(Author’s Note: I’ve never really known what to write about myself, or what to say about myself, when asked. How much information do I give? What do people really want to hear about? The boring, mundane details, or the really good stuff, the stuff that makes you, well, who you are. And what really makes a person who they are? Sure, people’s career’s make up and take up the majority of their lives as they grow older, but didn’t they become who they really are as a person long before they started working 9 to 5? With these questions on my mind, and an indecisiveness about the right answer to them in my heart, I’ve decided the most prudent course of action would be to provide both, and let you, the reader, make your own choices regarding what’s most important, about me. Even if writing ‘The Really Good Stuff’ does make me feel a bit like Chunk in The Goonies, when he’s baring his soul to the Fratellis.)
The Basics
My name is Matt Dossett, and I’m an accountant. I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, and I figured that I would just go to Ole Miss, graduate, and take the first job that came my way back home. Why not? It’s what everyone else did. I’d be close to friends and family, and I’d live the perfectly normal life that everyone expected of me. Then, in my final year at Ole Miss, I stumbled into a job interview with a hangover, and when my head cleared, I had accepted a job in Washington, D.C.
I’ve been living in Virginia and working in the District ever since. I still work as an accountant doing big important financial type things for Dear Ole Uncle Sam. Being an accountant is kind of like being an international spy, except with less excitement, danger, and cool high-tech gadgets, and with more paperwork. It’s not a bad job, it pays the bills, and I like my co-workers, but being an accountant is most definitely not what I dreamed of growing up to become when I was 8 (more on that later).
This website was born in the spring of ‘03 as I became interested in web design; it became ‘Southbound Home’ shortly thereafter. It chronicles my life in D.C., as I stumble through an existence that is foreign to most of my friends and family. I talk a lot about design (as it pertains to beginners like myself), my life, my girl, the moments that make living special, and every once in a while, what it’s like being a Southerner living outside of the Deep South.
In that regard, I feel like “Southbound Home” is a way for me to help connect two different areas that are worlds apart. Many of my friends back home in the south have never lived in, or even visited in some cases, other parts of the country, and nobody outside of Mississippi has ever intentionally gone there, so I try to connect the two worlds that I know, sometimes with with a little humor and my own brand of wit, mixed with bourbon, thrown in.
The Really Good Stuff
Some would describe me as a mischievous youth. I would use the terms curious, fun loving, or possibly exploratory. I feel that, under the guise of being fair and just, it’s best that I lay those moments out before you over which there is debate, and let you decide for yourselves:
When I was but a young child of three or four, or round about there, I was, on numerous occasions, apt to vocalize certain words in crowded restaurants, simply because I liked the way that they sounded. Those words were always, ‘Diarrhea’. The volume of my voice was always ‘Loud’.
When I was not yet ten years old, my now legendary acute sense of hearing was developed. I complained for hours one night from my bedroom that I heard water running downstairs. As always, I was shrugged off - ignored, if you will - until finally my parents went down to check, and found that the water heater had exploded, and the entire first floor was being flooded with water. I’ve been hearing things ever since.
When I was a preteen of only eleven or twelve, my family went to an Easter lunch with uncles, aunts, cousins and the like. At some point, everyone’s attention was focused on me, and I chose to announce, that based on recent standardized test scores, it had been determined that I was what educators liked to describe as ‘gifted’. Everyone had a good laugh, I suppose, because they thought, how cute, he’s so precocious. I still haven’t figured out what they were laughing about. You’re not reading their websites right now, are you?
Also, at about the same age of eleven or twelve, I saw quite the awe inspiring commercial. The facts of the story are disputed, but I think it went about something like this…my mother had purchased a two gallon jug of lemon-lime Gatorade at the local grocery store, and as Gatorade always is, it was delicious. However, the certain commercial in question advertised a ‘shatter-proof’ container, and I, always an advocate for the Better Business Bureau, and truth in advertising, decided to run what we would these days call a ‘field test’ on this specific claim. Needless to say, dropping a two-gallon container of Gatorade onto a linoleum kitchen floored resulted in a highlighter yellow shaded kitchen, and a mother who was given the opportunity to exercise her falsetto for myself, my sister, and two-thirds of the neighborhood to hear. My full name was used, but to it’s credit, the Gatorade container actually didn’t shatter, so much as simply break at two or three key pressure points (The Mom greatly disputes the facts of this story, but quite honestly, this version is how I remember it, and how I remember it is funnier than her version, so I’m not very apt to follow up on factual data).
When I was about 15, I wanted a dog more than anything in this God given world. The Mom, in all her infinite wisdom, realized, that not only would I not care for a dog properly, but that, if I didn’t, such a task would fall to her. Such a task she did not want. She devised what might be considered an ingenious scheme. She made a deal with The Sister and I that, if we would clean out the storage room in our house, which had been neglected for years, and was piled, neck high, with such storage items as one would normally find in one’s storage room - brooms, lawn mowers, ladders, and general housing supplies - that we would be able to talk about getting a dog. This was an insurmountable task. A hurdle that could not be overcome. For all of my life, my mother’s smirk as she devised such an evil plot will not be forgotten. She laid our chore at our feet at 11:00 AM, Central Standard Time. The dog, which we still have, and whom my mother still keeps at her house in Oxford (We love you Jake!), was procured by sundown.
When I was twenty-two, or maybe twenty-one, I might have made The Mom think that I had been taken to jail in a town, 1 to 2 hours away from the closest person able to provide bail. This is not my proudest moment. The most humorous moments never are. But when you’re drinking free drinks at a casino at three 0’clock in the morning, and someone suggests to call phone numbers very similar to that of your mother’s, and to tell them that you’re in jail, and well, could you call her and tell her, you don’t really think about the repercussions of such a situation. It’s kind of like proposing marriage, in that regard. The aftermath doesn’t get as much forethought as the moment itself. And honestly, that’s all I’d like to say about that.
Finally, when I was twenty-seven, I made one of many recurring trips to Oxford, MS since I moved to the Northern Virginia area, to see some Ole Miss game or another. This trip was made in October, and fall was in the air. Boys will be boys, and as such, the boys and I decided to make a night of it the Friday before the big game. Time passed. Night fell. The sun came up the following morning, and, upon waking, The Mom walked into her kitchen to find a previously unseen pumpkin, carved in such a way as to mimic the actions of someone who might have had too much to drink, and whose had responded as such. Where exactly did the pumpkin come from for sure? I’ve been sworn to secrecy, so I can’t say. But I am pretty sure that the neighbors never really missed it.
These are my sins. I do not deny them. I only ask that, when I do pass from this world, and come upon St. Peter as he stands guard at the Pearly Gates, those that judge me may have a sense of humor that is fair, and just, and maybe just a little diabolical. That is all.
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