The reason I stuck around to watch it was because it was in Huntington, a town I lived in for about a year & a month, from July 2009 to August 2010. & I confess I saw very little drug use while I was there.
My life was small, though. I volunteered at the Marshall radio station WMUL & did little else. Mainly I hung out with my dogs & cats. We got to be best friends, then. I wasn't home a lot in Austin.
The wife hated it in Huntington so much that pretty much every weekend - unless the weather was bad - we went elsewhere, to Lexington, to Athens (Ohio), to Columbus, to Cincinnati, to Charleston. We spent a great deal of time in a car - most places weren't on a major highway, so they took a while to get to.
After we left in the summer of 2009, I always meant to go back. I felt like I drove around a lot - I would go shopping at Kroger at night, & try to drive home different routes, try to take in the city when it was asleep or at least falling asleep. It simply wasn't that large. I would walk occasionally to Marshall when I volunteered, & would walk by old old houses that were empty & falling apart. I always wished that I had some ability to make a difference in the city, but I just didn't.
For example: WMUL didn't have many student deejays, & operated mostly on automation. At the beginning of the semester, they'd have one meeting, & sign up lots of students, but as the semester wore on, students would simply stop coming to their shows. The core volunteers were mainly interested in sports - the station was a kind of training ground for people who wanted to call sports professionally. I only met a couple of indie kids there.
The Station Manager would listen patiently to my ideas on how to increase participation, & then shoot them down with an anecdote (usually something that happened a while back, which he himself didn't actually take part in) about how it had been done & didn't work. I was usually crestfallen after such conversations. I didn't want to try anything without his backing - & at the end of my short tenure there, I attempted to help out on a live music show, & did a good deal of work, including arranging for the station to partner with another department that videotaped local bands, the Station Manager told me he didn't think it would work out - you know, because something similar had been tried before & failed.
What I wanted to do was try to invite more non-students to deejay, but of course the station used to do that & those people got mad when students were given preferential time slots. I suggested that perhaps you make it clear to the non-students - like me - that that's the case, but no, it was just not a good idea.
Looking back on the blog, I found this post where I announced my leaving WMUL - but I don't think I ever explained there - or anywhere - why I left. I didn't know we would be leaving Huntington when I quit WMUL - it was the middle of June - & my wife was about to spend a month in Madagascar, so I was going to be quite lonely & isolated. I was just tired of beating my head against a wall of indifference. I wanted to help, & I was able to do some things, but the station didn't really have listeners - it didn't stream its music shows online, for example, because it didn't want to pay the licensing fees - & like I said, there weren't a lot of programmers. I already did my shows mostly alone, at night. I would go to the school's Department of Public Safety & get a key, let myself in, turn the automation off & do a show, then turn it back on & leave. It was plenty lonely already.
Anyway, I watched the documentary to see if I could find anything of the Huntington I had lived in, & I really couldn't. I didn't see any familiar places, & I didn't say things like, "Oh yeah! I've been there!" Honestly, though, my world was, as I've said, very small.
One thing I did hope to see what a Chinese restaurant that I ate at too often which is where I first had bean curd home style. I checked Google Maps to find that it's still there, & was surprised it looked like this:
It had more than one story! I didn't recall that. It seems so unassuming.
There was a similar favorite place in Fort Worth that we went to at least once a week. I always wonder if they make any note of our disappearance.
In 2002 I had back surgery & discovered I didn't enjoy vicodin. So I suppose I wouldn't enjoy heroin either. The documentary says 1 in 4 people in Huntington struggle with addiction to opiates. It seems I was either there before the crisis got super ugly or I mainly interacted with the other 75%.
