Hotbed of Crime

This weekend, Sammi and I made a short road trip to the bustling metropolis of Danville. It was totally bustling and metropolitan except for the part where it totally wasn’t at all. I’ve been to Danville one other time, for a workshop with another college, and on that trip, Mapquest gave us directions that landed us in the gravel parking lot of a church on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere, possibly in North Carolina. Those directions turned out to be sending us to a Street instead of to an Avenue or something, but in any case, there’s not a lot in Danville.

Yet somehow people get killed there all the time. Seriously, at least once a week, the news has a story about someone who got robbed or beaten up or drive-by shot or flat-out killed in Danville. The local news would have you believe that Danville is a hotbed of rural warfare or something, and I’ve always found it a bit bizarre considering that Danville is tiny and in the middle of nowhere. So when we decided to head down there this weekend, I made a few jokes about the high murder rate, but wasn’t really too concerned.

I now understand why people get killed in Danville.

For one thing, everything in Danville is either out of business, just about out of business, or really seedy and apparently thriving. To me, such a depressed economy just screams, “Here’s a good place to kill someone out of total boredom.”

And then there’s WORM-NUK and Old Makeup Lady.

WORM-NUK was the personalized license plate of the dude who almost killed us by zipping back and forth through several lanes of traffic while I tried to avoid Old Makeup Lady. At this point, Old Makeup Lady was just Old Lady, and I considered telling Sammi to take the wheel, jumping out of the car, jogging up to Old Lady’s car, and forcibly putting her foot on the gas pedal. She was going that slow. I totally could have made it to her car and back without breaking a sweat. And I was getting progressively more impatient with her flagrant disregard for, oh I don’t know, THE FACT THAT SHE WAS NOT DRIVING A MODEL T IN 1937, and then WORM-NUK started being all WORM-NUK on our asses and almost killed us.

And then, just as I was getting over WORM-NUK, Old Lady morphed into Old Makeup Lady by pulling out lipstick and applying it in the rearview mirror, causing me to completely lose my shit.

“YOU STUPID MOTHERFUCKING OLD LADY, QUIT PUTTING ON LIPSTICK AND DRIVE YOUR CAR!” was about what I screamed, with the windows down, followed by, “I SO understand why people get killed in Danville.”

I couldn’t believe we both made it out of there alive.

6 Replies to “Hotbed of Crime”

  1. Yeah totally not anything to do with this post but I just wanted to say sorry about tonight and I love you

  2. For some reason this reminds me of when I was going to school in Kirksville, MO, and a walk around the square downtown revealed a dialysis clinic. In a teeny tiny town, where most of the population is college kids under 25. That’s because for the townies, there’s nothing to do but go to the Home Depot or DRINK.

  3. you are listening to plush! i read an article in in new city–por maybe the reader–about that album dude has been working on for years and years.

    how is it? email me. :-)

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