TEHAM Interlude: Places We Can Do Without

Michigan is an amazing place. I didn't say "good," just amazing. There's a lot of variety here. From place to place, the people are different, the culture is different, the attitudes, the landscape, the economics, the weather, et cetera.

But let's be honest: while Michigan is shaped like a hand, many of these parts of Michigan are like extra fingers or knobby warts that should just be sliced off to avoid embarrassment. And I'm the surgeon who's enthusiastic for the job. Nurse, scalpel!

1. The Upper Peninsula. These fucking worthless freeloaders need to be cut loose. They take tons of our tax money, produce basically nothing, and root for the Packers. The Packers! No one who takes my tax money is going to root for Green Bay. Fuck you, Yoopers.
2. Western Michigan. Statistics show that 35% of people who live in western Michigan are named Kyle van der Sloot. With that many ultra-religious Dutch people floating around, you'd think that they'd have the decency to grow long beards and wear overalls. Alas. While I am a white person, to be around that many other white people is really terrifying. I did some work there recently, and I almost hugged the first black person I saw. Thank god for Benton Harbor, because western Michigan is a cesspool of Amway, Republicans, and Caucasianosity.
3. Traverse City. You may have been to Traverse City. It's a picturesque town that attracts lots of tourists. And those tourists have ruined it with their drunkenness, littering, and absolute intolerance of places that don't have corporate coffee shops on every corner. Next time you visit Traverse City, you should remind yourself once a day that the locals hate your fucking guts for destroying their once-beautiful town. Also: behind your backs, they call you "conesuckers" and "fudgies" and they throw rocks at your car.
   
4. Northeast Michigan. I don't even know what's up there in the Alpena area, except that it's probably one of those places where bowhunters like to hang out. So the decent thing to do would be to slice it off and set it adrift in Lake Huron. We would have done it already, but Lake Huron has sent us a letter stating, "Eat cock. I don't want your stinking Alpena."
   
5. The Thumb. From the fleshy part of the hand between the index finger and the thumb, draw a line that starts west of Saginaw and curves around to end south of New Baltimore. This part will be ceded to Canada, if they want it.
6. Everything along the I-96 corridor starting at Kent Lake and ending at Lansing. This corridor is like a cancer that needs to be excised and then set on fire. Many people who fled the Detroit area due to the threat of brown neighbors ended up here. They shit up the roads every single day and we are all tired of them. Rumor has it that the KKK is still active in Howell. Fuck Fowlerville, Webberville, Lansing, Howell, Brighton, fuck it all.
7. Southern Michigan. This place is known for its decrepit small towns, unemployment, and rest stops. I have been to Adrian, people, and it is awful. Hand it over to Ohio and get it over with.
8. Macomb County. Granted, much of this area qualifies as "The Thumb," but the entire county deserves a special mention nonetheless. We have put up with this place long enough, and now it's time to sell it for scrap. This county contains towns like Warren, Romeo, Fraser, Mt. Clemens, Sterling Heights, and Chesterfield. They're all simply terrible, and all in totally different ways. The true horror presented by this area, however, is Roseville. The guidos that line their modified hatchbacks up and down Gratiot to show off their Ed Hardy shirts and fake tans preset a threat to our way of life that is worse than communism and global warming combined.
9. Oakland County. Oakland County is a sight. It's truly impressive that a place with that much money and that much commerce would be so impossible to get around in. I think we can all recognize that without Oakland County, the rest of us would probably starve. But does everyone have to drive they way up there? And while we're talking about it, why do they have to act the way they do? I feel like every time I cross 8 Mile (headed north) I'm taking my life in my hands. Most places in the world, you'd be dragged from your car and beaten with a bat if you drove like that.
   
10. Downriver. I'm not saying anything here that hasn't already been said by anyone who's ever driven down roads like Fort St. or Dix-Toledo. Most of Michigan's inexplicable hillbilly population seems to have settled in this area, and it shows. If you came from Tennessee, and you moved to Michigan, you settled in Downriver. Thanks to the car and steel industries, this part of Michigan is an environmental disaster nearly as bad as the Saginaw River area. There are towns like Ecorse or Melvindale where grass has a hard time growing, due to the toxicity of the soil. Honestly, everything along Lake Erie, from River Rouge to Monroe, just needs to be covered in quicklime and buried, where the shells of its dollar stores and American Legion halls can be explored by future generations who have discovered an immunity to whatever it is that made Downriver Downriver.
    

#5 People Who Used to Live in Michigan

Dear Former Michiganders:

Look, jerkwads: you moved out. You decided that Livonia and Roseville and Allen Park were just too poor for you, so you moved to L.A. and embarked on your hipster career. I'm not hating. Good for you, actually!

You couldn't stand it when you were here, and so you learned how to sniff out wallet leather. Its fine Corinthian scent grabbed you by the nose and lifted you away, like the green clouds of cheese aroma in a Tom & Jerry cartoon. You lost your accent, you learned to love public transit, and you finally developed that cocaine habit you've been dying to have. And now you can't shut the fuck up already about Michigan - the town you used to live in, the friends you used to have, the crappy shopping centers that you used to skate at, the punk rock band you used to play in.

Let's look at Baltimore for a second: even The Wire, Homicide, and a boatload of awesome crime journalism still can't get anyone to care about that place, and we really should care because that city is slowly poisoning the rest of the country with super-AIDS, heroin, and MRSA. Do you honestly think that your Brooklyn hipster friends really give a shit that you used to live in Livonia? Do you really think that your awesome new fashionable friends in those huge cities think that any story in the world is worth telling except for the one they live?

Let me tell you who cares: we do. (A little.) We live here. And as soon as you decided we were not cool enough for your dreams, we moved on with our lives. Who the shit are you trying to impress with your stories about St. Andrews and the abandoned mental hospital in Northville?

You're pathetic. You love Michigan so much, come back here and live in it. Otherwise shut the fuck up. And as God is my witness, if I hear so much as a ghost of a whisper that you're talking bad about us, I will come out there and smash that pair of Blu-Blockers into your face. Asshole.

#4 Madonna

Hey everyone: Madonna, you may or may not have heard, is from Michigan! YAY!

You are exempt from the first part of this post if you are actually living in Michigan right now, because you've heard this about 50,000 times a goddamn minute. I think we even have a local UHF station dedicated to repeatedly informing us that Madonna is from Michigan. That's right! Her family brought her up in Rochester Hills, and like anyone else who would name their child Madonna, they reportedly had a gigantic house with Roman columns and a front yard filled with gaudy statuary.

The part of all this that is just absolutely perfect is that no one cared that she was from Michigan until she started to REALLY suck, and then it was broadcast, I believe, as a possible explanation for her bizarre and erratic behavior. It's been fascinating to watch our little girl go big through the years.

• Before, she was faking a New York accent; now, she's from England.
• Before, she had the body of a college girl beer-bonging her way to the Freshman Fifteen; now she has the physique of a 15 year old wrestling team rookie.
• Before, she was fucking Big Daddy Kane on camera for her fuck book; now, she's married to a terrible English film director adopting little African children because there are clearly no other black kids worth the effort.

But underneath all that, I know her darkest secret: she went to Boblo Island as a kid, and she conned beer off the bikers at Metro Beach as a teenager, and in places she doesn't talk about at her retarded fake English parties, she really craves a Vernors float.

The truly consistent thread throughout Madonna's career is that no matter how young and playful she was, or how mature and self-aware she becomes, she is as dumb as a fucking rock. No matter how embarrassing her stupid Kabalah thing is, or how cringe-inducing her latest single is, you can always be surprised by how shockingly insipid her old stuff was. No, really, have a listen to "Like A Virgin" next time you get a chance. The only thing that's remotely tolerable about that pile of crap is her adorable idiocy. You'd think that there's some microscopic iota of genius in there for a Michigander to be proud of, but there isn't.

Britain, take our Madonna - please. You owe us for having put up with all of your terrible pop music.

#3 Using Your Hand as a Map

The oldest known maps are preserved on Babylonian clay tablets from about 2300 B.C. Cartography was considerably advanced in ancient Greece. Here in Michigan we have the most advanced way to know exactly where we are - no, it's not GPS technology, nor is it a Michigan map you can buy from one of the -MANY- lovely truckstops around the state. We use our fucking hands as a map.

We feel that when describing where we are, or where we are going, the best way to covey this information is by putting our right hand in someone's face and pointing to it. On top of that, you will often here things like "Oh, I live at the tip of the thumb". Whoever thought this was the most clever way to show personal location is a giant lazy fuck.

What other state in the country does this? Nobody. And do you know why? Because it makes you look like an idiot. People DO understand that Michigan looks like a glove, but you don't have to remind them of that every chance you can. Do you think people in Florida whip their dicks out when they talk about where they live? "Oh me? I live in Key Largo, right by my urethra" or "I went up north and visited Pensacola, right here where my taint is, under my balls." It's just not right.

Unfortunately I had the dishonor of having someone do this to me recently where they even took it a step further, and put their left hand above their right hand sideways to represent the upper peninsula. I now officially hate that person.

So everyone hates Michigan because we think just because our state is shaped like a glove, we have the right to make a big deal out of it. So please, the next time someone does this to you, take their hand and shove it up their ass for me.

Thanks.

#2 Poor Drug Quality

If you live in Michigan and you like to smoke pot, God help you.

It's not like it's impossible to get marijuana in Michigan. You can do it the same way you'd do it any place else - make the right friends, don't be a putz, et cetera. The problem is what you actually get for your efforts: a bag of what looks like brown, seedy twigs, sprinkled with fart dust.

The good stuff does come around once in a blue moon. However, for the most part, you really start to feel that drugs are to the Big Hand what gasoline was to Mad Max. We're excluded from all the best drug trafficking.

The part that infuriates me is that there is NO REASON for things to be this way. Michigan is a state with tons of open space, small towns, and lonesome highways. Its infrastructure is well suited to getting mota all over the place. I think it's got to be that law enforcement is a big source of revenue in Michigan. No matter where you go, for no particular reason, there are state police everywhere, and they crack down hard.

It's funny to say that, isn't it? "Law enforcement is a big industry in Michigan." It's not an industry at all! It's like saying "health care is a huge business in Michigan." No, dickbag, it's what every state has to do when people get hurt or sick. Likewise, when someone does something illegal and goes to jail, that's not helping the economy. It's not a business. It's misfortune.

It's so damn much misfortune all over the place that it makes me want to get high. OH WAIT.

P.S. the LSD here is so terrible that all the hippies left. And if you've ever tried to get hippies to leave anything, you know how remarkable that is.

#1 No Jobs

OK, let's be honest here. Michigan has no work. It's nearly impossible to get a job here.

The reasons that companies avoid the Mitten like the plague are as numerous as the potential items on this list. I mean, if you live here, and you go out-of-state for a little while, it doesn't exactly feel good to drive back across the state line and see the "Welcome to Michigan" sign again. I can only imagine what it's got to be like when you're financially invested.

The Detroit metro area would always be the #1 place to be in business. But Detroit itself is clearly out of the question - the sheer volume of bribes and gifts you have to hand out to do business in the city is incredible. Everyone, and I mean everyone, is on the take.

So what about the suburbs? Well, some do that. But just because the suburban bureaucrats don't as for as many bribes as Detroit does, that doesn't mean it's a nice place to do business. Most importantly, the urban infrastructure in the Detroit suburbs is a whole other set of problems. Just thinking about the roads, the water system, and the "sewerage" system ... it's somewhere between "headache" and "spontaneous human combustion."

So what about going outside of the suburbs? Well ... there's nothing there. I mean it. Nothing. Many of Michigan's rural towns are practically models of anti-tax anarchy. So thanks to everyone being so cranky about taxes, the schools get next to nothing, and the kids in the schools even less. That means you're not exactly getting the cleverest worker base. I'm not kidding about this. It's a common complaint among Michigan's business community - it's really hard to find employees who can find their own buttholes with both hands and a flashlight.

So we know why no one wants to set up shop here. But why do the companies who are already established here pack up and leave?

Because they are total bastards.