When I announced that I was quitting school to move to Oklahoma, most people were surprised and puzzled. "Oklahoma?" they would ask. "Is that really a place?" Or: "Isn’t that a movie?" Or: "Isn’t that one of only three states in the nation where cockfighting is still legal?" The answers to those questions are "yes," "yes," and "yes, but at least we finally have outlawed the scourge of bestiality. Thanks for wasting everybody’s time, Oklahoma State Legislature!"

Oklahoma is the 46th state in the Union, both in terms of when its entry took place and in terms of adult literacy. It is the third state in the Union in terms of teen pregnancies. It is flat on top and on both sides and squiggly at the bottom, and the strip of land sticking out from the top left corner is called the "panhandle." The panhandle is full of hog farms and militant separatists. The rest of the state is excessively windblown and given to tornadoes and evangelical pentecostalism.

Facts about Oklahoma: "Oklahoma" means "land of the red man." "Oklahoma City" means "land-of-the-red-man city." The largest airport in Oklahoma City is named after Will Rogers, a rope-twirling comedian who died in 1935 when his one-eyed pilot crashed their plane into a snowbank. The second-largest airport in Oklahoma City is named after the one-eyed pilot.

For years Oklahoma license plates bore the motto "Oklahoma Is OK," which was pretty generous, if you ask me, but local boosters felt it lacked enthusiasm. The new license plate reads, "Oklahoma: Native America," which is kind of crass, considering that 95 percent of the tribes that hold land in the state were technically natives of Illinois and Montana and North Dakota and Tennessee until the army rounded them up and marched them here.

From the 1830s through the 1880s, Oklahoma Territory served as the federal government’s official dumping ground for inconveniently located Native Americans, which by the federal government’s lights included the following tribes: a) all of them. The Cherokees and Seminoles were the first victims of this relocation policy, which was devised by President Andrew Jackson as a way of being an asshole. The Seminoles stole a cannon and fled to the Everglades; the Cherokees hired a lawyer. Neither tactic proved sufficient. The Supreme Court ruled that Jackson had to stop sending people to Oklahoma, but he was like, "Make me," and the Supreme Court was like, "Well, we are making you, we’re making you right now," and then he was all, "You and what army?" and then he told the army to send the Supreme Court to Oklahoma. So now the Supreme Court convenes right here in Edmond, in front of the Whataburger. The next time you are in Edmond, please visit our Supreme Court.

In 1889 the federal government decided that it had given the Native Americans more land than they could handle, and decided that the big central chunk of the Oklahoma Territory should be converted into a safe haven for the nation’s least interesting white people. The most sensible way to distribute this land, the government decided, would be to line everybody up along the northern border and fire a gun into the air, or maybe at somebody, because the government was drunk, and then have everybody take off running. The land was divided up into 160-acre plots. When you found plot you liked, you were supposed to drive a stake into each corner and then ride to the nearest claim office, wherever that was, and hope that nobody pulled up your stakes while you were gone. Claim-jumpers and people who sneaked across early were called "Sooners," and when they were caught they were generally hanged.

I don’t know if the plots were marked off with chalk or what. Our textbook did not explain the logistics of claim-staking, and while the movie Far and Away did feature a Land Run reenactment, it was generally more interested in Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman having sex under a blanket than in the explication of surveying regulations.

Oklahoma became a state in 1907, presumably through some kind of clerical error. Oil was discovered in Bartlesville just before World War One, and "boom towns" sprang up across the prairie in short order. In the 1920s everybody wore raccoon coats and swallowed live goldfish and drove to the burlesque shows in their Model T roadsters. Vaudeville was king, and the vast grassy hinterlands its slack-jawed empire. I myself am staging a vaudeville show right here in the laundry room. So far I have booked one scantily-clad girl dancing the hurdy-gurdy, a man who plays the spoons, Terry and His Wonder Dogs, a plate-spinner, two Irish comedians who hate each other, and the Happy Brothers, who will sing "Peg O’ My Heart" as it has been performed 800,000 times before: with feeling. In addition, I will be performing a comedy act I have written myself. It is called "Louie and Banana Join the Army." I play both parts. Here is a sampling of my act:

LOUIE: Did you take a bath this morning?

BANANA: Why? Is one missing?

Thank you. I also mime to records.

By the 1930s Oklahoma City was home to a thriving jazz scene, and also to 400 billion metric tons of dust. Everybody ate fried flour for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and everyone who had not been shot by Bonnie and Clyde bought a used truck and moved to Bakersfield, or else lived in abandoned barns and played the mouth harp. In 1942 Chuck Norris was born. I don’t know what happened after that, because the filmstrips we were supposed to watch in our state-mandated Oklahoma History class got burned up in the projector or crumbled to dust or something, which was not at all surprising, seeing as how they were 450 years old. Our rickety wooden desks, meanwhile, had been brought to the continent by the conquistadors, and our "classroom" was made of sod. Worms fell on our heads day and night, but we did not complain, because we were glad to be out of the sun, and away from the mosquitoes that made Ma so sick back in Beaver Falls. Then we all contracted scarlet fever and died. Yours truly, Laura Ingalls Wilder.

In the late 1930s, according to my Oklahoma History textbook, a man in Northeastern Oklahoma found some odd symbols carved into a cliff near the Arkansas River. These symbols were later identified as Viking runes, and the carvings themselves have been dated back to at least the 18th century. French traders may have ventured this far south, but it seems unlikely, the textbook added, that anybody looking for pelts in the 1790s would have been literate in 11th-century Scandanavian languages. Where did the Edmond School District find this crazy textbook? That is what I would like to know.

Here is another mystery: Now that I have moved to Oklahoma, everybody I have a beer with eventually feels compelled to attempt to "fix" my puffy Van Halen hair. What is up with that? Stop touching my hair.

I do not know what is up with cockfighting. I do not know how you can attend a cockfight, and I do not know anyone with whom you can place a bet on a cockfight, so stop asking. I do, however, know what is up with the University of Oklahoma football team. They are the best college football team in this great nation, that is what is up with them, and while Josh Heupel may be graduating, the team has a strong corps of young receivers, as well as a future All-American in sophomore running back Quentin Griffin. As the University of Oklahoma fight song puts it, "Boomer Sooner, Boomer Sooner, Boomer Sooner, Boomer Sooner. Boomer Sooner, Boomer Sooner, Boomer Sooner, OKU." As I believe I mentioned earlier, in the years following the Land Run, convicted Sooners were usually executed, and suspected Sooners were often lynched. I forgot what Boomers were, but I am pretty sure that they were also big fat cheaters.

REO Speedwagon is coming in July.

Come visit me in Edmond, and I will show you all the local sights. We can visit the Watonga Cheese Factory in Watonga. We can visit the Tom Mix Museum in Claremore. Tom Mix was the first silent-movie cowboy, and while he is not intrinsically interesting, his suitcase is. The Tom Mix Museum is home to the world-famous Tom Mix Death Suitcase, which flew out of Tom Mix’s backseat and decapitated him when he stopped too abruptly at a Hollywood intersection. What a super object to put on display in a museum! I have nothing but good things to say about the Tom Mix Museum.

While you are in Edmond, you will not want to miss the 147-foot cross next to the Interstate, nor you will be able to. At night they illuminate it with fiber-optic lighting, and in December it turns red and green. The cross was erected by Metrochurch, which has also seen fit to beautify our local freeways with 13,000 purple-and-hot-pink billboards that read, "Got Jesus?" Metrochurch is such a card. I have never been there, but when I was in seventh grade, I did get dragged to a service at CityChurch, their big crosstown rival. I went with my best friend and her mother, who had been my sixth-grade reading teacher, and who spent the whole sermon swaying and waving her arms in the air in the most embarrassing fashion imaginable. We sat in the second row. Nobody sat in the first row, because the former televangelist who ran CityChurch liked to jump up on the pew for emphasis. He was also sort of foaming at the mouth.

Anyway, Metrochurch built the giant highway cross a few years after some local Unitarians took the city to court to get the cross taken off the city seal. They had trouble getting it approved, since Edmond technically prohibits the erection of signs taller than 35 feet, and since their original plans called for the cross to measure 157 feet, instead of just 147. The seafood place across the highway, which has since, alas, gone out of business, petitioned the city council for permission to put up a 157-foot pole with a giant crab on it, which put a further dent in the Metrochurch plan, but eventually some new guys got elected to the council and told Metrochurch to go ahead and build it, because crosses are nice. They did not approve the giant crab.

Unfortunately, if you do not enjoy giant crucifixes that light up and turn colors, Oklahoma is not an especially fun state. All of the rock ‘n’roll bands sound like Sponge, the only hip-hop station goes off the air at 2 am, and all of the clubs are full of line-dancers. My friend Colin and I finally found the gay district over Christmas break–the "gay district" consists of three clubs owned by the same person plus the Habana Inn, which appears to have been airlifted in from Palm Beach circa 1947–but Colin refused to get out of the car because his face was "too puffy," and because his teeth hurt, and because the painkillers he was supposed to be taking were making him dizzy. So instead we went to that dumb pretend pub next to the mall and I drank three Cape Cods while Colin threw up in the bathroom. Then we went to Caroline’s house and watched the animated version of "Robin Hood" with George "Goober" Lindsey as the voice of "Trigger." It was the best Christmas ever! Yours truly, Laura Goober Wilder and her All-Goober Band. Wooooo! I am so dizzy.