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October 2006

2006.10.01

Among the interesting things I’ve found in the many boxes of stuff I’ve liberated from my parents’ storage building:

  • Several of the long-lost journal entries of 1988 and 1989, covering my decision to go back to school and some of my seemier “Farewell to Charlotte” escapades. I’ll post some of them here if they turn out to be interesting.
  • A toy supermarket I had as a child and had almost forgotten.
  • Credit card receipts from my trip to New York and Boston in 1988.
  • My exciting seventh-grade report entitled “The Hummingbird”.
  • A whole shitload of letters to various people that I wrote but never mailed.
  • Band flyers, band flyers, and more band flyers.
  • The very strange object you see pictured above. I’m not entirely sure what it is. Or was. I’m thinking pre-Columbian art, but I could be mistaken.

Pictures and text from two recent visits from friends yet to come…

Letting Others Speak for Me

If you’re patient (lazy?) enough, you can just wait for someone else to post things and save yourself all the effort. That’s how I’ll handle my visit from Rick last week. This way, you also get to read about the other stuff he did, in case you’re not interested in our cafeteria run, our Krispy Kreme run, and our quickie tours of Greensboro and Winston-Salem.

I also ran into Taylor last week for the first time in about nine years. Said meeting involved Stamey’s and a walking tour of downtown Greensboro, including the recently-restored downtown train station. Alas, I can’t rely on his website to provide details, because he doesn’t have one. I can, however, promise more pictures of the train station and downtown Greensboro will be coming soon in the Photography section.

I’ll be off now, in search of someone else’s content I can link to in lieu of creating my own. But here’s one last picture to tide you over:

2006.10.04

Well, gosh. Who knew?

It wasn’t really Winston-Salem’s oldest leather bar as I’d originally speculated, but a clothing store. Yet another exciting revelation from the big pile o’stuff, in this case a complete Winston-Salem Journal from Christmas Day 1947.

I’ve also just uncovered an ad for the premiere episode of The Partridge Family, and I’ve read untold installments of The Ryatts, none of which seemed nearly as funny as they probably did when I was five.

I think I need to do something twenty-first century (and not dusty) tonight.

Relief

It’s such a nice change of pace to go to a doctor’s office and fnd out that something is less serious than you’d expected, especially after you’ve been rather worried for several days. For clarity’s sake, it was actually a dentist’s office, but still…

Road Trip on the Horizon

Only four more days till the Great Midwestern Road Trip of 2006. Any suggestions of things to see along the way, particularly dumpy diners, vintage supermarkets and shopping centers, and relatively safe examples of urban decay are always appreciated. Our social calendar is already full, alas — or at least as full as misanthropes like us are ever likely to let it get.

On Pedophilia

Is Mark Foley a slimy closet-case and a major-league hypocrite? Absolutely.

Is he a pedophile? Should he be branded a criminal? That depends.

As Joseph points out, the Congressional pages involved in this ongoing “scandal” were all above the legal age of consent in the majority of the United States. In the eyes of the law, at least, a man in his fifties who hits on a 17-year-old is a different thing entirely from one who hits on a 12-year-old. While Foley’s attraction to guys in their late teens may be a bit creepy or distasteful to some, not to mention rather undignified, it’s no more illegal than hitting on a 25-year-old secretary or a 60-year-old society matron, at least in most of the country.

Of course, the controversy is officially about the actual email and text messages rather than any specific sex act. Ironically, that may be Foley’s only actual crime. In the US, it is very much against the law to send “pornographic” messages to a 17-year-old. However, in most of the US, it is also quite legal to actually have sex with that same 17-year-old. There’s just something wrong with that logic.

Or is it just me?