Eamon Levesque: Terror in the Ohiozone
If you’re unfamiliar with “Only in Ohio” — or too dignified to watch the linked YouTube meme comp — the joke emerged on TikTok at the tail end of 2022. The premise is simple: you take a video of something clearly wrong — so dysfunctional that it becomes surreal and unsettling — and describe it as “normal in Ohio.” You feed a baby in Ohio by throwing it out the window. Monkeys at the Ohio Zoo have AK-47s. Your Ohio Hotel Room has Slender Man’s cousin living in its walls. Hit up an Ohio amusement park and you’ll get full-blown trebucheted.
“Only In Ohio” became remarkably popular for such a visceral, weird joke, reaching near-ubiquity among Gen-Z and younger sometime late last year. Qualifying that statement is difficult; it’s not we have Nielsen ratings for memes, money for that type of startup idea just isn’t around anymore. But engagements with the meme on TikTok easily reached the hundreds of millions. The Sound associated with the meme — Lil B’s “Swag Like Ohio” — rose to become the artist’s most-played on Spotify, despite being over ten years old.
Ohio then followed the time-honored meme lifecycle. Legacy media ran obligatory SEO-driven explainer articles. Meta-memes about “Only in Ohio’s” oversaturation followed. Those that popularized the meme proclaimed its death.
So it’s all over. Don’t worry about it. Ohio isn’t real, it can’t hurt you.
But you can’t say “Ohio is dead” before you reckon with its past lives.
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Stephen Markley’s 2018 Ohio begins with the main character, Bill Ashcroft, driving from New Orleans to the titular state. Ashcroft is headed for his (fictional) hometown of New Canaan, where he needs to deliver a plot device wrapped in a mysterious package. Ashcroft unexpectedly bumps into Dakota, a friend from high school. In the abstract, you’ve seen this all before. Much like Ohio (the state), Ohio’s setup is excruciatingly normal.
Except that (SPOILER ALERT) Ashcroft is an anti-capitalist whistleblower linked to some Assange/Snowden-esque figures. The package will apparently bring down unnamed “global institutions.” Ashcroft has also been gobbling acid for the duration of his fourteen-hour drive. In spite of his mission, the first thing he does once back in Ohio is to try and buy more drugs. This causes him to run into his then-classmate-now-dealer Dakota, who upsells him on meth. While hitting the pipe together, a paranoid Dakota pulls a gun on Ashcroft, suspecting him of moving drugs through his territory.
But they make nice and Dakota goes to leave. Here’s how he leaves, which is narrated with “...and then something pretty strange happened.”
Dakota’s fingers stretched into gnarled autopods, and the ulna of his forearm deformed into the angled zeugopod of a bat. The creature, this deformed angel, flapped harder and achieved liftoff… the feet metamorphosed into talons and the knees buckled inward… a vortex of blue light spilled across the pavement, the streets, the downtown buildings, swirling violet violence and a piercing hiss as the oxygen was sucked into another dimension.
I initially assumed this passage was just a hallucination from the protagonist. He is, indeed, zooted. That interpretation doesn’t hold up. People in Ohio take plenty of drugs; nowhere else does a character grow wings and change dimensions. This stylistically aberrant scene has zero impact on the plot — weird, if you’re going to go through the trouble of getting all that by your editor. It’s a complete outlier, something from a different book.
In short: normal visit to Ohio.
Hear me out. Smoking meth at your high school reunion and watching your dealer go Cthulhu Mode could absolutely be an “Only in Ohio” meme. Somehow, Ohio (2018 novel) and “Only in Ohio” (2022 meme) are drawing on the same aesthetic. Which is weird.
There’s nothing to suggest that anyone making “Only in Ohio” memes was drawing from Ohio (book) for inspiration. And like, hardcover upmarket fiction doesn’t influence what’s going to be on TikTok four years from now. This isn’t causation; that leaves correlation.
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A January 2015 Columbus Monthly article describes how Ohio (specifically Columbus) became “the top test market” in the United States.
Shashi Matta, a clinical associate professor of marketing at Ohio State's Fisher College of Business, says that Ohio “is a microcosm of the U.S., what happens here will probably happen elsewhere." The Dispatch writer notes “that we in Columbus often serve as guinea pigs for businesses, especially those in the fast-food industry, is nothing new.”
Census Bureau data verifies that Ohio is close to the national average when it comes to income, racial diversity, education, population density, and political affiliation. OSU causes Columbus specifically to skew younger than the national average. As 18-35 year olds are known to be the largest, most-influenceable consumer demographic, “average, but younger” is vital to the nation’s marketers as they add new facets to consumer culture.
But I’d argue that the key demographic that Ohio has a lock on is population-weighted density. Standard population density simply divides “folks” by “land” to express how many folks you might find in a given area. That’s misleading. Census says New York’s population density is 414.68 per sq/mi and Delaware’s is 508 — but saying “Delaware is more crowded than New York” is dumb and wrong. Most people in New York live in New York City and experience a much higher population density. In accounting for this, population-weighted density quantifies something almost spiritual: what’s it like when you go outside?
As calculated by Prof. Werner Antweiler, University of Toronto, the weighted population density of the United States is 206.346. The weighted population density of Ohio is 228.178.
Statistically, when most Americans walk outside, they see something close to Ohio.
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Ohio Horror (Ohorror? Ohorrior? Horrioh?) isn’t a byproduct of the 2022 meme or the 2018 book. What’s most likely is that Ohio author Stephen Markley and the countless Ohio meme auteurs both drew on an earlier, Reddit/Tumblr iteration of Ohio Horror from circa 2016. Some of these will be familiar:
None of these above examples have the unsettling nature of the 2022 “Only in Ohio” meme crop. But they do feel like appropriate forerunners — early glimpses of the later darkness to come.
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I grew up in an exurban town which has a Premium Outlet Mall but no grocery store.
I went to a weird college in central Ohio. “Weird how” isn’t the point. I’m just saying that if you walked around, you’d agree it deviates from the mean.
In the summer of 2012, my parents and I drove from my hometown to my college. When I got there, I spoke to my new classmates about their drive (most everyone drove). Many of my new classmates described their drive like this.
* — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — *
(Leaving my old place) (In-between-y places) (I’m in a new place)
They described the distinct experience of leaving one space, “driving through Ohio,” arriving at another.
I had it in my head that Ohio was my destination. One goes to Arizona to see the Grand Canyon, you go to Canada to see Niagara falls. Not for these kids. Home and school were two places with Ohio in between, even though one of those places was inside Ohio.
This wasn’t just urban snobbery or coastal elitism: Kids I spoke to from Virginia Beach, St. Louis, Bethesda, Bismark, and Roanoke all took the same approach to the ontology of Ohio. The real kicker was when a kid from Cincinnati described how bad the drive through Ohio was. That one shook me to my core. Because here’s what my drive looked like:
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — *
(I’m in a new place)
I grew up 600 miles from Ohio. While driving through each of them, I could not ascertain a meaningful differentiator — tangible or ephemeral, visible or invisible — between where I grew up and Ohio.
I grew up in a part of Massachusetts which is in Ohio.
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We’ve established two concurrent narratives about Ohio’s place in the culture of the last ten years.
Ohio is, statistically, the American average.
Increasingly, people are using Ohio to invoke fear and horror.
Ohio is the dead center — and if that center will not hold, things will start to come crawling out.
Interpret this how you will. But right now, we need to find out whether or not you’re in Ohio. It’s not safe there.
We don’t have much time. There are three zones.
OZ (pronounced “awz”): Ohiozone. Places that are Ohio.
NOZ (“nawz”): Non-Ohiozone. Places that are not Ohio.
QOZ (“qwaz”): Quasi-Ohiozone. Liminal spaces between the OZ and NOZ.
Ignore the signs and maps, they mean nothing. Here are some field tests to determine whether or not you are in Ohio.
Needing a car to buy groceries (sidewalks indicate a NOZ/QOZ)
Restaurants with “special sauces” that are not even a little spicy
Doing Herbalife or Cutco instead of just selling drugs
Panera
Caucasians wearing red clothing
College Sport Team regalia
Driveway basketball hoops
Elderly people taking over a Dunkin in lieu of a public space
These places don’t have to be physical. You’re reading this in a NOZ. Instagram is a Noz. Facebook is in Ohio. So please, I’m begging you, be careful.
Ohio no longer exists as a state
Ohio is now a state of existence
Ohioum delendum est
Ohio will be Eliminated.