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.

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ONLY WOMEN BLEED (AND OTHER LIES ALICE COOPER TOLD ME):Sometimes, Image is, Indeed, Everything. But What's Really Being Communicated, Well...

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson,
from Self-Reliance, 1841

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- He told her, bluntly, that he'd slept with her first-year roommate as well as her best friend, two women mere days apart back in November, because she'd got kind of fat. He didn't care what she thought, didn't care that she loved him, he was going to spend his last semester in college sowing his oats and seeing women who wouldn't damage his rep.

I read the email, aloud, and tell her that, yes, obviously, her ex-boyfriend is one of those goddamn collar-popping, limp-dicked, pieces of motherfucking catshit chachballs I've often written about here in Oxford Fucking Ohio.

I declined her offer to show me his picture. Frankly, the guy's email turned my stomach to the point where I was ready to quite literally beat the living shit out of him.

I hand the very pretty, healthy-looking sophomore another wad of toilet tissue. She points out that she did, in fact, gain eight and a half pounds during a rather rough Fall Semester. When he quit calling her at home over Winter Break, she knew their relationship was in trouble. The strain of it all pushed her weight up a bit farther - she gained another ghastly, obscene pound and a quarter.

The poor woman's been sobbing for a week, off and on, depressed not only over a failed relationship, but over the fact that she'd ballooned to a beastly 126 pounds.

She goes on to explain that she hasn't been able to eat, sleep, or think clearly for seven days - she's terrified that, well, maybe every guy's noticed how much weight she's gained. She's been taking so much Adderall that one of her professors actually pulled her aside after class to inquire about her emotional and physical well-being.

She took her first shower in more than three days moments after I'd confirmed our "appointment" an hour earlier. She apologized profusely for not shaving her legs, for not drying her hair, or for putting on much makeup. She barely remembered to pull on her lucky track pants and Uggs boots when she exited her room for the first time all day, just long enough to sneak me into her residence hall.

For ten minutes, she tells me about all about how she managed her weight like a sadistic nutritional accountant, how she'd counted every single gram of fat and every single calorie for most of her high school career. But no matter how hard she tried...

* * * *

She jumped up off of the corner of her bottom bunk, bent over, and pointed at why, exactly, she thought she'd been dumped by a rather-worthless sounding prick.

"Look. My ass is fucking HUGE! I got cellulite every-WHERE! Who would want that?"

I looked. I saw nothing but a very nice ass attached to rather attractive girl, a very pretty face staring back at me from over a shoulder. She tugged down one side of her track pants, pulled up the leg of her boxers, showed me the four dimples at the crease between her ass and thigh.

Here is this emotionally wrecked, tired, angry woman, with quite possibly one of the greatest asses in the history of college sophomoredom here in Oxford Fucking Ohio, and she's telling a 29-year-old single librarian about how gaining less than ten pounds has ruined her, driven her rather wretched-sounding boyfriend into the arms of other women, and how this one electronic voice in the wilderness just must agree with her thigh-cheese-equals-troll assessment.

"Chica, I probably shouldn't say this, but I think you know you're not fat, know this cat was a cocksucker, and that this Ms. Perfect shit just makes you look like a dumbass."

There is no way to describe the looks some very pretty sophomores can give a guy when they know, deep down, that that guy may have a point.

"Huh?"

"Well... this ain't really about getting dumped by a douche. Sounds to me like this is about how you see yourself as a person..."

It's amazing, sometimes, the sheer maturity and wisdom I'm able to demonstrate, even with a nice ass in my face.

* * * *

She sat back down on the bed.

I waited for her to call me what blog readers who've mistaken me for some College Girl Crusader or Small Town Defamer often call me - a fraud, a huckster, or, usually, a fucking creepy asshole. Worse, there are some folks who are just appalled - downright DISGUSTED - to learn that, well, being a blogger makes one more of a village idiot than any sort of role model.

When I display the same sort of honesty offline as I often display online, many folks are taken aback, shocked. Yes, I swear like a drunken sailor, say completely inappropriate, insensitive, very un-PC things.

What one reads is what one gets - and if a reader asks a certain blogger to make a housecall to talk, that reader isn't in for any sort of bullshit Blogebrity routine. In all honesty, I don't have time for that ego-stroking, narcissistic horseshit - I work too hard at my day job and know too many good people in this town to behave so, well, stupidly.

She didn't say a word.

Instead, she sat cross-legged, picked at the lint and blackened dust bunnies that had defiled the fur tops of her Uggs. She stared down towards the hornet's nest of sports bras, crumpled jeans, coats, comforters, and sheets that we were both sitting on - she mumbled an apology for not tidying up before I'd stopped by.

I figured that was my cue. I said I'd leave her alone, thanked her for, well, keeping me entertained via her intoxicated late-night instant messages, and reminded her that, well, my office door at the library, is almost always open.

Without looking up, she reached up and grabbed my arm, squeezed. I sat back down, put my hand on her shoulder. She asked me to stay. So I did.

And, once the emotional hysterics that go along with being jilted were well out of sight, we had a nice, brutally honest conversation about why one doesn't take time off from college because of a douchebag, how one sucks up that rage and turns it into scholarly fuel, and the importance of never, ever letting something as trivial as a temporary low self-image get in the way of making good, emotion-free decisions.

I even recommended that she start a blog about her experiences under a pseudonym, document her struggles so that maybe, sometime in the future, some other sophomore in her position might find it and go, Holy fucking shit! This girl really knows what I'm feeling!

Hell, blogging has done wonders for my own concept of self-worth and self-esteem issues - why not pass on that experience to others? College women need to get online, need to share not just their musical tastes or fashion tips or bullshit political ideologies but personal experiences as well. Venting does a body good - and sometimes it's equally rewarding to simply read about an experience that let's a random stranger know that they're not alone in this world.

As we talked, she held onto my arm for dear life. I was the first person not a mutual friend or family member she'd spilled her guts to in a long, long time. She told me why she reads this silly web site has more to do with how I handle certain information more like a priest taking confession than a blogger - I don't use names and carefully conceal identities, so, therefore, spilling one's guts is less of a risk than, say, posting something to a MySpace or Facebook account.

That's why she asked me to stop by, made an afternoon appointment. She needed to confess her sins - and my openness about my own, batshit insane personal life made me sound like the perfect holy man.

In all honesty, I showed up only because I was terrified that I may be asked to administer Last Rites.

* * * *

Suddenly, mid-sentence, she asked me if I was hungry. I lied and said that, well, a nice hot toasted roll - one of the Local U.'s signature culinary treats - sounded abso-fucking-lutely scrumptious. Actually, the very smell of those things makes me nauseous, but, well, I was just on my game enough to realize the question about hunger was more self-directed.

Getting a Local U. girl who's been starving herself for a week may, in fact, be the single-most important contribution I've made to the Oxford community, professionally or as an everyday citizen, in more than a year.

As we hiked down towards the student union - she was craving a slice of pizza - she stopped me with an Ugh! Hold on. That's so annoying..., turned me on my heels like a wayward toddler, and started adjusting my cockeyed stocking cap and tangled mess the hood on my sweatshirt had become. She went so maternal on me, this woman barely out of her teens, that she even licked her thumb before she slicked down my disheveled eyebrows.

"You know, you have gorgeous eyelashes. There was this girl in my history class last semester who told me that she had a crush on this guy who worked at King..."

Suddenly, she stopped cold, pulled herself into me. The first-year roommate, one of the two boyfriend-fucking Jezebels, was on her cell phone, pacing, right in front of the student union doors, a mere thirty feet away. I started to turn and look, but, well, serving as a human shield left me with only the risk of sweatshirt strangulation as the very pretty, image-conscious sophomore clung onto my collar for dear life.

"Ohmygodohmygod... if she sees us together she's gonna think... she's gonna tell everybody... fucking whore!...God, she's s'posed to be in Cincinnati ... don't DON'T look... she's looking... FUCK!"

It took me, in my so not an undergrad mindset, a good thirty seconds to figure out what, exactly, that ferret-faced Ms. Thang, clad in her trendy North Face jacket and skintight black pants, guarding the entrance to a student union food court could possibly assume, or who the everybody was she'd possibly tell.

I laughed. Hard.

You know, the sight of a cute girl ducking into the chest of a 29-year-old librarian with supposedly gorgeous eyelashes probably is something to gossip about - if you're a catty, rodent-looking Cincinnati rich girl with nothing better to do than to fuck my blog readers' boyfriends because you were, like, soooooo wasted at beer pong parties, like, two or three times, accidentally.

I thought about it for a moment, pondered and weighed the potential risks to both my professional credibility and, well, my fine, upstanding reputation (go ahead and laugh, dammit!) as an online writer. I then strategically twisted in such a way as to position my mouth at the ear of the very pretty, way-too-young sophomore, twisted in such a way that Ms. Rodent Face would have a clear view of both her former roommate's face and my constantly graying stubble.

I whispered, slowly, into my chestwarmer's ear that she had nothing to worry about, said sweet nothings about how learning to tune out gossip comes with maturity, and told her, well, that she shouldn't give a flying fuck what others may think.

She giggled at my use of the phrase flying fuck (she didn't believe anybody actually spoke such things so casually) and whispered something back about not wanting people to ask questions. Again, she played right into my not-so-sinister plan of attack.

I could feel the stare. Just the type of stare I'd counted on, one of those soul-rupturing glares that catty gossipwhores tend to give people when they think certain things, when they assume that they are now entitled to do whatever they want with certain information, regardless of courtesy or consequences.

So, like clockwork, I pushed the very pretty sophomore back into an upright, chin-up position, told her that the time had come to say Fuck it and to march right past Jezebel No. 1. She sighed, agreed, and we double-timed it past the loose-lipped (in more ways than one, apparently) sentry. My blog reader, the trooper that she was, shoved her hands into her pockets and stared at the ground.

I just grinned a very stupid-looking grin. My plan was working.

I stood as straight as I could, puffed out my chest, and did my best Dirty Old Man impression, acknowledged the gawker with a well-timed, jaw-shattering S'up.

And how that other woman stared. She even had the beady little brown eyes of a ferret.

* * * *

Over a quick bite, I let my very pretty, supposedly hefty, 126-pound dinner date in on the intricacies of my, well, strategically placed movements, mannerisms, and whispers, on the use of a quick and controlled burn to manage someone else's need to perpetuate rumor and disinformation.

It took her a bit of time to grasp the concept. After she'd pondered it over the remainder of her very bad cappuccino...

* * * *

"So what you're saying is that she's gonna tell him and his ego's gonna be smashed?"

"Yup."

"That's weird."

"Okay, lemme put it this way: how do you think most guys react when they're hearing rumors that their ex is potentially fucking an older guy?"

"I'd be fucking pissed."

"How would you feel, in his shoes, if one of your gossipy mutual acquaintances was spreading rumors ..."

Silence. And then, the wondrous Eureka! moment.

"Oh shit. So he's gonna look like a total ass and I'm the mature one, right?"

"Yup."

"Really?"

As I walked her back to her dorm, we discussed all sorts of things, ranging from other forms of data manipulation in interpersonal relationships to her new-found obsession with G.I. Joe comic books and online poker.

A guy she knew, too, grad student, had invited her over to hang out, watch a couple of old 1980s movies. She wasn't sure about his motives, but, well... she wasn't ready ... she didn't really like him that way...

"Well, sounds like you're getting ready to upgrade to business-class there, chica."

She didn't seem to get what I was getting at. I let it drop, wished her a great weekend, and promised I'd have something new for her to read sometime Saturday afternoon.

She reminded me that I don't use real names and that she'd be really mad if I slipped up. I reminded her that, well, I really didn't need to be reminded of anything.

* * * *

I'm supposed to mention, somewhere, that Mr. Super-Prep was born blessed - I am sorta like a priest, after all - with a really, really tiny...

Er.

Would anybody believe me if I swore she asked me to include something about how his imagination resembles a Vienna Sausage?

Length and width, apparently. That's a serious lack of imagination.

And to think...

There are people who ask me how, exactly, my not-so-secret life as a blogger has helped build up my own self-confidence and sense of personal image.

I'm completely comfortable with my imagination, actually. Way overactive at times, but, well, I'm working on that...

Seriously.

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