When I die, I want to haunt New England. I love being a Yankee. Not a New York one, but a real one. Being a Yankee, a true New Englander, means that there are several truths and facts that come with living in the colonies.

First, New Englanders hate their neighbors. It’s a fact of life. Every single one of us who was born here or who fully embraces New England has, on the genetic level, a deep burning hatred of anybody who lives close to us or our family.

While civilization has buried this urge to withdraw from the idiots around us, it is not completely dead. In small towns, like the one I grew up in, we rarely speak to our neighbors once we hit 15. There’s a reason Robert Frost wrote “Mending Wall.” He was a New Englander. There’s a reason there are stone walls crisscrossing the landscape. Walls mean keep the hell out.

We don’t want anything to do with anyone else, and we’re happy that way. In some parts of Maine, knocking on the wrong door will get you shot, and no one will shed any tears because you should have known better. Leave us alone. Its New England – we’ve had guns since the 1620s and we have no interest in anything that you are selling, petitioning, or otherwise pestering for.

Now, while we’ve stopped shooting trespassers like so many clay pigeons, DNA and Darwin insist that we be unfriendly to outsiders. If you’re new to a town, don’t expect anyone to really talk to you for the first two years. The clerks in stores will help you, maybe, but nobody will really take an interest in you until you’ve proven that you want to live here.

Yankees are also in a rush. Our Puritan and Pilgrim roots have done nothing more than put the fear of death and eternal damnation in the id of every one of us. Blue laws, regulation of vices and the simple fact that buckles on shoes haven’t been in style for 375 years have left us a truly pissed off people. We don’t want to talk to our grocery store bagger, and he doesn’t want to talk to us. I want to get out of Shaw’s so I can go to Dunkin’ Donuts and get a coffee, so I can go home and read my Farmer’s Almanac and drink said coffee next to my coffee maker.

And the bag boy doesn’t want to talk to me. He wants me to get my damn groceries out his face so he can go back to counting the seconds before his shift ends and he can go meet that cute girl from the deli in the stock room for some serious commandment breaking.

We drink bitter beer, or so my friend tells us, and it turns us into bitter people. I say this is twisted around. We make bitter beer because we want to drink something as bitter as we are. And you know what? We like being bitter. We like it, on some weird level, and in some strange twist of psychology that scientists are still struggling to define, being bitter makes us happy.

Nothing gives me more pleasure than to sip my Sam Adams Oktoberfest and watch the leaves fall off the trees, the Red Sox blow another season, Bledsoe get sacked more times than oats, and then welcome six or eight feet of snow for six months.

I know God is a Yankee at heart. Why else would we have rules against having fun? Why else would there be a Hell?

I’m sure that the Almighty will grant my request, so following my death bed confession, I will be floating around the Big Dig and listening in pleasure as everyone drops their R’s and talks the way people should.

And tourists to our little slice of heaven just don’t get it. When will the rest of the country learn? Sure has two syllables, the Cape is only for tourists, and you can’t get there from he-ah. The true bounty of the Atlantic is not is beautiful beaches and relaxation, it’s the Grand Banks. It’s clamming in Rhode Island, lobster in Maine and cod fishing everywhere else. A Yankee who doesn’t like seafood is considered strange, and every southeastern New England male, at one point or another, when out of work, turns to the bounty of the shore to make a living.

Finally, Yankees are slow to change, and we are always completely sure that things better back in the old days. Our parents walked uphill both ways to school, our grandparents had to tunnel through hills to school, and our great grandparents used to routinely cross large ice packs as glaciers drifted down the street, and do you think they had snow days? Huh? Do you? Whippersnapper.

I don’t like the changes at the Bluewall, and I’m certain at some point this semester I’ll be in a rocking chair talking about these kids today and their damn smoothies. When I was a freshman we didn’t have smoothies. The Bluewall people would throw the fruit at you and you were happy to get it, dagnabit.

Yankees will always be lovably cantankerous. Fifty years from now I hope to be among the Swamp Yankee curmudgeons, despising my neighbors, and swearing at the radio after Lowe blows yet another save.

And loving every minute of it.