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Amber and I touched down yesterday morning, and we’ll be spending the next couple of days chilling in Athens, GA. In case you were on the edge of your seats worrying that some terrorist yielding a jar of Noxema had taken out the plane, you can rest assured that we made it safely. However, we did have to endure a “security breach” once we got on the
airliner.

We were sitting next to the emergency exit and this Arab looking guy came and sat down next to us. He took off his shoes and chatted on his cellphone and I let all those stupid implanted racial profiling thoughts take their leave from my consciousness. But then, just as I got use to the smell of his feet, the stewardess asked him to get up in this very serious tone, and escorted him off the plane.

We all sat there for an hour, rather quiet, except for the occasional completely off-base speculation from the passengers nearby.Eventually, a policeman came on board and stalked back to the restrooms. Lots of other drama ensued like trying to determine if “the suspect” had left any baggage on board, and whether or not this guy that was in the bathroom was one of his cohorts, etc.

We never really did figure out what went down, because of course they wouldn’t want to put our mind at ease and explain the situation to their beloved customers. But they did make everyone get off the plane so they could “thoroughly” check it ( for like fifteen minutes) . Some people said they saw the dude get on with a bottle of water, and this is what we assume the whole ordeal was based off of. Unfortunately for the world we live in, this story makes the most sense to me.

But we’re here now, and Georgia is fantastic. Athens is a peach. Except for the humidity, (which, I believe makes “everyone looks like they just got finished having sex”), this town is fantastic. Very green, but a darker green than Seattle. There is this wonderful parasitic vine growing over everything, that’s called kudzu.

I’ll try and take some photo’s of it and post them in a few days.

My favorite thing I’ve got to do so far is talk to people and get their own personal Michael Stipe story. (In case you didn’t know, R.E.M. was based out of here, and he apparently shows up at events all the time). Most of these stories from Amber’s old friends involve a guy they know getting propositioned to pose in their underwear for the lead singer.

It’s an interesting little culture; half indie rock glitz and half football injected frat. Apparently there is an entire condominium rented out during football season, and a few years ago when the team lost one of the games, the crowd pulled out the goal post and dragged it down the streets of Athens, trampling and killing a young girl. From what I can tell, there are two sides of the street, and these two groups (rockers and jockers) occasionally get into Outsiders (greasers vrs soc’s) style gang fights.

Now this is living. To be continued …

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 13th, 2006 at 1:14 pm and is filed under Open Discussion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.