Appalachian Word Association

Sorry to have missed you these last couple weeks, I was free-loading at a friend's in Hollywood with the family and couldn't sit down long enough to pontificate. But we're back, and with our time, I'd like to take you to the place my wife's psychology professoring job would take me. So, in the spirit of psychology...
I'll give you a word, and you say the first thing that comes into your mind...
Appalachia.
What'd you say? I didn't hear ya. Don't worry, I said the same thing in 1996.
Somehow or 'nother I ended up following my girlfriend to somewhere called Boone, North Carolina for her to teach at a place called Appalachian State University. Now don't get me wrong; I was in no way prejudiced against the Salt of the Earth homefolk. I had hewn my accent over stints in Bremen and Carnesville, Georgia, but Appalachia? I had a full-blown, ignorant, bigoted idea of moonshine stills and barefoot overall-wearin' Jed Clampetts.
Turns out I was mostly off. They got TV here too, and now that there internet, and Applebee's and Panera Bread, so you have to mostly let go of the corn cob pipe guy you were picturing when you thought of Appalachia.
And, by the way, you're pronouncing it wrong. Anyone who watched any sports programming over the past year has probably heard about half the announcers correctly pronounce Appa-LATCH-un, when they recount the tale of the greatest football upset in the history of mankind. And a big sorry it had to be you to those Michigan fans out there, but in addition to making Boone a lot more popular, I think it was also instrumental in the domination my Georgia Bulldogs provided the underdog Hawaii Rainbows in the Sugar Bowl.
But, outside of football, in the "regular old world," Boone is pretty great. It's way cooler than Atlanta here on June 19 (in the thermometer sense of the word), the mountains and the creeks and the animals ain't bad, and it would be Boone that gave me a chance to tumble backwards into the newspaper business.
There wasn't a teaching job to be found. Too much competition, too many old ties, for whatever reason, I took a job instead as a sports reporter for the Watauga Democrat. I convinced them to let me start writing a weekly column in addition to typing in the agate type of the Northwest 4-A Girls' Volleyball standings and spending Friday nights at the Watauga Pioneers' game.
Speaking of putting together the scoreboard page for the Democrat, and getting back around to football, I was sitting there every Monday morning, making all the columns line up under the right headers (real high-skill use of the 'TAB' key) and I would take the time to read over the statistics for the teams in ASU's conference each week. So every week, there was this kid from Marshall University, a freshman, putting up ridiculous numbers: 200 yards receiving, 3 receiving TDs, two kick returns for TDs, just week after week. I made a point of remembering his name so that I could keep an eye on him when Marshall made the highlights. I still remember that freshman, it was Randy Moss.
The columns I was writing, on the other hand, let me express a little more imagination than the agate page, but thanks to the conservative leanings of the administration of the ironically-name Democrat, I was barred from telling any stories that involved raucous behavior or the things that contribute to such behavior. Now, being a Grizzard, I was none to eager to cut that much funny right off the top. Apparently, since I covered high school sports I was supposed to be a role model for teenagers. So I quit. (To keep the irony fairy busy, I would end up teaching teenagers once again, and be forced back into the role of model once again, but that's after almost a decade in the paper biz.)
I went on to start a local entertainment paper, and then fell back into the clutches of the newspaper company when it turned out I needed to be making money as well as dribbling pearls of wisdom onto 5,000 copies of PEEK Magazine each week. I started laying out The Avery Journal, the red-headed, freckle-faced stepsister paper of the Democrat.
And that, dear readers, is where I finally found Appalachia.