Breakfast At Shoney's...

If someone ever wants to get a real taste of Eastern Kentucky culture--at least the negatives, anyways--all one needs to do is visit the neighborhood Shoney's. Here, for the low, low price of $7.99 one can get a complete, all-you-can eat meal with bland eggs, nacho-cheese and every deep-fried meat you can think of (actually just ham, bacon, and variants of sausage--all an Eastern Kentuckian needs). And enough calories, saturated fat, cholesterol, and coffee one needs to clog his or her arteries into the NEXT millennium. The only thing missing is the thick-layer of fog hovering a few feet off the ground from the old-lady society of chain-smokers. Stupid progress and no-smoking bans. Where are our liberties? Quick, someone get Sarah Palin.

I was a member of the post-sermon Shoney's congregation today. It was not of my own doing, but a favor called in by my mother; and, being the loving, dutiful son that I am, I had no choice but to comply. I must say that I am baffled by the post-church buffet crowd. This isn't something I just noticed today at Shoney's, but it is also from a series of observations from my post-Saturday-night-drinking-bender/CiCi's-the-next-morning-tradition (no longer observed). One of my guilty pleasures in life is watching churchgoers getting relieved of the burdensome life of sinning in the morning and becoming gluttons-again immediately after.

But today, the excitement wasn't the foreign atmosphere around the restaurant; the excitement was going down at my table over a plate of fake eggs and watered-down mushrooms. To understand this in its entirety, I will recreate the scene:

Nasty coffee, deep-fried aroma, poor lighting, my sister and her boyfriend (who is a nice, intelligent guy, but lives in completely different world than I do), his brother (same as the boyfriend), my mom, me, and my girlfriend.

Somehow, as it often does when my mom is around, the conversation turned to homosexuality--mainly, one phrase pertaining to the gay populations of Lexington and Morehead: "(In context to the number of gays in Morehead) Gays are bad here."

My mom rarely means half the things she says, and likewise, says only half of what she means. While she is not a champion of gay-rights, she did not intend the literal interpretation that she implied. The boyfriend, now, I am not so sure of. So there-in lies the problem.
I am a big fan of the gay-awareness ads and commercials showing the ignorance in using "gay" as an all-encompassing word for the uncool. This is a much more damaging use of rhetoric and connotation.
After that moment, all conversation was lost on me. My one-track mind and overly-vivid imagination was out-of-control. "The mosquitoes are bad here." "I saw three Mormons the other day. Man! They are bad here." "White Christians are bad here."
I can see a gay man in San Francisco saying, "Did you read The Chronicle the other day about the straight population? Man, the heteros are bad here."

My mind had been blown.