JRussell's BlogNO!!!!

Cornstarch Hellcats of the Mid-Atlantic

Its raining real hard in Richmond right now. There’s been a thunderstorm going on for like five hours now and the rain is thick. Its thick rain, coming down in sheets, fluttering and rippling down. Rain splashes up from the ground, moisturizing my fine cotton socks, making for a very uncomfortable foot situation. I wish could change in to some dry socks, but I don’t have any more clean ones. Dry dirty socks or moist almost clean socks? Barefoot it is! I normally would have trekked to the Dining Center (popularly slurred into “the Dinosaur”) after the Simpsons, which only comes on once a day here; Channel Five at 6. But its raining really fucking hard today. I want to check my mailbox, see if my Wachovia ATM card arrived so I can finally withdraw some cash and buy toilet paper, a new towel, one of those shaggy things you put on the bathroom floor so you don’t leak and make the floor slippery after a shower, some Hot Pockets, the first Velvet Underground record, a slurpee, a cheese steak with a side order of steak fries, maybe a new pair of shoes. Ha, but I’m no consumer, no. I’m not a lonely homesick college freshmen getting my kicks though comfort spending and eating. I get my kicks Johnny Cash circa 1966-style, through my addiction to painkillers and shooting women. Since I can’t go any where, because of the rain, this harsh fucking rain, I’ll stay in, pop some hydrocodone and watch ‘Return of the Jedi’. Poodoo. That motherfucker is right. Translated to ‘poodoo’. That Sam West deserves to be at Columbia, sharp boy, sharp well-dressed boy.

Enough is the rain, I’m not letting no precipitation stop me from eating and involving myself in America’s relatively low cost postal system. Hell no. I’m going to wear my United Airlines hoodie and use that hood for once. I wrote a letter to (New Cadet) Will Dwyer
and I’m going to mail the shitfucking letter tonight. Partially because I dated the letter late August and its almost September. I may be a full time coward, slob, loser, bigot, sheriff, hatemonger, civil servant, Robert Smith enthusiast, but a liar is one thing I'm only part time, so I will mail that letter, no matter how wet my hair gets.

“THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE HAS ISSUED A FLOOD WARNING UNTIL 7:07AM EDT
Issue Time: 7:15PM EDT, Monday Aug 30, 2004
Valid Until: 7:07AM EDT, Tuesday Aug 31, 2004”

So I stop ‘Jedi’ right at one of the most memorable moments; when the Ewoks recognize C3P0 as “some sort of deity” and prepare to venture outdoors into . . . . . . . . . the rain.

“Spotter Reports Indicate 10 To 14 Inches Of Rain Have Occurred From The City Of Richmond Into Portions Of King William County...”

Journeying through that rain was uneventful. Yeah I got a little wet, slipped on the steps, not too bad. Nothing worth writing about. There were some girls outside in the rain with umbrellas smoking cigarettes, which made me wonder if a fire alarm when off during heavy rain/tropical storm if people would actually go outside or just think that the rain would put out whatever fire so they’ll just hang out inside, I had created a much more in depth line of thinking, but that’s from when I was lying on the floor eating Cheddar and Sour Cream Lays. Ah, the chips. That’s the fun part. Since I don’t want to walk in this thick, gurthful rain to cafeteria (I mean Dining Center, it’s a faux pas to say cafeteria in college, its also not wise to words that sound French here in the South, I got punched in shoulder because I said ‘sobriquet’ and I was just agreeing with the motherfucker), so what are options? Ramen: talk about clichéd, although often delicious, it was cute in from 8th grade through 12th grade in my “I’ll act and look like a junkie derelict type” phase, but college, nah, if lots of kids are doing, I’m too cool for it, right? What else? Chicken and rice soup: reminds me of my slave days. Do you remember the days of slavery? Well what? Should I take from my roommates stash of Twinkies? Too many Twinkies aren’t good, we all know this. I remember learning the concept from Die Hard 2:Die Harder, with the black dad from Family Matter (who is different from the black dad on Fresh Prince of Bel Air) eating lots and lots of Twinkies throughout the movie. In one scene he stops at a convenience store knowing it will be a long night what with one of those Die Hards on the loose in an airport no less, and the clerk, presumably of an Indo-‘AZN’ background, gives him a funny look, and he responds “My wife is pregnant” or something, but he eats all the Twinkies himself. It was a learning experience. What did I learn? I don’t know. I just skimmed what I was writing, lack of attention to detail, story of my life.

A FLASH FLOOD WARNING CONTINUES UNTIL 10:00PM EDT

Boys don't cry.

“You’d think a handsome trucker like myself would be fucking a storm from coast-to-coast right?”

Some girl with lots of tattoos and a 1950’s haircut told me I had nice chops. I think she was a lesbian.

Since I can’t get to the dining metropolis, I did the next best thing. I bought a shitload of chips and candy from the vending machine. I got Reese’s Pieces, Chocolate M&M’s, Peanut M&M’s, crispy Cheeto’s, Cheddar & Sour Cream Lay’s, and some Nacho Cheesier Doritos. That’s my dinner. Oh its so college. Why are you wearing that dumb shirt? Its laundry day! Tell me about it! Rush – rush where?

“I’m in a sorority and I am NOT a bitch”
“Oh, so you swallow?”

“This Is A Dangerous Situation. If You Encounter Water Over Roads... Turn Around Don't Drown!!! Find An Alternate Route... Or Delay Your Trip Until The Heavy Rainfall Ends.”

Move it and hold it and shake what you got because when stuff is hot you’ve got to grip it up.

I was hoping this would be some massive historical flood, but it doesn’t look like its going to be. I think North Carolina got it worse. Either way, I had a great time, lying on floor eating chips listening to Watazumido-Shuso’s “The Mysterious Sounds of the Japanese Bamboo Flute”. It’s a fantastic record feating awesome jams ‘Ukigumo’, ‘Musashi No Shirabe”, and ‘Dai-Bosatu”. Each track has a short explanation and length of the bamboo flute used, ranging from the 61 cm traditional Hotchiku piece used in “Akebono-Jishi” to the 98 cm flute used in “Shi-Getsu”. Let’s put this thing in full gear. If its actually stopped raining, I can go get a hot meal from the Dinosaur, that’s what I’m talking I about, that’s what I’m talking about. Yup, trying to scratch my sack with cheeto dust on my fingers. Damnit. Sleep on it.

this ain't no metric nation

Oh man, look at me now. A college kid, a fucking dumbass college kid. I haven’t started classes yet; in one way I don’t want classes to start for a while because I kind of enjoy the purgatory I’m in now. So far all I’ve done is sleep a lot in my bed with the universal America college student extra-long sheets and fine ass fucking comforter. I think I sleep a lot because my room is quite cold, I think its set at 65 and I believe the cold makes you sleep a lot, you ever heard of an insomniac Eskimo? Thar you go. I’m basically eating two meals a day, one between 11 AM and 1 PM, the other between 6 PM and 8 PM. I’m still whittling down the best hours when the lines are short and well, when the prime poon is there. These college girls walk in determined intimidating packs. Fucking college students.

The first strangers I hung with were a group of students in my cell block or dorm phase or whatever the fuck they call it, a group that called me over from my path as I walking home alone to my dorm after seeing the Queers my first night in town. On that walk home I had feared that I wouldn’t talk to anybody my first night and that I would stay up watching Ren & Stimpy til I passed out in that really fucking comfortable blue chair with the rainbow dots. Oh man that chair is crucial. Think of the kind of large, soft chair with a wooden chassis that you’d expect in the “lounge” area or maybe in the quiet section of a well-funded New England public library, yeah, one of those. I’ve got one of those in my room, it’s a fucking chair. Since my roommate moved in a day after me, I wanted to steal that chair and put it my room from the living room in the suite and he’d be none the wiser. But I didn’t. I haven’t. Yet. So I was walking home from the Queers show contemplating my lack of friends in a town that I moved in to like six hours earlier, figuring maybe I should pull of John Lichman and start chain smoking and growing a beard, eventually fucking a Panda in the ass and writing a memoir about that includes several bum fight fantasies and so forth. But someone called out to me “Hey”. What the fuck, are they talking to me? I did the classic looksidetosidepointingmyfingertoseewhotheyarecallingtobecauseitcouldntfuckingbeme, but there was no one else and they called again “Yeah, you, come on over”. So I came on over, tripping on the little muddy hill between the sidewalk path and that part of prison. They asked where I was going as if I was supposed to meet them and was trying to avoid them. They invite me in for Jager-bombs (Jagermeister and red bull); nevertheless, I didn’t get a Jagger-bomb while I was there. Jagermeister seems like sham to me. I first heard about it because East Bay thrash bands like old, old Metallica, Megadeth, Nuclear Assault, and so on used to talk about how Jagermeister was so brutal and it created this whole meathead “CRUSH, KILL, DESTROY”-mentality, how it was strong and fiery, how it would make these denim-vest hessians beat up hippies, whip out their balls, and like piss on waitresses. With a preface like that I had to try that at some point, so when I was eleven or twelve, I gave a taste, it was of course, the official drink of Ozzfest 2000, you had to be twenty one to get a free shirt, so all I got were free condoms and dental dams. I was fourteen, Nissan Pavilion blows. Oh, yeah. Jagermeister. It’s not fire, its fucking puppy dog, old man with no teeth, licorice. I don’t like licorice and I can’t stand old men with no teeth. It was fire-breathing dragon blood, it didn’t make we want to smash tables over a hooker’s face, and when I was twelve, that’s all I wanted to do. That, and become an astronaut. According Michael Bay’s ‘Armageddon’, spacemen and scumbags were one of the same, things have never been different. So, Jagermeister is a sham. Lowlife metalheads adore, so do high school nerds-cum-college fratboys, but that ain’t me, oh it aint me, I aint no senator’s son. So they were drinking Red Bull and Jagermeister, I was eating cheese poofs out of one those giant plastic barrels. They ask where I’m from, I say DC. They tell me that’s where they’re from also. Oh yeah? Well, they’re Bolling Air Force dudes helping this girl move in. Do I know where Bolling Air Force Base is, they ask. I know what it is; that’s where sixth grade heart throb Katie Bopp lived. She had a government ID badge that she worn on a lanyard before it was cool to wear lanyards, popular rumor was that her dad was in prison and that was her pass to visit her dad in jail. That was during a time in elementary school when the only kid who knew a conjugal visit was; Danny Guilfoyle knew what one was but pronounced wrong. I wanted to bring up Katie Bopp to these dudes because I figure that you know, the Air Force dudes fuck the air force brats. Its presumed that Katie Bopp is involved with at least one large black man, these dudes were not black, well except for one. One dude was black, he reminded me of the likable Aaron Booze from Wilson, only this fellow was not as likable, not that he was unlikable, but he was no Aaron Booze I tell ya’. This black fellow was wearing a trucker hat with an embroidered patch bearing the logo of interstate(?) 295, with the word ENDS under it. They ask me if I’ve heard of a local group in the DC-area called 295-Ends. I tell them no. Bands with numbers in their name are generally not good, with a couple exceptions (7 Seconds, Five Maseratis, 1905, assorted ska super groups, Dave Hillyard and the Rocksteady 7). They performed for me, the girl whose suite it was, Casey, an asian dude named Steven who was remarkably eating a bowl of rice throughout the night, his woman and some other girl. So it was three preppy white dudes, and a black dude playing acoustic guitars and the black dude was playing electric bass. They played light Matchbox 20 pop music that wasn’t really my thing. I found myself in a situation that I didn’t want to ever find myself in, pretending to like a shitty acoustic pop group out of respect for the girl whose suite it was, a group of fucking soldiers decked in Abercrombie, agh, what the fuck am I doing here? I know why I was there. It was the barrel of cheese poofs, the king of cheese poofs, cold beverages, and someone to talk to. They played a song called ‘Smoke on the water’ that wasn’t the Deep Purple song; at that point I decided to leave. I mean, I was just at a Queers show, I had my socks rocked off from the Queers’ opener ‘She’s got no teeth’ to the highly appropriate ‘This place sucks’ to ‘Kicked out of the Webelos’ and a Screeching Weasel cover. I was set from that point in the evening. I walked to Seven Eleven and they were operating on the slurpee machine in the parking lot. It was like watching a small child suffer a massive head wound, the slurpee machine laid in the parking lot, leaking fluid, wires all over the place. I had to leave the site. I left that suite with the acoustic so-called rockers, and went back to my dorm, the girl Casey, who is indeed a very nice girl, has that Southern niceness, the “Where are you going with saying Hi to me?”-kind of niceness, she gave me her number but it’s a 757 area code and I’m not quite sure what a 757 number is, but I know I can only call 804 (Richmond) numbers from my dorm phone. So I have yet to call her.

I sleep a lot. It takes a teenage riot to get me out of bed. Two meals a day. Drink lots of water. I really enjoy walking around Richmond in the pleasant autumn-y weather. I walked down to Carytown and bought some records and headphones from Plan 9 Music, check it out if you’re ever down here, which you’ll never be. I got a Miles Davis Live at the Blackhawk in San Francisco and a Stan Getz live album with Austrud Gilberto and Jobim which rules. Today I went to a used book store called Chop Suey, got the Slaughterhouse Five for $3 and a book by Gus van Sant for $5. I’m going to see Defiance: Ohio tonight, one the few truly folk punk bands in existence, should be a good time. I’ve decided it be a good idea to not eat the French fries at the Cafeteria, not because they blow, but its just better for me to not eat a lot of French fries, onion rings are okay, French fries, only for special occasions. A day late and dollar short already.

crisper whisper

I’m reaching deep and all I’m finding is a lazy boy who isn’t sure of much and realizing that there’s nothing unique in that. The whole leaving home, leaving DC, leaving friends thing is hitting me like Guinness apparently hits you; like fifteen minutes later, it hits you like running into a wall while your head was turned because you were checking out the fruit stand girl in her soccer shorts, and then there’s a wall in my face and my nose is flattened, my teeth splinter and I spill my milkshake. Its possibly the worst nosebleed ever. It was a pretty good milk shake, it was a chocolate milk shake made with chocolate ice cream, not vanilla ice cream and chocolate syrup, when I say chocolate, I don’t mean something that has chocolate syrup in it, I mean rich fucking chocolate, and that’s what I got but I also just walked in to a wall. In a fit of worthlessness a couple nights before I left for Europe with the fellas, I composed a rant inspired around the idea of [me] being as valuable [to the world] as kick ass t-shirt (Gunther Presents Ladder Mania?) because it seemed in a world of lovers and solid meaningful friendships, that all I had going for myself could be put in the same box as an expressionless purple gorilla promoting Werner ladders, it’s a yellow t-shirt, I think it’s a 50/50 blend, its an extra-large. I found it at a Goodwill with my dad. That’s what I do, I go to various thrift stores with my dad, I enjoy the activity, it works out well for both of us, I can look for funny/comfortable t-shirts and cheap records and my dad can find navy blue button down shirts that he’ll never button the top two or three buttons of and he can find random shit in the toy section that “could be a rocket”. There I am with my dad at the Goodwill, he asks if I think that shirt will fit me, my self esteem shrivels, I quit shirts and go to the records. They’re on the bottom shelf below the books, so I have to get down to brose, bend over and wonder if the crack of my ass is visible, and if it is who is looking and why or I get on my knees like a machine-tanned, strung out girl in porn poses for the money shot, rather I’m just looking for records. I’ve had some good luck at that Goodwill, got ‘Combat Rock’, ‘For Those About to Rock”, “Kind of Blue” for 15 cents each one day. I had good luck that day, I was wearing my Fort Reno shirt, I had a good time even though I lost my bet on whether it would sink or float. Something about self-worth. Well, it was stupid to think of it like that, but it was the easy way out, anyway, in this rant I repeatedly mention how I would “shave off my nose” so that I could actually truly believe in the apparent truths in the world regarding my own worth and role; cutting off my nose was meant to show important these truths were supposed to mean to me, the method of removal was to face the sidewalk and grind that nose to nothing on the concrete. It was ridiculous and part of a longer absurd blog that was never published because it [I] was really fucking depressed, and there’s no room for unhappiness on the old BlogNo!!! We’ll shoot the moon before tears eat up this here bandwidth. I talked about cutting off my nose so that I could truly believe in these eternal truths about [my] value and role in the world in so forth, it was too dramatic, too much bullshit for something not that important. It was a lot like one of those new Coke C2 commericals, yeah a lot of bullshit, stupid concept, well that’s me, a tepid, watered down sweet beverage. I never meant to publish the whole “Add it up to t-shirt/shave off my nose” piece, but I bring it up because while my mindset has become something different, something that tries to dance around or numb itself to that sad worthless side of everything I come back to the image of my own broken face when I referenced walking in to that wall, that realization about leaving, that wall that hits me and destroys my face. So lets get over that. Its about me leaving home, leaving family, DC, friends, scene, establishments, memories, highs, lows, burritos. So we’ll take one, and we’ll take eight. And we’ll see eachother Thanksgiving.