THE BLANK [CHECK] GENERATION: In the Age of Self-Important Microcontent Conformity, Hipster Couture Wallows in a Sea of Dull Wit

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- Four young women and three young men, all upperclassman hipsters at the threshold of college graduation, huddled together in a dismal corner of a dark bar.

The bar is foreign territory for me, outside of my normal comfort zone. But, well, every once and a while a guy just needs a little change of scenery, away from bars filled with diverse mixtures of college undergrads and Townies, miscreants and stoners and saints, former high school football heroes and occasionally starving artists (tattoo or otherwise.)

I'd already finished my business in the place, my party long gone, as younger folks tend to do here, on towards the next bar on their pub crawl. I'd noticed the rather strange group because, well, they generally appeared more interesting - and out of place - than my 30-year-old ass.

In between boisterous laughter over strange inside jokes, choreographed awkwardness, and savage critiques of the "cattle" that supposedly makes up the remainder of the student body, each hovered over iPhones and mobile Wunderspielzeug, texting and emailing digital snapshots and Googling and checking e-mail.

One would Tweet along an update to Twitter, another would upload shots directly into Facebook, Tumblring and Digging and downloading annoying indie rock ringtones. And then, as puppies do when they realize they can roll in their own shit, the group would check each others' electronic communications, crack jokes about their supposedly hip and witty microcontent.

I joined them for a moment and attempted conversation, but, well, they were just too wound up in their own self-contained bubble to be even remotely interesting. They'd been discussing their various artistic and literary endeavors, which, at first had sounded intriguing. Instead, it turned out to be merely a self-important microcontented circle-jerk.

* * * *

Jesus Fucking Christ, I thought, If there's one thing worst than scenesters, it's a technosnob scenesters...

Such is life, alas, amongst the Millennials, particularly within a subgroup of that generation I've come to think of as a Black Check Generation - a group of American and European kids who exist as if one can buy the spirit of art and literature, cultural dominance and sophistication, by playing the role of the misunderstood genius, as if the Muse sings through electronic toys or college degrees or IQ tests.

Everything in their conversation revolved around cultural superiority through their sarcastic deployment of SMS data into the World Wide Web, their superior musical prowess thanks to this torrent site or that piracy site, how they couldn't live without RSS feeds or TMZ or any media, well, that pretty much supported their very restricted worldview.

Technology, the arts, media, and a steady stream of condescending dull wit directed at the Fratboys, the Sorority Sluts, the Preppy Kids, the Rednecks, the Trailer Trash, the Townies...

I mean, I can be an arrogant bastard at times and sometimes, yeah, I fall into my own limited perception of couture du monde, but I try to at least maintain some connexion to the rest of humanity... ... Try at least to understand the organic wholeness of things, the egalitarian nature of life, maintain a sense of awe at the differences and my own cultural limitations...

... I fucking hope...

One even mentioned my blog and how, yes, in an unsolicited literary critique, I should all-out condemn the supposed stupidity of supposedly 90 percent of the uncultured "sheeple" that attend the Local U.

Sheeple? I said to myself, Did this kid just say fucking sheeple?? Well, pour me a Frappuccino, slap a Wes Anderson flick into the Blu-Ray, and color me Espresso Bar and Sushi Bourgeois ...

* * * *

Another kid - an aspiring performance artist who, well, hasn't ever really performed anything before anyone outside of the group - asks about my favorite writers. When I answer that, well, literature-wise, I have too many to name, he INSISTS that every serious writer or poet MUST have a Top Five that includes Jack Kerouac and Chuck Palahniuk.

"Look, I don't rank authors, and right now, I'm sorta on a political science and early 20th century history kick..."

Besides not being even remotely interesting, the group, I've noticed, has been tying up a table in this crowded bar for four hours. They weren't really really drinking - and from what the bartender said while I'd ordered my beer earlier, they weren't tipping shit, either.

I can understand the cheap beer - when I was a student myself, I was fond of a libation called Lucky Lager, the sweetest elixir then available to Pacific dwellers with a hankering for suds and no money.

But in bars, even when broke, I tipped. I had friends, raging alcoholics, who would tip out before buying that blackout drink, starving writers who'd order only a cup of coffee at all-night diners just because, as well, they just wanted to make sure the cute waitress ended up with their last dollar...

No sense, I figured, in pointing out to the table of hipsters that, well, not tipping is the ultimate sign that they are not writers, not artists, not even remotely talented beyond maybe a job at a bookstore...

...Or as shushing librarians, maybe small, empty art gallery owners, as curators of shitty metropolitan museums, perhaps?

That, certainly, made me chuckle. The kid who'd inquired about my favorite authors thought I was laughing at some crack about a kid from the local trailer park's neck tats.

Well-read, dressed in prefab distressed, faded clothing, beards strategically unkempt, but their attempts at looking like starving artists served as nothing more than a reinforcement of their packaged suburban rebellion.

* * * *

I found an excuse to make my exit. The bartender "who'd been rude" was waving me over - he had a question about library hours and printing policies. Discussing work at two in the morning on a Saturday. Beat the hell outta dealing with culture snobs.

And I seriously considered letting Mister Neck Tat know that there was this scrawny, mop-topped literary critic, in that dark corner over there, homes, who'd just called him an Eminem wannabe who probably couldn't read anyway...

And, actually, Mister Neck Tat enjoys Edgar Allan Poe and reading about the U.S. Civil War. And he fucking loves the film version of Fight Club, too.

- # # # -

OXFORD CONFIDENTIAL: Of Mean-Ass, Downright Evil, High School Dictators, Fortresses of Suckitude, and Notes on a Wildshield

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

- 1 Corinthians 13:11,
King James Version

This is a dude who, 700 years ago, totally ravaged China, and who we were told, two hours ago, like totally ravaged Ashman's Sporting Goods.

- Of Genghis Khan,
Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- I was fidgeting with my truck keys when I noticed the bright pink paper tucked into the windshield wipers.

Upon closer inspection, I realized that it wasn't a parking ticket. Instead, something slightly more disconcerting had been left by someone other than Oxford's dreaded Meter Nazis.

Someone had left me a note, complete with purple ink, smiley faces, and very girlie-girl handwriting. More appropriately, someone left a note that began with Dear Mr. _______ or Zenfo Pro and ended with Sincerely, Anon. - P.S. Don't get mad but I don't like email.

I'm used to getting emails and IMs from just about every social demographic in Southwestern Ohio. Since 2005, I've gotten notes - 97 percent electronically - from students, alumni and staff at most of the Tri-State's colleges and universities, various area residents, two social services folks, and even a few members of the armed forces serving overseas.

But notes from Local High School students are indeed rare.

Especially notes left on my windshield at nine o'clock in the evening, on a school night.

* * * *

Buried within the simple note, intertwined with the compliments and admonishments over my smoking, the reader had a request.

There is apparently a demonic, authoritative menace stalking the local teenage wasteland, a terror undocumented and neglected by my Hypertext record, one who crushes youthful dreams like soda cans and shatters mischievous hope like a cheap wine glass.

And she (I'm going to go out on a limb here and call the reader a she) wanted me to write something about it, to provide some sort of warning to future Local High School students, to cry out into the World Wide Web about injustice and intolerable cruelty.

A Local High School administrator, from what I'm told, apparently sucks. And given the fact that something about this administrator drove a kid to leave a note on a blogger's windshield, the educator - at least from the student perspective - must suck something fierce.

Sadly, without anything more to go on, besides the cry of suckitude, I cannot condemn a school official for sucking, no matter how much or how great the level of sucky-ness.

And, even if I could, I wouldn't use the sucker's real name, because, well, this sort of sucking isn't exactly outside of a skilled secondary educator's job description, has never been a crime or a misdemeanor.

* * * *

These sorts of things can't exactly be documented by a 29-year-old blogger, really - one who last dealt with sucky high school teachers in the Year of Our Lord, Nineteen Hundred and Ninety-Six.

By high school standards, I'm, well, ancient, a relic of that Gen-X Paleolithic Era, a fossil from a time when Dinosaur Jr. walked the earth, flannel was the trendiest of trendy loin cloth, back when Nirvana was achieved by smelling the air for teen spirit.

Yes, I come from a late 1990s Ice Age, one filled with cop-killing, O.G. pimp pterodactyls and Amerikkka's Most Wanted reptiles, a barbaric time when we all sipped on Gin and Juice and did it Doggystyle while smoking a time-wasting herb nicknamed, appropriately enough, The Chronic.

And, for the record, 99.7 percent of my high school's administrators sucked some serious, deep, unwashed ass. The three-tenths of a percentage point? Well, those were the ones who managed to drill something into my juvenile delinquent, often booze- and narcotic- filled, skull.

I can't even remember the exact number of days I logged in detention or solitary in- and out-of-school suspension, but I do know that I spent a few weeks, easily, trapped in various crusty, vomit colored rooms, surrounded by my fellow inmates.

I'm fairly certain - to this day - that my high school's senior disciplinarians became sexually aroused by the amount of senseless, sucky-ass punishment they doled out like vengeful dominatrices. Yes, they were mean and evil and wretched, human bird shit splashed atop the forehead of youth.

Despite their best efforts and in spite of myself, I survived. In some ways, it made me a stronger, better person. And in other ways, I became more stubborn, more devious and snide and sarcastic.

Not that I'd ever thank my own mean, sucking teachers. Some are dead; most I'll never see ever again. But I did, over time, learn to appreciate their place within the American teenage wasteland. Without those who are intolerable, without those totalitarian educators who make lives hell sometimes, the whole individual high school experience would be, well, boring as fucking shit.

And, hell, I think I turned out okay...

Sorta.

* * * *

"I'll be in front of the movie theater, k?

"The... no ... the MOVIE THEATER, okay? God... Yeah... I will ... Yeah... K, bye."

A Local High School kid stared at me as if I were some ancient, alien menace.

I'd been, well, just holding up a city trashcan, smoking a cigarette outside of a coffee shop when she crossed the street, furiously texting and then chattering into her cell phone.

Two days removed from reading - and then shredding - my mystery correspondent's note, I decided to go hang out at the same place, guarding the same lonely trashcan, that the reader claimed she'd witnessed me doing all summer. Maybe she'd spot me again, stop and say hi, or offer some insight into the terror that apparently is the Local High School's administration?

Maybe this was my mystery tipster?

And this one teen stopped, for no obvious reason, less than five feet from me, just stared. So I did what every mature adult does in such situations - I stared back, made a face.

For a split second, I thought she may, indeed, be my victim of Local High School suckitude.

Another Local High School kid ran up and tugged at Miss Cell Phone's jacket.

"Oh my God," her friend whispered. "That guy... is like... so, like, creepy. Seriously."

Wow. Now that's embarrassing.

I stopped trying to figure out what, exactly, was creepy about me, because, well, the only scenarios I could think of, with my adult mind, were creeping me out. I went back to staring off into space, and the two girls went back to their conversation.

" C'mon! ____'s over there and he's not with her anymore! OH MY Gaaawd! Now's... your ... chance!"

The pair scurried back across the street, towards the long line outside of the theater's box office. Dozens of Local High School kids were waiting there, chatting on cell phones and whispering and staring and giggling at unknown fart jokes...

And for some reason, I suddenly remembered what that was like, what it felt like to be just a devious, pubescent pirate, coasting towards the eventual thrill-killing oblivion of adulthood, without so much as a care beyond the next weekend kegger, the next exam or the next smoked joint in the bathroom.

I stared at my cigarette and remembered what it was like to have mean-ass teachers step in front of my own youthfully awkward, too-damned-fun, train wreck.

And suddenly I wanted to write about how much, well, some educators...

How much...

... Some educators, including myself, just...like ...

... Like, totally suck some seriously mean ass, like, sometimes, like, when you're young and stuff...

Like, you know?

- # # # -

EXCHANGING THE ONE HOLIDAY GIFT THAT JUST KEEPS ON COMING:A Strange Tale of Sex, Violence, and Al Green on a Jukebox

Fruitcake Sex (n.) - Any exchange of certain carnal acts, modeled after the Christmastime gifting of a certain, often reviled, fruit and nut filled pastry. As fruitcakes are often passed back and forth between persons, without emotional attachment, fruitcake sex is often exchanged between exes, former flings, and friends with benefits at certain unceremonious times, almost out of obligation...

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- Some women knock. Some women just push the door open as soon as they see the handle turn and hear the deadbolt click.

I was only slightly buzzed, nowhere near the level of shitfaced insanity her intelligence had led her to believe. And, as she stormed from room to room in my apartment, she mumbled, swore she knew I was about ready to do something stupid, something about a hook up with a student staffer of one of my bosses...

"You fucker, I know you were with her at M__ & J__'s. She saw you! That girl's what? 20? Are you fucking re-TARDED! They'll fucking FIRE you!"

No clue what the fuck she was talking about. Or why she'd just barged into my apartment.

Ex-flings, especially the fun ones, tend to do, say, and even hear strange things while intoxicated. And yes, she was intoxicated and, as usual, overdressed for whatever occasion she was celebrating.

* * * *

Sure, I'd been talking to said FORMER student employee at a bar (21, actually), bought the girl a Red Snapper as we swapped war stories from my library. I've bought quite a few former employees drinks. And sure, maybe it looked like something else was going on at that jukebox - maybe flirting a little bit. And we did play a lot of Al Green and Rod Stewart...

This is not the first time I've been accused of such things. Working in an industry dominated by women, I've grown accustomed to being accused of blending work and play a little too openly. Goddammit, I'm still a professional - there are things I just don't do.

But is that anything to get all worked up about, more than a year and a half after you've quit sleeping together, more than a few months after telling a guy that her boyfriend had asked her to break all contact?

And what the flying monkeyfuck was she doing in Oxford Fucking Ohio anyway? Who drives down from the City of the Big Shoulders, drives five hours, just to visit the ol' alma mater during Fall Semester final exams?

And who the hell was the "she" who'd fed her obviously faulty information? Who the fuck was spying on me on a rather normal Thursday night? I knew she'd gotten her intel delivered via, as usual, a barrage of short, terse text messages.

I hadn't seen a single one of her friends in that damned bar - I had, however, received a rather strange IM from a local blog lurker ten minutes before the ol' ex knocked a hole through the door. Something about my inappropriateness in that same bar, a few lines concerning what apparently looked like a hook-up in the making...

Coincidence? Probably not.

Not that I would have done anything different. Hell, 18 months is a long fucking time...

* * * *

She calmed down, just enough, to start screaming. It's amazing how some women react to being wrong when there's just the slightest bit of alcohol pumping through 'em.

She got downright belligerent, brought up the fact that she was still pissed that I'd gone home with that fucking slut months ago, her former best friend, an act at the time she'd thought was fucking hilarious. So I got all up in her grill right back, with allegations of my own concerning her stereotypical local female alumna behavior, her flakiness and shallowness and tendency to spend too much time in tanning beds, about how, well, fucking insane and domineering and controlling...

She slapped me. So I slapped her. She threatened to call the cops. I shoved my mobile in her face and suggested we put it on speaker phone. She pushed me into a bookshelf. I pushed her, too, hard enough to send her into a my DVD collection - copies of zombie flicks and war movies everywhere. She jumped right back up, charged me, and sent my spine bouncing off the living room wall.

I'd finally had enough of the bullshit drama. Being Finals Week and living in a thin-walled apartment next to grad student neighbors, a loud quarrel would probably result in a visit from local law enforcement.

So I grabbed her, put her spine against that same wall and put my elbow to her throat. I told her, in that calm, quiet voice that scares the shit out of women at times, that she'd either calm down or she'd be unconscious and removed from my apartment by whatever police arrived.

My apartment, plus Uninvited Guest, could equal several criminal charges being filed. Sure, I may spend the night in jail, too...

* * * *

But I knew. Call it the sixth sense of a man's other brain.

I was terrified, however, that maybe I, too, was operating with wrong information, operating on faulty memory. Maybe that smell in my nose was wrong? Maybe that memory, that remembrance of a fight in an Oxford bar long ago, hadn't ended with the defiling of a women's restroom?

If she said stop, I figured, I'd guessed wrong. And, if my educated guess had been that wrong, well, I'd knew I'd be contacting a good defense attorney the next morning.

When I felt her legs wrap around me, when I felt less angry fingers on my neck and realized that both of our free hands had already confirmed that the excitement was, well, mutual, I realized that neither of us was about to go to jail.

There is a very, very fine line between foreplay and violence for some people - especially when neither party is sure that it's still okay to exchange a little Yuletide fruitcake. Her visit had less to do with any sincere worry over my career, or jealousy, or anything beyond a holiday exchange.

Seriously. This was mild. The last time this happened, I was the one with an arm to my throat and she ended up with bruised ribs. I started that one - I was upset that, well, she'd told friends that I wasn't the dating kind of guy, had gotten drunk at her graduation party and openly bragged to a restaurant full of girls that she'd borrowed a librarian from her local library and that they couldn't top that, no matter how many TAs or tenure-track profs they'd slept with.

Baking up that ol' fruitcake is harder than it looks. And, for some reason, the cops never showed up. Strange, too, considering things just got louder and more profane...

* * * *

Fruitcake sex is, in and of itself, quite enjoyable. The act usually resembles, for most people, a combination of the age-old fight/fuck and dirty revenge fuck traditions, with quite a bit of misdirected passion and lust mixed in for good measure. The sex itself is the fruit - the nuts are, usually, the individuals involved. Rum? Sure. Alcohol tends to add just the right amount of essence, lubricant to ease egos and fuel tempers.

There's nothing even remotely romantic about fruitcake sex. Quick and dirty. It's actually more hollow than mere casual sex - a friendly hook-up, for most folks, rarely involves matters of personal pride or vanity. Exchanging this sort of annual treat tends to be about conveying the image of sincerity in a sexual volley, without actually giving up anything important.

Fruitcake is, after all, the one food people make fun of the most, yet there are a lot of people who secretly wait for a chance to dig into that stale vile loaf when there's nothing else in the house to eat.

* * * *

My alarm went off at 5:15 AM Friday morning. I stared at the damned clock, praying for a sudden reversal of time. I hadn't even caught a quick power nap. And she was just happy as a clam, bundled up and lightly wheezing into a stack of pillows.

Looking around my bedroom, I did a brief damage assessment. Nightstand was overturned. We'd knocked over the banjo I never learned to play. And all of the books on that nightstand, the ones I'd simply left open to keep from losing my page, were scattered around the place like cheap confetti.

I reached over my sleeping guest and hit the off button. As I pulled my hand back under the sheets, I felt warm, curvy skin, felt my hands wandering. Some women, as much as they may hate the analogy, really are built like classic 1950s hot rods. Their hoods are decked out not with hood ornaments but with breasts, their tail fins aerodynamic and painfully smooth.

She pushed back into me and yawned. She told me that, well, the most annoying thing about me is that I have a hard time falling asleep with a naked woman in my bed. I reminded her that, well, I'm a guy.

She slid out from under the sheets and went out into the apartment. She needed ibuprofen. For some reason, every time we've slept together, she wakes up with a craving for Advil. Never understood the tie between anti-inflammatory medications and sex.

I closed my eyes and started to hit that power-nap nirvana. I heard the toilet flush, the quick pattering of bare feet back towards the bedroom, the Fuck fuck fuck! Cold! grumblings I usually hear when certain people forget that, yeah, I keep my thermostat set at a brisk 50*F during the winter months.

She hopped back into bed, sat on top of my hips, and grinned. There would be no nap before work. I asked her what she would've done had there really been another woman in my apartment, if she really thought that I end up sleeping with somebody every time I buy a woman a shot or have them help me pick songs on a juke.

She changed the subject. Instead, she wanted to tell me that she'd met another one of my library's former student employees a few months ago at a party, that my name had somehow come up in casual conversation. The other woman thought I was kinda weird and a little out there. She'd started to, after a few gin and tonics, tell her fellow alum about -

She stopped talking and looked down between her legs.

"Ugh! You are SUCH a boy!"

Yes I am. I'm a total fucking bastard, too.

And I didn't want to talk about how many different ways she could play six degrees of separation between my job, our sex life, and the cool people she's met in the City of the Big Shoulders, either.

Hell, my library almost burned down 72 hours before she'd stormed the castle and I'd been working 12 hour days since Monday - she was almost flippant when she told me that, well, she just didn't give a rat's ass if the place burned to the ground.

Why talk? Defeats the purpose of fruitcake sex.

* * * *

I left her alone in my apartment with a note on top of her dress, telling her that she was more than willing to help herself to any food or to the shower. The spare towels were in the closet; no need to text me to ask if the guest password on my laptop had changed. And, well, she knew she was free to steal a tee-shirt, too.

I arrived at work surprisingly chipper. Annoyingly chipper. Five different people I work with figured out that I'd broken my rather silly Celibate 'til 2008 goal for the remainder of the year. One person even sent me a text, wanting to know whose tits had been pressed against the glass of my living room window.

And, well, for going on less than 15 minutes of sleep in 48 hours, I was rather full of energy. I caught up on just about every project, cleaned out my email, and even managed to run through my backlog of work-related errands outside of the office.

Like the real baked good, fruitcake sex does, really, do a body good sometimes.

Maybe not the mind or soul, but I was glad to learn later in the day that she and the no-contact beau had broken up a few weeks prior, that we're back to never doing that ever again, and that, well, the guy she'd just started seeing was one of those "Born Again, No Sex Before Marriage" types who she was looking for an excuse to no longer see anyway.

Oh yeah. A Christian Fundamentalist and a woman who likes brutal sex and belongs to the ACLU. That would've been a match made in hell.

And hell, not like I really had anything else to do on a boring ol' Thursday night.

Fruitcake sex, like shit, just happens. No sense in worrying about it, sweating bullets, or pretending like there's any real sentimental meaning behind its exchange.

And in towns like Oxford Fucking Ohio, it's quite common, actually, to just go Well, fuck it, might as well get laid tonight. You'd be surprised, dear reader, how many folks probably ended up waking up Friday in a similar situation, especially in this town.

After all, shit happens.

- # # # -

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.

- # # # -

THE OXFORD (FUCKING OHIO) DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS: Summer, Sleep, and Other Sordid Things...

I have a sixth sense for drama. One would think that means I'm good at avoiding it.

Trouble is? I'm a fucking idiot.

- The Wombat, Ramblings of an Idle Insomniac,
" Drama, of Varying Scales," BOSTON, Mass., Aug. 17

Preach on, Brother Wombat.

Sums up the final days of Summer 2007 for a whole hell of a lot of folks, I think.

* * * *

I trust you. Besides, _____ says you're, like, completely dense and that I'd have to, like, be really obvious or something if I wanted to hook up. Like say 'Jason, I'm in your bed and naked and I want to fuck.'

- Woman No. 1, who crashed at my apartment,
In bed with me last week.

Kinda true, actually. Extremely hot 21-year-old, friend of an ex, who needed a place to stay until she moved back home. I don't use air conditioning, so we both slept pretty much completely naked.

And, nope, nothing happened. The only thing she asked for was for an extra pillow. She did, however, ask me to post something about it the next morning.

Just to piss off her ex-boyfriend. He apparently fuckin' hates me.

Heh.

* * * *

Three words.

Midget. Monkey. Wrestling.

- Local bar manager and friend,
discussing not-so-serious
ideas for school year promotions.

Trust me. You don't want to know.

But I will recommend the Orange Jell-O shots to local readers who know where I drink. Stiffer than a four-day-old corpse in a meat locker.

* * * *

No sweats? You don't own ANY sweats? Fuck it. I'll sleep in my underwear.

- Woman No. 2, who crashed at my apartment,
In bed with me last week.

Extremely hot 22-year-old, two nights later. And, nope, nothing happened. Just nice to sleep beside someone sometimes. I probably need to apologize for getting a little too touchy-feely, but, well, it's been ages since I last did the whole just curl up beside me so I can sleep thing. Not sure how those sorts of deals work these days...

* * * *

_______is like such a whore... does she, like, know about B___ and me last year?...They were, like, fighting, and he was, like, cute and I was, like, really trashed that night and...

- Local U. female undergraduate,
cell phone conversation,
outside of the ZenFo Pro Library, 7:42 AM ET

* * * *

When people suggest that men are more promiscuous than women, I always wonder how this is possible unless the men are having sex with each other.

- Liz, The LibraryTavern Wench,
"I'm Not a Mathematician, But...," Ohio, Aug. 14

There's a reason I'm throwing in this stellar quote from Liz, one of my favorite feminist colleagues and fellow bloggers, after the overheard mobile conversation quotation. I'll let readers draw their own conclusions about the nature of womanhood and internal gender conflict, human sexuality, and the complex, almost incomprehensible eccentricities of life in a sex-negative, secretive society...

Okay. That's way too deep for a Monday. Moving on...

* * * *

The only thing I learned as a sports reporter was how to hate the fanboy shit that goes along with men's college and professional sports. I love the competition, but hate the celebrity worship.

- The ZenFo Pro, to a guy who thought it
was so cool that I used to be a sportswriter.

First time in months I've had a conversation with anybody about my sportswriter days. Most folks are shocked to learn that, no, it wasn't a dream job or a chance to just talk about sports all day. It was hard, grueling work, keeping up with beats, tracking down leads, and meeting tight deadlines.

Don't miss it one bit.

* * * *

So. I guess we're not talking anymore, 'cause ____ says she saw you talking to a bunch of girls outside of M____& J_____'s Saturday night. And some tall girl kissed you. You are such a fucking bastard!

- Voicemail, one of five, from a very creepy woman.

I met the caller only last week, gave her my number, and told her to give me a call if she wanted to hang out sometime. Number now blocked.

Look, I'm almost 30. I'd like to say that the last time I played the talking to game was in high school, but I didn't do it then, either. I tend to hang out and socialize with more women than men, especially when I'm out on the town. I'm not too awfully interested in talking to a woman who obviously read way too much into me giving her my number.

And the girl who kissed me? Just a friend. She pecked my cheek as she and her boyfriend headed home for the night.

Drama.

Ugh.

- # # # -

STEEL OF THE SOUTH: More Scary Virginia Stories to Blog in the Dark...

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- Recently, while stuck on bed rest, I had the opportunity to get some pleasure reading done. At one point, I unearthed my old high school yearbooks.

Flipping through the vulgar comments and past pictures of people I've long forgotten actually brought back some interesting memories.

I found a photograph stuck between a few pages, a photograph of this frightening brute of a kid. He had a sneer on his face that could kill weaker men, eyes full of all sorts of illicit substances, hair parted straight down the middle, bandages covering gashes over his eye and across his nose.

Man, I'd almost forgotten what a hoodlum I was when I was 17. Scared the shit out of me.

And some people wonder why I consider myself fortunate to have survived high school. But I think I turned out just fine. Wouldn't change a thing.

- Jason

* * * *

The machete was brand new, fresh from the Rose's five-and-dime, plastic shrink wrap dangling from the handle.

I heard one of the school's vice-principals shout into his two-way radio as he chased after “Muhammad,” ordering the school's receptionist tell the sheriff's deputies that the “suspect” was armed and dangerous.

Muhammad was normally a peaceful kid, a Black Muslim whose parents had sent him down to Farmville to live with his grandmother. Muhammad had spent his early childhood being instructed in the ways of the Five Percent Nation.

Though a man of peace, who had many friends of many races, he readily admitted to distrusting white people, to being convinced that the FBI had killed Brother Malcolm and Dr. King, to believing that the federal government was pushing crack in housing projects across America.

Muhammad had been suspended from school for fighting with a white kid earlier that day. The white kid had received a lighter sentence. So Muhammad was sent home, and the white kid was sent to In-School Suspension.

Muhammad had obviously gone shopping for some very mean-looking hardware, purchasing a tool to extract his pound of cracker flesh for what he apparently viewed as a racist conspiracy. As he ran past me, after the white kid who'd passed me only a few seconds earlier, I noticed his eyes were aflame with that lust, that murderous thousand-yard stare of a man consumed by his own hatred.

I learned a long time ago that one does not step in the way of a man wielding a machete, even a normally peaceful man. Machetes do not leave pretty wounds and often sever limbs.

Mr. S., a chisel-faced man in his late fifties, was the senior disciplinary administrator of the school district. He'd survived the 'Nam; he once claimed that maintaining discipline in a rural Virginia high school was nothing compared to dealing with Charlie. But despite his reputation as a harsh man, he was also known to be fair and once, according to legend, had even laughed.

Mr. S. plowed through the throngs of 13-18 year-old kids who clogged the sidewalk as they waited for their afternoon buses. He pushed students to the ground as he ran, hollering ahead for students to get out of his way or risk being run down. Some moved out of the vice-principal's path; most did not.

“Muhammad” apparently did catch up with the white kid, who'd run to the school office for shelter. The principal convinced the Five Percenter, the normally peaceful kid with many friends of many races, to put down his weapon before he ended up doing something he'd later regret.

By the time the county mounties arrived, the incident had been resolved. And "Muhammad" went to jail, never to return as a student.

Later that week, the school yearbooks were distributed to those who'd paid for them. I remember wishing that Muhammad had waited to go crazy, wishing that he'd waited until after the school year ended, so I could've gotten him to sign my freshman yearbook.

After all, he was a peaceful man, most of the time, with many friends of many different races.

* * * *

I don't know what inspired me that night.

Maybe I'd seen too many gang-related films - movies about South Central Los Angeles, Miami drug lords and New York crime kingpins were all the rage in the mid-1990s. Or maybe it was the gangsta rap or the aggressive punk music, the stuff I started to listen to the moment I hit puberty.

For whatever reason, I was inspired, after helping a "Max" jump a guy behind the Food Lion, to piss in a kid's face as he lay on the ground.

We used to call this sort of juvenile code enforcement schoolin' a motherfucker. And, as my friend put it so eloquently that night, if this motherfucker wants to steal shit, he needs to be taken to motherfuckin' school.

Nobody else wanted to help this friend of mine out. None of our mutual friends, who all talked a good game, stepped up to get his back. They were all conveniently busy, had baseball practice or dates. So “Max” and I sat alone in his beat-up yellow tank of a car for two hours, drinking forty after forty of Colt 45 and waiting for this stupid kid to leave a shopping center cineplex.

The poor bastard didn't even see it coming. Walked right out towards his car as if he owned the world.

“Max” did most of the work. It was his stolen property, his lost income. The only thing I did was hit the kid from the back while Max informed him of the charges against him, of why this milder sentence of the Court of Street Justice was better than the alternative.

As the kid lay on the ground, squirming and begging, the 160 ounces of malt liquor filling my bladder suddenly demanded a prompt exit.

It was nothing personal, really. I just had to take a leak.

As Max reminded me afterwards, when I felt guilty about it, that kid probably would've done the same to me if he'd had the chance. And if it'd been other guys jumping him, less civil individuals from Church Hill or Hampton Roads or D.C., then he probably would've endured much, much worse.

An eye for an eye, a piss for a piss.

* * * *

That motherfucker had a .22...

When he first pulled it from the front of his boxers and started waving it around, screaming about how “hard” he was, most people just laughed. And when he fired into the air, bobbing his head up and down, one hand holding up those baggy jeans and the other holding a weapon, people just stood there and stared.

Here is this 16-year-old, skinny-ass white dude, who everybody knew was crazy, save for the court-appointed dumbass who'd let him off probation early. Here's this Crazy-Ass Peckerwood, waving a gun around in a parking lot at two in the morning.

And the only thing anyone could do was laugh, then stare in amazement.

If this kid's parents hadn't been wealthy socialites, I'm fairly certain he wouldn't have been set loose by the correctional system. If he'd been poor, or a minority, or poor and a minority, he would've been rotting in a juvenile prison somewhere.

But because he came from a good family, one where the poor little thing's psychosis was easily blamed on a desire to fit in and his parents' divorce, he was set free to go all apeshit in the middle of the night without so much as an ankle bracelet.

When Mr. Crazy-Ass Peckerwood started beating that tiny handgun upon his tiny chest, screaming about how he was going to bus' a cap on someone if he did'n get respec', people finally began to back away from the scene.

The cops, surely, had been called, and nobody wanted to be around an armed nutcase when the cops showed up. As I ducked down to climb into the driver's seat of the Maroon Doom, my prize Dodge Shadow, the idiot started firing again. But this time, he wasn't firing into the air.

I remember being shoved from behind, with a friendly hand on the back of my neck. My chin caught the shifter and my shin caught the door frame as my body fell into the car. My first reaction was to start laughing. Earlier that night I'd watched a documentary on the Reagan assassination attempt - the idea that my friends would choose to play Secret Service agents to a would-be Hillbilly Hinckley was too absurd not to laugh.

I rolled over and sat up in the driver's seat, still laughing. A hand reached up from the backseat and smacked me upside my skull, with voices screaming for me to drive, motherfucker, drive.

As I started the engine and shifted down into second gear, I looked over at the crazy motherfucker. He was pointing that little pop-gun .22 towards the Maroon Doom, firing away. From the back seat, people were arguing about someone needing to see a doctor, about me needing to drive to the emergency room.

As I drove, the person who'd been grazed climbed into the passenger seat next to me, showed me what looked like a long cigarette burn, and said that, no, he didn't need to go to a doctor – our other friends were just being pussies.

He'd been shot before, so I took his word for it. He smiled and pointed out that getting grazed was a much better alternative than having me get shot in the face.

I laughed at first. And then it hit me like a cinderblock to the chin.

I spent the next few days barely sober and rarely narcotic-free, afraid to face the nature of my own mortality, the fact that, yes, a .22 pistol is a small gun that can still, if someone's shooting at you, end your life if its rounds hit you just right.

... And he just tried to fucking kill me.

- # # # -

OXFORD CONFIDENTIAL: Of Dogshit-Covered Money, Summers in College Towns, and the Nicer Side of Life in Oxford Fucking Ohio

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- I should know better than to fall for the ol' dollar - glued - to - the sidewalk trick.

Yet I still squatted to pick up the extra bit for laundry money. With more than $300 in insurance copays spread amongst three different doctors (still no answers, other than just finish the meds prescribed for the swollen nut, stay off my feet as much as possible, apply ice for the swelling ... and wait - probably injury-related), money's a bit tight this month.

I stopped just short of falling for it. I noticed the brown/black smear around the bill, the smell of fresh, mashed dogshit filling the night air.

Creative.

We used to use already-been-chewed Big League Chew, especially on hot days, back in Virginia. Adhered to the paper better, plus it proved much more entertaining to watch some random stranger struggle with sticky mess afterwards.

I glanced up and down High Street. I hadn't even noticed the group of smirking middle-schoolers camped out on the picnic table ten feet away. One lanky kid, greasy blond hair covering a acne-filled face, whispered to one of the giggling girls in the group, sure I'd be a sucker.

I waved at the kids and smiled. One of the girls waved back, before one of their party sucker-punched her in the kidneys.

The greasy kid looked pissed, his attempt to relieve his peers' boredom and to earn coolness points with the pubescent ladies foiled for the night.

In return for his gift of rolling eyes and mouthed "pick it up, fucker!," I gave him the finger.

God, I love summer in a college town.

* * * *

I took a moment to appreciate the emerging summer nightlife, here in Oxford Fucking Ohio.

The vast majority of undergrads, who normally would be littering the sidewalks with vomit, their drunken bodies and foul behaviors ruining family outings past sundown, are gone home to the gated communities that spawned them.

It has been more than a week since I saw my last Hummer, since I last overheard my last Daddy just has to pay for me to go to Italy... or I was so fucking wasted I think I fucked that chick from my Accounting class... conversation.

Instead, at nine o'clock on a Saturday night, the streets are now full of parents pushing strollers home from Uptown dinners at restaurants. Parents are playing catch with their children in the parks beneath the city's streetlights. The locally-produced college students are home for the summer, sitting outside of bars, smoking cigarettes and swapping war stories from places like Columbus, Muncie, Athens, Ohio, Lexington, Kentucky, and Bloomington.

And, of course, there are the teenagers, making out behind the burnt-out shell of the former Wendy's, skateboarding down sidewalks and grinding down curbs, and making the town theirs again. Teen-aged girls fill one street corner in their respective cliques; the boys conglomerate across the street.

Several alumni, frustrated by what they see as the decline of the Local U.'s positive contributions to Oxford's culture, have told me that this is how Oxford was once, year-round, with student behavior held in check by the presence of the "townies."

Townies notice it, too, often citing the almost murderous hatred many full-time residents now feel towards the stereotypical Local U. undergrads as an example. As one long-time Oxford resident puts it, Local U. students, for him, are nothing more than "the occasional piece of dumb rich girl ass ... cockroaches with Mommy and Daddy's money who pay my fucking bills."

Trust me. If you're single, make less than $50,000 a year, and over 22 in this town, you've had similar thoughts. And if you say you haven't, well, you're a better liar than I am.

During the Academic Year, at night, one would think that Oxford's entire population is made up of nothing more than drunken privileged 18-22 year-olds, overworked police officers, and under-tipped bar staff. But during the summer, Oxford Fucking Ohio becomes, for all intents and purposes, a real college town.

* * * *

It feels real, honest, almost cliche - the All-American campus village that surrounds the ol' Public Ivy, the place American poet Robert Frost, according to rumor, once called one of the most beautiful communities he'd ever visited.

According to some versions of the legend, the poet was only talking about the Local U. campus. But according to at at least some of the older Oxford townies, there's always been speculation that Frost was actually talking about the perfect blend between campus and community that once existed.

Yes, THE Robert Frost, the Road Not Taken guy.

I sometimes wonder what ol' Bobby would say now, in 2007, if he walked around town during the school year.

What would Frost say, for instance, if he spent an evening sometime between August and April, tripping over Natty Light cans and listening to sophomore girls debate the merits of Botox? What would his reaction be, say, if he spent a night in an overcrowded bar, listening to the spawn of the Wealthiest One-Percent - the popular campaign target of just about every election - bemoaning the fact that, yes, they do have to leave a tip and, no, those dirty "townies" just won't move somewhere else?

What would Frost say about the faculty, had he seen some of the things I've seen in the past three years? I once watched a group of professors at a restaurant as they trashed a union groundskeeper, someone that I work with on a regular basis, for being a "lazy redneck." A group of regional campus students at another table, one of whom was the daughter of said redneck, got up and left.

I've always figured he'd probably say what many visiting artists say upon seeing the zoo that is the local Higher Education Underground:

"Hey, as long as you're paying me and I can get outta this dump quickly, I'll entertain your sorry ass..."

But if he showed up during the summer, well, his opinion of the Local U. and surrounding community probably wouldn't change one bit.

* * * *

As I walked home for lunch Tuesday, enjoying the ability to walk without groin pain on a balmy May afternoon, I overheard a fascinating conversation between a pair of summer session undergraduates in front of me.

"I wish I could just take classes during the summer. Everything's so chill and there's nobody here."

"Oh yeah. I even like the summer professors better. And you graduate so much quicker."

See.

I'm not the only one who notices it.

- # # # -