f13.net

As I prepare to move back to a fucking civilized city with civilized people with real jobs and money to spend, I want to reflect on my time in Rhode Island - aka Miserable Hellhole, USA.

First, food:

• The northeast is all fatasses. I don't think they know what calories are or how to spell it.
• They really like handpies and other absurd pastries. Oh, and outside of Boston, all the cannolis suck. You'd think if they were emulating Italians their pastry game would be on point. NOPE.
• They're big on meats cured with the salt of mediocrity, and pretending they're all fresh off the boat Italians. They don't do Italian food that well. They don't do cured meats that well. But it's all edible. The entire region is a notch up from Olive Garden.
• They like sweetener in their drinks more than the most diabetic trash from Alabama. Speaking of diabetic trash, I'd never seen an entire half of a grocery aisle dedicated to diabetic soft drinks.
• Hamburgers confuse them.
• There's good pizza, but it's all in a casino or in Connecticut. Grilled pizza is horseshit and I assume it exists because Rhode Island couldn't afford real ovens.
• They don't know how salsa or pico de gallo works. Hell, Mexican cuisine as a genre is a blackbox to these idiots.
• The ENTIRE region is clearly the victim of stomach ulcers. The food here is more mild than traditional Polish cuisine.
• Everything is cheap as fuck and tastes exactly like it costs nothing. Cost was an upside in Arizona since everything - even Filiberto's - was delicious. God bless Chino Bandido. Fuck New England.
• They're afraid of bold flavors.
• In terms of advancing culture through food, they're bankrupt. All their food is from a time when there was industry here.
• They have outright mastered the split bun, but they don't really know how to make any other breads. This gets really annoying since they can't make a proper sandwich. The "best" sandwich place in this state is absolute garbage. Though, granted, Noble Pig in Austin is considered one of the best in America and they don't know how to toast bread properly.
• The seafood is fresh but the preparation is lacking. See my comment on bold flavors. They sure know how to work butter though. Fatasses. Having fresh lobster is great if you don't completely fuck up every side dish. There are exceptions, but they're just that - exceptions.
• They really know how to fry dough but have terrible taste in donuts.
• Coffee Milk is excellent, but it's from the 1920s. Rhode Island has produced nothing of interest since then.
• New Haven Pizza is among the best I've had - anywhere. It's also 100 years old and they say all the names like fucking assholes. Take your "apizza" and shove it up your aass.
• Doughboys. Ok. Conceptually, great. They're basically big fat stupid funnel cakes and they're delicious. But fuck you for thinking this is cuisine. It's carnival food, you dumb street trash.
• This is just another bullet for me to call grilled pizza what it is: horseshit. The best pizza I can get delivered is Pizzaria Uno.
• Outside of casinos, meat here is cooked worse than it is in Santiago, Chile.

If you'd like specific information, feel free to ask. I'm here until the second week of October. After that, I will get some medical work done to erase 2015-2016 from my brainpan.

OH. Right. Chinese food.

There's one good place. Actual chinese people making actual szechuan cuisine. I have no clue why they're here. They must've gotten lost on the way to New York.

The Economy/Commerce/People/Small Businesses:

• First off, there's no computer store here. Not kidding. You have to drive through bumblefuck New England to hit a fucking Fry's/Microcenter/whatever up near either the heart of Boston or the Out of the Way Through The Ghetto Shitholes of Boston to buy a fucking computer fan.
• Speaking of, Amazon doesn't even have a warehouse here. Upside, no taxes. Downside, overnight never happens, 3 day is more often. Even for Prime.
• When all the mailmen retire, which is imminent because everyone here is old as fuck, the postal service will probably just shut down.
• Everyone is old. Except the students at Brown or RISD, who all leave as SOON as they fucking graduate because there's no jobs here.
• There's no jobs here.
• No one has money.
• The richest person in Rhode Island is worth 1.8B. This is the sixth worst in America.
• I hope you like working for a hospital treating the destitute, because the top 3 employers here are hospitals. In the illustrious 4th place, is CVS. Could always sling overly bready donuts at one of the 125+ Dunkin Donuts locations. 125 locations. Smallest state in the nation. Tiny casino down the road has two. Fatasses.
• Speaking of CVS, they're the biggest public company here with a market cap of 101B. Kill me. Looking through a list, Wyoming has it worst. But uh. Good job, Rhode Island. You beat Wyoming.
• Real Estate and Industry here will NEVER recover from their respective. EVER. No one educated stays here. All that's left is the stupid.
• Second worst roads in America. Connecticut takes the cake. But really, if you haven't been to connecticut, it's worth pointing this out: The entire state is 4 blocks of a nice college and an awful ghetto shithole with good pizza.
• The entirety of the government has been coopted by the mafia here. They say it's gone. But it's not. As far as the infrastructure goes - shambles. Can't even afford to pave roads after the winter.
• It's possible people can't leave and get jobs elsewhere because no one can understand what is being said. There MIGHT be a language barrier between poverty and success that is completely impenetrable. Marblemouthed motherfuckers.
• There's a secondary market here - not kidding - for license plates. And it's legal to transfer and sell them between private parties. The fuck.
• I have the nicest car in basically every parking lot, except for two of the people in the same industry as me. Our car is not that nice (2015 Lexus IS350). It's just a sign of the state.
• THERE'S NO FUCKING COMPUTER STORE.
• When I moved here, one of the selling points was how many small businesses there are. The small businesses here don't deserve to be in business. They make bad products, bad food, and provide bad service. It's fucking unreal what passes for "success" in this godforsaken mudhole.

Ah, I was worried this was restricted to food.

My wife has pointed out that I forgot one thing:

Service. It's true, this entire state is filled to the brim with assholes. Motherfuckers gonna stab you and shit for saying "what's up." They're all stupid mean. Which makes me be even meaner. Which, you know, I'm fine with. Except I don't speak the same fucking language these retarded gibbons speak.

Seriously, the service here is garbage. There is no such thing as "being nice."

Who goes to computer stores anymore?

OH. Also - and this is static.

Everyone you meet asks if you just moved here. Because, I don't know, we're not covered in dirt or something (so we're Kings). Inevitably, they ask why.

The answer is, I don't have a good reason. Why the fuck are you STILL here?

Oh, your CV reads High School and Dunkin. Got it.

When your liquid cooling blows out on your work machine, you go to a fucking computer store to get a fan.

Except you don't, because you're in Rhode Island and have to wait 3 fucking days.

Roast my state next!

Where do you live?

WA

I'm not roasting Washington. Good food, has a great major city, the people aren't shitheads. The roads work. Weather is decent besides the rain. I was hoping you'd say South Dakota, in which case I'd ask how you have internet whatwith the entire state being dug out for oil.

CLOTHING. You know typically this wouldn't deserve a section, people can wear whatever the fuck they want anywhere they want as far as I'm concerned. But we're gonna make an extra special exception for Rhode Island.

• Formal = Sweatpants
• Black Tie = Black Sweatpants
• Nonformal = burlap sack
• Only place I'd ever been where I was addressed as sir multiple times while wearing track pants and a shirt that says BLACK LODGE.
• Food on your clothes? No problem. Everyone else has 3 days of crust on theirs.
• Old Navy is chic.
• Fuck this place.

The bluest skies you've ever seen in Seattle
And the hills the greenest green in Seattle
Wooh oh oh oh, don't you leave the city.
On the outskirts it is super shitty!


Do you have a problem with the folks in Portland?
Seattles not as bad but it's still a chore land.
Wooh oh oh oh, watch out for the nazis
When in the islands picking up some tchotchke

The dryest drys and browbeat Browns are on the Eastside.
We can't have nice things cause of the east side!
Wooh oh oh oh, they won't vote for taxes
Even though they're too poor to even buy axes.

I really hope you do not live in Tacoma.
The worst thing isn't even the aroma!
Wooh oh oh oh, when Rainer finally goes
The south side with be covered in pyroclasotc flows!*

*note will actually be lahars

plz stahp

This is 100% The TRUTH.

Upside on the pizza thing.

I can get it at a casino in Manshatucket (spelling, whatever, all these places have garbage indian (feather not dot) names).

Seriously. I could do an entire bullet list of how much I hate the fucking names in this state.

Also, you've never been to Mississippi, so I'm not sure you know from really shitty roads.  :why_so_serious:

We've had this talk. Rhode Island and Connecticut have shittier roads.

Hell - South Carolina has shittier roads than Mississippi (and the worst drivers outside of Atlanta or Miami to boot). You get out of Georgia and can feel and hear the difference in public works spending instantly.

I'm not really sure where Nothern Illinois' roads would fall on the range of shittiness, since we're constantly digging them up and rebuilding them all the time.  So it's almost like they exist in some meta-state of "someday".

One thing that I think is not fully understood outside of New England and the mid-Atlantic is that outside of the Boston/NYC metro areas, a lot of places feel more like *they* lost the Civil War rather than the other way around. If you know the history of it, you know that the bad stuff that happened happened much later (basically deindustrialization in two waves in the 20th C., finishing in the 1970s), but the result are lots of places that feel completely ground under heel but they don't even have a sort of mythology of resentment to compensate, unlike a lot of the South. There are plenty of parts of the East Coast that nobody wants to live in or move to, and then there are places that people live in but just to commute to Boston or NYC. The grimmest are mid-sized cities like Waterbury, Bridgeport, Hartford, Springfield, and yeah, Providence. Middletown. New Haven. Pittsfield. Northampton. Manchester. Nashua. Keene. The thing I hate most about a lot of those places is what Schild refers to--so many people are assholes about almost everything, they'll cheat you if they can and then blame a black person for it, and they simply don't believe that there's any chance tomorrow could be a better day--not for them and not for you, and if you're trying to make it better, they'll shitkick whatever you're doing if they can.

There are parts of New England that I kind of like, both for how they look and because people aren't assholes in that way. The Berkshires from Washington Depot up to Bennington can be very nice, with the exception of Pittsfield. Dutchess County in New York. The Maine coast from Portland northward. Pockets of Vermont are beautiful and people are nicer, but there's also some pockets of omfg rural despair. New Hampshire too only there's also weird little pockets of psychotic libertarians.

It's just an utter shithole. The people have basically decided "I'm not going to lead a life of happiness and I'm going to take it out on everyone around me." It seems to be pervasive. The only escape is near the campuses, and fuck those kids for COMPLETELY different reasons.

I really don't have enough unkind words for this place.

I do like your description, but I think it runs even deeper than you describe. There's something fucking wrong with these people.

Rhode island isn't really part of the Northeast.

It's like a pimple on a fat man's ass.

You want good food head to Maine or south of Connecticut.

your advice for getting good food is to basically leave New England.

Well no fucking shit, Draegan.

Ha yea, RI doesn't really seem to do outsiders well. You're either from there or you're passing through from NYC to Boston. Kinda feels like people there have wheel treads run over them. There's no real city per se, just enclaves of rich visitors or multi-generational locals who could care less about anything else.

I see that in a lot of places. There's sort of a isolationism to many small and medium size communities I've lived in or visited. And I don't mean "where the fuck's a Syria anyway" isoltionism. I mean people who if they don't recognize you, don't go leaving the gas station grounds, just pump your gas and get outta town type. The only differences are in the style of food, dress, and accent.

City folk don't understand this sort of generic Americana, places time has forgot and which prefer it that way.

Which is why I laugh and laugh when politicians don't talk equal opportunity for those who seek it. Get out of the city or any of the bullshit even-more-generic anesceptic exurb/suburbs built in the last 30 years with a bunch of transplants who're only interested in riding out their mortgage until they move to FL or NM. Then you'll see just how many people aren't going to do shit to seek out nothing, and are perfectly happy bitching about those that do.

The exceptions are the smart or motivated kids that somehow escape their enclave on ability, chance meetings, or scholarship.

As for food, I'm originally from the real tri-state area. I haven't lived anywhere that's had anything but passably edible since.

What is the "real" tri-state area?

I grew up in Montana, and it's a similar effect. For more than 40 years, everyone with any ambition or curiosity has been leaving, and now the culture is *defined* by a lack of ambition and curiosity. It's pervasive and omnipresent. An environment of distrust and disdain for "out there", especially for the cities and their inhabitants (which for Montana are almost entirely mythical constructs, the nearest actual *city* being hundreds of miles away).

I can feel sympathy for them, understand their values, but I can't really empathize with them, because a life defined by being as limited and insular as possible isn't just foreign to me now, it is literally a slice of hell.

--Dave

I have no sympathy or understanding of their values. They're stupid and they suck and they serve no purpose on Earth.

It is the most primal explanation of American resentment today: places that anyone who could leave, have been left. The folks who are still there are the ones who couldn't or wouldn't. And they hate the fact that they know people left and want to leave. But in the crowded parts of the Northeast (basically RI/CT/central MA) that feels a bit different, because there's also a *lot* of people. And there are people in some places who have important (job-related or occasionally otherwise) reasons to be there. Academic jobs especially, which are clustered very strongly from southern Maine to Virginia, way more than anywhere else in this country.

A small thing for me is also just that unless you're along one of the few actual lines of meaningful elevation like the Blue Ridge or the Berkshires, the landscape feels to me a bit like it's either unrelieved stretches of near-urban development (New Jersey from New Brunswick to Paramus; Connecticut up the Connecticut River Valley; Central Mass over to Boston) or it's just kind of dense near-jungle forest/vegetation with very little variation in height and look. Things look a bit more interesting during the winter--the landscape takes on more distinctive forms--but even then it's just mostly kind of boring. The coast is also sort of undramatic--you just sort of roll up on it and there it is, either beaches or wetlands/swamps. Cape Cod's a bit more interesting but not much. There's too much of too much and yet none of it is enough of anything interesting. Whereas pretty much west of the Rockies, you drive for six or seven hours, you're going to traverse some pretty different landscapes, everything from moonscape wastelands to canyons to river valleys to vaulting mountains to cities. Ski towns, shitholes, oil towns, religious cult hideouts, endless miles of cows shitting and being turned into hamburgers, etc.  The East only offers serious visual variations in a precious few places, and human variations (food, architecture, attitude) are almost not to be found. Everything is sort of crowded, usually with assholes. Places that could be far more beautiful are being wasted; places that people think are beautiful are no big deal. I really think that if someone said to me, "You still have to live out here if I give you a hundred million dollars, but it can be anywhere you want except the middle of NYC", I would have only two or three places I'd even consider, and reluctantly. Whereas if we were talking anything west of Denver, I'd have about twenty cities, towns and locations I'd at least think about.

I grew up in Richmond, which is a shit town, but it was the 80s and 90s and the music scene there let me forget about how shit the city was.

As an adult, it's garbage, from Maine to Florida.

You used the term northeast. The Northeast and new England are different in my book.

Eh, they're different...but not by a whole lot.

Even coming from southern suburban NJ, it fucking sucks. People grow up there, and never leave. Ever, it seems. Going to the Jersey Shore is a Big Fucking Deal, and I have no idea why - it's just, by and large, long flat stretches of sandy beach and cool brown water. It's got absolutely nothing on the West Coast (Best Coast) - the people are nicer, the scenery is infinitely better, and the food...oh man, the food. You can do great fine dining, or you can have some of the best fish ever by just rolling into a little shack restaurant on a little dock in Oregon.

The major cities at least normally have some redeeming qualities (and NYC is it's own beast), but the 'burbs and other areas? By and large complete shit, and utterly forgettable.

And people wonder why I don't take much leave back home while I'm posted abroad.  :oh_i_see:

I grew up on the Jersey Shore. Almost everyone I grew up with is still there, and doesn't understand why I don't move back.
And everywhere has some good food, you just have to search and ignore any and all advice from locals.

[edit: extra redundant words]

That's what I'm getting at. There are left-behind people pretty much anywhere. And geological, cultural, or culinary diversity is entirely a personal preference relegated only to those who've left.

To Khaldun's point, one thing unique to this area is academia. That alone is a conveyor belt of transients who generate resentment merely by being driven, and very unlikely to ever stay.

I couldn't wait to leave my childhood home for as long as I can remember. Almost everyone I grew up with those is still there, some having bought their parents' homes.

I get the resentment from both sides. Why should people who never left home have any say in the way things work? And yet why should wanderlusts who never settle anywhere for more than a few years at a time have any say on a local community? You've got thousands of towns that'll never change and areas of major cities that flip between war zones to gentrified areas in the space of a single generation.

My guess this is global, more as a human condition. There's people who'll never be happy for long, either because the area never changes or it changes too much. Same as it ever was.

schild: NYC.

They're really not. The only difference I've been able to find is New Englanders have more marbles in their mouths.

Darniaq: what about NYC?

Except I have to say that in a lot of the American West, even the people who never left are more optimistic on the whole about the possibilities. When they're nuts, it's often an interesting kind of frontier nuts. The East's predominant mood away from the city cores and their suburbs is "sullen". Upper New England is the main exception, where it's kind of flinty-tough, which is sometimes admirable and sometimes a bit scary.

I enjoyed living in the mountain west FAR more than the NE.  I thought that people out west had a healthy attitude about their lot in life and seldom felt a chip on their shoulder.  East coast is filled with angry, bitter people that feel everything is someone else's fault. 

The mountain west has a cultural quirk that knocks the roughest edge off their attitude towards outsiders: If you don't like someone but you don't know them well, you express it by being painfully polite. "After you" is their version of a northeastern "Fuck off".

--Dave

The winters make people arseholes. That and the traffic.

Outside of that, did someone from NE once kill your puppy Schild?

Is it wrong to observe a place being a total shithole? Why'd it have to do something to me?

Oh sorry, to your question about my "real tri state area" comment earlier. NYC tri-state area of NJ, CT, and NY. That's the one I grew up at, so it's the real one. :-)

oh I see

CT and NJ fucking blow and New York has one city that doesn't and really, most of it still does

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of GREAT shit in NYC. Like, really great shit. But like, the city is surrounded by garbage. Don't even get me started on Long Island. Ugggggggggggggggh.

The Northeast includes PA, NY and NJ while New England is Connecticut through Maine.

No one not on Long Island think there is anything of value there.

Montauk and Shelter Island are vaguely sort of ok. The rest of LI is a toilet.

Your particular vehemence for the region is amusing though. You're from Austin right? Do you live downtown there or out in the burbs? I'd argue that pretty much any city in America is a cultural wasteland outside of downtown, some just look shinier (I'm looking at you Midwest).

See, I dunno--I think there are cities which actually have interesting transitions from urban to rural, and cities that have interesting rural areas near them. And small cities that aren't intensely urban but are interesting.

I think that's my favorite, actually--small cities/big towns that are interesting. They don't really have dull outer suburbs, they're just big enough that everything that's there is "the city/town". There really are almost none of those in the US Northeast. I sort of like Portland ME but it gets pretty overwhelmed with tourists in the summer. Brattleboro, Bennington and Burlington are all sort of ok in Vermont. Great Barrington in MA is a good place, but it's just barely a large town. Actually some good food. Nothing in CT that is big town/small city is nice. Nothing in NJ, nothing in upstate NY, nothing in PA qualifies. Whereas I think the West has a lot of rather nice smaller cities/large towns. Even the South has a few.

I can never roll my eyes hard enough at people who call us life outside of big cities a 'wasteland.' They're typically the same assholes who say you have to go to rural cities in Europe to, 'see the REAL <country>,' and are immune to the dissonance of both opinions.

There's a difference between visiting and having to deal with the ramifications of poor hick boondock fuckwits voting against their interests and allowing people like Trump to run.

I'm not saying this is political, I'm saying rural America is full of stupid. Stupid that affects us. Rural Europe is nice for food and saying how quaint it is.

I dig the Morristown area and Chester area.

Rural Europe has a chance of having something older than 100 years which makes it interesting, sometimes.

We drove through Morristown a few times when we lived in New Brunswick NJ. Seemed kind of interesting--I think we found a cool antiques place.

I also sort of like New Hope/Lambertville, though not on summer weekends when the bikers come up in droves. Delaware Water Gap is a beautiful rural area/park also.

Lewes Delaware/Cape Henlopen is also slightly more funky/interesting than the usual East Coast beach towns.

But almost everywhere that I sort of-kind of like takes special pleading of some kind or another out here.

I lived in New Brunswick for 22 years or so. Weird.

Morristown, Chatham and Madison have some great restaurants.

Chester, PA or Chester, NJ? The latter I've never been to, but the former is an absolute crime-ridden shithole that I have the misfortune of working in all too often.

NJ.

NJ is a good example of everywhere.

The stereotype is the NJ turnpike driving past oil tanks, or the ridiculous number of lanes on the Garden State that really should be way the hell more than enough to handle what is still always bumper to bumper traffic.

But there's some gorgeous areas in the state, mostly south and northwest.

And those gorgeous areas have little hamlets of insular people who couldn't care any more for beyond their town borders than anywhere USA.  :oh_i_see:

As to Long Island, the one thing it has is bagels. I've never been anywhere else in the US that has them as good, even Manhatten.

That's nothing like a reason to live there of course  :grin:

I don't think anybody likes Chester PA, even people that live in it. (Maybe especially people that live in it.) Though I often feel sorry for Chester--it's a good example of what happened to the East Coast, because it was a boom town full of hope until the early 1960s, when all the industry suddenly just left.

Yea, you could feel that shit within 2 weeks of moving to Providence. I mean hell, all the old industrial buildnigs have been turned into lofts. Shit, I live in one of the hundred+ year old mills.

Shame such a cool living space is in such an utter shithole.

A place is what you make it. The key is finding like-minded people and creating a community that basically ignores all the negative people.

I remember being out at one of the great little music establishments here up in the woods behind the lake. Great local band playing, bunch of old friends and new sitting around on the porch outside the venue drinking world-class local beer. Some fat gothtard chainsmoking and complaining about what a shithole the city was and how she wishes she was in whereverthefuck (I was trying to ignore her stupid, ignorant rant). I asked her what would she be doing differently, what is better than good brews with good friends with good music playing on a beautiful night.

I happen to love the Northeast and New England, but it's undeniable that a lot of people love to bitch about how shitty it is and then do zero point zero to improve it. That's changing in a big way, but there's still that background of negativity that makes it tough at times.

Really noticeable in the government, too. The Class of 88 is getting an infamous reputation because we're pretty much taking over the city and getting it into a really cool place (police chief, chamber, council, etc). So much pushback from the old way of doing things, but it's slowly getting better. The only way to fix it is to target and remove the cancerous people from the equation.

So yeah. If you just want to leave your family behind and relocate to somewhere that doesn't require you to actually do anything to improve your city, that's an option. I'd rather stay here with my family and friends in the place I grew up in and love and make it a better place.

It's ok for places to suck.

Also, not all of us want to be townies who live in the place we grew up in. That's how you end up with Providence.

There is some validity to saying that it's easier for a place to suck when you suck, or you are unwilling to reach out for chances to find the unsuck in things.

But some places really do just suck.

Sometimes there are no like-minded people nearby.

I live in a building with like-minded people. Like-minded people being miserable together doesn't make a place less not shitty. It just presents a nice illusionary bubble to live in while the dread creeps in.

Maybe if you sat in a circle and held hands?