Hidden in the shadows less than 100 yards from Trader Joe’s on Wake Forest Road there is a building.
It’s much more than just a building, actually. It’s a complex the size of a high school or small hospital.
The complex is an abandoned communications research facility that was once known as Alcatel.
Yes, I realize that name evokes Alcatraz imagery and yes that was one of the reasons we were so excited about exploring it.
Anyway, this enormous building has been a locally-famed urban exploration spot for years. We had heard stories of subterranean tunnels and hallways that went on forever.
We also knew that this abandoned area was a hotbed for criminal activity of the drug sort, plus a common home for the homeless, but choosing a weekend when the temperature was about freezing assured that we would be alone in Alcatel.
And so we went. Daniel, myself and his girlfriend who will be nameless in this blog until I’m told differently.
This wasn’t our first ro-day-o, so we scouted the area for a decent hour before finally settling on a parking spot where we left the van and headed behind the facility. We opted not to park in the nearby shopping center to avoid any “Imperial entanglements,” but as you’ll find out later, our spot in the loading area of the complex was mine and Daniel’s fatal mistake.
Well, not really fatal. Nobody died. Just let me finish.
This was not always the case, but a quick stint in West Africa followed by a semester in Athens, Ga. was enough to turn him from the nicest guy you’ve ever met into the nicest guy you’ve ever met who is also a total badass.
This transition is important because if you had told me four-and-a-half years ago…no scratch that. If you had told me last semester that of all the law-bending, debauchery-filled things that I’ve done in my college career, the one that would lead to my first police encounter would be because Daniel Ellis told me to do it, I would have told you that was as improbable as me getting cited for larceny and trespassing.
And I would have been right.
Anyway, to the story at hand: It’s a commonly-known secret (oxymoron, yes) that there is a labyrinth of steam tunnels below
Photo Courtesy Peggy Boone
N.C. State’s campus. There are various blogs that have chronicled exploits within the university’s netherworld so I won’t take away from their adventures by discussing it further.
Daniel and I (and a number of others who I’ll mention if they’d like to be forever connected to this blog confession of wrongdoing) had already conquered the tunnels. Steam and graffiti and beer and the steam plant…all of that had been accomplished prior to Mr. E’s senior year, so it was time for a new challenge.
Daniel’s network of friends extends across all demographics and across the entire southeast, so it wasn’t long before he tapped into his sources and found a new place for us to explore.
The plans were made, the crowbars were purchased and a date was set.
So when the greatest movie ever comes on, it takes me places.
Sometimes I’m on 16th Street in Denver, Colo where I first saw the movie with Stacy Ellis in the thralls of young love in between our adventures that ranged from the Pepsi Center to Coors Field to Elitch Gardens. That was the beginning of a relationship that lasted years and a friendship that (off and on) still ranks up there among the elite.
Other times I’m with all of my friends in the Brig. It’s Saturday night and it doesn’t matter if SNL was great or a shitty rerun, Anchorman is about to save the day.
Or we’re at the Ferry, my post-RA location where me performing a Super Mario Brothers speed run must have pre-empted me putting the DVD in. (My best time is in the eight-minute range)
Or we’re at Farrell Manor down in Oak Island and no one could decide on a movie so I made an executive decision.
Regardless of what memories the movie evokes, it’s always a foreshadowing of amazing times to come when I hear the opening lines from the narrator followed by this song:
The sound quality/volume is a little off, but I kind of like the idea that it’s on vinyl.
In Burgaw, N.C. there are three local newspapers. Well, technically one of them is for the entire Topsail area (Topsail Voice), but it, along with the other two (The Pender Post and Pender Chronicle) covered the same media event about tax revaluations with nearly identical photos!
I bought all three (plus a StarNews) and headed downtown to sniff out anything resembling a coffee shop so I could get my journalism on. Three stories and three photos all on the same event!? This was going to be like a self-led journalism workshop attended by me and led by me – essentially, I had found the perfect way to pass my remaining two hours in this town.
But the coffee shop downtown is out of coffee, so now I’m stuck in the car, juggling papers and drinking Sun Drop. I swear when the snobby lady said there was no coffee (as if I was crazy for expecting there to be coffee at a coffee shop!) my mouth had the subtle flavor of deep-fried disappointment.
Don’t get me wrong…I love Sun Drop, but how the fuck does a coffee shop not have coffee? That’s inconceivable, right?
What’s that? Almost as inconceivable as me being in Burgaw for two hours on a Tuesday?
This is how my life works…get used to it. I have and it feels awesome.
I’ve mentioned before that I have lived my entire life within the same, one-hour stretch of highway.
I lived in downtown Goldsboro for my first 3.5 years and then we moved out to Rosewood. When I graduated, I moved to Raleigh and have bounced around from dorm and apartment until I arrived where I am now on Brent Road.
When I first got to N.C. State, I felt like Raleigh was the perfect location: an hour’s drive was enough to be on my own, but if I needed money/food/medicine (Read: Mommy) it was always less than 60 minutes away.
But now, it’s an annoying distance. With my job in Garner splitting the distance and the new bypass that makes the trip a 45-minute dash (30 with my radar detector) it feels like Rosewood is right down the road.
Combine that with me having no reason to be in Raleigh anymore with no classes and my parents’ constant pressure for me to spend time with them and I’m going absolutely crazy.
I’ve been back and forth between Raleigh and Goldsboro constantly since classes ended Dec. 2 and the longest I’ve been either place has been a week. Most of my clothes are in Goldsboro, too because I did laundry there, so I’m even more fragmented.
I feel like my home has been Highway 70 for the past month. View Larger Map
In yet another example of me stealing ideas from one of my favorite blogs (Though I would prefer mine evoke Seinfeld imagery), here’s a poem that I found in the front of a notebook from my senior year of high school. I would date it March 2006.
Visitors to the “About” portion of this blog may have noticed a comment (two actually) from one of my favorite teachers ever, Mrs. Green.
In it, she mentions that she has a Ty Johnson original work about a student-teacher. Well, I found it in its original, pencil-print form:
A textbook tool of the queerest sort, Phony past a fault and stubborn more. You are impressed by all and know nothing, Of knowledge or self, Agree with everyone. Your anxiety shows your ignorance fully and leaves, no indications of knowledge beyond sense to breathe, and speak. Speak not so I may imagine you gone to the diamond, Come back cynicism! For I long to be challenged again, He murders poetry! and dances in the ruins of art, with a sterile mind.
The student-teacher in question was a baseball player, hence the diamond reference. Mrs. Green was always very cynical, hence her being homaged by cynicism itself.
I have nothing else to say except that reading this poem today caused me to laugh hysterically and run to the computer to transcribe it and share it with you.
It began a couple of months ago when I was talking to my mom about how I want to eat healthier.
I wanted a single, concrete way to feel that I had accomplished something and I decided I wanted it to be something I could give up. That’s when I came up with a “No-McDonald’s” plan.
It was easy enough. There are other fast food options out there if I needed a quick bite, but McDonald’s…I don’t know, have you ever just smelled a bag of that food? It smells like garbage juice, my dad’s affectionate term for the liquid that always seems to leak from trash bags.
I figured I would start weaning myself off of Mickey D’s during the final month of 2010 and then 2011 would fly by no problem. No worries, right? Wrong.
With the McRib back from its 2-year absence, I feel powerless against those arches. I hate it, but I have to embrace the McRib while it’s around. It’s a survival trait I’ve picked up over years of McRibs rotating on and off of the menu at that disgustingly gross restaurant.
So…new resolution: no sodas. This will help me out immensely! Between drinking sodas, beer and whatever else I can get my hands on to keep my liver busy, giving up sodas would give me a lease on my health, letting me at least FEEL like I’m making a single healthy choice even as I pursue my Flying Saucer immortality.
But I forgot and had a soda with lunch on New Year’s Day.
In fact, the only thing I’ve managed to remain consistent with in 2011 has been drinking some form of alcohol every night. Maybe that’s the way to go…365 days of alcoholic consumption? At least I wouldn’t be doing it in 2012 (It’s a leap year).
So now I’m contemplating a 25/25/12.5 plan, whereby I’ll do 25 hours of volunteer work, read 25 books and lose 12.5 pounds. Then, again, I could learn a new language…like American sign language or French. Why? Well because using fake sign language (as I often do) is offensive to people who know deaf people. Trust me, that was the final thing I learned in 2010.
But in the end, I’ve decided none of it really matters. I’ve gotten at least one year older every year since I learned to count, so that’s an accomplishment. I mean, it’s no Sharapova, but it’s something.
Which makes me wonder: Maybe our lives shouldn’t be constrained to calendar years, but we should look at the bigger picture. Why be vegan for a year when you could just be healthy for a lifetime? Why not try to limit my McRibs while learning survival French and enough sign language to ask what someone’s name is when I’m in a socially awkward situation?
Boom. I just blew your mind.
2011 is going to be awesome. It better, because it may be our last full year left.
But think about it…isn’t that how we should live every year?
What are your resolutions…not just for this year, but for this life?
First, the final results from my hair poll: Yes, get it really short this time. 42%
Buzz it. 15%
Other 15%
Yes, but just a little so you avoid that awkward bowl-shape you usually get. 10%
No, never! 8%
Yes, it’s time to get it trimmed into that awkward bowl-shape you usually get. 8%
Not right now, but the time is coming. 2%
Let me begin by saying how awesome it was that my hair poll received 41 votes while my poll about my graduation chances garnered just 28. It’s almost as if my readership understands where my priorities lie (I’d also like to take this opportunity to rub it in the faces of the 57% of voters that I did, in fact, graduate in December. Boom!)
So that left me with a dilemma. While 90% of readers (with Me, Myself and Ty included) felt I needed a haircut, the drive-to, payment for and immediate freakout part of haircuts drives me crazy. So what to do?
Well I had several volunteers that wanted to cut my hair for free. Mostly girls that wanted to try their hand at cosmetology, but I was open to it because if it looked terrible, well I had to get a haircut anyway and that would just press the issue.
But after Halloween, (when I needed my golden locks for my pirate costume) there were no true takers. I couldn’t get anyone to cut it…that is until my final weekend as an undergraduate.
I took that weekend to fly through the entirety of a college experience in 72 hours. Call it a collegiate microcosm of accomplishments, wherein I received two misdemeanors Friday night (Details to come following my Jan. 21 court date 🙂 ), got super drunk Saturday night and stayed up writing a paper so late Sunday night I saw the sunrisefrom D.H. Hill. It was a pleasure.
But that Saturday night was a doozy even among debauchery nights in my life: I let one of Richard’s friends give me her haircut. That wouldn’t be a big deal, if her hairstyle couldn’t best be described as an A-line bob with puppy dog ears.
I'm the one on the left, haha. Notice the puppy dog ear-like appendages coming out of the side of my head.
If you’d like to waste a couple minutes of your life, you can tilt your head 90 degrees and watch the finishing touches on my “Tracy” haircut, or you can just take a look at the picture to your right.
What next? Well my A-line received mixed reviews, but to me, it was freeing.
(Prepare for more Boy Meets World references than should be allowed in a single blog post)
It reminded me of the episode when Topanga cuts her hair to show Cory that looks weren’t important…except it actually worked for me (She freaked out).
I was so positively imperfect with my Rihanna-looking do that I just really didn’t care. It was nice, a vacation from myself, as it were.
But all vacations must come to an end, and so tonight, this Boy Meets World scene inspired me:
So it’s gone. It will be back, don’t worry, but after leaving it long for so many years, it was time for a change. (Plus split ends were catching up with me).
I look forward to the shocked faces from friends in the coming weeks, and while I already miss my hair, sometimes it’s time to reinvent yourself…ourself…all of us here herein together.
Editor’s Note: I’m no political scientist and I’m hardly a historian. I don’t pretend to have any answers. What I present here is simply something to consider as you scan the headlines of today’s news-aggregating media…or newspapers for a few of my friends out there. It is an embarrassingly brief synopsis of the French Revolution juxtaposed with today’s governmental crises. I only argue that the connections are clear from a historical perspective and seem to present a nice literary narrative.
————————————————————————————————
Read this for starters: There Will Be Blood
Mmm…more academic talk.
So in my nine semesters at N.C. State, I’ve been in and out of a lot of history courses.
Some of them I passed with no problems, while others (like the one on modern Russia) have been struggles leaving me wondering whether or not I’ve even learned anything.
Generally I come away with a broader understanding of a culture and historical perspective for the sake of understanding other history topics that I’m already well-versed in. For instance, I didn’t glean much of an understanding about all of the revolutions that befell the Russian state in my class on the U.S.S.R., but I did gather a new perspective on World War II.
There we go. Now that you understand that I learn without really learning, I can move to a juicy little nugget that came up in my France in the Ancient Regime class over the past few weeks.
(For my less-than-avid followers, the following will look a lot like a history lecture/analysis. Please skip down to my conclusion, marked roughly with an *).
France had no representative government in the centuries before the French Revolution, and instead held what was known as an Estates General in which the three Estates (the classes of the population) gathered to discuss taxes and such.
The first estate was the clergy, the second was the knights/nobles and the third was, well everyone else.
It worked out okay (according to the top two estates) because each estate only got one vote, meaning when the nobles and clergy wanted tax exemptions for the nobles and clergy, they steamrolled the third estate’s vote 2 to 1 every time.
The Estates General was something the king called…if he wanted to. Because of this, France went from 1614 to 1788 without ever calling one – that’s 174* years. (Not 114 as originally reported. Thanks Farrell). Imagine two generations of third estaters living and dying without ever having a voice in the government that was taxing them.
Now take into account the numerous wars France underwent in that time (Yeah, the American Revolution as well, if you can call it that…which I’ll get to in a minute) and you find yourself with quite a government deficit.
You’re taxing the poor and fighting wars on more than one continent…then comes a famine and you’re looking down the barrel of a revolution the likes of which the world had never seen.
So because of all the negatives, King Louis XVI calls another Estates General to be run the same way as before, i.e. with a powerless third estate. They get pissed and ask for more power, but by the time XVI gives it to them, they’re irate.
The rest you probably know from history classes (assuming you didn’t go to Rosewood):
Finally, something almost as badass as me on a tennis court.
*I understand summing up the history of modern France in two lines of Wikipedia liks is a foolish way to make this point, but that Revolution in which French citizens beheaded their own king left a power vacuum that led to more terror, Napoleon and several more revolutions before stability was ever reached. (Arguably at the end of the 19th century or beginning of 20th century, though we all remember what happened to France in the 1940s…)
The wisdom from this revolution dictates that if the rulers of a country ignore the governed, revolution can come, and I’m not talking about a glorious “kick out the British” revolution…I mean a French-style revolution where the entire nation implodes and chaos reigns for decades…Think like a long-term Argentinean economy with some dictatorship thrown in for good measure.
Our political compass in the U.S. is so skewed…we think we’re a superpower and we always will be, but guess what? That’s how people felt in France and England and Germany in the early part of the 20th century and a war nearly bankrupt them all, leaving an upstart power (the U.S.) and a country that ignored human rights (U.S.S.R) to emerge as the powers in the world. Where is the U.S.S.R now?
The connections between our country’s current state and France’s are many, and I won’t make them all for you, but the tax cuts one just drives me up the wall.
The Bush tax cuts are exactly the type of tax agenda the clergy and nobles had for themselves in the 18th century and with people like Former Senator Alan Simpson running things, it seems like we’re bound for a scary revolution just like France.
Now, to clarify my thoughts on the matter: France’s revolution is today heralded as one of the greatest moments in Western civilization. It typically marks the beginning of the modern era for history and it’s one of the most badass moments in history as far as I’m concerned. Any country that would rather rip itself to shreds than be ruled by an oblivious monarch is truly a martyr nation that should be commended.
What I’m saying is, 221 years from now, someone may look back at whatever is transpiring within the United States as a milestone, but I’m just not sure if the American populace knows what could await on the other side of this “revolution.”
Editor’s note: This post was postmarked Nov. 9. I blame Newman.
————————————————————————————————–
So to take you back to one of my more confusing posts (here) the dinner for my grant-funded history class was Sunday, Nov. 7.
This meant, for the first time since 8th grade, I was going on a field trip!
This meant my classmates and I had to be in Davidson at 5 p.m. Because it’s a three-hour drive, this means we left at 2 p.m. Because the dinner agenda let out after 8, it pretty much meant my entire Sunday was shot.
Sunday..that day when you worry about Monday and relax a little bit and get yourself semi-pysched up to drag yourself through another week…yep mine was gone all for the sake of the rule of law from a historical perspective.
I was afraid I would end up in the professormobile…two of my professors were picking up a third from Duke…but luckily I hopped into the car with my peers.
Understand that this course I’m in is a 2 hour and 45 minute snooze fest every Wednesday and the job I appointed for myself was to keep everyone awake. This is how you end up seeing so many Boy Meets World references in my Tweets…it was such a long class.
But outside of that classroom, I realized the people in the seminar with me were actual real people! Imagine that…a three-hour car ride peppered with references to Disney Channel Original Movies (Cadet Kelly for example) and the recognition that we all were thinking the exact same thing during every second of every too-long class led me to thinking that this was the best waste of a Sunday ever.
But then we got to the dinner, where a lecturer was supposed to give us a special presentation and this is where I learned more about me and my future than any number of advisers and counselors could teach me.
First, the dinner was awesome. I drank more merlot than ever bef…well I drank a lot of merlot, especially considering I was across the table from my professor…though I found he’s also a bit of a wino too.
So I downed some wine to dull my senses before the lecture…it wasn’t hard since I hadn’t had anything all day…and then came the introduction.
This woman was a dynamo. Here’s her biodata from a symposium in 2006:
Leia Castañeda is a doctoral student in the SJD program at Harvard University. After completing her law degree at Ateneo de Manila University, achieving the highest score on the Philippines’ national bar exam, and working for a leading Manila law firm, she completed an LLM at Harvard University, specializing in legal history, before moving on to the SJD doctoral program there. She is the author of “The Origins of Philippine Judicial Review, 1900-1935,” Ateneo Law Journal (2001); “Making Sense of Marbury,” Ateneo Law Journal (2001); “From Merit to Disclosure Regulation: The Shifting Bases of Philippine Securities Law,” Ateneo Law Journal (1998); “Philippine Elections: The Right to Political Participation in an Elite Democracy,” Ateneo Law Journal (1997) and, “From Prerogative to Prohibition: Article 2(4) as Customary International Law in Nicaragua v. United States of America,” Ateneo Law Journal (1994).
But as she stepped up to the podium that she could barely see over, she took a deep breath and began her lecture/talk/discussion/essay that would forever set me apart from overachieving smart people.
She read the entire paper to us. She was lucky someone taught her to take the time to look up from her sheet every now and then to make faux-eye contact with the audience, because otherwise I’m sure everyone would have left.
Well, except for the Davidson people. It quickly became a drinking game for me…I took a sip of wine every time a Davidson person acted like a tool. (Their professor accounted for half of my glass). They laughed at things that weren’t funny, as historians do, and asked questions that were truly lectures with question marks at the end…as in:
I feel like the impact France had in the American Revolution is very much downplayed in more contemporary works, including textbooks at the high school level, as well as in more modern mediums ranging from film to television and this has somehow allowed the American psyche to forget the international relationship we have with the French, allowing an anti-French sentiment to settle in and displacing what could be our most trusted ally in Europe in the forefront of popular opinion in the states…don’t you?
That’s what happens when everyone wants to teach…you can’t have a question and answer session with history majors without getting a lashing from those who have stuck their noses in so many books they feel like they’ve actually been to the Phillippines…
But back to the speaker: she lost us. She had no control over the room and never ever tried to teach us anything…it was one, long sentence with periods thrown in for good measure (and so she could breathe).
So while I sat there taking sips every time my Davidson classmates giggled or spoke, I reminded myself what sets me apart from people like her.
Besides 1.25 grade points, world traveling experience, a few doctorates and a full-time job…I like to create connections with people.
When I tell stories, I’m almost forceful in how I try to make the listener connect with what I’m saying…and maybe, just maybe that will be enough to set me apart in the workforce.
So after the epiphany I immediately began to…you know what I did…I drank more wine and grabbed a couple extra bottles on my way out.
Riding high on our wine buzz, we piled back into the car and my new best friend Andrew plugged his iPod in.
This next portion of the story can best be explained through these links: Now 3 Now 5 Now 8
Because I know you’re curious now…they’re up to 36.
Interspersed between our audio trips down memory lane were “pit stops” that Andrew and I commissioned…mostly so we could buy whatever the cheapest alcoholic beverages were (this…twice…painful, but the best bang for our bucks) and chugging them in the parking lot before continuing the mobile dance party.
And so, to sum up, it’s the little things (cheap alcohol, music from way back) in life that get us through.
The song was originally two songs, one by Paul (the middle) and one by John (the bookends).
The two were meshed together, and this happy sounding song about day-to-day life was sandwiched between John’s sarcastic, dreary view of day-to-day life. It’s awesome.
One more note, and probably the most fascinating thing about this song: the weird part that separates the middle from the two bookends that sounds like an entire orchestra just doing whatever the hell they feel like is just that.
They marked the beginning and end notes on the music sheet and drew a squiggly line between the two. It was up to each individual musician how he or she arrived at the final note, so long as they hit it on time and on key.
And that, my friends, is how you shatter the world of music.
Ty W. Johnson 
