SHORT TAKES & SUCH: You Really Are What You Eat, "Intimidating" Kids Through Auto-Tuneless Hip-Hop, and Hating on Motherfucking Snow...

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- I'm a creature of habit, have my daily routines, my rituals.

I usually, for instance, get up at just before five in the morning. Unless I get to bed after 11 p.m., which like clockwork leads me to sleep in until about seven in the morning. I never skip breakfast, enjoy a nice, hot brush-and-soap shave every three days, bathe every day. And I cannot function without that first cup of stevia-laced black coffee and a cigarette - though, in late 2009, I did finally give up caffeine after nine in the morning.

But perhaps the best example of my habitual nature?

My diet.

I now consume the same things for breakfast for months, sometimes years, at a time - cage-free eggs and turkey bacon, egg white omelets, oatmeal, or, sometimes, just fresh fruit and yogurt. For the rest of the day, most meals are simple and routine, kept mainly to what my body needs to sustain itself - lots of beans, baked yams, fresh greens, whole grains, and, yes, probably four to five times the amount of soy protein than your average American eats in a week.

When I was in my early 20s, I was, in all honesty, a fat fucking slob. At my peak weight, a year or so after going cold turkey from my teenage hard drug habits, I weighed 285 pounds. A decade later I weigh two-thirds of that.

I never went on a diet. I just changed what I liked to eat. And over time, the weight fell off.

And not a month goes by without running into or hearing from somebody who remembers how big I used to be and commenting about the weight loss. Not as bad as it was a few years ago, but, yeah...

It gets annoying.

Here's the funny thing: most days, in terms of bulk, I suck down at least twice the bulk weight of what I did when I was younger. For dinner tonight I sucked down two bowls of salad, a rather large baked sweet potato, and a pint of Greek-strained yogurt.

Over the course of a mere five years, I lost an average of about an inch and a half off my waistline per year. As I was introduced to new ways of looking at the world - spiritually as well as intellectually - my tastes changed. If soda made me feel sluggish, for example, why should I consume it? If eating at a McDonalds or Wendys gave me the shits and sent me running to the john fifteen minutes after eating at a corporate enterprise model I feel exploits of the poor, why eat in such places?

As my tastes changed, my daily habits changed.

I don't drink soft drinks or anything carbonated beyond beer, avoid high fructose corn syrup like a hypochondriac avoids the leper colony, and while I do eat meat, it's almost always poultry.

I do occasionally partake of pork and wild game, but I haven't eaten beef in a decade. Hell, I don't think I've even been in a hamburger-filled fast food joint in a decade, but I do eat out at times. Those meals, too, are habitual - there are people in this town who have a better idea what I'll order for lunch next week than I do.

And yes, I smoke a pack a day. And I do have a taste for Irish whiskey, and bourbon usually leaves me in a state where I'll choke-slam an overgrown fratboy seven years my junior into the asphalt for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.

Hey, everybody needs a few unhealthy vices.

Ya know, writing this, I suddenly realize why I've slept with so many vegetarians and women recovering from eating disorders - my refrigerator usually looks like a hippie culinary commune exploded in there...

* * * *

"You DO intimidate people, dude."

"Chica, that's horseshit. I'm just another old guy in this town..."

In Oxford Fucking Ohio, the median age of all residents, is 21.

You're only young by local standards if you're not old enough to legally drink. Anything past 30? You might as well wear your Dr. Scholls and Snuggie of a muu-muu to the drug store, because the "Middle-Aged" in this town look at you like you're there for hemorrhoid cream and Viagra.

"What's so intimidating? I was listening to music, window was rolled down, and -"

"That... rap music you listen to? The gangsta rap...? Um, yeah. You live in Oxford, not fucking Compton."

"Well, yeah. And not 'gangsta,' just whatever was on the iPod. Heavy beat shit. MC Eiht, CunninLynguists, Beatnuts, Stoupe, some Ramallah Underground I think... Anyway, these chicks at the light next to me in a BIG hunking Daddy's Little Princess SUV LOCKED their doors when I looked their way -- "

Silence on the other end of the line.

And then a sigh.

"Jason, dear..."

"Yes?"

"Where do you live?"

"Oxford."

"And do [Local U] students listen to that stuff? Or dress all, like, white guy Black Panther? Or NOT smile?"

"Um..."

"Yeah, dude. You're in the Bubble. Entitled kids probably, yeah, thought you're a Townie rapist ready to carjack Daddy's old Hummer or whatever."

"So listening to rap makes me intimidating?... Wait... Did you just say Townie paist carjacker...? Because I listen to - "

"No... but the whole package? I dunno... if I didn't know you, I'd be fucking scared of you... Especially with that beard..."

"What's wrong with the beard? Grew it out for Manuary."

"Nothing... you just look... you know... like a scary Townie."

Sometimes, it's good to chat with a female alum - one of the chill ones - who understands the what actually goes through the minds of Local U. students better than I do.

This is clearly one of those times. I did not grow up like the vast majority of those who squat in this lovely town for four years out of their lives, in search of a degree.

But, well, at least I still have some street cred.

* * * *

I'm not a snow kinda guy.

I don't fucking ski, I outgrew making snowmen when my balls dropped, and more often than not, when it snows, I'll be driving through it.

It's not ALL snow. Nothing personal or discriminatory against the whole specie of water. I love Colorado snowstorms - awesome powdery stuff that, in all honesty, I could spend days hiking, driving, or camping in. Or even the snowfall around Chicago.

No, I reserve my prejudices solely for the slushy, half-sleet, half-powder East Coast snows like the ones we get here in southern Ohio.

And this winter, we've gotten a lot of the white shit dumped on us this winter.

Does wonders for my arthritis, my bad knee, and the ol' bad hip. Makes me feel as if I'm 31 going on 90.

Call me cranky, but does anybody know any libraries in Arizona or New Mexico that may be hiring?

- # # # -

TWO DEAD GAY POETS, A STUFFED FROG, SANTA MONICA HOBOS & ONE BORED, WELL-READ MODEL: Transcontinental Conversations in the Key of Rod Serling...

I knew it was going to be an interesting conversation.

Conversations with Los Angelenos are always interesting

She started right into what had been on her mind the last few days, how it was affecting her normal party-all-night, sleep-all-day lifestyle, how growing up was, in her words:

Man, life's crimping my style hardcore right now... I think I'm turning into a fucking reclusive hermit... like you, ya know?

On the West Coast, in the all-night diner in West Hollywood from where she was calling, it was only 10:30 on a Friday evening. Traffic on La Cienega Boulevard was somehow too much too bare for the L.A. native. She couldn't make it all the way back down to the Sunset Strip for a night of clubbing after dropping her Girls Night Out dinner companions off at their respective homes.

Instead, some unseen force pulled her into her favorite hang-out, a place she used to dine at regularly when she didn't have much money, couldn't sleep, needed a comforting place to people-watch and read the free alternative weeklies and trade publications they always have in bins in the lobbies of those sorts of places.

Here, in Ohio, it was just after one in the morning when she first texted her usual "RU Bzy?" queue, the one she uses when she's looking to reach out and touch somebody. She uses the same message, all the time. I'd just gotten in from a nice quiet night out, contemplating life over a few beers at the local watering hole here in Oxford.

Bored out of my skull, well, I decided to return her call. Stupid me - I forgot how tired I was, forgot that it was still early on the West Coast, forgot that these sorts of conversations tend to go on for hours.

"I just don't feel like doing shit. Don't feel like dealing with fucking creepy guys or, ugh, the Lakers fans, or snotty bitches."

"Chica, everybody feels like that at times."

"But I feel that way a lot. It's fucking Allen Ginsberg's fault, I think."

"Uh...s'okay. Allen Ginsberg? As in the dead Beat poet?"

"YEAH! THAT FUCKER! You ever read his shit?"

* * * *

A pause, the sound of a woman who frequently makes those Name 10 Hottest Models You'd Bang lists of frat boys and Moose Lodge poker nights smacking her lips around a breakfast sausage link, and, finally, an answer.

Of sorts.

Bear with me. She was a bit tipsy, loaded up on Red Bull and coffee.

"You know he wrote this poem about, like, running into Walt Whitman in a grocery store. It was in "Howl," ya know...

"...Dude, so I saw a homeless guy in Santa Monica last week who looked just like that, so asked something like 'Where are you going, Walt Whitman?'...

"You know, from the Ginsberg poem, right? Anyway...the old dude gave me this, like, stuffed frog from his backpack... he said he, like, met Ginsberg once and, like, said Oh Captain, My Captain ...

"...And then he, like, ran away... I mean, that's not normal, right? I mean that's weird, right? I mean, it was a joke, sorta, and..."

I put the conversation on speaker, sat it down on the bed to undress. I forgot, momentarily, that I was actually in the midst of a conversation - I actually removed my contacts, stripped, brushed my teeth, all while she was telling her story.

I know. Very rude.

I apologized profusely and pledged to my late-night electronic cohort a free shot to the ol' nutsack next time we meet in person.

* * * *

"So, okay, lemme get this straight... Allen Ginsberg somehow made you a hermit?"

"No. Walt Whitman. But not like the pictures you see. EXACTLY like in Ginsberg's poem. And that homeless guy."

"...S'oookay. So, you've been reading a lot of Ginsberg, ran into a guy who looked like how Ginsberg described another old dude - like Walt Whitman - in grocery store, and YOUR guy gave you a stuffed frog--"

A burst of excitement, a girlsqueak.

"Man, do you believe in curses and shit? I think that crazy homeless guy put, I dunno, a spell on me or something. Is that, well..."

"Um, yeah. Chica...now that's crazy."

I suddenly felt very sorry for eavesdroppers on her side of the conversation, those poor, helpless bastards in that West Hollywood diner, with only bits and pieces of a conversation involving two American poets and a plush toy.

"YES! Dude, I keep having, like, dreams with, like, Jesus, this crazy hobo in them. I'm reading too much - is that weird? Ohmygod, I'm going crazy, right?"

How does one respond to such questions? Does one even attempt an answer? In the wee hours of the morning, half-asleep?

* * * *

From there, the conversation went from only slightly insane to downright absurd.

Dream symbolism, food interactions, even the existential nature of homelessness, Magical Hobo and Phantom Traveler tall tales, time travel, even hauntings and demonic possession.

Maybe Allen Ginsberg was an alien, a creator of a Whitman clone, a madman? Was Walt Whitman?

Or maybe her amphibian-wielding Santa Monica vagrant really was Whitman caught in some time vortex, appearing to Ginsberg back in that supermarket decades ago and now, to her? Maybe Ginsberg was an evil wizard, had trapped Whitman in a poem through some trippy peyote-filled magic spell?

Was the stuffed frog she still had in her over-sized diva purse really a frog? A metaphor? Alien technology, merely stamped with a beer company logo and Made in China label as a form of camouflage?

Was Space/Time Walt Whitman's alien gift somehow bleeding its Beatnik neutrinos into her MAC lip gloss?

Like I said.

From downright batshit insane to downright fucking absurd in under five fucking minutes.

Amazing the places the human mind wanders sometimes. Places where, thankfully, our very real, tangible world refuses our wild imaginations passage in this existence...

... Or does it?

We ended our long, rambling conversation at just past three a.m., my time, midnight in the City of Angels.

I'd dozed off twice. She'd sucked down enough diner coffee, fried eggs, and hash browns to send her into one of those FUCK.... four hours Cardio Sunday... Los Angeleno things.

I knew it was going to be an interesting conversation.

If for no other reason than the fact that all human beings lose some sense of reason every now and then.

- # # # -

ZEN AND THE ART OF RADICAL COUNTRY FOLK: Twilight Brunswick Stew at a Commune, The Revolutionary South, & Resisting Culture Wars Reconstruction

RURAL VIRGINIA (ZP) -- I have no fucking clue why she was being so secretive.

A large convenience store/fast food joint near the highway, an all-night place with old burnt coffee tormenting the air with the smell of its age, a dozen or so idle, slightly marijuana-eyed teenagers in baggy pants pacing back and forth at the entrance, a fat sheriff's deputy creeping slowly in a dark-brown cruiser as I pulled in.

Ya know... I told her we could just meet at the Huddle House down the road... I'm not fucking Batman... Good Gawd... I'm in the hometown to visit family, not to hunt down the fucking Riddler...

* * * *

I found a seat at a booth farthest from the door, stirred a cup of the worst truck-stop coffee I've ever had (and trust me, former reporters know shitty coffee), watched the door patiently, enjoyed a strip of venison jerky.

Not being able to eat any other red meat and now living in an Ohio town where eating Bambi is often frowned upon, I savored every bite of the forbidden deer flesh, like a man savors every drop of water in the desert. The coffee may have tasted like it was brewed with Lucifer's ball sweat, but I was glad I'd bought the venison treat earlier in the night at another gas station.

There are, of course, numerous things I miss about living in the Rural South - the food is one of them.

I had a good idea who I was looking for, despite never meeting my subject in person. I'd committed her photo to memory - or, at least, the online avatar she presented as an authentic, true image. One can never be too sure...

Four large white women in too-tight clothing, one Asian kid, a toothless man in a Stars & Bars adorned biker teeshirt, an elderly couple stopping by the counter to ask directions passed through the front doors as I waited.

I had my shitty coffee and my venison to keep me company. It's late at night on a Sunday, and I'm supposed to be on a family vacation. Instead, I'm alone and waiting for a complete stranger in a damned truck stop.

Kinda normal Sunday night for me, now that I think about it...

* * * *

Somehow, she managed to sneak by me. Into the booth slid a young woman, dressed in a black hooded sweat shirt, Capri-style jeans, and eco-friendly sneakers.

"Sorry I'm late. Please tell me you're Jason, because this'll be really creepy if you're not."

"That's me. You must be ________... because if you're not it's more than fucking creepy."

A few moments pass. My twilight stranger seems to be studying me, as if she's suddenly noticed some typo in a favorite book or loose thread in a favorite shirt, some flaw that she's never noticed before.

"You're really Jason? Oxford Fucking Ohio Jason? You know, you weren't kidding when you said you look like a fratboy or a cop..."

I get that a lot, for some reason. I pretend to be insulted, then grin politely. There are worse things to be mistaken for when one reaches an age over 30. Like, well, a senior citizen, for instance...

"Get that a lot. Don't sweat it. Hey... tell you what... so where are we going? This coffee -"

She nodded. This was, she explained, the rendezvous spot. She wanted to make sure I wasn't a serial killer, or psycho-rapist, or, well, a cop or fratboy, in a place with lots of witnesses.

Completely understandable. Use the same technique myself.

Frequently.

* * * *

We headed out to the parking lot, she gave me directions in case I found myself lost, and we hit the road in our separate vehicles down country roads I'd once navigated daily but, a decade later, seemed almost foreign.

I tapped on the steering wheel as I followed her late-model pickup's taillights. The regional country/bluegrass station was playing a familiar standard, the Carter Family's version of Wildwood Flower.

Down cracked gray asphalt and beneath a canopy of oaks and pines, I followed close behind, not trusting my sense of direction. Finally, we turned onto a gravel road, a driveway.

At the end, an old farmhouse, windows lit and welcoming, tucked inside a cocoon of dark treetops. A bonfire burned to one side, with six figures crouched around it, a keg of beer and a table full of homemade food glowing in the light...

Well, I'll be damned. Beer? Beats the hell out of hash browns and eggs at a diner...

FUCKING SWEET! I like these folks already.

* * * *

For the record, not my first visit to an honest-to-God anarchist commune.

First such trip, however, to one in Virginia, of all places, under the cover of darkness and maybe 30 minutes from the farm where I was raised.

Not at all shocking, in retrospect - it is, after all, the mainstream media who's made a big deal about the Old Dominion going from some mythological Red State to some equally illusionary Blue State status during the last few elections, that a governor of Virginia is the chairman of the DNC, that it's the influx of supposedly "progressive," educated-class white liberals from more civilized urban centers who've somehow changed the Commonwealth...

The mainstream media, for the record, knows absolutely jack and shit about the people of my home state, the nature of the Rural South, or the appeal it has for both the collectivist and the individualist, the philosophical socialist and ideological libertarian.

Instead, they've merely constructed an easily digestible version of what being a Virginian means, as if we're somehow not the descendants of Powhatan, General George Patton, Robert E. Lee, Jefferson and George Mason, Patrick Henry, as if we're all good ol' boys, toothless yokels, and former slaves in need of another fascist Reconstruction.

The powerful tend to do such things, after all, because it's easier to simply construct a stereotype than to acknowledge the true diversity and beauty of a group of people, or of individuals, or the dread unwashed masses that scare the living shit out of Republicans and Democrats alike.

Widgets and demographic-based stereotypes are easier to brand with the marks of conformity than reality.

Red State? Blue State? Good God, aren't we a nation of people anymore? Is this now the United Two-Color Crayola Box of America? Who the fuck came up with that dehumanizing jingoist horseshit anyway?

* * * *

The young woman's boyfriend, a big burly man with long hair and bushy beard, greeted me at the car. It was an honor to meet me in person after our communications back and forth the last few months, he said, and he was glad to welcome me to their little experiment in 21st century cooperative living and mutual aid.

A small group, sure, but nice enough and realistic in approach. They're not isolationists, not ideologues, not even professional protesters. My hosts, it turned out, represented folks from all sectors of society...

The boyfriend was a few years older than me, a former dot-com venture capitalist from the West Coast who'd developed a conscience and actually owned the land, the oldest gentleman held two post-grad degrees, the other man a self-described "professional drifter" who never finished high school and was trained as a mechanic. The women, too, were equally diverse - my escort was a trained horticulturist, the other two college drop-outs.

A few other folks drifted in and out from the house - neighbors. A couple of local guys were manning a spit above the fire, roasting a pig (friends of the college girls, my hosts explained) and smoking what smelled like homegrown tobacco from pipes. There were a few women quilting on the porch - one was the mother of the mechanic, visiting, while the rest were friends.

There was even, yes, homemade corn liquor in Mason jars. A fine vintage. I'm a bit of a connoisseur of homemade bootleg spirits...

My arrival coincided with the tail-end of what looked to be one hell of a neighborhood cook-out.

* * * *

It would be easy to write the group off, in fact, as just another midlife attempt at a hippie commune, an attempt to turn back the clock not to a simpler America but to that romanticized, failed agrarian reproach of the 1960s counterculture.

No, that would be unfair. These weren't folks who'd come out to the country to grow weed, fight the Man, or tune out of the modern world in favor of manufactured primitivism. All but the Charlie Daniels-looking owner of the property were from the South; half of the group were native Virginians.

"Out here, we're just able to be ourselves, free. And you're welcome to join us."

That was the common refrain of the night. The conversation was wonderful, the company good, and political debate intriguing. Discussing my own political philosophies online does, indeed, sometimes lead to some very interesting offline situations.

* * * *

A learning experience and, yes, a social experiment that as someone from Virginia, I can claim as evidence that "Change You Can Believe In" comes not from Blue State/Red State rhetoric, not from chest-beating politicians or their campaigns, not from power-hungry Washington or Richmond plutocrats but from individuals, from people.

And one of the benefits to a Libertarian former venture-capitalist and a Green Party - supporting plant expert falling I love, buying a farm in the middle of fucking nowhere, inviting friends willing to work for their supper a place to live rent-free?

Best homemade organic salsa and home-cooked Brunswick Stew (made with free-range chicken and mechanic-shot squirrel, vegetables from the garden) I've had in a long time.

Went well with the beer. And the White Lightning didn't hurt.

Sure beat the hell out of hanging out in the hometown alone, in a damned truck stop, drinking shitty coffee.

EPILOGUE

I made my way back to the lovely hometown at about one in the morning, swung by the Huddle House to use the WiFi and start writing again.

I hit the sack at three in the morning, curled up with a book of my father's, found on a relative's bookshelf recently, from his supposedly "conservative" college days, something I used to read in secret, as a teenager, more than his stash of Playboys...

...A book called Patterns of Anarchy, a literary anthology. Quite entertaining, actually. Especially passages underlined, back in the 1960s, well before I was born...

And to think... the Old Man, in his march towards senior-citizenship, thinks I gained my knowledge of radical political thought from "Communist" undergrad professors or, worse, "Liberals."

Please, Dad.

Heh, I learned it from you, Dad. Thanks for never throwing out books and encouraging me to read things other than the fucking Hardy Boys!

Maybe that ol' Rebel spirit the South is known for, well, maybe it's not dead after all.

- # # # -

VIRGINIA CONFIDENTIAL: Racial Identity, Culture Politics, Elderly Church Ladies, & Two Cartons of Vanilla-Flavored Soymilk

FARMVILLE, Va. (ZP) -- The elderly woman scrunched up her nose as two kids in front of us at the checkout counter held hands.

The girl rested her head against the boy's arm - he was a good foot and a half taller than her. The boy had his arm wrapped around her, was chewing on a straw and rubbing the girl's hip.

She had that giddy look to her, blonde and athletic in build, tan already so early in a preemptive summer. The guy wore a tee-shirt bearing a familiar and comfortable emblem, that of my own high school's mascot, the letters PECHS sprawled above a gold colored eagle, its talons poised for attack.

And they were oblivious to the people in line behind them at the grocery store. They could've cared less about visiting former residents or wrinkly old women with wrinkled brows full of disapproval.

As soon as the couple were out of earshot, the elderly woman felt the need to speak her mind, as old women tend to do at times.

"I don't know who raises their chil'ren to behave like that," she said. "They probably don't get no churching at home."

I nodded in acknowledgment of her comment, not in concurrence. There is no sense, after all, in starting a debate in a checkout line with a woman who appeared to be in her late 80s or early 90s. Those debates rarely end well...

"My daddy would've taken the belt to me or my people if we were all over each other like that..."

"Yes, ma'am. Times change."

That seemed to quiet her down a bit. Old people, for the record, sometimes say things merely because there is someone present to hear them speak.

There is a certain loneliness in aging, especially in tiny rural communities where the only things one has to look forward to in those advanced years are church suppers, bridge games, garden clubs, and reading the obituaries in a twice -a- week town paper.

Sometimes feeling as if you're always right, believing that your children and grandchildren's generations are turning everything to shit, is all you have left...

* * * *

The cashier grinned. She was eavesdropping as the elderly woman talked at me, offered me all sorts of advice on all sorts of things.

Including interracial dating. She was, well, not a fan, to say the least.

"That boy probably don't know what a black woman is," she said, digging her brown-yellow hand into her purse, "Or what that does to our women when a fine black boy like that goes running around with white women."

The cashier, a mocha-skinned young black woman, who looked to be a high school kid herself, started to snicker, then choked her momentary outburst down.

* * * *

It is really funny, you know.

Here's this elderly light-complexioned "black" woman only a shade "blacker" than the "white" 30ish dude she's talking to, attempting to explain the disgrace of a dark-complexioned, well-built black kid holding hands, in public no less, with a rather attractive white girl who looked kinda like a certain bubbly, blonde, Disney-raised pop singer from Louisiana.

I kept listening, nodding, and saying "Yes Ma'am" frequently as the woman doled out her coupons, did her These kids today rant, counted out her $10s and $20s to buy her groceries.

I was trying hard to be polite, a true gentleman, courteous and respectful of my elders. The cashier, too, was trying to be polite.

But then the woman went to the one place I didn't figure she'd go.

"If that boy wanted to be a real man and represent OUR people, he'd pull those pants up and respect himself, like OUR President ..."

I lost it.

I know. Very Rude. Laughing at old people's never a polite thing...

* * * *

Ya mean the Mom-was-a-white-chick, Dad-an-African-immigrant, multiethnic, only- a- shade- less- white- than- his- redfaced- cracker- from- Delaware- Vice-President President Obama?

The one whose American family history includes a history of slave ownership but no direct descendency from what's commonly thought of as the single largest signifier of "African-Americanism," that of having been actually related to former slaves?

So a black dude holding hands and getting all PDA with a white girl is disrespecting an entire ethnic cultural heritage, and if he just pulls his pants up, finds some religion, and looks up to a "black" president whose mom was a white woman, he'll somehow... somehow...

* * * *

Somehow what?

Grow up with the same sort of belief in preserving and defending a downright mythified African-American "race," in much the same way as some white Southerners grow up believing that they're somehow preserving the "White" race by waving a Confederate flag around, going to Klan meetings, or bitching about maintaining some fairy-tale racial purity that never existed?

Hell, hasn't that sort of thinking already proved to be the biggest embarrassment to the culture of these United States? Our eagerness to cling onto our often manufactured, self-sustaining ideas on race through social division at home, while condemning ethnic strife abroad in our media and diplomatic rhetoric?

People in the U.S. often live and die by racial history like dog breeders cling to kennel club papers - a dog is worthy of a dog show, after all, not because the dog is a dog but because his or her pedigree can be proven worthy to obsessive record keepers and judges.

* * * *

"That lady's a trip," the cashier said as she scanned my purchases. "But, I mean, for real though..."

I shrugged, swiped my bank card through the reader.

"Hey, I just try to respect my elders and let old people talk. How I was raised I guess."

The cashier had these gorgeous eyes when she smiled.

"You know, I was raised that way too. And I've got aunt like that."

"Hey, we all have relatives like that. It's how they grew up."

Nice to know that things are progressing just fine in my ol' hometown, all on their own, one youthful generation and one elderly rant at a time.

- # # # -

OXFORD CONFIDENTIAL: You Know... The "Radical Activist" Librarian... The One Who Looks like a Cop, Wears a Stetson, Likes Cold Beer & Tom Waits...

"Merciless criticism and independent thinking are the two necessary traits of revolutionary thinking."

- Bhagat Singh (1907-1931),
Freedom Fighter & Indian Independence leader

LOCAL U. (ZP) -- The crowded, cavernous dining area of the local student union building swallowed all of the outside world, and there I sat, waiting on a college student at seven in the morning and sipping horrible coffee.

Jesus Christ, I told myself, what the hell kind of advice can I offer a student who thinks I'm THE local radical?

I'm not, for the record, a radical - at least from my standpoint. A minimalist, an anti-consumer, sure. Well-read and thoughtful, too. And I do have certain political and social views quite askew from the norm for a generally ultraconservative college town. But most of my fundamental political philosophy is based on, well, ideals that have been fostered organically, are rather undogmatic and, well, more Whitman and Emerson than Che or Trotsky.

I'm not some half-petrified New Left yuppie stuck in nostalgic dogma wrapped in "Activism," not the stereotypical, media-construct Virginia-raised Good Ol' Boy conservative in a cowboy hat, either.

* * * *

Ever since I outed myself as something more, well, philosophically libertarian and collectivist than your average Democrat or Republican, I've been overwhelmed by the number of responses from younger folks concerning the exact nature of my politics. What is a "left-libertarian?" How does one become one, what does one read, study, believe?

And I don't look like the stereotype of someone with such views. The more one digs online into left-libertarianism and socialist libertarianism and anarchism, the more one finds images of mostly upper middle-class white kids sporting hemp-suits and dreads, bandito-style bandannas and quirky protest signs at rallies.

Ain't too many of us who, well, get mistaken for cops and Marines and frat boys more than hippies or stoned granola-heads, guys who hate hacky-sack and the over-commercialization of reggae, or who really believe that mass protest is less important than conversations between friends at bars...

* * * *

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself."

- Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
Russian novelist, Christian Anarchist,
Founder of the modern non-violence movement

Swallowed within a writhing body of unwashed students and building maintenance guys, faculty and vending machine delivery guys and cooks and custodians, I wait patiently, face buried in the day's Cincinnati Enquirer.

What the fuck am I going to tell this young woman? Worse, what does she want to ask about me, and what am I going to ask about her?

What about my personal philosophy does she find so damned fascinating?

The conversation I am to have involves yet another young woman from a rather conservative, unpolitical background... likes some group called the Jonas Bros., shoes, and sundresses... DVRs Lost and House and Gossip Girl... belongs to a sorority... mother's really religious... reads, duh, blogs in her boring gen-ed classes...

Yeah, what the hell is a chick like this doing seeking MY advice? I'm quite the fuck-up...

Fuck, I'm the librarian who used to date an adult entertainers and once worked as a bouncer at a friggin' strip club... watch Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica... have to be told by friends to watch "cheese" TV once and a while... and, yeah, I BLOG in my spare time...

I have no clue what my querent looks like, other than brunette. She's an online chat buddy, an electronic phantom. I told her I'd have a paper and my Stetson; she said she'd find me.

And she did, indeed, plop down at my table, a few minutes late, dressed in pink sweatpants and a printed white tee, purple bra strap twisted like a pretzel and poking out through a hole in the cotton. Beautiful young woman, looking quite stereotypical and so non-political, not even scenester hip but, well, everyday normal, un-radical American.

"Wow, you're really here."

"Yup. Kinda weird, huh?"

She paused, nodded, looked around.

"Don't sweat it. It's kinda, ya know, normal around these parts."

Haven't heard a girl with that sort of snicker-laugh in a while.

Sad but true... these days, I'm a lot less worried about my "public image" than I am about the privacy of my subjects...

* * * *

"So you're fascinated by my... politics? Why?"

And that was all it took to get a rather intriguing conversation going.

Despite her coming from a die-hard Republican family and having identified herself as a moderate conservative for most of her life, she'd been going through a crisis of political identity since she started college.

She can't relate to the Republicans anymore - too religious in all the wrong ways, too profit-driven at the expense of working-classes, not compassionate and no longer conservative. No way in hell could she side with the Democrats. She tried a campus Libertarian meeting during the last presidential election and, well, no go, either.

"I dunno, I just started Googling some of those guys you quote sometimes and said, 'Hey, these were some cool people... why don't we make cool people like that anymore?'"

"Really?"

"Yeah. Weird but I actually asked this professor last semester about that Zapata guy and the whole land and liberty thing..."

"What happened?"

"Ohmygod, she freaked out! Like, it had nothing to do with the class but she thought it was, like, weird coming from..."

... From someone in a sorority who likes the Jonas Bros. and shoes and sun dresses, who prays regularly and who tans almost as frequently.

I spent two hours chatting with a college girl about such things, over shitty coffee and a couple of pastries charged to her meal plan. About drug legalization (agree), legalized gambling (agree), over-politicization of the most absurd things (agree), and the tendency of academicians to bias their curricular material without knowing it (agree)...

* * * *

Tell them dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for being

- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

American poet, essayist, and orator,
from the poem "The Rhodora"

Amazing what a young woman who looks like a preppy collar-popper and a librarian who looks like a cop can talk about in two hours.

For the record, yes, I have the most attractive college-aged readers of any online writer in Ohio.

Brilliant, well-spoken, and fascinating.

And in that mass of people, of professors and custodians and students and food service folks, all of us wallowing in the cavernous belly of a rather ugly student union, I wonder what the casual passerby thought of the pair of us.

Dollars to those shitty pastries they thought, if anything, we were talking about Jesus and beer pong. Or, well, maybe they thought we were discussing a late-night hook-up, or a new prayer group, or a crush party.

Revolutions, you know, have this nasty tendency to start not with protests but with conversations.

- # # # -

ON THE ROAD 2008: Welcome Back to Caliporn...Er...California! May I Crush You with my Boobs?

PASO ROBLES, Calif. (ZP) -- I didn't think anything of it at first.

A group of very drunk women in the midst of a pub crawl, eight in all, with one hollering something about knowing me from somewhere, staggered past me as I pulled cash from an ATM.

These things happen. Particularly when there's drunk women involved.

I look like a lot of people. Sometimes famous, sometimes high school boyfriends, and once - from the mouth of an ex - I was told that I resembled a favorite coach at a Catholic school at the worst possible time a woman could bring such a thing up.

Rarely does anybody ever tell me that I look like, well, me.

I laughed as the women passed. One woman - the one who claimed to her friends that she knew me - reached out and grabbed my shoulder.

"YOU! I knew it!" the strange creepy gal yelled. "Oh Gosh... did you used to date _____?"

Her English was accented, northern European. An appropriate voice, too, given the fact the woman slurring into my face looked like Thor and Barbie's lovechild - luscious blond hair, full red lips, fair and spotless complexion, and enough surgically enhanced boobage to keep custom bra manufacturers in business for years to come.

Funny thing. Though a few years older, she looked familiar to me, too. I must've stared for a good twenty seconds, without blinking and head cocked to the side, like some Cocker Spaniel watching its master shit for the first time.

And, well, I did once date somebody with the name she'd given me...

* * * *

Wait! I think I know this drunk chick! my neurons screamed. Hmmm... ____'s friend? Name?

Think! DAMMIT!

Okay... breathe... I'm thinking Vegas... 2005... The Venetian's pool ... Don Julio shots... jumping jacks...

Yeah, now that was a fun morning swim.

...Got IT!

* * * *

I shoved my forty bucks in my pocket and smiled back. I had a name, dammit. Even if, well, I couldn't figure out why a SoCal-based actress just happened to be in Paso Fucking Robles, California, two days into the New Year.

"Well, look at this shit! _____ ______, in the motherfucking flesh! How are the fuck are ya, honey?"

The tall blonde not-so-stranger shimmied towards me, skirt riding up her thighs, an army of latex marching across battlefields of porcelain leg. A quick hug and a peck on the cheek, artificial double-Ds crushing my ribcage, holiday greetings exchanged with all the honesty and sincerity of a faked orgasm on a junior high prom night.

Seriously.

Few things outside of organized religion are as plastic and ritualistic as the Los Angeles Hug-Kiss-Kiss.

* * * *

"Wow! I almost didn't recognize you! Cheri, hey, this guy used to date ______. And he lives in Cleveland..."

"Um, well, Cleveland's on the far side of the Ohi-"

"Oh gosh, you just look AMAZING! How ARE YOU? I heard you were, like, dead or something."

"Gee, thanks, chica. Looking pretty hot yourself. So you're still in the adult busin-"

"Oh my God! You remember? Wow! Gosh, like, you probably don't know this but..."

She went on for twenty minutes without pausing for a breath, oblivious to the fact that we only hung out one night, years ago, in Las Vegas. I now know more about her career, sex life, her dogs and cats, and her ex-boyfriend's little premature ejaculation/fidelity problem than I ever wanted to know, really.

In the one place in the world I generally expect to NOT run into THAT ex's friends...

Wow, I thought as she pecked my other cheek, The Central Coast really is looking a lot more like the San Fernando Valley every fucking year.

* * * *

I'd been on my way out for the night; the group of women were done for the night, headed back to their hotel. And they were all pretty much too drunk, by their own admission, to head back out to the few bars Paso Robles has to offer.

Thank God. No offense, ladies.

Last time I hung out with Ms. Double-D, I woke up in bed next to four women, complete with a Nordic-pale leg wrapped around my neck, somebody's ass beneath my head, and the then-girlfriend's passing out with her twat in my slumbering face.

Long night. And equally long story. These things happen. Especially when there's drunk women involved.

But, well, there's a reason I have no desire to ever return to Las Vegas.

- # # # -

ON THE ROAD 2008: On Getting Caught Checking Out a Woman's Ass, Rich Old Wives and Old Worried Hubbies, & Being Anything But a Gentleman

Behind all their personal vanity, women themselves always have an impersonal contempt for Woman.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

NAPLES, Fla. (ZP) -- The old man stood there, staring into the storefront, mouth gaping.

"Good lord, she does this every goddamn year!"

Inside the store a woman looking roughly half his age stood at the register. It took not one or two clerks to bag her purchases but four. In one bag went the pairs of hundred dollar jeans. In another went the boxes of shoes. And in another two or three went the blouses and sundresses and skirts.

He bummed a cigarette as he explained the ritual. His wife was in her early forties, attractive and smart enough to qualify as Wife No. 3. But while his first wife died, and his second was addicted to booze and painkillers, Mrs. Tres was sucking his seventy-year-old moneyed ass dry.

In the bedroom, sure. That's acceptable in the Viagra Age. Suck away. But in the Economic Clusterfuck Age, well, mass consumerism amounts to nothing more than bullshit comfort and protection, an equity line condom full of holes.

"I love her to death," the old man said, not to me but to the storefront. "But that woman's dumb as shit when it comes to understanding that buying for the grandkids comes first."

He adds that, yes, he has a half-dozen grandchildren to shop for and his wife, well, Mrs. Tres just blew an easy three grand without spending a dime on the kids.

Four fucking hours he'd been waiting for her to finish buying for herself. The sales, she said! Never mind the kids! The sales!

He started pacing, told me that the Marlboro he'd just bummed tasted marvelous. First cigarette in 15 fucking years, dammit. Fuck the cardiologists. His wife's greed - yes, he called it greed - would kill him first.

"Son, take my advice and be poor and single."

"Hey, that shit's the reason I don't believe in marriage."

* * * *

TAMPA, Fla. (ZP) -- I wasn't looking to get caught.

But, well, it was a very nice ass, and the way her white linen skirt clung to her as she bent over reminded me of fresh cream atop a cup of hot chocolate.

"You know, that's really rude."

How that woman knew I was checking out her ass, behind her back and bent over packing away her laptop, I'll never know. But, yes, I was caught red handed.

And I don't know what I was thinking when I responded. I probably should've just shuffled on around behind the newspapers.

Instead, something just came out of my mouth, an audible demon between my teeth, escaping.

"Your dress holds you well."

Huh? What the flying monkey fuck does that mean?

It was a nice ass, sure, and the dress definitely complimented her rather curvy frame. But women wear dresses. Dresses have no arms or hands, so simple white fabric cannot hold anything (bras notwithstanding).

"Um, thanks. Bought it in Puerto Rico last week."

And with that she rolled her eyes and wandered out towards the departure gates. At least, well, I'd been caught in the airport and not, say, in a church or at work or at a wedding by the bride.

I don't blush often. But as she walked away her hips did, indeed, seem to sway a bit more than they had before. I saw her reach for her phone, dial, and turn to glance at the ass-staring freak once more.

And she winked.

Good God. One day I'm going to get slapped in an airport.

* * * *

BONITA SPRINGS, Fla. (ZP) -- She'd left me scores of messages, all over the place, asking - begging - me to get a hold of her as soon as possible. It was an emergency, after all, a crisis, the biggest thing in the world.

In her messages, she made it sound like she'd just walked in on Death herself going all reverse-cowgirl on Satan in the living room. A life-or-death situation, go-time on the reality gridiron, a world-shattering event of such importance...

"J, you're, like, cheaper than my therapist. And you make me laugh."

She's just a tad drunk. It's 2:30 in the morning. I'm in Florida on vacation, sober yet full of Scotch, perfectly prepared red snapper and a dozen raw oysters.

And she's just kicked her cheating douche of a boyfriend out of her life, for good this time, out in Southern California. Sent some of his shit to the ex-wife, some to charity, and some, well, she just set on fire in the back yard. It's 11:30 p.m., her time.

"Death and Satan screwing. That's just sick, dude."

I'm sitting out beneath a full moon on the phone, smoking a cigarette on a park bench on no-smoking resort property. I'm supposed to be one of the nice guys, a good catch - I'm supposed to help her sort through went wrong, to offer insight into how to date decent guys...

Ha. Now that's fucking funny. Oh well. Life's just one quirky-ass motherfucker sometimes.

"Chica, look, men are like fucking potato chips. Don't like the BBQ ones, pitch the bag and get another flavor," I tell her. "Hey, look at me. I love being fucking single-"

"You're such a liar. And you don't really treat women like potato chips, do you?"

"Worse. I treat women like heroin addicts treat empty needles. Not gonna lie."

Silence.

Yeah, trust me. I know my weaknesses pretty well, thank you very much.

- # # # -

MAYBE DEATH STILL WALKS THESE RAILS & RIDES THESE MIDNIGHT ROADS: A Ghost Story, Of Sorts

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- Our travels through this world are not ours alone, not merely the logical paths of our construction crews and civil engineers but also the ethereal inspirations of those which man-made things such as logic and reason cannot touch.

In this world, there are things that are natural and things that are supernatural. It's as simple as that, if you accept such things.

But choose to believe at your own peril. This is, after all, the New Postmodern Millennium. To most postmodern men and women, such talk falls into the realm of ancient superstition, religious naivety, or even blasphemy.

As a 21st century man, raised in a resurrected, desegregated New South, I'm probably not supposed to believe in the mythology of my supposedly less-cultured ancestors, either.

You know. Old ghost stories and whatnot. But some of the things I've seen in this world, at crossroads...

* * * *

I'm still not sure who that old black man was, the one who scared the living shit out of me one night, while taking a midnight stroll along the property line of my family's farm in Virginia, away from a clandestine party in the woods.

I'd been drinking and partaking in other illicit substances with friends nearby, well out of sight of local law enforcement and parents. An afternoon of shooting a an old abandoned car full of holes, fishing, and playing Marlboro Fucking Man had taken its toll, that's for damned sure - I was annoyed with the petty late-night boy brawling and cursing and needed, yes, a quiet moment by myself.

He'd wandered out from behind the pines and brambles, from my family's side of an old Virginian Railway access road, from where that red clay road intersected the old timber road.

He made no noise as his feet crossed the earth, as he moved between the rows of thorns and into the open night. Not a sound. In fact, if I hadn't seen the movement in the bush, hadn't seen him step out of the shadows myself, well, I wouldn't have known he was there.

In my part of the country, well, when a strange old dude -regardless of color - sneaks up on you from the woods, even beneath a full moon, you're probably going to level the business end of your shotgun his way when you holler. And that's just what I did, instinctively.

The black face showed teeth and raised his black hands, hollered back. He hollered back that he'd been lost in the woods a whah, boss and couldn't fin' he whah backa' quittin' whenna boss holla'd. He kept looking at the ground, old rag of a hat in hand, asking me the way back towards the railroad tracks so he could get back home for the night.

I pointed due west, back towards the rail bed. I remember laughing and thinking that the guy was merely drunk; a moonshiner lived a few miles away and, well, it's not like his customers only showed up during daylight hours.

I mean, c'mon - boss? In Virginia, by the 1990s, even the oldest black folk had quit staring at the dirt and calling random white folk boss. And hell, one of the Virginian's successor railways had yanked up the last of those tracks when I was a kid.

Figured the guy was one of the numerous retired, half-senile old railroad workers who lived in the area, still stuck in the glory years, and, yeah, just wandering back from a white lightning ride towards home.

The guy just smiled, thanked me for my help in his Gone With the Fucking Wind manner of dialect and disappeared off into the night, feet moving without a sound, walked back towards where the rail bed had been.

I remember staggering back to the campsite, telling a few guys about how I'd run into Uncle Fucking Remus's cousin out in the woods.

Everybody thought it was pretty funny. Even I thought it was funny, back then.

* * * *

More than a decade later, while visiting my home state and the town of Keysville, I met the most interesting elderly gentleman at the lunch counter at one of my favorite restaurants in the Old Dominion.

A retired railroad worker, one of the last of the Gandy Dancers. Older than sin, skin like spotted brown leather, white woolly hair. We started talking about all sorts of things - about his dead wife, his having grown up as, well, a second-class citizen in a segregated United States, his grandchildren, his oldest granddaughter's fondness for downright fugly-sounding white trash guys...

And, eventually, we started up a conversation about railroads, old work songs... and superstitions he'd heard as a young man working the tracks.

Funny thing, those old railroad legends.

Ever hear the legend of the Ol' Joe Gandy?

Neither had I.

* * * *

Apparently, the Angel of Death was once said to take the very human form of a lost railroad man - Joe Gandy. Death would walk the rails, looking for souls to test, strangers in the night who could be judged as either kind or cruel, depending on how they answered his questions.

If the strangers he met in his journeys along America's rails passed his tests - the measure of a human soul is in its capacity for kindness, after all - he'd leave empty handed. If the strangers were treacherous, belittling, or, well, just plain ol' racist pricks, Death would extract a payment in misfortune and doom.

Not that I believe in such things, mind you. I mean, it's not like I grew up hearing my great-grandmother's stories about Louisiana Rougarous and Hoodoos, or ever went witchhunting in the wilds of Lunenburg County or anything...

But now, every time a memory of that childhood experience pops into my mind...

Let's just say that I'm on my best behavior when I happen across an old dude near the train tracks at midnight. I think I've already used my Get Out of Hell Free card once - no sense in tempting fate.

* * * *

"... So I was waiting for the Blue Line out to O'Hare. And it's late, right? Like really late and kinda empty, you know?"

I'm wondering where she's going with her story. She's just finished telling me everything she's been doing with her life for, oh, the last year and a half. And, out of the blue, she interrupted my story about a rather abysmal, tiring week at work here in Oxford Fucking Ohio.

"And I get in the car and there's, like, only, like, ten of us, right? And this old, like, black guy in a CTA hat - Ohmygod! he smelled like something DIED! - like sits down next to me, right?"

I'm getting annoyed. I'm tired. I've got the cell phone plugged into the charger and on speaker, so I can respond to late-night emails and chat simultaneously.

"So... okay. Couldya hurry it up here? Not to be rude or anything, chica."

"Oh. RIGHT! Well, this guy just sits down beside me and starts, like, asking me about flying and telling me that he's never flown before and asks if I'd tell him how to find the Northwest terminal --"

"Yeah. So? Did you help him out or just make fun of him for smelling like ass?"

"DUDE! No... I helped him. But you remember that creepy-ASS story you told me about that Black Gandhi train demon or something..."

I hung up on her. It's two o'clock in the morning, Saturday.

I've a few beers in me and the last thing I need to have nightmares about is an old railroad legend.

Crazy-ass chick, really.

But I pray she hadn't given him bad directions.

You know. Just in case.

* * * *

Hell, maybe Ol' Joe Gandy's flying the friendly skies these days, riding Chicago's L lines, New York's subways and in Los Angeles taxis. Maybe he's traversing European rails and African buses, South American roads and Far Eastern high-speed lines, testing the men and the women of the world by just asking for directions.

Angel. Of Friggin' Death. It's not like he's stuck as a black dude. Hell, every human culture on this planet has a personification of that creature...

But imagine Death as an elderly Polish Jew, sitting down on a train in Berlin, maybe next to the great-grandson of some forgotten Schutzstaffel sturmbannführer, striking up a conversation, like old men tend to do. Say the kid blows the man off, intentionally gives him bad directions to that hotel at the next stop, simply because, well, the guy's Jewish...

Or imagine that angel appearing as a beautiful middle-aged Lakota woman in a truck stop somewhere in Montana, sitting down at a meal counter next to the semi-driving descendant of an Indian Wars veteran and asking for directions to the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. Say that trucker not only gives her directions but ends up so smitten that he picks up her coffee...

Not that people in the 21st century, us modern folks, should be worried or anything. These sorts of mysterious occurances are long behind us, stories our grandparents heard from their grandparents, stories that became the basis for our movies and television shows and horror novels.

It's not like you, reader, are reading this very essay on an Information Superhighway - a veritable electronic railroad of knowledge, built megabits at a time by hundreds of millions of random strangers every day, each one gandy dancing their way into Facebook profiles and MySpace pages and Wordpress accounts.

Surely, Ol' Joe Gandy, that dancing Angel of Death, isn't capable of navigating the World Wide Web?

I mean, why would he bother with testing our travels upon tracks made of fiberoptic cables?

Right?

Heh. Sleep tight tonight.

- # # # -

SINGING SONGS TO CHERRY BLOSSOMS: Rainy Day Women and Forgotten Hymens

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- She couldn't remember the name of the first guy she'd slept with.

She remembered that it was her junior year in high school, some random Friday night after a party during the summer, while her parents were out of town. She remembered that he worked Uptown, that he was either a sophomore or a junior at the Local U., drove an SUV. He smoked a lot of pot, drank vodka with Mountain Dew, and smelled marvelous.

But she couldn't, for the life of her, remember the guy's name. She was tipsy that night, he was drunk, and the whole blasted sexual experience lasted maybe five minutes, tops.

It just wasn't worth remembering, she said, because she'd moved on and found other lovers, caring guys and even, yes, her fair share of worthless assholes.

From her description of the event itself, well, I don't think I'd want to remember much, either.

* * * *

Her tale went something like this:

Pushing. Pushing. Almost...

Snap. Ow. Temporary reprieve.

Ow. Push. Ow. Push. Ow.

Ow. Push. Push.

Kiss, kiss, kiss, I love you, push. Push, push, ow.

A slip-out, a wrong-hole, a push, a You're not in, and finally - FINALLY - back inside, and yes, the grand finale...

... I'm coming... Oh God!...

Shudder - shudder - weird feeling - Wait, don't -

Pop. Out. Flop.

And, just like that, she was no longer a virgin.

She was, however, surprised at how anticlimactic the whole cherry-popping business turned out to be.

* * * *

She had a knot on the back of her head and bruises on the inside of her thighs for two weeks.

They hung out a few times after that night. He called non-stop, and she was flattered by the attention.

But he wasn't that cute, was as dumb as a post, and had smoked enough weed to qualify as retarded. He stopped smelling so marvelous, too, and started to reek of perpetual desperation.

He turned out to be a complete asshole, expected that he'd get laid every time they were at parties or bonfires together. Eventually, she just learned to avoid him completely.

After a few months, well, he was no more of a first lover than her fingers had been before that.

"Dude, girls figure out how to masturbate way before you guys."

Really?

"Well... we figure out what we like first, 'cause half the time guys in this town have no fucking clue."

Wait.

Really?

* * * *

Since she shared her Loss of Sexual Innocence bullshit with me, I figured I'd share my own I'm a Man Now bullshit.

"Wait. You don't even remember doing it?"

"Nope. Drunk. Blacked out. Remember the abandoned farmhouse and the MD 20/20, though."

"In Birming...ham?"

"Buckingham. Virginia. 1995."

"Okay... that's SO much worse than mine."

She held her coffee in both hands as we huddled beneath a coffee shop awning. Every one or two sips, she'd take a drag off her cigarette, nervously push smoke from her nostrils as she talked.

A heavy downpour hammered down on the storefront overhang, rain shot from the pitch, overpowered the helpless gutters. We were trapped, coffee in hand, in a curbside cave, waiting for a break.

Apparently, the night she'd lost her less-than-precious virginity, it'd been raining, too. Something about the downpour spurred the conversation. And smokers, well, do have the best conversations while we're huddled outside in the middle of thunderstorms.

I'd never met the woman before in my life, never seen her anywhere in Oxford. I didn't even bother to ask her name.

One of the coolest random strangers with whom I've ever shared a temporary shelter, in fact.

And I'm sure, if I could remember anything about it, my first would probably rank as my worst sexual experience. And I'm fairly certain that, well, I'm probably at the bottom of my supposedly sacred First's list now, too.

- # # # -

A CHRISTMAS STORY, SORTA: Standing at the Electronics Superstore, Watching All the Girls Go Buy...

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (ZP) -- He said he was shopping for his girlfriend, that she'd given him a list of acceptable gifts to buy for her, as well as for her family.

A lapsed Jew, but, well, still Jewish - and he's out Christmas shopping a week after Hanukkah.

He added, with some bitterness, that his girlfriend didn't seem to get that, traditionally, Christmas Day for most Jewish families involves no rituals beyond catching a movie matinée or a trip out to a Chinese restaurant. Hell, his family never really celebrated Hanukkah or the other minor holidays; they did Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, called it good.

But she was his girlfriend. And it was her holiday. Never mind that she'd just given him a list, told him to go buy shit for a holiday he'd never celebrated. He'd accepted the invitation to have dinner with her parents on December 25. He thought it sounded cool - until she'd given him the mandatory list.

Poor dumb bastard.

He really believed that dating a woman for less than three months somehow obligated him to buy five people he'd yet to meet acceptable holiday gifts.

* * * *

Acceptable?

Acceptable.

Acceptable, as in self-help books written by evangelical megachurch witchdoctors and crap about the New World Order being the product of the supposedly diabolical United Nations.

I asked him if her family knew, well, that he was Jewish.

Probably not. His girlfriend forgot half of the time herself, said even discussing religion made her uncomfortable. Hell, she'd told him that he'd just love Mom's Christmas ham and the prayer service with Brother ____ Christmas Eve...

He said he'd been thinking about that ever since she'd given him the list. He hadn't bought a single thing. He hadn't even known that she came from such a religious family.

I suggested that he give himself an acceptable Christmas gift: a new girlfriend.

He laughed nervously.

Poor dumb bastard.

* * * *

He took a drag off of the cigarette I'd bummed him. He'd seen me exit the electronics chain superstore, pull out my pack, and figured that a cigarette break beat the alternative.

"Man, did you see that Latin chick?"

"The one in the white pants with the - ?"

"- OH MY GOD! THAT THONG! Dude! Have you seen Superbad?"

"Dude. I rarely miss a nice ass."

Seriously. Nice ass. Not a single heterosexual man or lesbian could've resisted at least, well, looking. The black widow tattoo across her lower back seemed to be tangled up between purple elastic and very transparent low-rise white cotton.

Acceptable conversation?

Sure. Just as acceptable as giving a Jewish boyfriend a Christmas list, or insisting that he buy total strangers gifts simply out of courtesy.

I suggested that, well, if he'd been staring through those transparent slacks long enough to memorize the color of the Latina's underwear, his relationship was as good as over.

He laughed again, this time with more confidence. Bailing after three months, right before the holidays, sure beats having to suffer through living room showings of The Passion or the subsequent proselytization speeches.

* * * *

The Latina in question walked out just as we were finishing our shopping break. Maybe 5'7 or 5'8, plum-tinted shoulder length hair, bangs covering one eye and the bridge of her nose. She was probably in her mid 30s, one of those women who looked ridiculously, wickedly young for her age. Her platform shoes clicked against the pavement as she carried her two tiny bags towards the parking lot.

The Jewish cat crumpled the Gentile girlfriend's approved Christmas list as he eye-fucked that poor woman all the way to her car. Honestly, I've seen middle school boys with more subtlety.

And sure enough, she dropped one of her bags just as she opened the trunk, bent over, with that purple thong strangling the life out of that black widow tat ...

"Yeah. Fuck it, dude."

Silence.

"You know, she's probably Catholic, right?"

"Really?"

Poor dumb bastard.

- # # # -

OXFORD CONFIDENTIAL: Vignettes from a Nowhere College Village:Of Townies, Students, and Cultural Divides

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- The small cafe fills with undergrads and grad students, visiting scholars and faculty. I'm gnawing, slowly, on a soft, chewy brownie, sipping cool coffee.

There's a younger woman staring at me. The cowboy hat. Must be the hat. Or maybe the swollen face. Or the strange pile of books. She's wearing a gray sweatshirt and those painted-on black workout pants undergraduate females seem to wear like a uniform.

I try not to notice, try to ignore it. But, well, she looks like Audrey Hepburn, circa 1967's Two for the Road. And I see no boyfriend built like Albert Finney, no guy who may or may not get upset at me for, well, checking out my watcher.

And then I give up, quit everything I'd planned on doing that Saturday night.

I push the books piled up on the cafe table aside, push aside the brownie and the mug of Java, and open up the laptop case.

There are stories to tell, fragments of legends and folktales, things I've witnessed in this town worth writing about. There are vignettes of beauty and mystery along the spine of every small college town's Book of Life.

And if I'm being watched in a one-horse Midwestern town, by a woman who looks like Audrey Hepburn, from across a crowded coffee shop at five o'clock on an overcast Saturday, I should at least try to document some of the paradoxical dynamic that makes Oxford Fucking Ohio an interesting place to call home...

* * * *

Off came the wifebeater.

And then another tee-shirt hit the breeze, adrift and ripe, like a wet fart through cheap underwear.

Two drunken men, covered in jailhouse ink, were ready to man dance in the middle of the goddamn alley over something imbecilic and petty.

Both twenty somethings had been scorned by the same 16-year-old trailer park Lolita. And both men forgot all about the statutory rape and disturbing the peace raps that often follow fights over underage sex partners.

Cheap ink, tattoos meant to convey toughness in a small town where hard is defined by the ability to survive a few months locked up on a drug charge. Necks aflame with gothic fonts, shoulders sprouting naked women, lost girlfriends' names scarring flesh like bullets.

One man took a swing. His scrawny tat-covered arm shot through the night like a wingless lawn dart. The other cat took it in the jaw, then lurched forward, an attack more akin to a fat man at a buffet than a street brawl. More broken lawn darts flew through the twilight, the shadows cast by sodium vapor streetlights distorted and mean.

College girls, all dressed up and pretending to be urban sophisticates, watched and crowed and whispered and gasped, unaware that, should the cops arrive, they could be detained as witnesses, could be carded for underage drinking.

In the Hamptons, or out on the Cape, or on the banks of Lakes Michigan and Erie, in gated communities and other picture-perfect suburban brainfucks, Daddy's little princesses aren't exposed to this sort of skulduggery – they treat the fight as something for their entertainment, some freakshow put on by Townies for their amusement alone.

Both fighters were skinny and drunk. Fortunately, nobody expected a title fight. With all the grace and delicacy of an exploding car bomb, the whole physical outburst was reduced to smoldering screams from opposite ends of an alley in under a minute.

And the college girls blinked behind their out-of-place cocktail dresses and expensive high heels and designer handbags. There was, good Lord, blood coming from gaping head wounds and busted lips! The wifebeaters and tee-shirts were streaked with crimson as their owners pulled their clothing back on afterwards.

Must be nice to be shocked at the sight of two rednecks fighting over a trailer park Lolita.

* * * *

They tell me he overdosed, years ago. Heavy drug use turned a once gifted local child, a certifiable genius, into a cocaine-retarded blight upon the face of Oxford Fucking Ohio.

Instead of curing diseases or writing manifestos or building the damned world a better fucking mousetrap, he now wanders the streets as a zombified simpleton. He picks up work wherever he can find it, manual labor his destiny until death brings sweet liberation.

They tell me he's tried to kill himself, too, but the good people of Oxford Fucking Ohio just keep saving him.

I watch from a park bench as he lumbers by, quietly, his face obscured by an oversize hoodie.

And the Campus Crusaders and Soccer Moms, the men in white khakis and leather penny loafers, all seem to ignore him, an unfortunate blight on a college town Robert Frost once called one of the most beautiful college towns in the world.

The preppy students ignore him, as do the campus radicals who're busy preparing their latest bullshit protest. The campus liberals are all fired up about poverty, about wars on terror and crimes against the working class; the campus conservatives are demanding concealed weapons and curriculum oversight.

But everybody just forgets about the local kid in the hoodie, as soon as he moves out of sight. Just like the liberals ignore the poverty in this community, just like the conservatives blame locals for their need to carry weapons, he's just Static in the way of The Message, another local to call irrelevant for the sake of that grad school application.

He moves like a phantom, a tragic ghost that everybody secretly wishes would disappear, a brain-damaged Druid who scares the college kids and makes the alumni uneasy and who doesn't fit into an imaginary world based on a quotation by a dead New England poet.

In all honesty, I can see why the good people of Oxford Fucking Ohio want to keep him around, bum him cigarettes and give him the occasional free beer or sandwich.

The illusion of a perfect little college town, where the red-brick nostalgia of university recruitment often drowns out the harshness of reality, needs to be kept in check by somebody.

Robert Frost loved small town life too much to be just another bullshit quotation in a rich university's handouts.

Does anybody really think that ol' Yankee wordsmith, if he were still alive today, would've given a flying ratfuck about a college town where students are taught to ignore the people in front of their very eyes?

* * * *

She punches buttons on the cash register as she tells me about her one day off this week, about how she plans to spend the day with her son, to go catch a movie in nearby Hamilton.

As the cashier talks, I can feel the pair of sorority girls behind me, staring daggers through the back of my Stetson. It was my fault, obviously, for asking the middle-aged woman how life was treating her and her son, my fault for supposedly slowing down their quest to purchase a shopping cart full of Michelob Ultra – that lime-flavored shit that seems to be perpetually on sale and ripe for the undergrad consumer's picking.

The cashier and I are chatting, sure, but she's moving as fast as she can, running items over the scanner as she talks. And I'm a-swiping my debit card through the reader, answering omnipotent survey questions and navigating past the Cash Back? prompts and requests for a PIN number as efficiently as possible.

The stares seem to intensify when I respond to the cashier's plans, when I wish her well and express my hope that her son enjoys the day with ol' Mom. I can hear the sighs behind me, feel the daggers roll inside their eyesocket scabbards.

Never mind that the cashier is still ringing up my purchases, that my debit purchase is still processing across the untold millions of miles of Big Box retailer fiber-optic cable.

Simply being friendly is not something one does when other people are in a hurry to binge drink away a weekend. There are, after all, wealthy trustafarian boys to seduce, popped-collar poppycocks and pastel-colored preppy nincompoops to impress with tales of wild ski trips to exotic New Hampshire and Aspen, tales of daddy's time as member of some Ivy League crew team.

I listened, over my shoulder, as the two debutantes vented their frustrations over being forced to wait in line while their very important lives passed them by – mumbled and whispered and sighed, as if protecting their sheltered upbringing meant more to me than my bags full of smoked oysters, potato salad, and free-range eggs.

And to think, yes, there are single moms who work two jobs, who get only one full day off, once in a blue moon, who dare disrupt their precious routine with smalltalk about their children and kids' movies.

The audacity of some people.

Those women shouldn't have to wait in line, anyway.

After all, Daddy rowed a motherfucking boat all through college.

* * * *

I finish writing. Look up from the laptop, only to discover that Audrey Hepburn has left the building. I stand up, stretch, hit the head for a quick, caffeine-filled piss.

Wandering outside, I light cigarette and look off into space. Having stared at a laptop screen for hours, my eyes were having trouble adjusting to the dim light of early evening.

Two walk by on the sidewalk - more female undergrads. Undergrads, even in college towns, are easy to distinguish from full-time residents. Townie women stand out a bit more, carry themselves with more confidence and comfort, the streets of Oxford more of a childhood playground than some mythical Public Ivy holding tank.

One of the women exclaims that she wants to do some work in the coffee shop. The other states that she'll finish her cigarette, come in for a few minutes to warm up, and then head towards the bars.

Soon, I'm standing on a lonely sidewalk and staring off into space, in front of a crowded cafe, with a woman who looks like Sophie Marceau puffing away and staring, five feet away.

She didn't say a word. Just stood there, smoking, until I finished my cigarette. Maybe Sophie just wanted some company. Or maybe it was the cowboy hat. A lot of undergrads see the hat and think that, somehow, that automatically makes me one of those no-good, unsophisticated Townies. In a way, they're right - I grew up in a tiny college town, like Oxford Fucking Ohio, where undergrads thought we were all ig'nant hicks.

Yup.

Oxford really is full of interesting stories. And sometimes, it's good to be an ig'nant hick storyteller.

- # # # -

AN EDUCATION COVERED IN BLOOD: Answering Questions That Shouldn't Need To Be Asked...

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

- Wilfred Owen, "Anthem for Doomed Youth," 1917

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) - It was an Amtrak operator who first discovered the girl's body, limp alongside the bed of the train tracks early Saturday morning.

The girl, according to what little is known, had been drunk and abandoned by friends to the unseasonably cold Ohio night. No one will ever know why, exactly, the 19-year-old was wandering the streets alone, why she was wandering the streets alone at night, about a mile from her campus dorm room.

Her blood alcohol level, according to local authorities, hovered somewhere near twice the legal limit, somewhere above 0.229 percent. Under Ohio law, 0.08 percent is considered legally impaired.

Her hands were covered in black exes and other bar markings, indicating that she was a minor. Though it's now known that she'd been drinking at a house party prior to hitting the Uptown district, it's highly unlikely that she didn't find some way of obtaining booze while at the bars.

The driver of the southbound CSX train didn't even realize that he'd hit anything when he was notified in nearby Hamilton. His locomotive had passed through Oxford 90 minutes prior to the Amtrak train.

Sometime in the next week, the family of a 19-year-old Speech Pathology major will bury their daughter in Strongsville, a suburban Cleveland city of almost 44,000 residents.

Beth was in her first year at the Local U. She'd transferred earlier in the year. Her Facebook profile picture was one of a smiling, happy girl, embracing some other smiling, happy girl.

I teared up up looking at the face of yet another dead college student.

* * * *

I've seen many dead college students over the course of my short life.

I've seen the gleeful face of a murdered Wyoming student plastered across the television screen, a young man executed for simply being open about his sexuality. At Cal Poly, as an undergrad and as a reporter, I covered the kidnappings, torture and deaths of two classmates.

And I still don't talk much about the shooting at Northern Colorado during my first ol' college try, the one where my friends and I sat in a dining hall and watched the CNN footage of a madman shooting from the windows until he was finally brought down by a police sniper.

Many people throw out completely jingoistic garbage about the College Experience.

Going to college is the only way to succeed in America, going to the right school can get you that dream job, or a college education will improve your life, help you make friends, help you grow into a responsible adult.

Those people, in their over-zealousness, often forget to explain the darker side. Maybe they don't know or maybe they just don't care.

Going to college, in the United States, can get you killed.

* * * *

In Blacksburg, they're mourning the loss of their fallen comrades, too. But it's not merely a young girl who wandered in front of a trail on a cold night, not merely an accident.

Thirty-three dead. Students and faculty, noted scholars and budding, bright young minds.

According to official accounts, there was only one gunman, one very angry, disturbed young man - he, too, is one of the dead students who will never see another graduation day.

Virginia Tech now joins a solemn club within higher education. Like Kent State and the University of Texas, like Jackson State and Cal State Fullerton, another university will bury its butchered scholars - its aspiring musicians, its writers, its poets and scientists.

No championship football season, no amount of Nobel Prizes or Rhodes Scholarships, will replace what that university lost on that cold Monday in April. None of those things have ever, after all, resurrected the dead.

A phantom stain will forever haunt its campus, the imaginary smell of blood hovering above its classrooms and dormitories. And no amount of scrubbing, no amount of vigils, memorials, or university committees will ever remove that, no amount of administrative or political whitewashing will ever erase that from the collective memory of those who survived.

* * * *

Already, the finger-pointing and politicization has begun about what happened in that quiet Appalachian town this week, the analysts and pundits spouting off about every scapegoat imaginable:

It's the guns. No wait! It's the meds the kid was taking, the failure of the psychologists. I've got it! It's another dangerous foreigner. No, no, no - listen to me! My causes are next! It's the lack of God in this country! We need prayer!

We need better campus police! It's the NeoCons, the Liberals, the President! The War in Iraq caused this! Let us protest...yes, a protest will save us!

Absalom, Absalom! Let us find answers quickly, my Countrymen! The pain is too much! Our children are dead, and we must assign blame...

And they will offer every theory imaginable, to sell their books, to move their causes forward, to maybe, possibly, legitimately do some good. But they will never provide any answers. And we'll all chose sides, divvy up our opinions like vultures along a roadside, picking and choosing theories based on how secure and comfortable they leave each of us feeling.

No one will ever know, truly, what went through a lonely South Korean kid's mind before he put a bullet through it, ending his rampage through Blacksburg.

And no one, here, in Oxford, will ever really know why that 19-year-old girl ended up in front of that CSX freight train, either.

Of course, her death won't make the national or international headlines. Death, in the press, is measured in terms of spent ammunition and body counts.

Ask the analysts.

* * * *

No one should even try to fool themselves into thinking that America's college campuses are the literal ivory towers they sometimes appear to be. There is no sanctuary from the cold reality of our world, not in Blacksburg and not in Oxford.

Senseless death is just as much a part of the college experience, for way too many campuses, as overpriced textbooks and cheap-tasting dining hall food. Estimates place alcohol-related campus fatalities at roughly 1,500 per year. According to the Centers for Disease Control, as many as 24,000 attempt suicide each year - the equivalent, roughly, of the entire campus population of the Local U., including faculty and staff - and another 1,100 succeed where the 24,000 thankfully failed.

We are, and will probably continue, to be a violent culture, societally schizophrenic in how we choose to look at how we live, and why we make the choices we do, and why certain things happen to good and bad people alike.

In America, on its pristine college campuses and in its libraries, through our literature and film, we fight a war as old as humanity itself, a war within ourselves, a war to both love and despise thy neighbor, a war to understand life and death from mortal coil.

Most importantly, we fight our own battles, daily, to simply find comfort in the answer to the Question Why?.

Our war, our wretched internal cultural war full of moral relativity and World Superpower pragmatism and self-pandering, never reaches its zenith and never will.

One cannot win any war against a mirror reflection, an inverse version of one's self, revealing all of the flaws one refuses, through ignorance or denial, to even acknowledge. There must first be acceptance of what answers lie beneath the glass, the things we fear or are afraid to admit to ourselves.

Why? questions are never answered simply by declaration. The why? questions must be thought about first, and then asked.

Why? questions, in Blacksburg and here, offer no easy answers. But the more we think about them, the more we ponder holistically, asking before answering, the more solutions to problems we may be able to unearth.

There are no experts of human nature better at answering these types of questions than ourselves, and that responsibility falls squarely on the shoulders of each and every one of us. It is our duty, as the living, to ask questions for the dead, to find education beyond Finals Weeks, nostalgic alumni memories, beyond everything and anything that could possibly be taught in a classroom.

That is what college students are supposed to learn in college - the ability to think, to ask, and to answer. They shouldn't have to learn, in a civilized world, how to lay wreaths on the headstones of peers, to look for shelter at the sound of gunshots.

Maybe, one day, we can live in a world, or can at least be able to send children to college, without worrying about that.

* * * *

What candles may be held to speed them all?

There aren't enough candles in all the world.

- # # # -