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Really that's pretty close. Missouri is a land of neither/nor. • It's geographically at the edge of the Midwest, but it's really more like the South. • It's a redneck state, but the big cities are mostly far more "white ethnic" than WASP. Tons of Irish Catholics such as myself, Czechs, Balkanites, Italians. It's overwhelmingly white and segregated, but there's a whole city within Kansas City that's like 200,000 Latinos, many of them either recent immigrants or children of immigrants, with street signs in Spanish, Spanish-speaking cops, etc. • It was, and probably still is, the crystal meth capital of the world. Specifically the city of Independence, which is where Joseph Smith said the New Jerusalem would be. I swear to god that there's a Mormon church here that has a helicopter pad in case Jesus Christ returns via helicopter. • That all-important American qualifier, "Which side of the Civil War did it fight on?" – Missouri's answer is "Neither! Both!" We never joined a side, and there were huge Union vs. Confederate militia battles here, one quite close to my house. • All our heroes – Charlie Parker, T.S. Eliot, William Burroughs, Stan Brakhage – got the fuck out of Missouri as quickly as they could. • Over the last couple years, Missouri seems to have inherited the status of "allusion to shithole place nobody would want to live," which was previously accorded to states like Idaho, West Virginia, Oklahoma, et al. • You could call it a Rust Belt state, at least the big cities in the north, but it really isn't, because we never had an economy based on heavy industry. Our old thing was stockyards and river shipping, and our new thing is predatory loans.

that's very kind of you, but this one's just late cos I've been away from home & ended up being unable to record at the hotel, which I thought I could probably do

exactly what I was thinking, because I'll tell you something you may not know, and this is official D/C lore: I've never actually seen that movie, but I love donkeys