Stuff Hillbillies Like: Dirt

As evidenced by their sports, their vehicles, their homes and trailers, and their bodies, hillbillies like dirt. And all its multitudinous forms: dust, mud, filth, grime, and grit.

A hillbilly wants nothing better than to spend--the culturally insensitive might say "waste"--his or her Saturday afternoons driving a vehicle through mud. The more exposed that vehicle can be to the elements, the better. The hillbilly will ride small, open, four-wheel vehicles in the mud so he can become caked in the sacred substance.

The hillbilly likes to call this vehicle an "all terrain vehicle." Terrain, after all, is just a fancy city word for "mud."

It's better known, though, as an ATV because terrain is hard to pronounce and it sounds vaguely French.

ATVs are responsible for more than just dirty hillbillies, though; the ATV is the cause of injured hillbillies. Despite days and days spent riding aimlessly in the hills and valleys and who could forget the "hollahs," hillbillies seem unable to master the art of avoiding trees and telephone poles in their four-wheel Medicaid machines.

Fortunately for the hillbilly, the government subsidizes their recuperation time to the tune of billions of dollars each year. Unfortunately, it's time spent in a clean, sterile and booze-free environment: a hospital.

And that's no fun.

Stuff Hillbillies Like: Multiculturalism, So Long As Drinking Is Involved

Hillbillies aren't particularly Irish and aren't particularly Catholic. They will be tonight, though.

The celebration of St. Patrick's Day is indicative of the hillbilly's ability to turn any holiday into an excuse to drink until medical intervention is required. Go into any backwoods bar tonight and you'll find hillbillies face down on the bar, a little plastic green hat askew and a little vomit caked on their L.E.D.-lit shamrock pin.

On St. Patrick's Day, like other holiday, the hillbilly will push past religious differences and intolerance, forgive years of cultural imperialism, and raise a toast to America's multicultural tapestry.

Hillbillies could solve any long-standing cultural grudge with an alcohol-fueled binge. Trouble in Israel? Have a few beers on Yom Kippur. War in Iraq? Knock back some brewskies on the Prophet's birthday?

Hillbillies will show their solidarity for people in Tibet by getting bombed on the Chinese New Year.

As the environment becomes a more hot button issue, expect to find hillbillies passed out on you lawn after a vicious Arbor Day celebration.

Stuff Hillbillies Like: Talking Really Loud About Stuff They Like

Because a hillbilly can barely read or write, she indulges the one form of communication that doesn't tax the use of neurons: talking.

Have you ever seen a child who mastered the ability to ride a bike. The child bursts in wild exuberance and pedals madly, screaming at the top of his lungs. Now watch a hillbilly female yucking it up with friends at a Bob Evans, the well-named Cracker Barrel or other note hillbilly feed trough.

It's the same juvenile excitement. It's like it's the first day with her new mouth.

Don't mind being impolite. Go ahead and listen in. It would be like trying to ignore a low-flying 747. The hillbilly wants you to listen to her travails and victories. She'll talk about the deal she got on feminine hygiene products at Walgreen. She'll propose welfare reforms to better support her and her children. She'll wonder aloud when her disability check with come.

The hillbilly is even louder on the cell phone. You wonder why she needs it at all. Her voice can
carry at least a time zone.

Stuff Hillbillies Like: Middle Names

Hilbillies are rarely creative. They tend to celebrate destruction with all the passion of a crack-fueled chimpanzee does.

Hillbillies revel at videos of high-speed chases, although some of it is to catch an image of the relatives. They invented smash-up derby, which combines two of their favorite loves: self-mutilation and pulling down an item's intrinsic value.

Some hillbillies believe that the oldest profession is Professional Wrestling, which they follow with a religious fervor. Again, the notion of destruction enthralls the hillbilly.

Creative writing, it would seem, just wouldn't appeal to the hillbilly. And, you're right: prose and poetry are beyond the hillbilly. Except if it's the creation of middle names for their newly-born social pariah.


Here the hillbilly becomes a Be-bop jazz-fusion artist. A hillbilly mother will often insert several middle names into their male children: Billy Bob Joe-Joe, Joe Bob John-John, or Dale Earnhardt Bob... The list and variations go on like the riffs of a Miles Davis sonic soul exploration.

Why so many middle names? It's actually because the female hillbilly is trying to hedge her bets in actually using the name of the child's father in the middle-name string. She usually starts with all of her first cousins and works up the family tree, making careful notation to add the supposed names any traveling carnival workers.

This theory is further verified in the hillbilly approach to naming a female hill-baby. Names include Sue Ellen Bob, Billie Joe Bob, Bobbie Jo Billy, etc.

Stuff Hillbillies Like: Fleeting Religious Beliefs

You probably think that the stuff that hillbillies like are incompatible with religious obligations. After all, hillbillies busy schedule of drinking, drug abuse, monster truck competitions and marital infidelity give them little time to engage in religious practice.

But, that's where you're wrong. Hillbillies carve out a nook for religion when under duress or when plotting revenge.

For the hillbilly, Jesus is a sort of voodoo hitman, a threatening god of vengeance who exacts justice when a husband strays into the local strip joint or in-laws make unrequested assessments of parental skills during a child's birthday party that suddenly explode into boozy inter-familial brawls.

When those incidents occur, the hillbilly will immediately re-orient herself with the Christian religion and pray for God to make testicles whither or cause a fiery motorcycle to smash into the center window of the in-laws double-wide.

Religion is useful to the hillbilly as a auxiliary Welfare agency. The hillbillies devotion to religion is cyclical; it begins when local church food banks about three days before Thanksgiving and reaches a peak during the Salvation Army's holiday gift drive.

The devotion lasts until January 2. Or, maybe a quick visit to church for some Super Bowl Sunday snacks.

Stuff Hillbillies Like: Bouts of Holiday Domestic Violence

Ah. There's nothing like being home for the holidays.

In the lifeways of the hillbilly, there's nothing like being home for the holidays, being excessively whiskey drunk for the holidays and exaggerating your aggressive tendencies for the holidays.

The period between Christmas and New Years sees an uptick in hillbilly-on-hillbilly violence. Frying pan assaults skyrocket. Brother hits brother. Sister hits brother punching brother holding down father who was beating mother.

Usually, these incidents, while fueled by liquor with the same alcohol content as jet fuel, are actually started because one member of the family expressed his/her distaste for another member of the family's pasta salad at a holiday get-together. Or, alternatively, the male head of the household spent all the Christmas money on liquoring up some bar skank he met at the local bar/IHop/hardware store/high school parking lot (please choose one).

All of this leads to the hillbilly holiday trifecta: the festive assault-murder-suicide.

Why do the holidays bring out the worst in the hillbilly? After all, how often are cops called in to break up the Jewish family's Hanukkah party?

I believe that it's just a cheap way for hillbillies to see the festive, pretty red and blue lights of a police cruiser.

Stuff Hillibillies Like: Lands-crapping

Landscaping is when you take a piece of property and through use of care and design make the place more pleasing aesthetically.

Landscrapping is when you make a piece of land worse and drive down property values. It is honored and admired by hillbillies everywhere.

Like Dante's inferno, the hillbilly envisions the space as a series of concentric circles of hell. The general design rules are as follows:

• The border space is defined by lines of crap. Half complete fence projects and over-sized satellite television dishes add to the drama.
  
• The second ring is the ring of crap. This lawn space contains everything the hillbilly doesn't have the heart or brains to throw away. It can include deer carcasses, dolls and mannequins, and even automobiles.
  
• At the center, the hillbilly always has a collection of garbage cans and dumpsters, sometimes filled, more than often not. These can be symbols of irony and defiance. Also, laziness.

Hillbilly Haiku

Ah. More hillbilly hate.
Here's the definition of Hillbilly Haiku by a perceptive user of the Urban Dictionary:

hillbilly haiku

A poem, spoken by hillbillies, that *sounds* something like haiku but doesn't scan like it. A hillbilly haiku doesn't fit the 5-7-5 syllable scheme, or even have three lines, because hillbillies can't count.

This is a fun writing exercise.
Here are a couple of my own Hillbilly Haikus:

didja git yer buck
didja didja?
ma rack's bigger

At car's too quiet
Silence. Unrattled
What I need a muffler fer

Childrens cryin
Nothing to eat
Why they so fat, though?

Setting the Record Straight

I often share the many, many stories of hillbilly hi jinx with my friends.
Recently, after telling a story, my friend said, "What... is the guy retarded or something?"

I was a little taken aback. Special needs kids get a lot of grief in life, do they really deserve to be lumped in with the hillbilly? It's unfair and mean.
In fact, when retarded kids make fun of people they call them "hillbillies."
The difference between the hillbilly and the special needs kid is vast.
Here are just a couple of examples:
Many special needs kids are gainfully employed... The Hillbilly? Not so much.
The special needs kids will engage in sports and recreational activities. Since pretending you're a NASCAR racer by driving your beat-up car through town and boxing your girlfriend around are not technically "sports," the hillbilly avoids exercise. (Note: There is no such thing as the Hillbilly Olympics.)
Special needs kids show some degree of responsibility. The hillbilly is paid by the government to be irresponsible.
Special needs kids are aware of hygiene issues. The hillbilly believes hygiene is a greeting for a dude named Gene.
Finally, special needs kids warrant our help and pity.
The hillbilly? Not so much.

Springtime in Hillbillyland

Well. It's almost springtime and the hillbillies are stirring.
For the government subsidized hillbilly, who has spent most of the cold winter cooped inside his Section-8 shacks fornicating and getting drunk (not necessarily in that order), this is a great time to be alive.
If you had a beautiful spring day off, I'm sure you would find a hobby or indulge your current hobbies; not so, for the hillbilly, who has all day, every day off.
No, the hillbilly just can't seem to make it off the porch. It is as if an invisible force field of laziness has restrained the hillbilly to his porch or stoop, like a leash on a dog. This is one reason why the hillbilly's porch is so cluttered. They really wanted to throw those broken toys away... they just couldn't... seem... to... make... it... off... the... porch.
You'll see the early hillbilly riser on his stoop when you go to work. His mind feverishly at working at solving the great mystery of the day--how to buy a pack of cigarettes without expending any energy.
When you come home from work, the hillbillies are out in full force, the only thing missing is the poor special needs banjo boy from Deliverance. (He wouldn't even be seen with government subsidized hillbillies.)
Just think, you probably spent an hour a day working so that these hillbillies could enjoy this carefree lifestyle.
I think every hillbilly should be forced to stretch a banner across the front of his or her porch that reads, "Thank you, American worker."
Although, it would probably take no time for the hillbilly to hide the banner behind broken bicycle parts, ash trays, tattered Halloween decorations, and a film of tobacco spit.

The Hillbilly Equation

There are several ways to assess the fact that the Hillbilly is a detriment to our society.
Let's get beyond the indisputable hygiene question. (If you are ever in a convenience store at 3 a.m. in Hillbilly Country and have unclogged nasal passages, you'll probably disagree with me ignoring this detriment.)
We at the Anti-Hillbilly Association (A-HA) are proving that the hillbilly and his ilk cost decent, hard-working Americans trillions of dollars.
To begin with, there is an inverse ratio between the amount of hillbillies in a given area and property values. If a hillbilly moves into your neighborhood or the government sanctions a GSHB (Government Subsidized Hillbilly) housing project nearby, expect your property value to plummet like the stake of a condemned sign planted in soft mud.
We estimate that there are 4 million hillbilly residents in the U.S. If there are ten properties in that neighborhood, that makes 40 million afflicted properties. At $100,000 per property, that's about $4 trillion. If property values go down 10 percent a year, that's $400 billion each and every time the sun makes it's annual trek around the earth, as the hillbilly believes!
Secondly, the GSHB is a two-time losing proposition for the American taxpayer. Not only is he or she losing property value, but, is actually paying for the privilege of losing money on their property! And, this government waste actually creates more hillbillies.
These revelations raise uneasy questions, no doubt.
Can we stop this cascading spiral into hillbilly bedlam?
Yes. There are solutions.
Are these solutions doable?
Yes, they are.
Palatable solutions for the tender American heart?
Perhaps not.
But, we will explore both the vexing presence of the hillbilly and solutions to the Hillbilly Question in future posts.

The Hillbilly. My Struggle.

This blog is dedicated to a creature called the Hillbilly.
Both male and female hillbillies come in varied shapes and sizes; but, generally speaking, the hillbilly is squat, fat, hairy, unbathed, and smelly.
The Native Americans called him Sasquatch, or "he who smells and is always short on rent" and most Sasquatch sitings today are nothing more than a Hillbilly who lost his way in the woods.
Hillbillies generally adhere to rural areas where limited legal restrictions and a noticeable lack of land covenants allow the Hillbilly to collect junked cars, rusted refrigerators, rusted swingsets (that they're children are forbid to play on) and other items that to the non-hillbilly are considered junk, but he considers treasure.
The Hillbilly has primitive vocalizations--grunts and growls. When the Hillbilly begins to vocalize he often starts with a high pitched squeal, thusly: "Youuu gunna..." and completes the semi-coherent rabble.
In the coming months and years, we will explore the Hillbilly in depth.
How do I know so much about the Hillbilly? I live among them. And I must pass on these lessons so you never do.
Our next lesson will be what is the difference between a Government-Subsidized Hillbilly (GSHB) and the common semi-domesticated Hillbilly?