Kentucky Is Exactly What You’d Expect: Married Cousins and Inbred Children

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I am from Kentucky, so it’s only natural that I married my cousin. Not that I had much of a choice, though; here in Kentucky, it’s just one giant cesspool of incest. Actually, to be fair, there are really two families that we credit our lineage to: the Hatfields and the McCoys. Given the amount of bad blood between aforementioned clans, we pretty much just stick to marrying within the families, as we’d hate to have another Romeo and Juliet situation on our hands (Romeo and Juliet were cows who ran off together from two competing farms. Tragically, they were found days later, washed up on the shore of Cumberland Lake, hooves still intertwined.).

Marrying your cousin really isn’t all that bad. It’s just easier to marry someone you’ve grown up with your whole life. You don’t have to do much courting when your other half already knows what brand of tobacco you prefer to chew. Plus, an incest marriage kills two birds with one stone: the legal binding of two individuals and a family reunion! We try to get the whole family together once every few months, but nowadays, it’s difficult. It’s not like back when our grandaddies were farming and could have a barn-raising party to get everyone together. Now, people are too caught up in their automatic milkers and satellite television to bother visiting on Sundays. So really, intermarriage is the last hope we have of keeping the family together!

Of course, I leave out another crucial aspect of family gatherings, and that’s babies. You see, here in Kentucky, there’s not much to do except cook meth and make babies, so by golly, that’s what we do! People are always concerned over what our babies are going to look like, as if they’re going to pop out with a couple extra heads, but that’s just plain silly. Sure, little Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson may have eighteen and zero toes, respectively, but Bobby is awfully good at sharing with his brother! See, we have to learn how to rely on ourselves and our families, and good, inbred marriages make for just that.

Now, life in Kentucky isn’t just farming and marrying and baby-having. We excel at a few other things too. Ever watched the Kentucky Derby? You’re welcome. Ever used a glue stick? You’re welcome for that, too. No, now I kid; the Kentucky Derby has horses from all over the world compete in it, not just from our great state! We sure do take pride in our horses though; in fact, one out of every ten students who make it to high school is a horse!

Some people may mock us for devoting our lifeblood to raising these horses, but since we don’t have any major universities that have National Basketball Championship titles or one of the twenty largest cities in the nation, we find ourselves to be just plain bored sometimes. We just don’t have the fortune to be the birthplace to a president or a couple of Academy Award nominated actors, because frankly, once you’re born in Kentucky, there’s really no getting out (we put roofies in our fried chicken, but don’t tell the Colonel that I told you the secret to one of his eleven herbs and spices!).

Speaking of food, it is a real shame that we’ve only been featured several hundred times in magazines, on television, and in articles for our world-class restaurants because boy, let me tell you, the real cooking starts at home, not in one of these fancy restaurants. Who needs Louisville to be named one of the South’s tastiest towns by Southern Living when Aunt Polly makes a mean opossum stew? And while I’m on the subject of awards, I think it’s high time that Lonely Planet and Conde Nast stop giving awards to Louisville’s hotels and calling them the top travel destination of 2013 just because of their fine dining, Whiskey Row, the Bourbon trail, oldest operating steamboat, baseball bat production, world renowned art scene, and southern hospitality! Don’t they know that we only drink moonshine brewed next to our trailers? And that we don’t wear shoes? And that our accents are impossible to interpret? Look, I’m just trying to warn y’all that if you should ever head down to Kentucky, my eighteen-toed son wearing his tobacco juice-stained Confederate flag shirt may not be the first to greet you, but don’t let that fool you. Kentuckians are just the backwards, inbred, shoeless, corn-fed rednecks you always thought we were. Thought Catalog Logo Mark

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