PP: Part Thirteen

Plywood window on house, plus garbage window on car. Ahh, Richmond's notorious Jeff Davis Highway corridor, will you ever cease to impress me visually? One time, looking for houses, I looked near this area at a place which is the only house I've ever looked at to rent that had actual bulletholes in the door. Of course, I didn't rent it. A little further down got taken over by Mexicans, and used to be a pretty nice type of Mexican immigrant locale when the Mexican invasion was newer to this part of the south, but now it's overrun with those younger grimy Mexicans who grew up on gangsta rap and like to chop each other with machetes. Used to be a great ass joint called El Pollo Loco there, which didn't even have normal Mexican restaurant shit like you always see, but you'd go in and order a steak and it'd come out with peppers and onions and salsa and sour cream and some heated homemade burrito shells with a bowl of pintos. That place was tight, but every time I went, it was like I was raiding an indio village for copper or some shit. I guess that comes with being a stupid gringo though.

Slow rolling blur style. This photo was taken on Spring Street in Oregon Hill in Richmond, Virginia, about half a block from the house where we had my oldest kid. I used to love Oregon Hill. It was this scummy white trash neighborhood where all the older folks were like Merle Haggard songs and all the kids were more Paul Wall than Paul Wall, just broker because they didn't hook up with a China-dude to sell jewelry to rappers, and at first, we were outsiders - stupid college kids moving into the neighborhood and fucking up the natural ambiance of people doing crack in alleys and having regular fistfights at the main intersection, just for the tradition of it. But once we had a kid, we were more accepted and the teenage hoochie mamas even knew our daughter's name and would give her ghetto barbie dolls where the head would fall off when you actually played with it. About the time we moved out, more financially astute outsider white people moved into the neighborhood and attempted to gentrify it, which made property taxes go up, running out some of the locals whose families had been there for three or four generations, and then no one actually bought the gentrified townhouses because, dude, it's in scummy Oregon Hill, so they are mostly abandoned and that has brought in outsider crackhead influences, thus making the place even scummier than before. Thanks well-to-do white people, for ruining yet another perfectly fine thing.

The smiley face sign is not actually attached to the truck, but this truck sits at an abandoned car wash place in Buckingham County, and I've always wondered why the fuck that sign was there. Like what type of business in the middle of a rural backwards county in central Virginia where the best opportunity awaiting you is to either leave or work at the Food Lion would need a giant smiley face sign? The fact somebody is attempting to sell a late model pick-up painted pink, including pink grill, pink camper shell, and pink rims just adds to the weirdness. Of course, this is within half an hour of my home and on the way to where I grew up, which probably explains to you fake ass internet strangers partially why I'm so retarded.

Oh Fulton Hill in Richmond's seedy east end, why must you hide your true flavor? You can tell from the gold-tone paint and the nice wire rims that this is a sweet ride, but didn't dude hear that Richboy song? He should've thrown some dubs on this thing. Relatedly, I was riding around the day I took this through Fulton Hill and there was a crazy awesome ghetto fab Cadillac outside a barber shop and I did a loop thinking about popping out and taking a Polaroid of it, but if you know anything about ghetto barber shops, usually there's a whole lot more than cut hair going on in those joints, so I figured it would be best to avoid terrible car chases and potential beatdowns over a stupid Polaroid.