I know what it means to be Southern. This is an entirely different thing than knowing that I am Southern, or identifying as Southern. I am Southern, and I potently, self-consciously know what this means. It is as much a part of me as my blood type or the patterns of the veins on the backs of my hands. Because I live deliberately in the South, I daily knock up against the distinctions between myself and other men who were born and raised and still live down here. My distinctions are etched by the experiences of traveling and living abroad when I was a young man. The things I saw,…