She was shooting pool with a kid. He was hitting the cue ball, but just barely. She kept pointing out how to do it, but he couldn’t so she knocked the balls in one by one herself.

Good, I thought, teach him how to lose early.

Later she approached me sharply from the right, asking why I was drinking Bud Light Platinum when Corona was the same price.

I pointed to the man at the bar and said “He seems like a man who knows his beer and he suggested it.”

Lie. It wasn’t that. I just wanted a beer that wouldn’t get me stares. It was hardly a bar, and even further of a cry from the “tavern” the sign outside claimed it to be, so I ordered whatever the drunkest man at the bar had.

“What’re you drenkin’?” I asked him rhetorically, staring at his Budweiser product. I didn’t care and neither did he apparently. He remained silent.

I asked for a Bud Light, but he rotated his beer to show that it was Anheuser’s new-fangled beer — the Platinum. Lah-dee-fucking-dah.

I asked if it was any good.

“I’ve had six and I feel fine,” he said, as if his sparkling endorsement of Bud Light’s 6 percent ABV version was gospel.

What the hell? I asked for the Platinum and here we are.

She turned to confirm who I was pointing at.

“That’s my dad,” she said.

I could scarcely contain my guffaw.

Despite her father’s four-hour residency at the corner of the bar (and let’s face it, I secretly wanted to be anchoring that barstool next to him instead of covering the damp festival outside) she seemed incredibly adept at making conversation. She was from here, but now lives on the coast.

I’m not sure I had ever been picked up at a bar so effortlessly, but it was like looking in a mirror. She had whisked me outside for a smoke before I even knew I was stepping out and we settled in on the deck.

The wooden porch bore the weight of a strange crew of characters — the type you would expect to be drunk and dragging smokes out back of a dive bar at 1 p.m. during a festival in north Wayne County.

Among the natives where I live there are a variety of accents, although sensing them is like picking out the individual tannins in a two-dollar wine — it doesn’t matter what part you focus on, it all tastes, well, just awful.

What I call the “hick” accent is a nasally-produced dialect. How they talk during allergy season is beyond me, but those who are especially good at it find careers as country music stars, so it must work on some level.

This is not the land of the deep, “suhthun” drawl, no. It’s a land of higher-pitched snippets of English spliced together with unseen apostrophes where entire words should be and syllables simply pulled from the heavens to make words as drawn out as possible so speakers have more time to sound out the next word in their nicotine-addicted minds. Continue reading →

Now that I’ve done my whining, I can blog about how awesome my job has been.

I felt like I was getting ready to jump.

Goldsboro revolves around Seymour Johnson* Air Force Base and likely wouldn’t exist without it. The proximity to the base also means that reporters at the News-Argus cover Air Force happenings as often as they cover the city, and that there are incentive flights where members of the media go up with airplanes.

Kenneth, the military reporter who was juggling city government, too before I showed up, was embedded on a tanker for 18 hours back and forth to Afghanistan, and every other member of the newsroom had been up, so when the Air Force

Thunderbirds came to town for the Wings Over Wayne Air Show, I went up in a KC-135 Stratotanker to fuel the jets.

We made it to Arkansas and back in four hours, and when we landed I interviewed a Thunderbird pilot who got his start at Seymour Johnson, but essentially I got paid for seven ours of flying and watching planes land.

*Being from Goldsboro and having the last name Johnson, I can honestly admit I never saw the hilarity of the base’s name until college.

I swear to God he was looking right at me.

The 916th ARW boom. That's where the fuel comes out.

As per Jessie‘s advice, it’s time to pop the cap off of this new job and take it for a spin in the blogosphere before the dichotomy of my situation leaves me as two-faced as a Batman villain.

It’s been a month now since I began work at the Goldsboro News-Argus, and I love the job.

I’ve interviewed the governor, flown in an Air Force tanker and written several other stories that I will never speak of again. (Two words: Puppy Puppets).

But working at the News-Argus has one caveat. It lies in the paper’s name.

When the Goldsboro News merged with the Goldsboro Argus in the 1920s, they hyphenated the name to News-Argus (Argus comes from this, and the paper’s motto/mantra makes the newspaper seem pretty badass:

“This Argus o’er the people’s rights doth an eternal vigil keep.
No soothing strains o’Maia’s son can lull its hundred eyes to sleep.”

But I have no beef with Argus. Or News. Or the hypen. It’s Goldsboro that bothers me.

And that’s because the Goldsboro News-Argus was my hometown paper. I clipped articles from the Argus in 5th grade for current events. I looked for my name in the sports digest throughout high school. Now I sit over the left shoulder of the journalist who reported I won second place in Business Law in 10th grade and right in front of the door where the sports editor who covered my senior tennis run to the conference championship sits.

I have no problem with the paper, and, to be honest, my local roots likely helped me to earn the job over the other 75 applicants. When the editor sends me to Mount Olive, I know three different ways to get there and I lived four blocks from Goldsboro’s City Hall for the first four years of my life, so I guess I have to be grateful for being a Goldsboro native.

But, then there’s the issue of being BACK in Goldsboro. I now hate this song, which reminds me that if I die in Wayne County, I would have lived and died in a small town. (Note: If I die, scatter my ashes into the Caribbean. Or flush them down a toilet in Raleigh…just don’t let me end up in this place eternally).

And living in Goldsboro means having to find a place to live in Goldsboro, meaning I’m hitting the snooze button before work in the same bedroom where I once hit the snooze button before school.

I’m still paying rent in Raleigh through July, but my parents are giving me rent-free housing in Rosewood, and I’m decaying from the inside-out. My parents have actually been way cooler about the situation than I thought they would and haven’t suffocated me, but to go to Raleigh, run a paper, graduate and get a full-time job only to end up back where it all started just eats away at me. It doesn’t matter that I didn’t use any family connections or favors to get the job, I still feel like a comebacker.

And it wouldn’t be so bad if I just had someone to drink with!

I haven’t hung out with anyone I graduated with (aside from Jeff) since Fall 2006, so it’s almost like I’m a lonely stranger in my own hometown. I was so desperate, I went to church to find drinking buddies a few weeks ago. (I also just realized that the part of that that I find so strange isn’t that I went to church for drinking, but that I went to church).

So I’ve shuttled between Raleigh and Goldsboro at least twice a week and have done a lot of solo drinking behind closed doors to stay sane, but I’m still struggling.

I managed to find a full-time job in a dying industry during the worst recession since the Great Depression less than four months after graduation, but I can’t help but feel like I’ve taken a step back.

Fear not journalists! We have at least four years of prime journalistic’n before we can stop the presses for real.

Last weekend I sat down with a calculator and studied the budgets of every newspaper in existence. I modeled their advertising business plans along a five-year trek and it seems a $6/month paywall subscription for each website would provide enough revenue to keep us in business until 2015!

Actually, I did sit down and discover we’ll be okay last weekend, but all I did was watch Back to the Future II. Go to 5:38.

We’re gonna be okay!

EDITOR’S NOTE: I just realized that there is no reference to the Internet at all in Back to the Future. How prophetic could it be without noting that? Also, are we anywhere near the development of a Mr. Fusion that can generate 1.21 gigawatts of power through the processing of garbage? Hell, there are no hoverboards, powered or not…or self-drying jackets endorsed by Stephen Hawking…and, come to think of it, USA TODAY hasn’t even changed their logo to that futuristic design yet…

False alarm journalists. Turns out the deadline could come anytime.

Most of you probably don’t remember my time as a resident advisor with N.C. State’s University Housing.

It was my junior year and I was basically offered the job without ever having applied. I saw it as a way to subsidize my college costs through free housing (albeit on-campus) and a meal plan, but in actuality it was my first job outside of babysitting and a quick two-day stint helping Rosewood Hardware with some inventory.

So I went to the three-hour staff meetings and planned programs that no one wanted to attend. I honestly did enjoy the work because it was all people-oriented, but that was all before I went out in what Tim has described as “a flaming ball of technicality.”

That’s not to say I didn’t raise some serious hell as an RA. I notified my residents of every RA rove cycle to minimize their chances of getting caught skateboarding in the halls and let them know whenever we had our mandatory meetings, always leaving them with instructions that usually amounted to “burn the place down.”

And then came my 21st birthday. This is the biggun that I spoke so highly of in a post last October. At the end of the scavenger hunt and the Orioles cake, we all went to Hi 5 off of Glenwood South, mostly because I was the only 21-year-old among my friends and we had to find a place where everyone could get in.

My first drink was a rum and coke. My second was a Magic Hat #9, but that all faded into a series of beers, liquor shots and Smirnoff Ices (Remember, we were all alcohol novices at this point) before we went to sleep. The issue? The latter of those drinks were all consumed in my resident advisor dorm room in a dry dormitory.

It should be noted that my birthday often falls on Fall Break, just as it did that year. There were only two residents on my hall that night and one of them slid an anonymous letter under my supervisor’s door. You’d think every 21-year-old would be allowed to get toasted on his or her special night, but my first legal night of a heightened BAC led to me being put on probation. It was a “one more chance” type moment, so when I was late with some paperwork in February, I was “terminated.”

But, as I often do, I fell bass ackards (Eastern N.C. term) into something better. I took the position at Technician that Housing was holding me back from (News Editor) and parlayed that into the Editor-in-Chief gig.

Fast-Forward another year to Jan. 19, when I was “suspended” from my position at Technician (More about that in a future post) and I fell, bass ackards again, into a position with the Garner Citizen where I could actually be paid better than an indentured servant.

As Sports Editor I had a lot of fun running the section and even won a couple of awards for column-writing and feature story writing, but after I graduated, I realized it was time for something more permanent and full-timey.

Now we come to February, again, when what could, at best, be called a “misunderstanding” led to the Executive Editor at the Citizen to give my job, that I still held, to someone else. He thought I was leaving to take a job as a teacher (In February? Really?) but I ended up finding a bass ackards way to turn it into a raise. Yay, me!

But then I bass ackardsly landed a general assignment reporting job with the Goldsboro News-Argus. Yay! More money and benefits at a newspaper with six times the readership of the Citizen – but what made it even better was knowing that, for once, I had hand.

I was going to march in for the first time ever and tell an employer that it wasn’t him, it was me. I had found a better option and was taking it. I was calling it off. I was the breaker upper, and leaving on my own. It was going to be glorious.

So I called ahead to make sure Barry was in. The phone went straight to the Citizen’s after hours voicemail, which was strange because it was 3 p.m. No matter, though, so I headed to Garner.

When I walked up to the door, it was locked. No biggie. They lock it when they head to lunch, though it was awfully late for a lunch. Rachel came to the door and let me in, closing and locking the door behind me.

“Are we on lockdown mode, or something?” I asked jokingly. “Sorta,” she said.

Puzzled, I went into Amy’s office, where she looked at me like a cow looks at an oncoming train.

Finally, I asked “What’s going on around here?”

Then she told me: the paper is shutting down, effective today.

Yes, I had another job lined up, but I was pissed. No one knew anything about it until that morning at a meeting I was too hungover to attend and now the people I had grown closest to at the Citizen were all going to be unemployed with student loans. It wasn’t fair and it wasn’t funny.

But throughout the day as we put together plans for our last paper and watched Charlie Sheen videos to keep our sanity, I couldn’t help but laugh.

Again I had been robbed of my ability to leave a job on my own.

So as I begin this newest chapter in my journalism career as a reporter at the Argus, I’m soaking up every ounce of knowledge I can and delving into my beat (city government) with no convictions.

But, deep down, I can’t help but wonder how this chapter will end…will it be with my forced termination or the paper’s going under?

Here’s to journalism.

Links of interest:
Barry’s column from one week before announcing the paper will close. Notice how he calls out each of our competitors, (Garner-Clayton Record and Garner News) one of them by name. Now notice that those two publications still exist.

The Garner Citizen Obituary By Amy Townsend:  In my opinion, some of the finest creative writing ever.

Barry’s column where he explains why he’s stopping the presses (And seemingly thanks everyone in the staff box except for his Sports Editor).

My first ever farewell column.

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.