growneds up
Mike: What the fuck are you carrying a gun for? What, in case somebody steps to you, Snoop Dogg?
Sue: Hey man, you’re not from here, alright. You don’t know how it is. I grew up in L.A.
Trent: Anaheim.
Sue: Whatever, man. It’s different out here. It’s not like New York, Mikey.
Nashville is a growing city. Do you know how I know? It’s not all Christian Tatoo Parlours stagnating in a languishing cesspool. There are new, foreign elements you wouldn’t expect to find in a city like Nashville.
Things like bloodstains. Maybe I am biased because I’ve walked past it every day for the last week. But there’s a giant blood pool/smear on 2nd avenue under the Shelby Street Bridge. It’s a large-ish smear of blood, that staggers off in the direction of my home, in a steady but decreasing stream of droplets, which diminish as, presumably, coagulation took effect. I don’t know what happened that night, but I can guarantee you that triage was not involved. The only thing more disturbing than the giant bloodstain itself is the fact that no one has cleaned it up yet.
Then there are the prostitutes. Last Sunday I actually ran across three prostitutes on Second Avenue. No shit — Second avenue, people. The same place to which Opryland regularly ships busloads of wide-eyed starseekers from the heart of the bible-belt Now, I daresay that Nashville hasn’t seen actual prostitution in this area since it was still called Market Street (and let me assure you, it was a post-war den of hedonism, during those times). But there they were, plain as day, asking me if I was looking for a good time. They lost interest in me when I assured them I had no interest in them, at least strictly business-wise. I was curious about how successful they were, but they had no patience for such inquiries. A shame, though — I was going to talk to them about unionizing.
So, yeah, Nashville is growing, in its own way. Look out, before long we might actually get real mass transportation and a police force that has to tackle real crime instead of traffic violation quotas.