/him) (:That sounds, I mean, of course that sounds like a really great study to do. I never did watch baseball much. was, I was raised on football because we were in Tennessee and so Tennessee is the land of football, particularly college football. So.
Beck (:Well, I hurt my leg around 2007. I went to the beach and I got MRSA in my leg and it ended up being a diabetic wound and I was in a boot for 18 months. It was a whole thing. And I needed a hobby that I could do from my couch that was cheap or free. And watching baseball really was the thing that, you know, met all of those criteria for me. It gave me something to do. And I played softball from tee ball all the way through high school. And then I played in community leagues after high school.
Dash (he/him) (:you
Beck (:That was, that was softball and I always followed the Cincinnati Reds. I'm a third generation Cincinnati Reds fan. My father and grandfather were both huge fans and it was just something that came natural. And then like I said, I needed something to do that I could sit on my couch because I had to sit with my leg in the air. Like at all times, like what are you going to do with that? You know what I mean? So that's how I got back into baseball and I've been watching it consistently since I hurt my leg. Go Reds.
Dash (he/him) (:laughs
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah, it's not something I, don't, I don't follow any sports right now. but I, I do, I still, if there's a football game on, I will be just drawn into it. So I'm not a fan of any particular, you know, team, but the, the game itself, I love it. think.
It's so strategic, it's chess basically. mean, it actually is like the way they line up. mean, that's the pawns and the wide receivers. They're like the rooks or, know, it has always seemed like a really intelligent game to me.
Beck (:That's the, I know football. don't know which position is which. I know the quarterback, I know the center, I know some of the basics. But I took football theory as an undergrad. I dropped a class, right? And I had 12 hours and I dropped a class that put me under full-time status and I needed like one credit hour or something to bring me back to where I was supposed to be.
Dash (he/him) (:What?
Beck (:and it was the middle of the semester and I had to take a sprint class and the only one that I could get into was called football theory. And it was me and the entire football team at Miami University. And there was one other girl, were me and this one other girl. We had to do things like go to a practice and write a paper about what we saw. And in the, was, was, it was like January, December, somewhere around there. I don't remember which exactly, but it was cold outside and the class was held in the basketball stadium. There were classrooms underneath
Dash (he/him) (:Thank
Beck (:like where the locker rooms are and stuff, so we had to go there. And out in the main breezeway where people walk, we would go out and they'd teach me how to block and how to do all kinds of different things. I know all kinds of stuff about football. It's just too violent for me to really enjoy it. I think it's a beautiful game. It's just so violent.
Dash (he/him) (:It, there's a lot of games out there that are, just they're, they're in life ending or life ruining injuries waiting to happen. And yeah, football's ours. But I think also people, think people in America, they play football in a way that, that lends itself to injury. So look at the difference between rugby is a very, very full contact sport.
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:Mm-hmm.
Dash (he/him) (:but they're not tackling each other head first the way, because we put helmets on ours to keep them safe. Well, then they start to, you use the helmet as a tool or a weapon. And so it's the difference between like learning how to fall correctly so that you don't injure yourself and then just falling off of something.
Beck (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:All right, let's see what this wheel lands on.
I'm gonna give it a spin. If we get one of We landed on the great outdoors.
Beck (:right outdoors.
Dash (he/him) (:Mm-hmm. Which was just a lot of my life was outdoors. I think there's like online, you see Gen Z like being shocked or not believing that we really were locked out of the house all day.
Beck (:See, I didn't have that. I've always been more of an indoor cat myself. Like I said, when I was a kid, my parents, the porn shop was open from 10 in the morning till nine at night. So during those hours, and plus it was a half an hour away in town from where we lived. So I had basically from 9.30 in the morning till 10.30 at night that I could do whatever the hell I wanted to do.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah.
Beck (:And my sister got married early. I was the youngest. So my sister got married when I was 10, 11, somewhere in that range And then my brother, he moved out and lived with my dad when I was really young. So I became an only child. And so I had the house to myself and
Dash (he/him) (:So when you went outside or went out into nature, it was because you wanted to.
Beck (:Yeah. Yeah. As an even younger child, I would come home and I would play school with my friends after school. Like I was that kind of nerd. Or I would go read. Reading really was my lifeline. And then after all that shit with my brother went down, I started staying with my grandmother a lot. And there I didn't even have access to books, so it was all TV all the time.
Dash (he/him) (:What did you go outside for?
Beck (:I had a bike, softball was pretty much my entire world during the summers and that kind of thing. During the fall and winters, I always did bowling, which is an indoor sport. I was in leagues and did that kind of thing. I know, I know. And people were so surprised when I came out and it was like, come on now.
Dash (he/him) (:I
Dash (he/him) (:You
You're such a dyke.
No they weren't.
Beck (:I got all my hair cut off my sophomore year of college and I've never grown it back out. I did all the baby gay things.
Dash (he/him) (:I just did gender wrong, but I went to, I went to the fair here recently, there, or yesterday there's the county fair happening. And I forgot about this certain kind of lesbian question mark. You don't know because the aesthetic is very lesbian, but it could also just be that they're dressing like the boys who also are in 4-H. But you know, like that, like the ponytail lesbian with the shit kicker carhardts and.
Beck (:My first girlfriend was a 4-H lesbian.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah, yeah, I love the 4-H lesbians. And so it had been a long time since I'd seen some in real life. It's nice to know that they have them here. Yeah.
Beck (:Yeah, we're everywhere,
Though there are some girls that get a gay rap when they're not. My first girlfriend, she was a 4-H lesbian, but her mother looked like one. She had really short hair and she worked in a cattle farm and it was her job to like inseminate the bulls and you know, she did all of the rough and tough... You know what I mean. She would reverse that. She would inseminate the not bulls. Yes, thank you for getting me on that. It might have been a gay farm. You don't know.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:that we do not inseminate balls.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah, we didn't say we were trying to impregnate anybody. Well, and you're right. And that's what I was, was thinking too, is like there's a certain spheres you go into in, in like rural spaces where everybody, every girl looks like a lesbian, but it's just the aesthetic.
Beck (:It was just Saturday night.
Beck (:That's so confusing for lesbians, you have no idea.
Dash (he/him) (:huh. Yeah. And it's like, are you or aren't you, or, are you something else? Right? Is it, what is this? What signals are you sending? But it's, you know, like it's, it's more like that's their culture, but the culture of that is very masculine. It's very gendered towards masculinity. And so I think a lot of girls who do participate in it are maybe just pressured to, also present that way. And that's.
Beck (:Yeah. Plus it's more comfortable if you're out working with, you know, big hot animals and stuff, it makes more sense to cut your hair off and, you know, that kind of thing. Wear jeans because you're going to get dirty.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah.
Yeah, and like the masculinity of like the perception of that as masculine is probably also just classed.
Dash (he/him) (:I never was in the four H or anything like that, but, but I was outside constantly. And when we lived in the trailer park, was less the great outdoors than it was finding a place to, to be inside. So we would, we would find, and when you're little, you all kinds of things can serve as the place you play. So we would play in the ditch a lot. There was this culvert that went under the road. We would play inside that.
Beck (:Yeah, for sure.
Yeah, me neither.
Dash (he/him) (:I climbed a lot of trees, climbed a lot of buildings. but then there was a park down there in Jellico called Indian Indian mountain state park that mom and dad would take us out to with our bikes so that we could, you know, ride without having to worry about traffic as much. So it was a little bit of like, you had to travel to find the outdoors and we lived in the trailer park and then we just moved to a mountainside. So we went from playing in ditches and culvers and.
like gravel playing on gravel, like mountains and things to having a whole mountainside to wander around on and, know, 70 foot pine trees. I, and I would climb trees. would climb until the tree would become wobbly at the top. You know how pine tree, like the, the, way that the branches on a pine tree are, you can just climb them like a ladder. It's like a staircase that goes all the way to the top.
Beck (:Mm-hmm.
Dash (he/him) (:And so, you know, I was only 90 pounds or something. I would get real high up in the trees and just stay there. I was, this is when I started to become really miserable with like being bullied at school and hating the fact that I was, I was stuck being a girl. and so I would just climb up there with a book and a blanket or a coat or something. And I would stay 50 foot up a tree for hours.
Beck (:Wow. See, I would have had to do that stuff by myself and I was not brave enough to go out and climb a tree by myself, you know? Yeah, no. When we moved to Lucas, when we moved to the town where I lived, we had 17 acres that our trailer sat on of hills and there were two ponds on our property and my grandparents kept an acre garden up on top of one of the hills and you know, it was just...
Dash (he/him) (:yeah, I was by myself, yeah.
Beck (:isolating and it was just, I grew up in the city part of my area. And we had an indoor, not an indoor, we had an in-ground swimming pool. And you know, that's the kind of thing that I was used to playing. Or I'd be out on the porch or I'd be inside reading. And then we moved, then I hung out with my grandma a lot. And then when I was in the sixth grade, we moved to where the trailer, from where we lived in the trailer.
And by that point, you are usually already set in the way that you recreationally behave. I was just a TV watcher and a reader. That's been basically the ways I've consumed media for my whole life. I wish I would have had more time outside because I think that has something to do with my weight, where I've battled my weight my whole life. But summer was for softball and that's what I did outside.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah. It's like all of the free time, I guess, that I had outside was pretty much the summer. Cause I had so many like chores and things too. And so that a lot of that during the week or even on weekends time spent outside was mostly just killing time until we were allowed to come back in for dinner. Like street lights come on or mom, she would yell out, she'd be like time for dinner. and then we could watch.
Sesame Street and Star Trek, that was what we was allowed to watch after dinner. So that was our TV. That was the only TV I saw for years, probably the first 10 years of my life.
Dash (he/him) (:But the mountain was also, had some mines on it. It had a gas mine and a quarry. So it wasn't a coal mine, this mountain we lived on, but they would mine like rock and just various gravel and stuff. So we would play in that and climb all the way to the top of this mountain. It wasn't a huge mountain, but it was big enough that it took several hours to get up there.
Beck (:Did you ever go camping?
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah, not as often.
Beck (:That was our vacations. That's what we did for vacation. We went, my grandparents bought this little trailer, like a mobile one, like a camper trailer. And we would take it to Pike Lake in Adams County, Ohio, which has a little river and a creek. The first time I ever took a bath in a creek was at Pike Lake. That's where I learned to fish. And like the things that I remember are little things. remember making little, like they had a cast iron pie maker and we made both apple pie and pizza pie.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah.
Beck (:And my mom putting her feet up against the retaining wall that they put around the fire, the metal one. She wasn't thinking of putting her tennis shoes up against that and her feet melted to the fire. Yeah. We had a lot of fun camping and we did it with my mammaw and papaw usually.
Dash (he/him) (:awesome.
Dash (he/him) (:my god.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah, we didn't camp much. went and never with my parents, but they just worked a lot. So, but I went with some friends of theirs. That was first time I shot a gun was this, the, this first time I went camping with these, these friends of theirs, just, they had two of them. One was a, think a 22 and the other one was a revolver of some kind. I don't remember. I remember it.
Beck (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:like kicked really hard. and I was pretty good at shooting, cans. That was the only, not the only thing I've ever shot, but it's the only thing that that was the first thing I shot. And then we would just fish a lot. but fishing, like that wasn't a really a big part of our childhood because you had to go to the park to go fishing and you couldn't leave with it. So plus we didn't have lures. I had some cousins though. They, was all they did.
was fish. They even owned a fish store for a while.
Beck (:wow.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah, they had a houseboat. Have you ever been on a houseboat?
Beck (:No, I've been on many a pontoon.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah. I mean, those are weird too. I now they may be not as much like this, but it was literally a floating house. It had like a roof and sides and gables and siding and stuff, and it was just on water.
Beck (:That's awesome.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah, it was really cool. I loved that thing. I would have one now. I used to think I used to have a big fear of zombies. So every time I would move somewhere, I would have to come up with a zombie escape plan, like how I would fortify the house and get supplies and stuff like that. And I always think like the perfect way to survive a zombie apocalypse would be on a houseboat. Because surely they can't
Beck (:That's a good thinking.
Dash (he/him) (:I worked on, let's see, this is the summer after my freshman year of college. I worked as a whitewater raft guide for some outfitters there on Cumberland, Cumberland river at the falls. they there below the falls, it becomes like a class three, class four out of the, if out of the class six rating system. And I just went in, they always, they hire people, new people every summer.
My parents live right there by Cumberland falls. And my mom was working at the restaurant at the falls that summer. So I just drove in one time to go see her and I saw this place with their hiring sign up and I went in and I was like, that sounds really interesting. I'll do that. but I, I couldn't swim and they were like, we don't care. Like nobody can swim in a PFD. In fact, you'll kill yourself trying to swim in a, a life jacket because it's, you're not trying to swim. You're trying to float.
And so swimming is actually, you're kind of flexing with nature. If you're trying to swim in rapids, you're like, you're fighting against the flow. really just, what you do is you pull your feet up and try to float till the water calms down. So was like, well, I can do that.
Beck (:My mom and dad got a pontoon after I was grown. I was probably 19 or 20 when they bought it. So it was more of a later in life kind of activity. We had a lot of fun. We go to Grayson Lake and Rocky Fork Lake. Grayson Lake is where I got hurt. Rocky Fork is out by Serpent Mound. It's like they're next to each other. Serpent Mound is really cool. I don't know if you've ever...
Dash (he/him) (:cool.
Beck (:explored it online or anything. It was found in the wild by Harvard researchers who were basically mapping the area back in like the 1840s or something like that. I might be a little off on the years, but it was definitely the early to mid 1800s. And they found this and it totally lines up the waves of the snake line up with the different seasons and the mouth is eating an egg. And if you look at it at the right, it fits the summer solstice.
It's really cool.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah, I'm looking at it now. Online. Interesting.
Beck (:There's a lot of mounds where I grew up. Mound Park was right across the street from my elementary school. We would go over there and have lunches and stuff. I had a horseshoe burial mound there. But mounds are all over the place down in Southern Ohio.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah.
Yeah, there's mounds in Tennessee too, but I don't remember them being in the shape of, of animals or anything. Yeah. We're just regular burial mounds. remember finding arrowheads at various places in, like where there were mounds and stuff. I just, forgot about that. Not a lot. I think I found maybe two or three the whole time we lived down in that area. We only lived on that mountainside.
Beck (:Yeah, effigy, they call them effigy mounds.
Dash (he/him) (:Maybe, well, no, it's probably like five, five years. Cause I was a junior when we finally moved to Kentucky.
Dash (he/him) (:That was also where we found the abandoned house that had the mounds of adult magazines in it. That was on that mountainside. And it was like in a movie where there, you know, people like their car has broken down and they're walking, trying to find somebody to help and the trees part and this just wrecked looking house comes into view.
Beck (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:And they're like beginning to weigh the options of, we go in there to ask for help or should we keep going?
Beck (:One time it was, I got my license, I turned 16 on September 1st and then I got my license on October 5th. Like it was, I did my driver's ed and got my license within a month, right? It was pretty fast. And I was a pretty impulsive driver when I was young. I got in several accidents in my first car. And one of them, I was going around a curve too fast and my car slid off the road and slid into the hillside that was next to the road.
And this lady, I was 16 and I had two of my friends with me and we were on our way to the school to do something. It was dark out and we didn't know what to do because this was before cell phones. And there were a couple of trailers on it because we were up a holler and there were a couple of trailers sitting there. So we walked up to one to see if they would let us use their phone. And the lady was like, honey, just tell them that a deer jumped out in front of you. So being dumb, that's exactly what I did. I didn't want to tell my dad that I had been going too fast.
And so he called a friend of his that had a tow truck. We didn't even get the cops involved. We just had a tow truck come get me and tow it to the house. And my dad is the one who fixed it. But he got there and it was dark out and he had a flashlight and he looked at the marks I left on the road and he looked at me and he looked at the hill and he went over to the boys. He's like, tell me the truth boys. There was no deer was there? And the guys were like, they talked about that for a long time, but yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:you
Beck (:We call that the invisible deer, getting hitting of an invisible deer. We still talk about that.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah, I remember that impulse from like the first time you wreck your parents' car or something and like, God, do I tell the truth? Like what version of the truth do I tell?
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:Yeah. He sorted me out in minutes.
Dash (he/him) (:Well, and for me, like I was never doing any, it's not like the worst it's you're going to wreck a car, you know? And so like what we put a lot of pressure on people to be better drivers than they can possibly be. Most people can spend their whole life trying to become a mediocre driver and not succeeding because it's ridiculous to think that everybody can be great at something like driving.
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:person is as likely to be good at driving as they are to be good at singing. What would it sound like if we required everybody to go around singing all the
Beck (:Yeah. My, what made me be a good driver was I was the last car in a five car pileup. I don't recommend that at all. Your insurance goes through the fucking roof. basically I was, I was tailgating a car too closely and that car, there was a car stopped in front of it and the car that I was following veered over into the right lane real fast. And I didn't have time to stop at the van that was stopped in the middle of the road. So I hit the van and then the, was a PT cruiser is what it was.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah.
Beck (:Yeah, I hit the PT Cruiser and then they hit the one in front of them and they hit the one in front of them and they hit the one in front of them. And I learned not to tailgate. I do not tailgate now. I keep several car lengths back to the chagrin of some other drivers, but I'm I'm a leave space between you kind of girl these days.
Dash (he/him) (:That's the only acceptable version of defensive driving, right? Like being, being proactive about your own behavior instead of, you know, this, this philosophy of distract, of defensive driving that they made us all learn about in the eighties or nineties was it's basically assume everyone is stupid and that leads to accidents. It leads to, misunderstandings trying to like,
Beck (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:Doing things for other people that you don't have the right to do, making decisions for other people, that's always a bad idea. I don't know.
Beck (:Yeah, Shanna tries to be nice to people in traffic and I'm like, you cannot be nice. You have to be predictable. That's the way to stay safe in traffic is to be predictable. You can't stop and let somebody out because somebody behind you is going to hit you or something bad is going to happen. And I've had to drill that into her over the last 20 years, but she's getting better. can't, mean, as much as you want to be a nice person, I love that about you, but you can't do it when you're driving. It's dangerous.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah, exactly.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah. Same with like pedestrians and crosswalks. mean, there's a reason some of these things, traffic laws, there's a reason they exist. They're arbitrary, yes, but we do have to all still operate. If we want to change them, we could, but we'd all still have to do the thing we changed it to. Otherwise it becomes completely unsafe and unpredictable.
Beck (:Right?
Dash (he/him) (:But that's me being 45 years old and sounding exactly like I'm 45 years old.
Beck (:I'll be 47 in a couple of weeks and it scares the crap out of me.
Dash (he/him) (:You're a September baby. Yeah.
Beck (:September the 1st.
It's Labor Day this year, so you're welcome. I got you off work for the day. I arranged for everyone to have the day off, except for... And people are like throwing parades in my honor and things like that. It's wild.
Dash (he/him) (:Thanks. That's pretty great. You deserve it.
Beck (:I do, I really do, no I'm kidding. I was born on Labor Day weekend. I always get a three day weekend for my birthday. A lot of people don't like Labor Day weekend because it's the end of summer and you gotta go back to school and do all those kinds of things. But I like it, because it's perfect weather. You always got gorgeous weather for my birthday. I always get, where it's beginning of the school year, everybody's ready to go out and do something fun or have a party or whatever.
Dash (he/him) (:Mm.
Dash (he/him) (:Mm-hmm.
Dash (he/him) (:As far as three day weekends go, you know, federally established three day weekends, Labor Day is the elite option because, because all the things you said, but also ideologically, right? This is, this is about like unionizing. These are, this is when workers advocated for themselves and this, this, wasn't just to get this day, right? This day simply,
Beck (:I agree.
Dash (he/him) (:marks that and canonizes that. Conversely, we've got other ones like Memorial Day or the 4th of July.
Beck (:But they give you a job. All of those things give you a job. Like the 4th of July, you gotta go out and have a picnic, or you have to set up fireworks, or there's some ritual involved with that. Memorial Day, you gotta go out and decorate graves. Labor Day, you just gotta party.
Dash (he/him) (:it
Yeah. Memorial day never bothered me until David died. It did not, and I'm sure this is not a shock, right? This makes total sense. But my relationship to that particular day before and after it's, can't function on that day. Like it is, it's actually.
I'm a, because I'm afraid of what I'm going to run into. I'm afraid because they will, they'll spring this shit on you. It's Memorial day is filled with jingoistic flash mobs. Like you'll roll up, you'll roll up on a business and it'll be taps on the radio or something. And I have, uh, I kind of black brown out, I guess, when I hear taps, um, I learned it. I discovered that. Oh my God. So I started my master's program, like maybe a year.
Beck (:Hahaha
Dash (he/him) (:and a half after David died and didn't know anything that I did not know that you could get PTSD from the sudden, you know, tragic, violent death of a loved one. and I just hadn't been able to actually mourn or process. And I just started, just started grad school. Like everything was going to be great. And it, it was one, it wasn't Memorial day because we were in class. was Veterans day. think that's the one that's in November. yeah.
Beck (:Yeah. 11 11.
Dash (he/him) (:And we were in this building in the center of campus right next to the quad and the windows were open. from the quad comes the, at first it was taps and then Amazing Grace on the, you know, horrible rendition of Amazing Grace on the bagpipes And I was like, what the fuck is happening? I started to have this.
Beck (:Bagpipes.
Dash (he/him) (:physical reaction that I didn't understand. And then I started bawling, crying, and I apparently left the class. Well, I know I left the class, I just don't remember doing it. I had to go back for my books later. And I was like, what in the hell was that? I think my first time like actually dissociating from trauma.
Beck (:Bam.
Beck (:Yeah, that's crazy.
Dash (he/him) (:And they'll just throw that shit around out there like it's not out here doing things like that to people. Because they don't know.
Beck (:Right? Yeah. But on the other hand, anything can be really traumatic like that. I remember when my brother died, we buried him in an Ohio State jersey because he was such a football fan. He didn't graduate from high school, but he has Ohio State on his headstone. When I die, you know I'm not getting any colleges on mine. But like a couple of months after he died, I was at Walmart and I don't have, I need glasses, but I don't always wear them. So somebody at a distance, is it a real fuzzy, you know?
Dash (he/him) (:That's true.
Beck (:And I saw a guy wearing an Ohio State jersey and shorts and he had a goatee and dark hair and it stopped me in my tracks. You know, how can I ask people not to wear their Ohio State jerseys or whatever? You can't do that. You got to just learn to deal with it. But it was a trigger for a long time. Somebody with a goatee wearing an Ohio State jersey. You never know when things are going to really get you.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:No, because it just attaches itself to whatever's Because really all it takes is just sort of some common element.
Beck (:Yeah.
And there's many of them.
Dash (he/him) (:yeah.
Well, would you like to hear from this week's sponsor?
Beck (:I would.
Dash (he/him) (:It's about that time of year. It's back to school. week's episode of Queernecks is brought to you by the yard sale. Not a garage sale or an estate sale and certainly not thrifting. If it's not a 50 cent t-shirt pile on a dew soaked bed sheet, you can keep it. Out here, a yard sale isn't a hobby. It's a survival tactic. It's where necessity and creativity meet, shake hands and gossip about the neighbors.
When money's tight, you get inventive. You turn a bedspread into a Halloween gown. You stack cinder blocks into a bookshelf that definitely won't pass a safety inspection. You find a dented punch bowl for 50 cents and suddenly it's the centerpiece of your cousin's wedding. For queer Appalachians, these sales are our supply chain of self-expression. Wigs for $3 a piece, flannels, so perfectly worn in they feel like they've been through breakups with you.
Beck (:You
Dash (he/him) (:A vintage Pyrex casserole dish that somehow smells like both lasagna and white diamonds perfume. And the stories that sequined blazer worn once to a county fair pageant retired after the incident. Those mismatched mugs are from when the throupledown Egan holler split up. And that painting of a fox in a suit, you don't want to know about that, but you definitely need it in the main bathroom of your mobile home, the one with the deep red carpet.
We don't shop yard sales just because they're cheap. We shop them because they're ours. Every dollar stays local instead of heading to a big box store three states away. And in a place where wages are low, options are few, and queerness can still earn you some side eye at the Piggly Wiggly, a yard sale is safe ground. Commerce as care, resourcefulness as resistance. Here, scarcity turns into style, rust becomes retro, and hand-me-downs become high fashion if you pair them with enough confidence and maybe one rhinestone too many.
This week's episode is sponsored by Yard Sales.
Beck (:That's fun.
Dash (he/him) (:That was our back to school shopping when we were in.
Beck (:It's always a tax-free holiday when you're at a yard sale.
Dash (he/him) (:Did you ever put on yard sales? Yeah. Getting up at 4 a.m. and I just remember like the, the grass being so like wet and putting, I had a real reaction to putting a blanket down on wet grass to put like, you know, items on it for sale.
Beck (:yeah, yeah, my mom was-
Beck (:Last year, my mom died and my best friend's mother was in dementia and was in the process of passing. So we both had houses full of crap to get rid of. And my wife was working as her medical assistant. She was helping her mom with her mom and doing stuff like that. So basically every weekend last summer, they had a yard sale. They had it perpetually going on and we sold ashtrays, we sold quilt sets. My mom had
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah.
Beck (:built on when they built on the house to the built on the room to the house, they added a gift wrapping station. And my mom probably had 300 gift bags. She would go to like, CVS after like Thanksgiving or Halloween or whatever, and buy out all of their bags for like 10 cents a piece. And she had hundreds of them. We sold them all.
Dash (he/him) (:What was the gift wrapping station for?
Beck (:for for Christmas birthdays, basically so she could take a present and just walk back and have her scissors in a place and have all of her wrapping. Yeah, she had all of that. She had electric scissors. She had all kinds of fun stuff. mom was a seeing on TV kind of guru. She had all of the as seen on TV, like the potato gloves. Did you ever see those? They were gloves with little bumps all over them. Yeah, they were really shitty. She was...
Dash (he/him) (:Wow.
Dash (he/him) (:Thanks
Dash (he/him) (:But yeah.
They seemed like it.
Beck (:Yeah, everything that was on as seen on TV, she had to have it. She was big on that kind of stuff.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah, my mom has dabbled in the as seen on TV stuff, she's not much for... Do you know about the as seen on TV aisle in Walmart? That's where hers came from because my mom is afraid of the internet.
Beck (:Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, mom, mom got a credit card and it had Amazon and eBay at her disposal. Um, so she would, she would buy anything she wanted. Basically. I don't know how my dad bankrolled it.
Dash (he/him) (:I don't know.
I don't know if my mom is serious about this. It's hard to tell with her sometimes, but she has expressed believing that the internet is an entity that has a personal grievance with her. And so she refuses to do online shopping. But.
Beck (:My mother-in-law won't shop anywhere online that doesn't take PayPal.
Dash (he/him) (:Well...
Beck (:That eliminates Amazon. She won't shop on Amazon. And that's like where I, yeah, there's not a, yeah, we've had to order things for her on Amazon before. but yeah, she won't shop anywhere. There's not a PayPal. That's, but she's also a conspiracy theorist and, she sent me a video yesterday. She sent me some of the strangest videos. She sent me one yesterday that was, 28 minutes about Type O blood, about how it's, a powerhouse or something. I have B positive, so I really don't care about O positive blood.
Dash (he/him) (:I was gonna say, good for her.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah.
Beck (:She's a big fan of RFK.
Dash (he/him) (:Well, goodness.
Beck (:Yeah, she's really cool. She's a really kind woman. She's just gotten into some dark parts of the internet.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah. I mean, a lot of folks are just fully fucking defenseless against like that rhetoric or those kinds of media. You really do have to have a certain preexisting facility with understanding those types of things. If not, you're just going to be, just going to be taken in by it.
Beck (:Yeah, some sophistication. Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:And that goes in every direction. That is not limited to the political spectrum. I know lots of crunchy lefties that believe that microwaves remove the nutrients from food. Because somebody wrote a blog post about it. have a friend who, she hears this, she's going think this is targeted to her. It is not. You're not the first person who said that to me.
Beck (:Right.
Dash (he/him) (:But if you can incorporate the right mixture of pseudoscience and preying on someone's anxieties, you've got a winning combo.
Beck (:Yeah. Like she made her own quote unquote, her own ivermectin by, by cooking in a crock pot by with like lime peels or something. I lemon peel I don't know what the hell she was doing. but like that's the kind of stuff that they were doing. She swears by it. I'm like, all right, you take your, your deworming medicine. It ain't hurting me. None, I guess.
Dash (he/him) (:Lord.
Dash (he/him) (:God, can't you like accidentally make some sort of chemical agent from boiling the rinds of some? I know you can, you can make, you can make ricin from, I'll have to bleep this. You can make ricin from the, from processing the seeds of a certain commonly available fruit, in a certain way. My mom was all about this particular mushroom that was supposed to extend your life or something in the nineties.
Beck (:wow!
Dash (he/him) (:People are just afraid of getting old.
Beck (:Yeah, my mom embraced it. She was a chain smoker and a chain drinker and bingo enthusiast and all the things that come with being older, I guess.
Dash (he/him) (:You know, there's a bowling alley in this town. realized it's got three things in it. One of them is a bowling alley. Um, I think I'm to go over there and check it out. Cause I feel like if there's any, if there, if my people are here, they're in there.
Beck (:That's cool.
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:I love a good bowling alley.
Dash (he/him) (:have me too. love I fucking love a bowling alley. Just the mechanical ingenuity of the machines, the the weirdness of the sport, the various rituals and etiquette. And it's usually a fairly safe place to be just considering the kind of facility it is.
Beck (:Yeah.
k at the newspapers from like: Dash (he/him) (:you
Dash (he/him) (:Hahaha
Did you ever bowl a 300?
Beck (:No. 260 something is the highest I ever got.
And that was once.
Dash (he/him) (:I saw one once and I have worked, yeah, I've worked in bowling alleys for about seven years total and saw one.
Beck (:yeah, I've seen him before.
Beck (:Yeah, well they happened on the leagues sometimes. My parents were in two, my mom was in two different leagues. She had the Sunday night mixed league that she and my dad played with my grandparents. And then she had the Wednesday afternoon ladies league where it was just her and her friends. I saw a couple of 300s in the mixed league.
Dash (he/him) (:Bye.
I hate, I hated league bowlers because I was the mechanic. And so I had to run the lane. So I put the oil pattern on the lanes. Anytime somebody was having an off night, it was my fault. And I had, and, I, you know, when I've had my first interview in a white collar setting at a university, they asked me, you know, how they say like, tell us about a time when you had to manage competing.
Beck (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:priorities and interests and basically keep multiple parties happy at the same time, even though those parties wanted different things. And I use the example from the bowling alley and league bowlers. Like they think I have magic powers if they can't hit their split.
Beck (:right? Yeah, it's a lot of ritual, like you said, and a lot of superstition around bowling. But I mean, it's the only it's one of the only sports where you can actively get fatter as you're playing the sport, you know.
Dash (he/him) (:with him.
Dash (he/him) (:And it's not a hindrance. And sometimes it's actually kind of a, help you out. Cause then skinny bitches would be out there struggling with their eight pound balls. I do love a bowling alley though. still like, I have, I dream about the sound of pins hitting the, the, or a ball hitting the pins still sometimes, which is weird.
Beck (:Yeah, kid.
Beck (:Yeah, with her wrist guards and...
Beck (:Wow. I had a red sparkly ball with a cat on it and it said purrfect on it.
Dash (he/him) (:I never had my own ball.
Beck (:I did. I had my own shoes, my own ball.
Dash (he/him) (:Eric, found a ball at the Goodwill up there and he named it Dolores Mabel. And we used to take Dolores Mabel bowling, every pretty regularly there in BG. But I don't think I've been since.
Beck (:Hahaha!
Beck (:If we ever get to see each other in person again, we should go bowling.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:I was, I was thinking, I might have to cut this out, but like, you know how I was talking about going on tour and stuff like that. And I was like, we're too old to go on a tour, like some sort of rock star, but we could set up like just once a month, like random show in some holler somewhere like at a bullet. Like, or once every other month or something, like we do one show and be like, Hey, you can come to this armpit in.
Beck (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:West Virginia and see us live
Beck (:That would be so much fun.
Dash (he/him) (:We'll have the best seats for our non-drinking and we got our low sensory area over here where you can bring your own earphones. The old people are gonna love us.
Beck (:Hehehehehe
Beck (:Absolutely. Old people do like me. I know that because of my bingo years.
Dash (he/him) (:It's just learning. It's just being able to talk to, you know, or just pay attention to the way different generations communicate. was just seen as still people. I ran into a baby. So babies love me. I think it's because...
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:And a lot of people just want to be seen, especially as they get older.
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:Me too, and Elves.
Dash (he/him) (:I look at them, I make eye contact and I trade affect. A lot of people, if kids don't like you, you're probably not looking at them like they're another person. You have to actually make, you still use your facial expressions. You still smile, you still furrow your brow, you trade facial affect with them, even though, because that's, they estimate that that could be between 60 and 93 % of our communication is nonverbal affect.
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:Yeah. When I worked at the photo studio, I shot a lot of babies. And one thing about being a child photographer is that you have to be okay with making a complete jackass out of yourself.
Dash (he/him) (:Can we make some merch that says, shot a lot of babies? Sponsored by Boy Titties.
Beck (:But yeah, we had a lot of little kids that would come in. Because we were known for our weddings and our senior portraits and things like that, but we had a lot of family portraits. We'd do Christmas photos. We'd do baby. We'd do whatever that you wanted us to. I did a tattoo book one time. I've done everything that you can think of when it comes to photos. But you really have to be comfortable with making a complete jackass in front of the parents to get a good baby photo.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah.
Beck (:And in the end, that's what it's about because you make your money selling the prints and the better smile that you can get, the better expression you can get from the baby, the more they're gonna buy.
Dash (he/him) (:It's the product.
Dash (he/him) (:hold on. I just remembered I left something in the freezer that's going to explode if I don't get it.
Beck (:Okay.
Dash (he/him) (:you
Dash (he/him) (:put a seltzer water in there. Let's see how it does. Well, that's okay. Well, I believe it's time to hear a noun of Appalachian interest. I'm dying to hear about it.
Beck (:All right. All right. Let's see here. All right, friends, welcome back to Queernecks, the podcast where queer meets coal country. And today's installment of nouns of Appalachian interest is brought to you by the letter m And no, not for mountains, though those are nice. Today we're talking about mason jars, those squat little glass time capsules that have held everything from last year's green beans to your grandma's mysterious apple pie moonshine that could start a lawnmower.
Now let's get something straight. Mason jars are not just rustic Pinterest props or an overpriced drinkware at trendy restaurants. No ma'am. Around here, a Mason jar is a tool, a tradition, and sometimes a personality trait. First of all, let's talk versatility. A Mason jar in Appalachia can be a cup, a flower vase, a lightning bug prison, a hardware organizer, or even a measuring device. Just fill it to the ring, they say.
jar with a cartoon on it from:And let's not forget the holy Appalachian ritual of canning season. This is not just cooking, this is generational survival prep. It involves a pressure cooker, an apron that smells like vinegar and hope, and enough mason jars to build a small glass fortress. Somewhere between blanching and sealing, your aunt will mention the war, and no one will ask which one. Mason jars are a symbol of Appalachian ethics, frugality, resourcefulness, and the deep-held belief that you should always have a jar of something pickled within an arm's reach.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah
Beck (:Also, if your cousin Jim ever hands you a jar of clear liquid and says, now don't tell nobody, congratulations, you've been handed either the strongest drink of your life or the fastest way to clean your engine. So here's to the Mason jar. It contains multitudes and tomatoes and secrets. And if you ever break one, prepare for someone to say, that was a good jar. Because in Appalachia, there are good jars and then there are store-bought plastic containers and we don't speak of the latter.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:you
Dash (he/him) (:You
Beck (:That's it for this edition of Nouns, of Appalachian Interests. Next time, we might just crack open the mysteries of kudzu, possum lore, or even why every grandpa in a holler owns at least three five-gallon buckets and a personal weather system. Until then, keep it queer and keep it sealed tight.
Dash (he/him) (:I can't wait to talk about kudzu Yeah, man, we used to drink coffee out of mason jars
Beck (:Yeah, like I've eaten chili out of mason jars. I've certainly eaten green beans out of a mason jar. Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:Cause you can microwave them and just put, put, would put, pinto beans like soup beans and then some raw onion, like a layer, and then a crumbled up cornbread in a Mason jar and then take that as lunch or something.
Beck (:Yep.
Beck (:Yeah, my mom did a thing where she took, she put buttermilk in a glass and put, she'd shred up some cornbread and put it in the bottom. And then she'd add bacon grease and a green onion and loved it.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah. You told me that I, the bacon grease is where she loses me a little bit, but because we, I know, and I don't disagree. It's just, I'm having trouble imagining that one because our version of that was more like we would put buttermilk and sugar in it. Yeah. So it was kind of like a, almost like a milkshake or something or a protein shake. but I bet the bacon grease would.
Beck (:That's fat.
Beck (:Gotcha.
Dash (he/him) (:Do you have to drink it fast or it becomes no, okay. Yeah.
Beck (:I would never try it. The bacon grease got me too. Because I couldn't imagine just drinking grease just on purpose.
Dash (he/him) (:Because it would rehydrogenate or whatever it's called.
Beck (:Yeah, she said that she drank it because her dad offered her $5 and that was in the 50s. So it's a try it and she loved it. She was the only one of her five brothers and sisters that she tried that tried it and she drank it her whole life.
Dash (he/him) (:My papaw drank buttermilk with every meal and I could not get down with that. I, I not going to just sit and enjoy a glass of buttermilk. And I did try it and I don't recommend it, but I guess, I don't know. I never did ask him his reasons. I wish I had. I wish I'd asked him why he preferred that over sweet milk. Did they call milk sweet milk? Where are from? There's buttermilk and there's sweet milk.
Beck (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:which is just a regular pasteurized milk or, just cow milk normally. But my aunt Jenny was in the hospital one time and she wanted some milk. And so she asked the person who was attending to her for some sweet milk and he went and put some sugar in some milk. Brought it back like, here you go. You fucking weirdo.
Beck (:No, but they did call basically anything that could be pickled, they called mangoes, like green bell peppers especially were called mangoes. Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah, you told me that.
Dash (he/him) (:That's cool. I wonder where that came from. Did somebody just hear the term and assume it applied?
Beck (:You know, I did some research on it and it came from the pickling tradition where when for winter you would pickle everything from your garden that way you had food for the winter. And somebody pickled some mango or something and it came from that tradition.
Dash (he/him) (:In certain parts of the United States, particularly the Midwest, some people, especially older generations, refer to green peppers as mangoes. It is a historical linguistic quirk, not a mistake.
Dash (he/him) (:During colonial times, when mangoes were imported, they were pickled for the journey.
Okay, so yeah, by transitive property, anything pickled became mango because that's...
Beck (:And then fresh green peppers became mangoes in their place. It evolved into that. So I didn't know what a mango was until I was in high school.
Dash (he/him) (:Mm-hmm.
Well, I didn't either, but it's because I'd never even heard the word mango.
Beck (:Yeah, yeah, I'd only heard it in terms of the green bell peppers. My grandparents always kept an acre garden up on the hill because they lived on the land that my parents lived on as well, the 17 acres that we had, and they grew everything. They grew cucumbers and tomatoes and carrots and...
Dash (he/him) (:you
I used to at Granny and papaw's house, because they had theirs right outside the back. So they brought up the back of their house off the back porch. They had the tool shed with the like tractors and lawnmowers in it. And then the root cellar went right down under there. And then the garden was off. It went down the side of the hill.
And I would take a salt shaker and a pepper shaker and just go sit in the garden and pull stuff up and eat it.
Beck (:Yeah, there was a cellar that they built on ground level. It was cement and dark and built into the hill behind my papaw's house. There were still cans in it when I sold the property this last year. I didn't go in and clean them out. I left that to the next person because I didn't want botulism because
Dash (he/him) (:Was it, was it a, like to have concrete in it or was it just earth? Oh, cause I think, I think we still might call that a root cellar where I'm from, even if it had concrete in it. But for the most part, it would be like.
Beck (:Yeah, it was completely concrete.
Dash (he/him) (:think the root cellar was where anything could go that you would want to keep out of temperature variation. It was less about it being chilly, that was, I'm sure, benefit, than it was the air itself, like how rapidly the temperature could change. So they'd be canning down there, but they would also literally be roots hanging from the ceiling, because it was just earth.
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:Yeah, yeah, no, there's, like I said, was all cement. They had, they had built everything they needed on that little property. The people that bought it really got a good deal on it. I wish I could have stayed there. I wish I could have handled that much property, but just cutting the grass was overwhelming for me. And
Dash (he/him) (:Mm-hmm.
Dash (he/him) (:No, I only had two acres in Kentucky before I moved out here and it was, it took all of my free time to keep that green. And it was bluegrass too. if listeners, if you don't know about bluegrass, it is, if it, if it gets one or two days out of needing to be mowed, it is going to gaum your motor up, your mower up. You'll have to stop and clear that thing out every 10 feet.
Beck (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:Because bluegrass is, it is a physical there. Okay. So there's gas, liquid, there's, you know, solids, and then there's bluegrass. That is one of the physical states that matter can exist in. is its own thing. And I had two acres of it and not a lot of time.
Beck (:Hahaha!
Beck (:They said they were going to turn the back part of the property that goes straight up the hill into land for cows. They're going to put some cattle up there, which I think would be really interesting. But there's two houses on the property. There's my parents trailer and then my parents, my grandparents house, which they built it out of two train cars end to end. So it's kind of a trailer. Yeah. Yeah. And then they put a brick house around it.
Dash (he/him) (:What? That's so cool. I have always wanted to do some shit like that.
Beck (:You know, and I had the electricity off at Mama and Papaw's house because, you know, why pay for that? And I was given a tour to somebody and it was like the middle of July and it was so hot and inside it was a cool 60 degrees and that was with no electricity. Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:Interesting. Wow.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah, when we build our, our commune and incorporate into our own country, I'm not going to start a cult That sounded really like I was some separatists. That's I'm too, too lazy for that. but I thought a train car is like, I've seen people like dig trenches and put them down in there and they have live in underground tunnels.
Beck (:Yeah. They just set a foundation, put two train cars on it, and built a house around them. Yeah. It was a very long, thin house.
Dash (he/him) (:It's so cool.
Dash (he/him) (:The stuff people come up with.
Beck (:Ingenuity for people that came out of the Great Depression is really fascinating to me.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah.
Beck (:My grandparents, we always called him the funky-doos because they had funky hairdos. But I realized as I've gotten older, I have adapted to Papaw's hairdo. Because he would part it over to the side and there'd be a little flip. And he had more flip than I had. But I've got Papaw's hairdos these days. Mammal with teaser hair really tall, a dye it so black it was purple. It was great. Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:You
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:Awesome. Yeah, I believe I got my, my papaw's hairline. You know, I actually look like this happened to my brother too. We both look like an exact 50 50 split of both of our parents' parents.
Beck (:That's how I am too. People will be like, you look just like your dad. And then somebody will be like, you look just like your mom. And depending on the picture, I really do. But I mostly look like my dad for sure. When I was thin, I looked like my mom.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah.
Beck (:When my dad was in hospice, I went down to Virginia to stay with him for a couple of weeks. And I went to like his doctor to pick up something and I went to his pharmacy and people just stared at me like, wow. And the hospice nurse, she came in before I, she had already been there and she came in after I was sitting there. She's like, whoa, you got to be his daughter. mean, my wife looks just like her dad too. So yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:Mm-hmm.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah.
I used, I'm teaching, running a session for our incoming students. And there's an example I use in their code switching with my dialect and sort of showing how context, will help context is, is so integral to code switching to being able to, to make that, that communication get worked. And so I told them the phrase kindly favor.
And I said, you know what those words individually mean or multiple meanings because some of them are, have, multiple meanings. I was like, can you guess what they mean in this phrase? And I said, he kindly favors him. And they were like, no. And so I said, okay, my brother kindly favors me. No. Okay. So I said,
My brother kindly favors me, but he is taller. And a couple of people started to get it. And I said, my brother kindly favors me, but he's taller and has blue eyes and even more of them. And I was like, this. so I was like, does somebody have it? And several of them did. They said, yeah, does it mean to look like them? And I said, it does. And I was like, how the first piece you didn't have any context information to figure out what I might be talking about, but.
as I began to build up more context, you understood that it was about looking similar. You understood that it was two siblings. And so you were able to put it together. The issue is that like, I would have no way. So I went to college, had no way of knowing that nobody knew what I meant when I said he kindly favors him. And so it's been your job to say, I'm sorry, would you say more about what that means? I haven't heard that phrase before. Instead of politely smiling and nodding.
Dash (he/him) (:In which case no communication has occurred and I later am made fun of for saying something super alien.
Beck (:You look like you're from Kentucky.
Dash (he/him) (:I still don't know what that means. does someone... Listeners, let us know. What does it mean if a child says to you, you look like you're from Kentucky? Is this a Gen Z thing?
Beck (:At least they didn't say Ohio, because that's bad.
Dash (he/him) (:yeah, then I would have understood that one.
Well, let's perhaps wrap up this ramble. What should we say to the folks before we go?
Beck (:goodness.
Dash (he/him) (:hit up the last yard sales of the summer.
Beck (:They're always the good ones when people are finally getting to the crevices in the back end of their garage. Yeah, go support your local yard sales, because those people really want to do well. They sold so much stuff at those yard sales. Quilt sets. My dad was a pocket knife collector, and we found over 50 pocket knives as we were cleaning stuff out. There was one knife set. I don't know where he got it or why he owned it.
Dash (he/him) (:Yep.
Beck (:but on the knife itself on the handle was the plane crash of 9-11.
Dash (he/him) (:I feel like I've actually seen that merch in one of those like gun magazines. Do know how you could order merchandise from magazines? Yeah, I saw there was a lot of commemorative weaponry with that on it.
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:Yeah, but it's the actual like the building on fire, like just right after the crash itself. Like why? He didn't care about 9-Eleven. He wasn't from New York. He didn't have any tie to any of that. Why did he own that? Some of the most random things we found when cleaning out my parents' stuff, it was wild.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:Well, our parents are just as weird as we will eventually wind up being.
Beck (:Yeah, it really, nothing will make you simplify your life like cleaning out your parents' house. Like, you become a minimalist when you do stuff like that because you're like, why are you keeping all, like why did you need eight cookie jars?
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah.
Beck (:Why does anyone need eight cookie jars?
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:I don't have one cookie jar.
Beck (:Exactly, my mom had eight because she had a credit card and their eBay existed, so...
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah. And, and a handle of old Canadian or whatever it was.
Beck (:One of the things we left behind because we couldn't sell it, do you know those machines that you basically stand on it and you put the belt around your waist and then it shakes you to death and it's a weight loss? She had one of those. She bought it on Amazon for $200.
Dash (he/him) (:Yeah. Yeah.
Beck (:I think it's called a, not a shake weight. It's a shaker exerciser.
Dash (he/him) (:Shaking belt exercise, vibrating belt machine.
Beck (:Yeah, she had one of those in her bedroom. What the hell are you supposed to do with that? Nobody wants to buy that!
Dash (he/him) (:interesting.
And what, I don't know. Yeah.
Well.
Beck (:Mom had the weirdest stuff.
Dash (he/him) (:I don't know. I hope someday when people are going through my things, they're like, what the why you kind of do want to mess with people a little bit. Like you want there to, you want to raise some questions with the things you leave behind. Well, listeners can, if you, if you can do us the, the kindness of leaving us a five star review on Apple podcasts or Spotify, or rating and give us a review and,
Beck (:Yeah.
Dash (he/him) (:some folks I think are not listening to the show and giving us one-star reviews even though they haven't listened because they don't like who we are. So help us claw back from that unfair rating.
and follow us on Instagram at Queernecks and also on threads. I will try to do better at posting things on there.
And we'll see you next time. Say hi to ye mom and them.
