Culture shock 2013

Since the Mayan's prophecy and Roland Emmerich's movie about the end of days in 2012 did not come to fruition, I've decided to revive The Book of Micah and spread my thoughts all over this inter-web thingie. My biggest change recently is the culture shock of moving from a liberal dope smoking gay marriage okaying indie music loving crunchy hipster beacon of the northeast to the wilds of western Maryland. When I thought of Maryland, I pictured a cultured state with the highest household income in the US, bordering the center of the Free World in Washington DC. I imagined the beauty of Chesapeake bay and the Eastern Shore, Annapolis home of our Naval Academy, Fort McHenry where Francis Scott Key wrote our sacred Star Spangled banner and the home of one of the most important battles of the civil war, Antietam. Maryland-home of Edgar Allen Poe, Fredrick Douglass, Thurgood Marshall, Rachel Carson, Billy Holliday-even John Madden and David Hasselhoff. Being one of the original 13 colonies, Maryland has a long and storied past that rivals any other US state. But then I realized-there is western Maryland. Oh my....they spit at my New England Patriots hat (four words-wide right Billy Cundiff)...They burn couches when University of West Virginia scores a touchdown...they fly rebel flags in honor of "the war of northern aggression"...there is an inordinate amount of adult bookstores right next to bail bondsmen store fronts...the women have worse teeth than the British...the water tastes as if it was processed from the local swamp...the cows on the abundant dairy farms have a higher literacy rate than the local population who speak with a twang that sounds like Tommy Lee Jones after a bottle of Wild Turkey (most of the time I need a local interpreter as if I'm in the wilds of Borneo speaking to the indigenous peoples). The locals have gun racks for their gun racks for god sake and they fervently believe our president is a secret Muslim. If you turn your radio on cruising through town, your options are country, country western, and evangelical country western. Will I, the carpet-bagging yankee hippish "ivory tower" New Englander with a full set of teeth survive this redneck paradise? Will I have to adapt with cowboy boots and Waylon Jennings greatest hits?Only time will tell...as I think I am the only one for miles that doesn't need an analog watch to actually tell time. Reporting from ground zero of a future succession movement-I'm out.