The white-trashiest side of my family is from Cleveland. My mom got away from there but she gets still mad because I didn’t bring my kids to Cleveland to visit her side of the family. Sorry Mom, I love you, but your siblings and nephews and nieces are pure fucking garbage and my kids are better off not knowing them.
I remember one day when I was 10 or 11 and some local teenagers rolled up to my grandma’s property because my cousin had stolen some auto parts from them or something. They all got out of the car wielding pipe wrenches and baseball bats. My uncle comes out of the house, screaming at his wife to “Call the law!!” Then he holds one of them face down in the dirt with his .308 at the back of his head. The others run back to the car and my uncle fucking shoots the back tire out. They drive off with the flat. Uncle holds the dude there until the sheriff shows up. And we all get seconds of grandma’s peach cobbler on the front porch like nothing ever happened.
In the grand scheme of things, the events of that day are not even newsworthy, but the fact that nobody in the family even raised an eyebrow at it resonated with me even as a kid. That was my first realization that my cousins and me might as well be living on opposite sides of the planet from each other.