Our house was not a very, very, very fine house

A shack from my past, plus my weekly shareables: Badass Olympians, Scott Van Pelt + Jon Stewart, and HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS

The house on Oconee Hill, circa 2015

I just spent three delightful days in Athens, Georgia—my old college town—doing a DOGLAND book event and speaking to students in UGA’s masters of fine arts program in narrative nonfiction.

It’s been 42 years since I arrived at UGA as a freshman, and when I’m there I always drive around to see what’s still around and what’s changed. One place I have to check is our old house on Oconee Hill.

I didn’t take a picture this year because there were people outside and I didn’t want to be the weird guy taking pictures of their house. But it looks the same now as it looked in the picture above, back in 2015. And it looks pretty much the same now as it when the five of us moved in there in the fall of 1985.

I’d lived in a dorm my first year, then apartments my sophomore and junior years, but had never lived in a cool old house like some of my friends and classmates. This turned out to be … not such a cool old house.

The day the first two of us moved in, a burst water pipe made a geyser in our front yard. (This led to us going to the dorm to get showers, which led to my friend David’s wallet getting stolen, which eventually led to us filling out police affidavits weeks later affirming that we had spent one particular Saturday night in Atlanta eating barbecue and watching “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure.” But that is a whole other story.)

At some point someone had done renovations to the house, possibly while blindfolded. The front hallway led … nowhere. It connected no rooms. The front bathroom was tiny but had a shower; the back bathroom was huge but had no shower and a toilet that was kind of in the middle of the room.

The house was built on a slope, front to back, and the back door opened onto a 15-foot drop, straight down. No back stairs. I’m pretty sure this was illegal. We double-locked that door and jammed it shut for parties.

We had many parties there. At one of them, a young woman threw up on her jacket, tossed it in the living-room closet and left it there. (Yes, the living room had a closet.) We did not discover she had done this until a couple of days later when we were trying to figure out what had died in the house.

Another time, a bird got trapped in the space between the drop ceiling and the actual ceiling and terrorized us for days. I can’t remember how we got it out. Maybe we opened the back door and let it plummet to its death.

We had a great old green couch, perfect for sleeping. But I honestly can’t remember another stick of furniture, besides our beds, in the entire house.

In Kristy Woodson Harvey’s new book A HAPPER LIFE, the story centers around an old house in Beaufort, North Carolina. Kristy tells the story through multiple narrators, and the narrator that starts the story off is the house itself. It made me wonder about the stories that house on Oconee Hill could tell. Surely we weren’t the only college students to spend a year there. No doubt there were others even stranger and slovenlier than us. That house has seen some shit.

And I go back and take a look, every time I go to Athens. Partly to see if it’s still standing. Partly because I miss it, and miss those times, as weird and crazy as they were. I wouldn’t trade any of it. Except maybe for the vomit in the closet thing.

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10 things I wanted to share this week:

1. This week’s guest on SOUTHBOUND was LB Prevette, who grew up on a chicken farm in Wilkes County, NC and is now a fellow with the Aspen Institute, doing good works in her hometown. She also co-owns a cocktail bar called Merle’s that is on my list the next time I’m up that way.

2. I was also on CHARLOTTE TALKS with Mike Collins this week, as they replayed the episode where Mike talked to me about DOGLAND.

3. My weekly for WFAE was why Roy Cooper made sense as a vice presidential candidate. This was relevant for about 10 hours before he withdrew his name.

4. Another brilliant story by Eli Saslow, the best newspaper reporter in America, on an ailing right-winger who found his tribe among conspiracy theorists … and was one of many bamboozled by a “miracle cure” called a medbed. Note how Eli takes a main character that many would consider a fool and makes you see his humanity. (NYT)

5. If you’ve read DOGLAND, you’ll remember the section where ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt talks about the loss of his family dog, Otis. This week, on his podcast/YouTube show, he talked to Jon Stewart about Stewart’s dog, Dipper, who also recently died. Otis and Dipper. You might need a tissue or two.

6. The Olympics! This year’s Olympics produced one of my new favorite photos of all time: this brilliant shot of Brazilian surfer Gabriel Medina (and his board) seeming to float over the surface of the ocean.

   

   Here’s how photographer Jérôme Brouillet got the shot. (The Guardian)

7. One of the other heroes of the Olympics is Stephen Nedoroscik, the American in the Clark Kent glasses who had one job—the pommel horse—and did it to perfection to help the U.S. men’s gymnastics team to a bronze medal. (NPR)

8. Nedoroscik had a great pommel horse performance … but the GREATEST pommel horse performance is still former Olympian Kurt Thomas defeating an entire village of the damned in the B-movie classic GYMKATA. Why was there a pommel horse in the middle of the village? It is not for us to understand.
   

9. I had never heard of the new movie HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS before Austin Kleon mentioned it in his newsletter … but now I absolutely HAVE to see it.
   

10. Finally, here’s new music from the brilliant duo of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings:
    

    
    Have a great week, everybody.

—TT