I was going to write something last week about the New York Times “This Land” series on Elyria, Ohio, a city just east of where I grew up. It was going to be a brilliant essay about Americana porn, and East Coast condescension, and an eagerness to see poverty and struggle as a somehow noble experience, rather than a degrading and terrifying one. Also, it was going to be about sentences like this:
Bridgette the waitress glides through morning at Donna’s Diner with an easy, familiar air, as though she were born somewhere between the cash register and the coffee maker. She is a constant, like pancakes on the menu.
She’s constant like a pancake, eh?
Anyway. You can tell how I felt about the whole thing. So I scrapped the essay and made a pot of chili instead. It was a far more rewarding experience.