Blame this tweet. Buy this album.
You’re whistling the instrumental break after the chorus right now, aren’t you? I am too. And I hate it.
You’re welcome.
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If I can’t practice, I can’t practice, man. If I’m hurt, I’m hurt. It ain’t about that at all. It is as simple as that. It ain’t about that. It’s not about that at all, you know what I’m saying? But it’s easy to talk about. It’s easy to sum it up when you just talk about practice. We’re sitting here, and I’m supposed to be the franchise player, and we’re in here talking about practice. I mean, listen, we’re sitting here talking about practice. Not a game, not a game, not a game. We’re talking about practice. Not a game. Not the game that I go out there and die for and play every game like it’s my last. Not the game. We’re talking about practice, man. I mean, how silly is that? We’re talking about practice. I know I’m supposed to be there, I’m supposed to lead by example, I know that. And I’m not shoving it aside like it don’t mean anything. I know it’s important, I do. I honestly do. But we’re talking about practice, man. What are we talking about? Practice? We’re talking about practice, man. (Laughter.) We’re talking about practice. We’re talking about practice. We ain’t talking about the game. We’re talking about practice, man. When you come into the arena, and you see me play, you see me play, don’t you? You see me give everything I got, right? But we’re talking about practice right now.
I’m certain that Amazon is utterly confused at what I’ve looked up so far. I personally think Belinda Carlisle is a little too saccharine here but I was in the minority in the house growing up. I also didn’t know the word saccharine back then.
Update #1: I learned more about the suicidal comment but, I’m sticking to my former newspaper’s policy on suicide and attempts and just saying it was taken very seriously.
Full disclosure: I learned last night that I know people who know the suspect and I’m somewhat aiding in Emily Cole’s post-graduate job hunt. I still don’t know how I wound up getting fully entrenched in this story from over 200 miles away. A list of a good chunk of the stories related to this and controversy from earlier in the academic year can be found under the tab The Captain’s Log and CNU. I’m not writing this as a straight news item so there will be some editorializing.
The Daily Press posted this brief that fills in a gap but there are still some unanswered questions. Despite that, it’s enough to do a roundup of everything that took place since that fateful night at the end of March 2012 on the East Campus of Christopher Newport University.
According to Daily Press articles, on Wednesday, March 28 and Thursday, March 29, a student or students or another person annoyed at the situation alerted police to the existence of illegal drugs of some sort in Wilson 231B. CNU Police swooped in on Wednesday, according to some documents quoted by the Daily Press, and allegedly uncover liquid chemicals and paraphernalia and on that Thursday, a lab in Norfolk confirmed that the chemicals could be used to make meth. Police evacuated the room, sealed it as a crime scene and did a second search that police say included recovering fumes related to cooking drugs. Here’s where the narrative gets hazy. If that happened Thursday, why was Wilson not evacuated as a whole until 7 p.m. Friday? If it were a meth lab, did CNU let CNU Village roll along for about another day with potentially volatile materials unattended in a room?
Regardless, 7 p.m. on Wednesday, March 30 was not a drill: Get out of Wilson Hall; we’re going to announce an hour later that we found a suspected meth lab. At some point, according to the Daily Press, one of the students who lived in Wilson 231 returned, which is another hazy point. So, after the initial investigation the day before, there was no disciplinary action to the people in the room or earlier that day, whichever day it was? Other students reported two people being in handcuffs to the student newspaper.
According to the Daily Press brief, a student, Derek Werner, 20, of the Western Branch area of Chesapeake, my ancestral home, allegedly claimed all of the material was his on March 29, given the offense date in the Newport News General District Court’s system.
At some point, the detainee who lived in 231 — it could have been Werner or another student as at least two people lived in that room — made an alleged suicidal comment that was most likely a figure of speech, according to the Daily Press. He was charged with trespassing by the university, I assume. There is a chance that he had been told to remove himself from Wilson the day before but that gets into things CNU most likely will not release readily. Two students, I’m assuming Werner and either a friend or roommate, were banned from the campus. Apparently, honor code violations are still churning through the system.
As local media began to descend on this breaking news story, someone hacked into the website of The Captain’s Log, the student newspaper, in an attempt to shut it down. The hack did not work immediately.
On that Monday, April 2, according to the Daily Press, Werner was interviewed again and confirmed that the material was his apparently as waiving his right to an attorney. By this point, this was a blip on the state media wire that probably would have disappeared quickly from widespread scrutiny.
On Wednesday, April 4, that week’s edition of The Captain’s Log hit the stands and this story grew a second head. It just so happened to be the day of an admissions event. Not long afterward, in a move that confirmed the suspicions of CLOG staff members for over a decade, someone employed with the school administration called for the removal of the papers so the front-page brief on what occurred in 231B would not negatively affect the experience of those prospective students and their parents. Some people who were caught with the papers and they were returned. That then gained the attention of the CLOG alumni and, subsequently, state and national media.
As I haven’t heard otherwise from Cole, who technically is editor in chief until tomorrow, there hasn’t been a direct apology to CLOG. President Paul Trible wrote a blanket email that touched on the subject and no further questions on it by the media were directly answered. This part of the story almost fizzled out because it was so close to the end of the year and a couple other colleges had bigger run-ins with their student papers but, on Friday, April 13, the CLOG website went down. By the time it is up and running again, we learn of how the hack began the night of March 30. For all we know, that was an incidence of synchronicity. At this point, the CLOG was more or less done with its year of editions.
A little over a week later, on Tuesday, April 24, Werner is arrested and charged with manufacture of a Schedule 1 narcotic on college property and possession and/or manufacture of DMT, which was what was found. DMT and meth are not one and the same but this probably will wind up being the “CNU Meth Lab” story for years to come.
Werner first appeared before a judge the following day and the arraignment/bond hearing (it’s hard to tell exactly what the hearing was for just from the court system) was continued until May 9. Due to the lack of releases from Newport News and CNU or the nature of the news cycle at the Daily Press, that brief that puts some of this in context did not appear until 10 p.m. last night online and I’m assuming is in today’s paper. Literally 36 hours from when that article appeared online, some of the people who have head or were involved in both heads of this story will graduate and whatever wheels at CNU that need to turn will turn under less scrutiny.
We still don’t know what will happen with the second student or if anything has yet. We still don’t know the correct timeline. There still hasn’t been any reconciliation between CLOG and CNU. The journalism program has still been set out to die on the vine.
This story is far from over.
If the previous post was too long, you’re reading the wrong blog. If you haven’t gotten to reading it yet since newer entries are on top, I’m opening myself up for occasional questions from this point until such a time when this blog as a whole is over as further proof of my candor. I’ve decided to start with this story.
Other than saying things I really should not have or moments where I’ve been with someone and been like, “Oh, God … Everyone, I am NOT here with that person”, it really has to go back to fifth grade when pants fell down. I started growing into my 145-pound weight so my husky pants didn’t fit anymore. I think they were like 34 or 36 if I were wearing grown-up clothes. I briefly flirted with 34 a few months ago. I hit 32 in 2006. If I apply myself, I could be back in 30 pants before the year is done. Anyway, so I was on my way to being an ex-fat kid thanks to the rumblings of puberty so my clothes weren’t exactly fitting. I needed a belt because asking for new pants would have made too much sense. The problem was that the last time I needed a belt was perhaps second grade or so. It did the trick but it was a Micro Machines belt and I didn’t want people to know that I, a fifth grader, was wearing a toy car belt because also asking for a new belt would have made too much sense. Thankfully, I never tucked my shirt in.
One day, the school was testing fifth graders for scoliosis Aside: My spine is every so slightly twisted so my left leg is about a quarter inch shorter than my right. I was supposed to do yoga-esque exercises to pull it into place but that took effort. We were warned that it involved us being shirtless and I hoped that my mom didn’t pick out my jeans for school because they were entirely too big. I didn’t pick out my clothes for the day until some point in middle school. Of course my mom picked my probably too big for me even when I was big jeans for that day.
I figured I could pull it off. Other than walking to the bus stop, walking to class, walking to and from the cafetorium once for food and again for the scoliosis test, walking back to the bus and walking the half block home, oversized pants would be no big deal. Sagging was starting to be really popular and my grabbing my pants every 15 feet or so would maybe just be perceived as trying to be in style. I’ll spend most of the day sitting. We can do this.
We had P.E./recess that day. Our teacher rarely let us go outside for free time and, this time, we had to do stuff as a class. Thinking back to this now, I’m still thinking, “You have to be kidding me. Today? Today? Of all the days, today?“
That’s been my life, though. Everything has always been overly complicated or absolutely ridiculous. I’m entertained by it 95 percent of the time. Nothing of note really happening here in Jacksonville is extremely out of the ordinary. I think that means, once I get out of here, things are going to be AMAZING. Like puts college to shame amazing.
But I digress.
So, here we are. We’re doing some sort of far too much motion than necessary ever exercise and it turns into an exercise of how long I can do these motions before I have to stop obviously and pull my pants back up. I kept it going for a while but I knew it was a losing battle with the earth’s gravitational pull.
And then it happened.
For felt like the same amount of time that the world saw Janet Jackson’s nipple live followed by all of the times it was replayed on every news outlet, I was looking like a fool with my pants on the ground. About a quarter of the class saw. At almost any other point in my life, I wouldn’t have cared. I have had someone meet me for the second time say, “Nice to meet you with your clothes on” because, when we first met, I was kinda just naked in a friend’s living room. A few of us were testing a claim that it was possible to get naked from dressed normally in 25 seconds or less because why not? (Answer: Yes it is.) But, on this day, this very day, I was in fifth grade. I had no desire for anyone from my school at that point to see me in my underwear.
But nothing happened.
Nothing happened.
I wanted to die because OH MY GOD MY PANTS JUST FELL DOWN IN FRONT OF MY FIFTH GRADE CLASS and life just moved on.
Other than a couple of three comments later in the day, my pants falling down never came up ever again but it stuck with me. Not much has stuck with me about fifth grade beyond two friends who moved away. I’ve never seen them again and my super-journo stalker skills have failed me on both.
If I every find them, I can introduce myself as the kid whose pants fell down during recess.
Initially, I planned on this entry coinciding with the eighth anniversary on June 1 but the CNU thing happened and I got carried away with the March photos and the ’80s April.
Although I padded this one a little with the hundred entries since February, it’s a little comforting to know, despite some slacking off in the past year or two, I’ve had a relatively constant 200-odd posts a year average since the average-skewing first year. I used to keep spreadsheets of my post frequencies but I stopped updating it in October 2009. I just did some quick math. When I stopped tallying up in 2009, I averaged 18.4 posts a month. From that point till now, it was 12.8. Overall, it’s about 16.8. That’s still roughly every other day.
Who am I kidding? The viaduct is starting to grind to a halt.
Eight years ago, Facebook barely existed and tweets were only things birds did. I’ve noticed that there have been many things that I would have posted here that have instead been condensed to 140 characters or some things thrown on my timeline. On top of that, I’ve become partially dreadfully boring and I’ve stopped recounting how amazing whatever party I attended over the weekend was. On top of that, this isn’t my private haven anymore to vent about people or situations. Those have been directed off the Internet as texts and phone calls to people lately. You know, the thing normal people used to do.
That said, here’s what I think the future will be here:
- Continued long-form entries. I’m a writer. When the mood hits me, there will be thousand-word tales of me getting in my car in going somewhere; rambles of things in my brain I need to work out; general musings of things as pieces of literature (see the 792 entries); picture posts.
1a. I see picture posts being more of a thing. Typically, on my not seeing my girlfriend weekends, I roam around Eastern North Carolina and take photos on my phone. They often aren’t very good but I can string along a story at times. Once I’m living in a new city with her, I’m going to get out a lot more and I’ll buy yet another point-and-shoot camera and maybe a good one as well to capture more of city life. - A continued average of about 12 entries a month unless a theme (more on that later). It’s going to be all about quality and not quantity. A LOT of my old posts were frivolous. Some of them were even short enough to be considered ur-tweets. I’m going to make a promise now, though: Unless I’m on vacation, I’m going to guarantee at least one entry a week from now on. The reason for that is twofold: Originally, this blog was for me and only me. At times, I still write this as if no one is reading. It’s serving as an auxiliary memory and it’s doing me no good if I’m blacking out my life for weeks at a time. I fell into a rut when I first arrived in North Carolina and I think it will help me break my routine of work-sleep-farting around on the Internet-going outside to read to do something worth writing about. Like I said before, this is temporary: once I’m around friends and loved ones again, I’ll be doing all kinds of stuff. I’ll use the old print schedule of my old job as a template. Guaranteed Tuesday post then Thursday then Saturday, if stuff can wait.
- Video. Yes, video. After I make sure I have enough hosting space so I don’t have to put them on YouTube, I’m going to be here in living color. My computer has a webcam and my phone currently has room for seven hours of regular high-quality video or two hours of 720p HD. I’m saving that for when I’m no longer living in the Bayshore house so I’m not that guy talking to himself alone in his room. At the earliest, this will start in July when my lease is up and I’m … somewhere.
- Themes. I’m definitely keeping fotos de marzo. I’m not doing ’80s April again (at least not in April) because I don’t want them to be back-to-back. Later this year, I’m going to experiment with pulling a random album from a random artist in my collection and doing a summation of why I own it and why I love it every day for a month. I may do a reprise of my Week of the Wine by going to a place where I can buy single bottles of beer and pick out 30 I haven’t had before. The sky is the limit.
- Issues. The CLOG thing inspired me. I’m journalism tag has been beefy lately because I’ve been commenting on the media in general off and on. I want to do that more. If I ever transition out of journalism, there may be more current affairs popping up.
- Continued candor. I once told Katy that being me is interesting because I try not to have anything to hide. I can’t think of anything to which I wouldn’t own up or make me die of shame. I mean, there may be some situations where I’d rather that story not come up that second but, unless it’s going to royally screw or embarrass someone else, screw it. It’s a part of my experiment with my own life. I make conscientious attempts not to lie; I’m not ashamed to say I have literally lost count of how many people have seen me naked and the vast majority of that had nothing to do with sex; and I go out of my way to be kind and helpful.
I KNOW. Some of your are like, “Wait. What?” That’s what I mean. I picked something benign as to not distract to the whole purpose of this entire entry. Like I said, I think it’s better to just throw things out there. Sometimes literally. There are still some off-limits things because of my journalism career (politics, hot-button issues, &c.). I typically don’t take requests but, if you want to throw questions at me from time to time, I may be inclined to dedicate an entry to answering it. I’ll even throw myself a softball one in the next entry, which will be up in a few minutes.
Anyway, so that’s it: the state of the viaduct. Nearly eight years, six cities and 1600 entries later, it’s still something. If I ever become famous and this blog is part of the reason, I want my historical marker in front of 210 Deep Creek Road in Newport News.
Onward to the eighth anniversary in less than a month and thence beyond.
Oh, you thought I’d post music from the ’80s over the course of 30 days and forget RUN-DMC?
April needs more days. I was just getting started. I still have the bonus ones left for you.
I have to say Rock Me Amadeus was my favorite song in the ’80s. I was immensely sad when Falco died.
I have been making awful word play with the title of this song since 1987. Someone should have realized I was going to be an English major back when I was four. Or when I wrote a novel in third grade. Or a sequel by fifth grade.
I love that there was a day when I worked in Petersburg where two of my coworkers and I went to work and then drove to New York because we could. The centerpiece of the trip was Coney Island and, afterward, we took turns dozing off on the way back. There was literally no sleep till Brooklyn.
Licensed to Ill was literally in my hands in vinyl form when I was a kid. At this very moment, I’m wondering where all of these albums and cassettes that were in my house are. I didn’t realize how much this one was played in my house until I looked at the tracks and was like, “I know that one, and that one, and that one, and OH! that one! YES.”
I just added this to my wish list.
I once had a music discussion with my girlfriend. This is one of the few areas where we’re WILDLY different. It’s either going to be a headphones household or she’s going to learn to love The Mars Volta. Or slow and low.
DOUBLE BONUS.
That’s what you get, dear readers, for putting up with my blog being more than a running tally of how weird I am since 2004 because of my college.
The Beastie Boys: the gift that keeps on giving … you brass monkey.
