Monday, November 10, 2014

Party like it's 1989...

It was a weeknight, but that didn't mean much to a bunch of slackers in their early twenties whose lives resembled an early Kevin Smith screenplay.

It was the kind of night when there were probably a half dozen people over, and the lights were out and the only illumination in the apartment came from cigarette coals and flickering candles and glowing pinpricks of incense punk and the Nature Channel program on the TV with the volume muted while Dark Side Of The Moon played on the stereo and people were having conversations that included heavy use of the word "dude".

And when the Nature Channel documentary (something about African wildlife, IIRC, but my memory's a little shaky for obvious reasons) was over, someone picked up the remote and began to surf around looking for something else to watch until we ran out of Floyd cassette and decided to go for a walk down by the river or whatever.

This was early November, and the annual college football matchup between the Georgia Bulldogs and the Florida Gators, sometimes called "The World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party", was in a couple days. One of the Atlanta TV stations had a news crew already down there, covering the hardcore tailgaters and fans who were already congregating in Jacksonville. There were people in the dark, and large concrete walls of the stadium or whatever, lit by flood lights and camera lights in the background...

...and the channel clicked again...

...and those people in the dark night, lit by floodlights, were smashing those concrete walls with hammers and there weren't any cops doing anything about it and I said "They're getting a little out of hand down there in Jacksonv... HOLY SHIT! THAT'S THE BERLIN WALL!"

And that's how I remember it.
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