I’ve heard the term “Ohio Guy” bantered about lately, and as a near thirty-year resident of Ohio, let me tell you: you don’t know Ohio Guy like I know Ohio Guy. Consider this your field report on the mysteries and intricacies of this strange creature spotted in the outlet malls of America’s most C+ state.
Ohio is a state in a perpetual identity crisis. It’s never been a cool place to live in any moment in time, deriding for its boringness and a river catching on fire. Both urban and rural simultaneously, it gets the dreaded “purple state” moniker from the state’s gerrymandered districts and divergent demographics. The big cities almost always vote Democratic, suburbs switch from time to time, and rural always votes Republican. The Ohio GOP is a pigpen of some of the fattest, ugliest hogs on the planet, and the Ohio Democratic Party is wimpy, anemic, and pathologically incapable of inspiring anyone. With absolutely no irony, it is a land of contrasts, which basically means it has no personality at all.
The primary resident is the Ohio Guy, part of the American male taxonomy that has always been around us, yet due to its anonymity and bland ubiquitousness, has eluded our most in-depth analysis.
If the genus is Suburbanite, Ohio Guy is a species, birthed from the same American goop pool of bored entitlement, debt-based wealth, and unfocused anger at a changing world. But unlike the slightly classist “Florida Man” trope, Ohio Guy is already on top, but thinks of himself as a constant victim, so it’s worth kicking him in the dick just to level the playing field. (He’s very similar to Lawn Dad, a type of cousin who’s less pointlessly angry and more clueless, more benign.) What places Ohio Guy out from the traditional suburban conservative is three things: his specific uniform, a lack of an overarching narrative, and his eternal, aimless rage. Ohio Guy lives in no place, but is everywhere, for Ohio isn’t a geographic state, but a state of mind.
The “Ohio Guy” Aesthetic
Taxonomy begins with visual identification. The best place to spot Ohio Guy is to go to a place where you feel dead inside, where no possibility of a meaningful future can exist. Everything must feel as pointless and terrible as it can get. I recommend your local Bob Evans, the one right off the highway next to the church the size of an airplane hangar.
Ohio Guy can be found waiting in line for something: a vending machine, a bank teller to complain about auditing the Fed, a rollercoaster which will strain his barely coherent arteries, to buy movie tickets in a seething fog because he can’t figure out the fucking MovieBucks app, or just a fried Twinkie stand at the Lorain County Fair. In life, he is waiting in line to die.
You can spot him by his outfit, a visual metaphor for what is happening to his soul. It screams “I am so angry all the time, but I also don’t give a shit”. Typically, Ohio Guy is wearing the following:
- Baseball cap of various racist mascots
- Tucked in polo shirt, the ones with the little alligators on them
- Beige cargo shorts
- White cuffed crew socks
- New Balance or Nike shoes depending on what’s in the news
Ohio Guy is exclusively white, painfully so, and therefore perpetually sunburned (even in winter). His skin is a blotchy, flushed mess, a combo of borderline alcoholism and bad skincare. Ironically, he spends approximately 30 seconds outside on a given day, the exact distance from the crossover SUV to the air-conditioned interior of whatever. A variant of this is the Overtanned, someone who despises the outdoors but wants to resemble a leather handbag.
His face has no discernible shape, much like his outlook. Ohio Guy is entropy made into a person, angry at the fact he has been pushed into a river’s current, but too lazy to swim against it. He is made of shapes, like a rough artist’s sketch before definition is filled in. Appropriately, this is also his mind, a first hastily written draft of copy/pasted ideas and thoughts, never to be revised. If you want a psychic vision of Ohio Guy, imagine the sweaty driver of a Chevy Suburban circling a parking lot forever. He’s always stuck behind himself, and is enraged, honking and swearing, never realizing he is honking and swearing at his own ego death.
Cul-De-Sac of the Soul
A strange phenomenon of Ohio Guy is to viscerally hate nature, except in ways he can dominate it in petty ways. Bragging about meat consumption, land ownership, and oddly enough, each Ohio Guy owns a tiny boat with no name. Not a yacht or even a schooner, but something more than just a rowboat or dingy. He fits in no place in history, has no aspirations, and therefore a tiny, useless boat suits him well. It lives in the driveway or half of the garage, just like him.
This aimlessness is a core of his being, the other a raging fire of misplaced anger at that same nothing. The world is a distant and confusing place, very far away, and Ohio Guy’s universe appears only in the moment he is about to bite into a fast food cheeseburger, the changing of a channel, flipping on the turn signal.
There is a delay in the absorption of pop culture. Ohio Guy isn’t on Facebook, not really, he’s in the comment section of your local news website still annoyed Miley Cyrus twerked at the MTV Movie Awards. He is a living comments section.
Is there a God? Maybe to Ohio Guy. The concept of God is like the concept of a celebrity. You know their name and some facts about them, it just doesn’t get absorbed. The deeper truth of existence skips off the atmosphere of his brain. Perhaps the tiny anchor of his tiny boat will hit him in the foot, and he can experience a small moment of transcendence.
He is somewhat religious in that way cultural conservatism is combined with consumerism, a political affectation if he had politics. Sex for him is a mechanical act, and can’t comprehend or enjoy hedonism. His body is a prison. He is annoyed because everything in his world is a reminder of how meaningless everything is. His only real orgasm comes from when the AC of the mall hits him. He does not love, he tolerates, and God is as distant as the stars.
They claim to be from big cities, only due to the anonymous nature of Ohio suburban towns. Real quick, conjure an image of Parma, Ohio in your mind. Like most Ohio places, it is nowhere, and for a man in the empty space of history, it must feel like home.
On the top peak of nihilism and apathy, there is Ohio Guy, and his only way to express himself is through unfocused rage at the world. Sometimes it’s fury at a coupon not being honored, sometimes it’s a bent golf club at a sliced swing. His concentrated apathy has a consumed dark twin. His only moment of control is whether or not the drywall has a hole in it or not.
Angry at Nothing
The joke is he punches drywall, but why? Punching the drywall is a redemptive act, a way of screaming out loud that life is suffering. The hole in the drywall is the hole inside him and he must make it a reality. He cannot look inwards, instead shoving outwards, all praxis and no theory, a semi-sentient creature.
For all his debt-wealth, he enjoys absolutely none of it. Boredom turns to rage at the speed of headline. Ohio Guy is bored out of his skull and overstimulated at the same time. His mind is a rat’s nest of minor arguments with various retail workers, imaginary political enemies if he had politics, neighbors, strangers.
His anger is not the typical conservative anger at, say, Muslims. This is where he exemplifies himself. While Beltway conservatives and bank managers are angry at cultural or racial foes, Ohio Guy has no functional worldview. There’s just a vague, unnamed emptiness. He is just angry all the time at a truth he cannot state, a throb of barely suppressed explosive rage pulses beneath the puckered reddened skin. They don’t snap and become murderers, they grow multiple tumors. He wouldn’t punch out God, he would just have a blowout argument and drive home angry. Suicide is impossible, because that would be giving everyone they hate exactly what they wanted. He survives out of pure spite, coasting on a fluffy cloud of prescription opioids.
Ohio Guy is an entire generation of large sons just living inside their Escalades. If they’re especially industrious, they make videos about cryptocurrency or Bigfoot conspiracies in their car. The car is their castle, their real safe space, free from eyeballs and wives and expectations. It is the closest thing to a womb they can inhabit. They can feel smart or cool for once. They can get fans for their brutally honest rants about how politics are bullshit, how they hate their ex-wives, and how people shouldn’t get so PC and offended all the time. If the driver’s seat was a cross, he’d be nailing himself to it with a rented Black & Decker nailgun.
The closest thing he has to a political opinion is that he hates unions, because all their dads were union guys at the toxic fume factory, and he of course hates his father. He sees his father’s perfectly round head in every dogshit political ad with white dudes in hard hats. Ohio Guy’s own children turned out to be us: a mix of Teen Vogue Maoists, Fortnite Nazis, goth theater kids, Tradcath bloggers, or shitposting cops.
Ohio Guy Jr is the Large Son, either emaciated or orb-like, no in-between. The flat brim hat, chin beard, and urban affect betray a deep sense of needing to belong to something, anything that feels genuine and unrehearsed, despite his presentation being intentional performance in itself. Junior tortures cats and does junk meth out of a broken lightbulb, embodying the worst stereotypes of rightwing’s opinion of inner city life. He lives in Dublin, Ohio: a cartoon persona in a cartoon town. Hip hop culture is the opposite of Ohio Guy Sr., so Junior must flock to it and embrace it.
Every generation of Ohio Guy is intensely reactionary to the last.
Carl Wilhoyte is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His work has appeared in Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel, Abomination Magazine, Bourbon Penn, and Farmhouse Magazine.