Little Big Town – "Boondocks" (2005)

You can take it or leave it

This is me

This is who I am!

I have good news and bad news for you today.

2 or 3 lines has always been self-absorbed as all get out.  But last month, I produced a series of posts that represent a personal best when it comes to narcissistic navel-gazing.

But it’s a new month – “Narcissistic November” is over!  Today’s post will bring an end to what probably seemed like an endless series of posts discussing obsessive-compulsive personality disorder . . . and then we’ll be ready to move on.  

That’s the good news.  The bad news is that I’m not going to do another audio advent calendar this year.  I’m sorry to disappoint you, but the decision is final.  (Doing 24 posts in 24 days last December left me plumb tuckered out, and a wise man learns from his mistakes.)

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According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – or “DSM-5” for short – an obsessive-compulsive personality disorder diagnosis requires the presence of four or more of the following behaviors:

1.  Preoccupation with details, rules, schedules, organization, and lists

2.  A striving to do something perfectly that interferes with completion of the task

3.  Excessive devotion to work and productivity (not due to financial necessity), resulting in neglect of leisure activities and friends

4.  Excessive conscientiousness, fastidiousness, and inflexibility regarding ethical and moral issues and values

5.  Unwillingness to throw out worn-out or worthless objects, even those with no sentimental value

6.  Reluctance to delegate or work with other people unless those people agree to do things exactly as you want

7.  A miserly approach to spending for themselves and others because they see money as something to be saved for future disasters

8. Rigidity and stubbornness

I plead guilty as charged to #1, #2, #3, #5, and #6.  And I wouldn’t deny that #4 and #8 probably apply to me as well.

That leaves #7.  I don’t think that I’m miserly, but I am frugal.  (I hate to spend more money on things than I have to – even when the amount in question is insignificant.)

But whether #7 applies or not, there’s little question that I exhibit more than enough of the behaviors listed in the DSM-5 to justify an OCPD diagnosis.

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Just before I started writing this post, I stumbled across a Free Press article titled “Nobody Has a Personality Anymore.”

“Today, every personality trait is seen as a problem to be solved,” according to the author, Freya India.  “Therapy-speak has taken over our language.”

She continues:

[W]e are being taught that our personalities are a disorder. . . . Now you are always late to things, not because you are lovably forgetful, not because you are scattered and interesting, but because of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).  You are shy and stare at your feet when people talk to you, not because you are your mother’s child, not because you are gentle and sweet and blush the same way she does – nope, it’s autism.  

You are the way you are not because you have a soul, but because of your symptoms and diagnoses; you are not an amalgam of your ancestors or a curious constellation of traits but the clinical result of a timeline of childhood events.

Exactly!

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Here’s something else very interesting that I learned from that article.

Survey data on self-reported mental health diagnoses shows that liberals in general, and white liberal women in particular, are more likely than other groups to say that they suffered from a mental health condition (e.g., depression).

However, mental distress is more strongly linked to one’s generation than it is to one’s gender or political orientation.  

Each American generation since the baby boomers is progressively more depressed than the generation that came before.

A 2024 survey of over 3,000 Americans found that 67% of Gen Z men and 72% of Gen Z women believe that  “mental health challenges are an important part of my identity.”   But only 27% of baby boomer men and 34% of baby boomer women said that mental health challenges represented an important part of their identity.

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I’m a boomer male, so it should come as no surprise that I have chosen to reject an OCPD self-diagnosis.

I don’t care how many of the DSM-5’s criteria for OCPD apply to me.  I don’t have a personality disorder – I just have a personality!

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I’ve featured Little Big Town’s “Boondocks” before, and I’ll probably feature it again.  

I love “Boondocks” despite finding it somewhat lacking in authenticity.  (You might feel the same way about 2 or 3 lines.)

Click here to listen to “Boondocks,” which was a top ten country hit in 2005.

Click here to buy “Boondocks” from Amazon.

Little Big Town – "Boondocks" (2005)

You can take it or leave it

This is me

This is who I am!

One of the many books I requested from my public library based on the late Larry McMurtry’s recommendation was Wallace Stegner’s memoir, Wolf Willow, which McMurtry called “a wonderful book.”  (He was right.)

Stegner was born in 1909.  He spent much of his childhood in a tiny and isolated farming town in Saskatchewan called Eastend.  

McMurtry grew up several decades later in Archer City, an equally obscure plains town in the Texas Panhandle that is 1500 miles from Eastend as the crow flies but probably wasn’t all that different culturally.  I’m sure Wolf Willow spoke to him in a very personal sense.  

From Wolf Willow:

I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from.  I can say to myself that a good part of my private and social character, the kinds of scenery and weather and people and humor I respond to, the prejudices I wear like dishonorable scars . . . the virtues I respect and the weaknesses I condemn, the code I try to live by, the special ways I fail at it and the kind of shame I feel when I do . . . have been in good part scored into me by that little womb-village and the lovely lonely exposed prairie of the homestead.

I grew up in a very different environment – the small city in Missouri where I spent my childhood in the fifties and sixties was very far removed from the isolated frontier village where Stegner lived a hundred years ago – but like Stegner, I know where I am from.

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More from Wolf Willow: 

Once I was comparing my background with that of an English novelist friend.  Where he had been brought up in London, taken from the age of four to the Tate and the National Gallery, sent traveling on the Continent for every school holiday, taught French and German and Italian, given access to bookstores, libraries, and British Museums, made familiar from infancy with the conversation of the eloquent and the great, I had grown up in this dung-heeled sagebrush town on the disappearing edge of nowhere, utterly without painting, without sculpture, with architecture, almost without music and theatre, without conversation or languages or travel or stimulating instruction, without libraries or museums bookstores, almost without books.  

My hometown wasn’t a “dung-heeled sagebrush town on the disappearing edge of nowhere.”  Unlike Eastend, it had a good public library that I took full advantage of, and there were a number of music teachers who taught piano and violin and other instruments – almost all of my childhood friends learned to play a musical instrument.  We also had movies and radio and television, which exposed us to the wider world.

Wallace Stegner

But while Joplin wasn’t as far culturally from New York City and Chicago as the prairie town where Stegner grew up, we still had a cultural inferiority complex.  Joplin had an airport serviced by commercial airlines and was situated on a major interstate highway, but I never flew anywhere until I was almost 18, and my family rarely used that highway to travel anywhere more than an hour or two away.

I read constantly.  But reading about England or France or Italy isn’t the same thing as being there.  And reading a Shakespeare or George Bernard Shaw play isn’t the same as seeing that play performed.

There are still dozens – perhaps hundreds – of place names and other proper nouns that I can spell and define, but am reluctant to speak in public out of fear that I will mispronounce them, which would reveal to my more sophisticated friends and associates that I’m a redneck hick.  (You don’t learn how to pronounce French aphorisms or the names of Tolstoy characters by reading books.)

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Despite his very humble beginnings, Wallace Stegner eventually got a Ph.D., and taught at Harvard and Stanford.  He wrote a dozen-odd novels, a dozen-odd nonfiction books, and several collections of essays and short stories, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, a National Book Award, and many other honors.

I’m guessing he was always of two minds about people like that English novelist friend.  On the one hand, he was probably somewhat intimidated by their sophistication and politesse.  But on the other hand, I’m sure he was fiercely proud and would have been happy to invite anyone who condescended to him to step outside.

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“Boondocks” was a 2005 hit for the very successful country music group, Little Big Town.

Little Big Town

It’s a great song, but I wish an edgier artist than Little Big Town had recorded it.  Nothing against them, but I think the song would from benefit if it was performed by someone who sounded like he had a big chip on his shoulder – someone who would happily take a swing at you if you gave him an excuse.  That would take the record to a whole ’nother level.

Click here to see the official music video for “Boondocks.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Little Big Town -- "Boondocks" (2005)

You can take it or leave it

This is me

This is who I am!

Time is passing at an unacceptably rapid pace.  For example: Little Big Town's top ten country hit, "Boondocks," was released in 2005, which is simply not possible.

"Boondocks" is a very calculated song, but it works for me despite its questionable genuineness.  When I hear it, I always think of my hometown -- Joplin, Missouri -- where I was born and spent the first 18 years of my life, and where my parents still live.

I visit Joplin two or three times a year, and those visits never fail to put me in very odd mood. 

Most of my closest childhood friends have moved away, but I still know a lot of people in Joplin.

But instead of getting together with them for a drink or dinner and waxing nostalgic about our high-school days, I tend to hang around my parents' house (fiddling around on the computer when I'm not obsessively looking through old photos and newspaper clippings from 40 or 50 years ago) -- and I take long, solitary  walks.

The last several 2 or 3 lines posts (or "columns," as one of my Joplin friends is kind enough to call them) were about Las Vegas, where I go on business every September.  The last few years, I've started dropping in on my parents for a few days on the way back from Vegas to my home in suburban Washington, DC.

This year, that trip carried more significance than usual because my parents have had a number of health problems this year and because they were going to fly back to Washington with me to see my oldest son -- and their oldest grandchild -- get married.

When I visit my parents, I always walk through the neighborhood just north of where they live, which was almost completely flattened by the tornado that hit Joplin on May 22, 2011.  

The destruction starts less than two blocks away from my parents' house.  There used to be 22 houses that stood on Alabama between 20th and 22nd streets.  After the tornado, only one house was left standing.  Today, eight new houses have been built or are in the process of being built.   The rest of the lots remain vacant.

Just across 20th street, there's a large tree I've been watching with interest.  It lost nearly all of its limbs and leaves in the tornado, and most experts predicted that it and many other such trees would not survive.

But almost two and a half years later, this tree is still hanging in there.  I would guess that it has grown enough leaves to provide sufficient energy to keep it going, but time will tell.

Since I've explored the hundreds of city blocks that were hammered by the tornado pretty thoroughly, I spent quite a bit of time this year walking the trails that radiate from the Wildcat Glades Conservation and Audubon Center, which is located on the southern edge of Joplin.  The weather was absolutely perfect during my visit, and it wonderful to be outdoors in the middle of the day instead of stuck inside my office in downtown Washington.

Wildcat Glades is at most a ten-minute drive from the house I grew up in, but it seems much farther away.  The most notable natural features found in the area are Shoal Creek, a beautiful Ozark stream with numerous rapids and falls, and the 25 acres of chert glades that border Shoal Creek -- which represent about half the remaining chert glades in the world.

Chert is a very hard rock -- also known as flint -- that was used to make arrowheads.  A glade is an opening in a forest, which usually features a lot of exposed rock.  The areas of a glade that aren't bare rock are usually covered with only a very thin layer of soil, which means that glades are very inhospitable to plant life during dry summers.  (The Wildcat chert glades are home to prickly pear cactus and lizards that are usually native to deserts.)

Shoal Creek is crossed by a primitive little one-lane, low-water bridge that some drivers can't bring themselves to cross.  There's not a lot of room for error.  (You wouldn't have to be Ted Kennedy to get into trouble on that bridge.)

If you turn right after crossing the bridge, you quickly come to Grand Falls -- the highest waterfall in Missouri that flows year round:

The chert formations at the falls are very weathered, full of little nooks and crannies.

If you go away from Grand Falls, the road goes uphill to a small parking lot that marks the beginning of  the "Bluff Trail," which takes you on top of some chert bluffs and is roughly 50 feet above Shoal Creek.  It's not that scary a trail unless heights make you nervous.  (Count me in.)

Some people say that this stretch of Shoal Creek, Grand Falls, and the chert glades and bluffs is the most beautiful natural area in Missouri.  I wouldn't disagree, although there's a lot of Missouri I haven't seen.  

Here's a view of Shoal Creek from the Bluff Trail:

Here's a big crevice in the rock that I hopped over while walking the Bluff Trail:

After half a mile or so, the Bluff Trail gradually descends to the level of Shoal Creek and follows the west bank of the creek all the way to the base of the old Redings Mill Bridge.

We'll take a closer look at that bridge and the trails on the east side of Shoal Creek in the next 2 or 3 lines. 

I liked "Boondocks" the first time I heard it in the spring of 2006, when we were visiting my daughter Sarah, who was a freshman at Ohio Wesleyan University.  (Sarah later figured out what the song was and sent me an e-mail identifying it, which was thoughtful.)

It was "Kids and Sibs" weekend at OWU, so we were accompanied by Sarah's ten-year-old brother.  (Peter was suffering deeply from the migration of his twin sisters to college the previous fall.)

Ohio Wesleyan University

I remember a couple of things from that weekend.  A very funny comedian/magician performed for the students and their families in one of the residence halls, and there was a special showing of the movie Benchwarmers at an old downtown theater.

Benchwarmers is one of the worst movies I've ever seen.  It was basically a Bad News Bears ripoff -- a bunch of misfits and lovable losers get together and beat their snobby, affluent opponents in a baseball game -- except that Benchwarmers was about adults, not 12-year-olds.  (Although those adults acted like 12-year-olds.) 

The movie starred Rob Schneider, David Spade, Jon Heder, and Jon Lovitz -- none of whom were the least bit funny.  (But none of them ever are, so why should we be surprised?)  It featured cameos by ex-Yankee great Reggie Jackson and ex-NFL'ers Sean Salisbury and Bill Romanowski.



I don't find Little Big Town's recording of "Boondocks" particularly convincing.  The two women and two men who make up the group are a little too nice and a little too clean-cut to really pull this song off.

Part of this song is sweetly nostalgic -- there's some stuff about tasting the honeysuckle that grew down by the creek, and hearing the midnight train pass through town, and learning about Jesus on Sunday mornings.  Little Big Town handles that part of the song very nicely.

But the rest of it is about having a big chip on your shoulder about where you grew up -- about getting pissed off when you hear some assh*le from Boston or San Francisco or some other big city make a condescending comment about small towns in general, or your small town in particular.  

The lines from the song that I've quoted above -- "You can take it or leave it/This is me/This is who I am!" -- need to be delivered by a good ol' redneck singer who's got an angry streak in him, or at least someone who can do a convincing imitation of a redneck with an angry streak.  (Toby Keith comes to mind -- I'd love to hear him sing this song.)

Here's "Boondocks":

Click here to buy the song from Amazon: