Behind, the dirty south.

So i have this strange fascination which has recently all kind of...come together recently and all ties in with each other. The "fascination" in mind i write about is this thing called "the dirty south" but to understand where that came from i have to rewind back nine-ten years to where it all started.

The early beginning...
Strangely enough it started off when i began watching WWF (now WWE). I think i even recall the date...it was sometime in october 1999 and i'm going to take a wild guess that it was the pay per view event No Way Out that i first glimpsed the raw energy and power of two young daredevil brothers called The Hardy Boyz. It was probably some crazy ladder match that the two of them were entered in and me and my best friend who lived across the street at the time became totally entrolled in their abilities to fly across a ring and do this crazy backflip stuff off the ropes. So yeah i became obsessed with them and ended up reading their autobiography they co-wrote a few years later. Y'know when they announce where the wrestlers come from when they're walking down the ramp into the ring, well this place was Cameron, North Carolina. Being the young impressionable kid that i was i thought this must be a cool place to come from. So when i read their autobiography it all made sense. They used to play in the woods as kids and their dad used to grow tabacco and such. This i thought was cool. A nice family, in a small town. Maybe a secret desire of mine? So at the same time as this going on i got into a tv series called Dawson's Creek. Boy that was even cooler to me at that age. Teenage kids in a small town, with not much to do but play by the creek (the sea in my case) and watch films (back on vhs in these days). I became intertwined by this tv show and the characters and lives they led. We had also just got the internet (aol dial up, what a joke!) so i was "surfing" imdb and the official sites for all this finding out and taking in as much information as i could about the creek. Anyway, it was filming in this place called Wilmington, North Carlolina..."oh wait thats near where the hardy boyz are from, thats so cool!" were probably my youthful thoughts. I was a member of some Dawson's Creek messageboard and i remember always reading about these people who lived in Wilmington and got to see it being filmed and meeting James Van Der Beek and Katie Holmes, et all. Then the fans would also travel into this small coastal town as tourists and tell of their stories and adventures there. I was hooked! Plus while i was watching the show i could relate to the type of town they grew up in, being a young teenager n' all. Wilmington just looked like the place i wished i had been born in. So DC finished, i was upset. I turned my back on the new tv show being filmed there, One Tree Hill. Nothing could replace Dawson's Creek in my eyes.

The Middle...
I kind of floated for the next few years, not much had drawn me closer to North Carolina other than Dawson's Creek re-runs and boxsets and i eventually grew out of the wrestling phase. I wrapped my life in music and bands. I have thought long and hard about where i stole the term "the dirty south" from but have been unable to pin point an exact, genre of music or film i heard it in. All i do know is that when i was 16 i created a Photobucket account called the dirty south because i felt that living where i did, by the seaside in a crummy little town that has no clubs, no real cinema, just a beach...that i infact did live in the dirty south. It is by far the worst town to come from on the south coast, albeit i was not born here (thank god) but i spent most of my youth attempting to find things to keep me occupied down here. The teenage pregnancy rate is one of the highest in europe, making it a dirty town and its the most south you can get in england. So i'm guessing this is where my theory came from and therefore i felt i really related to the term at that age.

Recently...
...it all came together. I'm not sure which came first, but it all began around november 2008. I have always had a fascination of knowing what James Van Der Beek is up to after Dawson's Creek had ended, guess it's kind of a teenage school girl crush to remind me of the "old days" but anyway news came in he was going to guest appear in One Tree Hill, as i mentioned earlier the current tv show being filmed in Wilmington. So i thought as a bit of nostalgia i thought i'd "download the episodes from itunes" and have a bit of a sesh. This sesh then turned into watching six whole seasons of One Tree Hill over the course of a few weeks earlier this year. Oh no, i was hooked. Back on the messageboards and forums i went to find out every last bit of information i could about the show. Oh and hello my love for wilmington and experiencing different locations in One Tree Hill that wernt shown in Dawson's Creek. Some way shape of form i am convinced if i came back in another life i would live there. Running alongside my OTH sessions, i became obsessed by a tv show called True Blood as well, this was set deep in the american south as well, only to leave me for fascinated with the true meaning of the dirty south. Throw in my enthusiasm recently for reading lots of american literature and soon poetry and short stories, i came across a term called southern gothic. Add in a bit of googling and wiki later and i find i have already begun my path into reading southern american literature as i had recently purchased To Kill A Mockingbird which is amongst this genre. Add in some southern gothic films i have watched over the years, the green mile, the gift, monsters ball, the cold mountain, the skeleton key, frailty, texas chainsaw massacre, the reaping...etc. Plus add a good southern rock band from Wilmington, He Is Legend who also have links to OTH. Put it in a pot, mix it all together and my strange fascination for North Carolina and The Dirty South becomes evident.

What exactly is it that i like about all of this you may or may not be asking yourself? Well i'm not sure to be precise but i know i like the hot weather, the scenery, views, trees, green landscape, winding creeks and rivers and simplcity of a town like wilmington, it reflects the easy life for me, always has and always will. I like the dark stereotypes in southern literature including the hope that the slaves had to overcome and the heirarchy of the confederacy. Knowing that there is a content love story between the southern beauty and the chivalrous gentleman with that accent you swoon over and then you have the christian preacher that knows there is a dark and deeper force out there but will keep it to himself. I always have had a thing for escapism and vicariously living through other people's stories...

Now it is 13 days until i embark on my adventure to america, add a few more days onto that and i get to travel through the dirty south itself including Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Virgina, could my dream be anymore real of visiting these states and realising i grew up in the wrong dirty south?

Hannah xoxo