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gutterpunks in Hurley
Thursday, August 3 2006
Gretchen's parents headed back to Albany today in their rented American car (are there any American cars that don't either belong to the elderly or a rental company?) en route to their flight back to Silver Spring. Meanwhile I actually had a housecall in Woodstock today. On the drive there I saw a pair of young male gutterpunk hitch hikers in front the of the Reservoir Inn, so I stopped to pick them up. (I'd seen them in the past hitchhiking across Ohayo Mountain on occasions when I only had room for one passenger.) These two might not have actually been gutterpunks; they could have been some form or post-punk retrohippies of the sort who frequent Burning Man. These neo-demimonde subcultures can be hard to tease apart based on appearance alone; they are all fond of radical facial piercings, tattoos, and customized clothing. And even music doesn't always give much of a clue. These kids, for example, claimed they were headed to an Eastern European music festival in Vermont (one of them was even carrying an ud). What sort of subculture gravitates to that scene? Who can say? We talked a little about Eastern European and Turkish music and I told them I'd been in Istanbul back in October and had greatly enjoyed the music there. I also told them about drinking too much beer while tubing on the James River down in Virginia. The kid in the back seat was marveling at the gnarly nodules of quartz crystals I'd retrieved from my parent's back pasture, which I'd yet to unload. The only indication they gave of the scene they belonged to was two passing semi-disparaging references to "rich people" (one made by each). Evidently these kids didn't have trust funds to draw from.
If these kids had made plans to get to Vermont, they didn't seem to be in much of a hurry. I was taking them to the center of Woodstock, which seemed like a better place to arrange a ride than the Reservoir Inn. But when I turned to go up Rock City Road they seemed to be just as happy to go wherever I was going. I told them I was heading up the mountain and that they stood a much better chance of getting a ride
in the village than wherever I was going. Perhaps they were hoping I would give them an opportunity to make some easy gutterpunk money, the job known as blow.
This evening I put a huge effort into cloning and adapting the DHTML code for my generic MySQL table designer into a tool allowing someone to reorder arbitrary rows in a database table using a specified sort id.
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