yessir, it’s that time of year again—when little girls and boys have sore necks and backs from moving antique chifforobes and upset tummies from drinking budweiser! yes, it’s moving time—when all good pals chip in to claim unwanted lp’s and busted end-tables. and it’s a great time!
so friday i hustle outta work and hop in the o’steen wagen—my favorite jetta of all time. we grab john black attacker steve and grab a stack of cd’s and hit the mcdade’s wine store. after fighting over an appropriate pinot grigio for the party we’re going to that nite, we hop on i-55 to the land of youth and dreams: starkville.
i’m lying, of course. starkville is a desperately empty and bottomless hole—that’s gotten worse the older i get. how many other towns can boast of having out-of-business (and empty) shoney’s, baskin-robbins, krystal’s, and kinko’s? what other sec college town would let a bar burn down on its main “cool” thoroughfare and replace it with condominiums? it totally sucks there.
but the people are great. so after listening to way too much postal service and the smiths—and, uh, drinking a couple of 40’s and a six of corona light—we stagger up to ford manor. thank god we didn’t have a corkscrew.
but tech-king bill & his artiste-wife susan, two of my favorite people in the whole world, surely did. the menu: some sort of meat (i don’t even notice anymore), awesome garlic mashed potatoes, steamed & crisp green beans with lemon and cilantro, and a wonderful summer salad chock-full of sliced strawberries and walnuts. oh, baby!
the songs: plenty more smiths, jba, lots of psychedelic furs. perfect. but i’m moving kc down from columbus to jackson tomorrow, so i knock back a few glasses of the pinot—the one i picked out is not so good—and head to bed in the office room, sometimes called the sailboat room (guest rooms at ford manor are named according to the dominant decorating theme).
that’s the least glam of the three guest rooms at ford manor, but my second favorite. it’s filled with computer goodies and science fiction novels—all the william gibson a boy can handle, plus a t-1 connection for the pc and a 10 gig ipod hooked up to the g-5 with cinema screen. wow.
the monkey room is the best, but reserved almost exclusively for couples or the results of susan’s often-excellent (if short-lived) attempts at matchmaking. it’s dark and secluded, with inches-deep feather padding on the queen-size bed and what seems like dozens of pillows.
third-tier is the butterfly room, with two twin beds. blah! it’s bright and airy, and not-so good for making out or sleeping in with a hangover. chapman called it, though—the beds are arguably better than the office’s and there’s no computer hum or residual heat from the hidden-server.
so i hop up kind of late the next day—slept from eleven to nine!—and head over to columbus, to the college street mansion kc’s moving out of after several years.
yikes! boss is calling me. update later.
cool post. starkville doesn’t have much going for it, does it? maybe when they get that bypass finished… or when they start selling cold beer in the stores… or they get some aldermen under 70… or something. it breaks my heart that oxford and hattiesburg are so charismatic and fun (respectively) and starkville is so idiotically backwards. it doesn’t HAVE to be. that’s the bad part.
actually starkville does have a lot going for it, but the people who run the town don’t seem to want to work with it (or with the students, more likely). the countryside around town is pretty, the town itself is nice in that dilapidated Southern town kinda way… but i know what you mean—nearly the whole time i lived there, i thought about getting out.
that lady you moved to jax needs to get on here and relate stories of her new teaching gig. i bet there’ll be some doozies.
“the monkey room.” haw haw. where one gets jiggy like a monkey.
viva la starkvegas! may she ever reign in our hearts.
yep, i couldn’t wait to get out of there either.
hem-hem…speaking of JBA, someone promised me a cd…
sheeit!! soon, t/z, i promise!
I feel differently. i never hated starkville. i was there for a while for various schooling (6 years!), but not as long as some (ahem). I was also there for a longer period of time that most of my peers, so i saw it grow more. amazingly, that extra year actually saw a night and day difference (1992-1993). I believe that for most of us, Starkville was never/could never be about the city, but it was always about what we made of it. so knocking it was in a way knocking the times and people therein. I’ve been envious of other college towns, but to be honest…i never wanted to be in those other places as much as i wanted starkville to be a BETTER place. Some people really try…and its frustrating to see the people that don’t give a shit be the ones that hold it back. I’m going to starkville for the day on monday if anyone wants to meet me for lunch.
Starkville’s charms lie in the fact that it doesn’t appear to have any. It forces you to create your own fun—when I was new to Starkville, my friend RD and I used to do a bi-weekly check of the decomposition progress of a rat down the street from his house. That’s entertainment. Other advantages: being able to walk everywhere (except if you’re Steve, and you get too drunk and get lost walking home from Dave’s), only having a few bars (you can always find your friends), and only having 2 mexican restaurants (makes decision making easy).
And because there’s not a lot to do, the only thing left to do is to hang out with your friends and talk to them and drink beer that you’ve gotten cold using the 7-minute method.
7 minutes?
Can you seriously get a good pinot grigio in a town that doesn’t sell cold beer?
Isn’t the 7-minute method the one where you fill your sink with ice and cold water?
I seem to recall a method pioneered by some gentlemen in Martin Hall that found 9 minutes in ice-filled water would render a brew frosty. Nine minutes and 45 seconds, to be precise.
“I seem to recall a method pioneered by some gentlemen in Martin Hall that found 9 minutes in ice-filled water would render a brew frosty. Nine minutes and 45 seconds, to be precise.”
This is precisely true, assuming you’re talking about cans of beer. Specifically, cans of Beast Light. Getting a 40oz of, say, Colt 45 takes a bit longer. Don’t know about bottled beer; we were never flush enough to afford bottled beer back then.
sips bottled premium beer
i’m a spinner, myself!
(dunks beer in ice, starts spinning furiously)
i also remember steve & woody having a little battery-operated spinner. it was essentially a little bucket that you could put ice in, which you would lay a can or bottle on top of. you would affix said can or bottle to a little motor, which would then spin the bottle for you.
complicated. but yummy.
KFB, why would you want to drink white wine in the first place? Blech…
But seriously, Brewski’s, where I worked for a time, was probably one of the nicer liquor/wine places I’ve ever seen. No bars on the windows and no bulletproof cashier kiosks. And we had people roving around the store to help customers (my job). It was a lot of fun. I’ve never seen another liquor store (besides the ABC store in Tallahassee near Elise’s apt.) that nice before. We had plenty of good wines there and a 1500 dollar bottle of cognac.
One time, a guy pulled up in a limo with two “hot” babes (hookers?) and tried to impress them by buying that bottle of cognac…all of his credit cards were denied and he was on the bad check list. D’oh!
Wait…David…are you coming to prom this weekend? Grab jp or somebody. IATWTC playing 80s covers…sweet!
GOD! what i’d give to go. My dad is running for office. the primary is tues. and i promised i’d help him canvas neighborhoods! grr…damn politics!
Believe me, I wouldn’t want to be buying any white wine. I just thought it was hilarious to worry about snagging a fine bottle of pinot grigio in a place where the beer can’t even be sold cold. So I guess the big question is, can they sell white wine cold? If so, how is that different form beer?
Jesus, I’m glad I live in a non-bible belt state where I can buy cold beer and booze in supermarkets at any hour and on any day.
Amen to that, KFB. Amen. I live in Athens, GA, which is still bible-belt, but sort of like an oasis in the middle of it. We can drink on Sundays, but only in restaurants, which isn’t really a problem, ‘cause you need a night off now and again, you know? No one really complains about it much.
But, God, being able to buy cold beer is still amazing to me, five years later. I still light up with glee when a pull a six pack out of a fridge at a gas station and I usually tell a fellow customer how great it is and about how in Starkville you couldn’t do that, etc. etc. I am always met with ennui and mild disdain. That warm beer shit was such a big part of our lives in S’ville…you can take the man out of MS, but you can’t take the MS out of a man, I guess. Country come to city!
I met a guy a few weeks ago that got his undergrad at MSU. He prefaced it with something like: “you’ve probably never heard of this town.” Oh, but I have. He mentioned Dave’s, etc. and, of course, the no cold beer. Seems to be a contentious point among all of you. Understandably.
bg, i feel the same way about cold beer. and places where you can buy SINGLES—!! oh, it just sends chills up my spine! pun intended!
you can get chilled wine. as for booze. nothing beats New Orleans. weird thing. SO MANY places sell booze that there are virtually NO liquor stores. kinda like what’s the point? you can get everything at Eckard for christ’s sake!
I grew up in Arkansas where, when I was younger, there were still so-called Blue Laws which dictated that places like Wal-Mart couldn’t open on Sundays until noon, much less sell alcohol of any type on Sunday or any day. By the time I left there breathes sigh of relief ten years later the state had “progressed” so that Wal-Mart could open when they wanted on Sunday and a person could buy drinks in a restaurant on Sunday. And they were JUST starting to allow booze purchases on credit cards when I left. I’m shore glad they didn’t allow such when I was in college or I’d be in huge debt!
Here in LA, anything goes as far as booze sales. You can buy singles, cold beer, warm beer, 5,000 cases at a time, on any day, in any ole kind of store. It’s nice to be able to go to Von’s (CA’s Safeway) and buy milk, bread, deodorant, ground beef, and Jack Daniels all in one place.
that is what i miss about the grocery stores in N.O. while Calif. shops i’ve been to were ok, nothing beats the New Orleans grocery stores! one day i was buy the coldest beer cooler in the world. it was so cold that the non-chilled bottles across the isle from it were cold just by being that close to the sooper-cooler. heh.
One has to wear a parka just to go snag some club soda across the aisle from that coldbeer.