Good Ol' Nebraska

The good life? For whom? Tornadoes, maybe.

Do you know why all the trees in Iowa lean to the left? Because Nebraska sucks. I’ve been in some really suckass places in my life, but you know what sucks more than Nebraska? Fucking nothing.

Three times now I’ve been forced to drive the total distance of the state on one of the loneliest stretches of interstate in the country. That means 455 miles of utter, desolate shit. The speed limit is 75 for a reason. So you can hurry the fuck up and get out of Nebraska. I’m pretty sure the residents are fully cognitive of their suckiness too because we stopped at a Mickey D’s, which was one of the only locations in the state with actual live people—although all of the specimens were ancient with their gnarled, liver-spotted fingers wrapped around their steaming Styrofoam ® coffee cups and their yellowed, mistrusting eyes peering just over the brims—and the bathroom was so goddamned cold that my pee turned into an icicle as soon as it hit the air, and it just broke off and fell in the toilet. Only business managers who intend their customers to rotate rapidly in and out keep their thermostats on fucking frigid.  I completely understand why hundreds of Nebraska’s cities have less than 1,000 residents. Not many people care to advertise so blatantly that they are 100 % sucky.

Guess what early Nebraskans used to call homes? Sod houses. You know what those are, right? Anyone? Anyone? Okay. Y’all suck too. Sod houses are humble abodes made of large cubic chunks of sod. Like bricks, but made of dirt with a little grass on top. The worst thing about sod houses besides the dank smell and floors that never come clean no matter how many times you mop is that when it rains and you are lying on your straw-filled mattress under a moldering quilt, snakes and worms and bugs fall out of the dirt on your head. In your hair. In your mouth if it happens to be open. The creatures that live in dirt like to burrow deeper when it rains to get away from the water. Unfortunately, there isn’t that far to go when the sod is no longer attached to the ground. Hence the sudden pile of slimy, crawly things all over your bed. Gackkkk. Good ol’ Nebraska.

We made the mistake of booking a hotel in Lincoln on one of our jaunts through the nation’s asshole, and there were lumps in the carpet. Large, creature sized lumps that were spongy and extremely disconcerting to discover in the darkness on the way to the bathroom to drop an icicle. There is no way that the carpet installers didn’t notice that they were covering palpable piles, and where else but Nebraska would allow carpet mounds?  The only good thing I’ve ever heard about Nebraska is that it sports the world’s largest porch swing. 26 children or 18 adults can fit on it at one time. That seems cool, and I’d like to see it. But it probably has a seat of poison-tipped nails, and all the children just cry for the whole ride and then die. Good ol’ Nebraska. 

Picture from newsroom.unl.edu.