This is a bit of cri de coeur, so bear with me, chumlies.

There has to be something better than North and South - right?

That's my view. I was always an instinctive Southerner - not in that I liked the South, I don't, but in that I see all too clearly what is wrong with the North. The horrible flatness of northern types is repugnant beyond perfume.

Nancy Grace. It doesn't get any more horribly northern than that. Yes, I know she's Southern, but she is the epitome of flat northern uncomprehendingness. The northern focus on productivity and neverending careerism and rictuses and glad hands and team-playering and one-upsmanship - it's like watching a bunch of rats trying to gnaw their way first into a bag of some disgusting lentils or off-brand cheerios. The rats are so horribly earnest about it. Their tiny hearts are really into it. You tell them, "but you're a rat! Surely that is the larger point. And you're only going to live three months anyway!" They shake their feelers at you, but they don't really get it.

One cannot sympathize with these northern rats.

I'm with the South in the mocking whine-drawl, the deliberately work-stoppagey, legitimately niggery drawn-outness of Tom Petty's aural recalcitrance. Northerners don't say things like "me and her was feuding," as a Southern gal once said to me. Northerners don't feud, that would be declasse. They freeze each other. And cut each other. Not with knifes. Not even with words. With lack of words. It's more efficient, you see. Time is money. Indulging an actual feud stinks of indulgence. It might require Courage. And take Time. And Time is MONEY. And MONEY is GOD.

But much as I dislike the north, I can't lose my innate Germanical love of order. Of organization. Of precision. Of details, observed and respected. That has no echo in Southern culture. No one goes to the South to get something done right. Nor is the South noted for serious, private, quiet individuals of thoughtfulness.

The South is better than the north, on the whole, in the most important things, but the South is very far from desirable - for me, at least. It's fit only for Southerners.

I'm not sure what the solution is, but this problem is real, at least to me.