Imagine yourself in my shoes for a moment--living in a tiny hamlet in the middle of nowhere in deep south Mississippi, surrounded by other tiny hamlets and piney woods. Imagine that you like live theater and intelligent discussion, that you like Bill Maher nad despise George Bush. That you have read the classics, and have Dante and Flaubert and Chekov, and the complete collection of Shakespeare and other great literature on the shelves and that you've read them all; that your favorite book is The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam--and that you have no one to share them with.

I am a closet intellectual, stuck in a backwater where if you espouse opinions not held by others--here in the land of George Bush worship, a place where people actually believe dinosaurs and people lived on Earth together and evolution is something liberals made up, and carbon emissions and cutting down rain forests is a good thing and global warming is a hoax--then you can understand why I stay at home and keep my own company.

Since my Scrabble playing friend died, I have found no one else to play with, so I stay here alone and the hamlet people probably think I'm a lesbian because there's no man in my life--keeping your own company is weird, dontcha know! Having written for the newspaper and written and read essays on Mississippi Public Broadcasting, some people think I'm "smart," some people think I'm eccentric etc. So here I am, only out of the closet in my own house, reading and writing (and watching good movies) but in public, just being like my peers except I refuse to discuss politics and religion--or other things.

For Instance, I wouldn't dare say aloud I think pot should be legalized and television evangelists are con men etc. Not down here; not in this unique milieu. No indeedy. Now I'm going to town, so I'm back in the closet again. susil