Quiz: How Upstate Are You?

✓ 1. You drive your 2002 Nissan Sentra with bald tires 100 mph in the middle of a blizzard to Stewart’s for more Mountain Brew Ice even though you have a 30-pack of Busch Light sitting back at home on the unheated porch because you’re just that bored.

 


✓2. You have a “that crazy time in Canada” story that you and your friends have sworn to never speak of again… until out of the blue one day, you get an email from Jason, who you haven’t seen since the summer after graduation, letting you know the property where you buried the body was recently sold to a developer who will be breaking ground on condominiums in the fall and it’s only a matter of time before they find the hitchhiker, so you need to somehow come up with an excuse for your boss and leave your spouse alone with the kids for a weekend and get up to Northern Ontario (in the middle of a pandemic) to move the body… but where? And can you even trust these people anymore? How do you know this isn’t a trap? God, how this one mistake has haunted you all these years. How you envy the unladen consciences of those around you. How you yearn to be free of this burden!

✓3. You walk around being all fat and shit, wearing jeans and yesterday’s top. Unshaven, coffee stain on your collar, eyeglass frames superglued together, cracked screen on your Galaxy Note that can’t hold a charge. Lay off, this ain’t a fashion show. It’s just another Tuesday in the land that time forgot and the milk’s gone bad again. Might as well get a Mega Millions ticket. Someone’s gotta win. Another day in paradise, am I right?

 


✓4. You sound like you could be an extra in the Coen Brothers 1996 black comedy “Fargo.” In other words, like a fucking moron.

 


✓5. Your idea of “fine cuisine” is a giant, heaping plate of chips, cheese, jalapeno poppers, macaroni & cheese, bacon bits, chicken wings, Frank’s Red Hot sauce, deviled eggs, baked beans, pierogies, fried dough, bleu cheese, maple ham, crumbled meatloaf and spicy mayonnaise, all topped with mouth-watering, homestyle, organic Fentanyl.

 


✓6. You can picture no better way to spend a Friday afternoon than riding your four-wheeler, three-wheeler or dirt bike in circles around your house. Round, and round, and round… Yep, that is just about as good as it gets. Just keep riding in a counterclockwise loop on a well-worn, grassless path, huffing that 2-stroke exhaust all the while. Screw any neighbors who would like to listen to the birds singing on a peaceful country day. Instead, they’re getting the constant Waaaaaahhhhhhhh buzz-saw-like sound of a small-engine. Maybe after that you’ll get loaded and shoot some bees nests with your shotgun… 25 fucking times… in the middle of the night.

✓7. You are tired of explaining to people from other states or countries that you don’t live in New York City. Look at the map people, there’s over 50,000 square miles of land in this state with over 6 million residents who don’t live in NYC or Long Island. And come on, New York City is really expensive, you pay $3000 for a shoe box apartment. True, the job opportunities are limitless and the culture is second-to-none, and the wages are commensurate with the increased cost of living. To be honest, you just don’t think you could really hack it there, so you decided to stay in your little rut where you’re comfortable. And though you say you stay for the beautiful natural vistas and more relaxed lifestyle, it’s really because you were too chickenshit to take a risk with your one wild and precious life.

 


✓8. You effect a southern accent and adopt Confederate iconography not because you’re racist, but because you know that you are ultimately doomed but want to be thought of as having put up a good fight. You recall that the Confederacy, with barely any industrial capacity to speak of and a fraction of the population of the north, managed to endure for four years, and even looked like it might win at some points. Of course, every serious historian knows it never had a chance, and any courageous battlefield actions undertaken by soldiers were a complete waste. Still, as a white person with a rather dim future who wants to have some self-respect in the present day, something about the lost cause resonates with you, even though you were born 450 miles north of the Mason-Dixon Line.

 


✓9. You had your first date at Wegman’s. Later, you got engaged, married and honeymooned there. You now live in a Wegman’s. You refuse to leave Wegman’s because it has everything you need, the workers are friendly and the customers are all so happy to be there. It reminds you of how you felt as a child when you leaped out of bed in the morning to greet the sun rise, and every day was a new adventure, every stranger just a friend you hadn’t met yet. That was, until your trust was repeatedly betrayed by people who should have had your best interest at heart, but turned out to be uncaring sociopaths. You managed to put that trauma behind you and lead a functional existence, which was a victory in itself, but over time life began to feel somehow hollow, every moment not quite measuring up in ways you found hard to articulate. You felt like maybe the problem was lack of connection with another person, so you threw yourself into courting, and made no secret of your desire for a committed relationship, not another fuck buddy. Just to show you were serious about that point, you picked a brightly lit supermarket on a Sunday afternoon for your first date. Now you’ve made a life together here, between the Salad Bar and Fresh Bakery. Who could ever predict what strange paths life has in store for us? Yet in retrospect, it all seems meant to be…

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