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.