SHORT TAKES & SUCH: Chitlin' Cough Hits Oxford Fucking Ohio, "OMG! Like, I Totally Made Out With That Online Library Guy" Stalker Moments, Etc...

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- After a week of rumors, half-truths, and downright stupid urban legends floating around Oxford Fucking Ohio, the Local U. finally released a statement confirming what many folks already knew.

The dreaded (over-hyped) H1N1 virus - the Chitlin' Cough, the ol' Bacon Lung, the Pork Rind Plague of Mass Paranoia - may have indeed hit the local community, with as many as 25 suspected cases of Influenza A reported on campus by Friday afternoon.

Wow. Twenty-five whole cases. In a city of around 20,000 or so.

At a university with a slight on-campus housing shortage - dozens of students, at week's end, were living in temporary barracks-style units created out of residence hall lounges and cubbyholes.

Huh.

Imagine that.

A contagious disease that, well, flies around a college town full of not-exactly-hygienic college kids.

Imagine that.

Never mind that other universities around the country are reporting similar numbers, that there are 10 Alabama football players quarantined because of test results, that there are cases being reported at Colorado-Boulder, at Xavier, at other colleges and secondary schools who start classes before Labor Day.

Twenty-five kids reported. Probably two- to three- times that number currently infected who just don't feel well enough - or who weren't turned into ranting hypochondriacs last year - to rush off to the doctor or campus clinic to take a test for a virus that, really, has no 100 percent treatment beyond a few OTC medications and bed rest.

You know, as several members of the African diaspora in this country have pointed out since this whole thing began, the U.S. leads the world in pointless fretting over a virus that will, well, kill you if it kills you.

Africans should know. Hell, their home communities are dealing with cholera, malaria, genocide, starvation, AIDS, basic sanitation, lack of clean water that the Most Industrialized Nations have only given mere humanitarian lip-service to for decades ... and now the Great Super Power's media-saturated masses sweat the flu.

Some might call it irony.

Huh.

Imagine that.

Go figure.

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UPTOWN OXFORD (ZP) -- I've decided to write off a recent occurrence as a blog lurker drinking game. Or as a really awkward momentary lapse in judgment caused by too many Red Bull and Vodka cocktails - and too much time online.

I've been dealing with Ohio's strangest stalker - a woman who hunts her prey by running up, grabbing a guy's ass while bumming a cigarette outside of a random bar, licking/kissing his neck mid-sentence, and then wandering off without so much as giving her real name.

Same very weird girl. Very cute but very, well, creepy.

At one point, we're talking three nights, consecutively. Three or four run-ins a night.

The only information she would give me was that she "knew my O-M-G, like, so not a secret," that she was an upperclassman who's "major wasn't important," and that '[Whispering] One night we're hooking up, right, like, here on the motherfucking street."

Same weird girl. At least a dozen separate run-ins in alleys, on patios, even, a week ago, at a soon-to-be demolished local watering hole during the local band Look Afraid's last set (Great show, guys!) in their favorite longtime, soon-to-be-demolished, college town venue.

Seriously, how fucking drunk and/or stoned does a junior or senior undergrad have to be to just walk up to a 31-year-old librarian leaning against a bar during a loud-ass rock concert, ask for a cigarette, then tell him she's "got a motherfucking mystery" she's planning on showing him at some future time, when he's drunk enough, and that I "can just call her Raylene" in whatever I write?

Um, yeah.

Just a little creepy.

In all honesty, it's probably my fault to some extent. I probably egged it on a bit at one point ... ah, um... well, okay... I was sorta tipsy enough to kinda...you know...

... Well, if a random 21-to-22 year-old licks your lips for you, while tipsy, most guys are going to lick back, okay? My bad. I was a bit tipsy myself.

But in all seriousness, I REALLY don't roll that way, Mystery Lady.

Ever try something like, "Hey, I hope you don't mind me saying this, but I like your blog... My name's ______?"

You know.

Something less creepy?

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CINCINNATI (ZP) -- After years of being accused of ignoring folks in the Queen City - I rarely leave the comfy bubble of life in Oxford Fucking Ohio without some motivation, to cut down on my carbon footprint - I was finally talked into hanging out with probably the most fun group of college students in Ohio.

I'm talking, of course, about the Local U.'s longtime rival in football and in scholarship, the University of Cincinnati.

There's a whole houseful of absolutely gorgeous girls down there who, well, know how to make amazing vegan food, who picked my brain about all sorts of things, in terms of both my former community organizer and [admittedly vague/sketchy] "information analyst" consulting days, in person, over way too much wine and grilled tofu.

I forgot I promised those wonderful Bearcat ladies a shout-out.

So, well... here it is.

Here's the fascinating thing: one Local U. alum, upon hearing the PG-13 version of that tale from earlier this summer, accused me of "cheating on" Oxford.

Yep, local students, my Ex-Other Man nature does sometimes lead to stepping out on ol' Oxford and its residents. And, I guess I should be honest here, I've also "cheated on you" with kids in Muncie and Bloomington, Indiana, even up in Columbus and down in Lexington, Kentucky.

I'm such a bad monkey. I know. Please forgive my cheating ass.

But when you can grill organic farmer's market corn and discuss Post-Marxist theory, Global South debt to various Industrialized nations, and culture-jamming like those lovely ladies, well, call me. I may let you spank me...

QUICK BITS

• Welcome back, college students. Be glad you're still in school, else you'd be another degreed kid in the Unemployment Line.

• Don't drink the Kool-Aid. That's for corporate media news junkies. Put a little booze of truth in it.

• Why, yes, I have been too busy to blog a lot. Don't I get a summer vacation, too?

• Apologize for calling Democrats and Republicans terrorists? Um, why the fuck would I do that?
  

• When I see real "health care reform," I'll be sure to write about it. But until then, well, I'm content to watch the U.S. Congress and the owners of both parties' collective balls duke it out like bullies on a playground.

• I respect the Dead Kennedys, sure. Oh, you're not talking about the punk band, are you?

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"THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS" AIN'T EVER GONNA BE A CAMPAIGN PROMISE: Why U.S. Citizens, Leadership Are in Perpetual War with Each Other

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- I do not, nor will I ever, trust anything in this great nation that slithers its way up through the shit-coated sewer that is partisan machinery and into the hallowed halls of Washington.

I trust not one Senator, not one member of the House. Those in the White House, in the Cabinet, those sketchy appointees and backroom reactionary poll-and-rhetoric speechwriters & policymakers, those deviants who make up the Campaign Finance Infrastructure more worthy of the label "Raiders of State" than "supporter" or "donor."

And trust me here, ye Party Loyalists and Pundits - I am in the Majority on this one, if "majority" still means anything to anyone.

Every policy and law proposed, thus, is treated as a flawed policy or law, produced by a corrupt system that will not ever be reformed without a massive disassembly of the two greatest terrorist threats to the Yet-to-Be-Free World - the Republican and Democratic parties.

Yes, they are. As were the Stalinists who "saved" the Soviets by forcing the defense of the Motherland through the Gulags, anti-unionism, forced economics, and speech suppression, as were the Pinochets and the Amins, the terrible Ivans and the Torquemadas and the Genghis Khans.

Seriously. I challenge anyone to name any two political organizations other than the former USSR or the People's Republic of China's monopolistic Communist Parties, that, since the end of the Second World War, have sponsored more dictators and madmen in the interest of its elite interests, oppressed more people into inhumanity and poverty in self-interest of its powerful, that have poisoned and polluted more of the world, that have lied to its own people and the world, that hold the global community hostage with a nuclear arsenal and massive military, through unaccountable policies and Cover-Your-Ass diplomacy.

I love my country too much to feel otherwise. Not its bureaucracies, not its myriad periods of government imperialism and fascism, its state-created censorship and mob rules of the elite and powerful. Not its politics, its propaganda-rigged elections, its Hero-Vs.-Heel closed-race puppet presidencies and governors supported by Dumbing Down Corporate Media and their Advertisers.

No, I love the PEOPLE of these United States, just as I love Mexicans, Canadians, pretty much all of North America, as brothers and sisters. As in WE, THE PEOPLE. The rest is just a struggle by a self-appointed wealth-and-power minority that, well, for decades, has only been able to hold power by tricking the majority into believing that power and wealth really matter.

Love, perhaps, isn't even strong enough a sentiment - I worship, yes, our individualism, embrace passionately our often spontaneous communal events and assemblages and protests, would sacrifice my own life to preserve the fundamental liberties and protected freedoms that, despite being created 200 years ago by a group of Educated Rich White Dudes in the hope of pacifying a rowdy people with the table scraps of a revolt against a British Crown, hold some unspeakable, transcendental truth more perfect than any god man can imagine.

While my government will never give us viable health care of its own corrupt volition, my countrymen will indeed fight amongst themselves but will also fight against whatever the government pitches as unfair, or too socialist, or too capitalist. They're once again marching to protest pretty much all forms of government "aid" - the ones that send volunteer soldiers into wars to liberate oil for our industry and the ones that steal from those same people to save "too-big-to-fail" industries that led to the wars in the first-place, the ones designed to pit a small business, mostly struggling mercantile class against the working class, working-class against the poor.

Regardless of party in charge and regardless of which version of Big Transnational Business pulls the strings, all the U.S. government can do is to be "pragmatic," and "realistic," and "powerful," while the people, despite differences in opinion between right and wrong, morality and sin, still instinctively resist the State's by-force pragmatism and realism, almost subconsciously.

Those in Power, who trade their humanity in the moment they join the ranks of State Influence, are not THE PEOPLE. Let's be clear here. They are THOSE POLITICIANS, the pentultimate global threat, the nemesis of liberty and rights, of collectivism and even dissident socialism, keepers of all property through coercion, dominion, and capital, possessed of the same I Am Legion phantom that Christ fought, that imprisoned Mandela, that killed King and Malcolm, raped the Chiapas, killed the Lakota, Sioux, the poets on the Great War's Western Front, the union boys through their Pinkertons, the slaves of Rome in arenas and our own former slaves on Southern plantations.

But THE PEOPLE, yes, through the chaos of many voices of many differing arguments, keep the authoritarian hordes of Big Corrupting Evil at bay, fight through both entrepreneurship and communism simultaneously, through both free trade and soup kitchens, church suppers and investments, protests and marches.

The citizens of this country are, indeed, a splendidly revolutionary bunch, with a proud history of both pacifism and violence against oppression - and almost all of that often built-up explosion of resistance is the result of some marginally democratic government that assumes that its power and wealth came be stripped at any time.

At the end of the day, when all is said and done, the United States is nothing more than 300 million people crowded in between seas and shining seas, with THE PEOPLE being nothing more than a euphemism for "WE have no fucking clue what unifies the Montana rancher to the New York labor organizer, We have no fucking clue how a Hawaiian hobo is really that much different than a New York reality televison celebutard, how a Harvard-educated, sherry-sipping lawyer is similar to a West Virginia pro-gun and pro-family moonshiner."

The greatest thing to dwell on now, the most important perhaps since the massive outrage of the 1960s, the rambunctiousness of the 1910s and 20s, is the return of that wondrous sense of a vast majority of often silent Americans asking themselves, together or in groups:

"What the fuck is wrong with our country? And how do we stop those who fucked it up so bad?"

God bless them all and may they first find answers for themselves before ever again accepting partisan loyalties so blindly the true exploiters of the world, the great Pale Rider Elite upon their Manufactured Consent Horses.

God bless every one. Even the atheistic academic Trotskyist and furled brow humanist faculty, even the pamphlet-wielding Trustafarian college kids, the religious nutjobs convinced some International Banking Illuminati is planning to set up Elderly Death Squads to stamp out Jesus and Free Will.

Dissent. Ain't it grand?

Now THAT, my friends, is change you can always count on in this here Land of the Free Spirit.

When Woody Guthrie wrote "This Machine Kills Fascists" on his guitar, he wasn't talking about government, our politicians or transnational CEOs, Wall Street, Madison Avenue, or Hollywood.

He was talking about us. Each and every one of us.

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