My birthday was
Tuesday, but I’ll start a few days before.
I was at an art show in Northville Michigan, more or less a suburb of Detroit. Sunday night after the show, feeling some combination of gross and sweaty and completely exhausted as always, a woman who was more or less my neighbor at the show that I hadn’t spoken to for more than 30 seconds all weekend offered to let me use her shower at her hotel room. So I showered, felt like a million bucks, snacked on some grapes and cheese she had in her fridge and we talked for hours about all kinds of stuff. She had lived in Trinidad for years and had great stories for that as well as many an art show story : as we all do. So then I turn in after this and had sort of made plans for the following day with the most unusual booth sitter I’ve ever met. He’s not an unusual person, but booth sitters are typically 75 year old ladies, and he’s a 30 something year old chef who just has an affinity for supporting the arts and had invited me over for breakfast and a driving tour of Detroit. Monday morning I wake up, after a glorious night of sleep in the parking lot of the hotel that I had showered in the night before, all 4 gallons of my filtered water I keep in the RV were empty so I just decided to start driving to whole foods in Ann Arbor to have breakfast and refill my water because whatever, who really needs to see Detroit, right?. About 10 minutes into my drive, my booth sitter wakes up and calls about breakfast and our driving tour of Detroit so I turn around and of course his house is like one street over from where I had been parked the night before – so no big deal, just a little morning joy ride, I get like 8 miles per gallon so who cares. Haha. (sarcasm)
We make breakfast, he’s got a badass herb garden and I don’t know if I’m going to be able to accurately describe how hilarious the timing of this situation was, but I’m going to try. So we’re walking back inside after breakfast (we ate in the backyard) where beans was hanging out, laying in the grass, and trying to steal pieces of egg, and he sits down a bottle of juice on the step, to have a free hand to open the door, his other hand has a some other dishes in it. And I call to beans to come back inside (she’s just smelling around the yard) and like a bat out of hell (she often does this when she’s going inside or outside) just sprints towards the door and has to be the first through, he doesn’t realize she’s coming, she doesn’t realize that he isn’t opening the door just for her and just as he picks back up the bottle of juice to walk inside she just barrels into it knocking the bottle out of his hand and one of the dishes out of his other spilling the juice all over the steps but luckily not breaking the dish. We both cracked up, and I’m now sitting here at my favorite cafe in greater Cleveland in my pajamas, drinking a smoothie recapping this story and cracking up again as I notice the fully made-up ladies sitting around me glancing my way to see if I’m crazy.
So the driving tour of Detroit was largely as you might expect – Detroit… I mean its not Maui. But we went to a “beach” (I use this term verrrrryyyyy loosely, so loosely, I don’t even want to use it, but that’s what everyone else calls it because it’s a dirt area next to a river) where this girl who was super duper pale in the strangest bathing suit I’ve ever seen was slathering on sunscreen but didn’t have a towel to lie on(??). My Booth sitter asked her a question and I’m not even going to try to recall the hilarity of the conversation but I couldn’t keep it together, I was actually laughing while she was talking. The only thing I can even remember was her saying with a completely straight face “I’m taking my tan very seriously this summer” and I think it all went blurry after that- the dryness of her delivery of that comment just really hit my funny bone. As we walked away I was informed that she was a hipster and I guess I’ve never really thought of what a ~girl~ hipster would be. There are no hipsters in Maui, there are no hipsters in key west, and there are no hipsters in my RV, so my personal experience is very limited, but my booth sitter would have put his entire life savings on the fact that she doesn’t own a car, is a barista, is going to college for some unemployable liberal arts degree and racking up as much student loan debt as possible, and likes craft beer.
I was at an art show in Northville Michigan, more or less a suburb of Detroit. Sunday night after the show, feeling some combination of gross and sweaty and completely exhausted as always, a woman who was more or less my neighbor at the show that I hadn’t spoken to for more than 30 seconds all weekend offered to let me use her shower at her hotel room. So I showered, felt like a million bucks, snacked on some grapes and cheese she had in her fridge and we talked for hours about all kinds of stuff. She had lived in Trinidad for years and had great stories for that as well as many an art show story : as we all do. So then I turn in after this and had sort of made plans for the following day with the most unusual booth sitter I’ve ever met. He’s not an unusual person, but booth sitters are typically 75 year old ladies, and he’s a 30 something year old chef who just has an affinity for supporting the arts and had invited me over for breakfast and a driving tour of Detroit. Monday morning I wake up, after a glorious night of sleep in the parking lot of the hotel that I had showered in the night before, all 4 gallons of my filtered water I keep in the RV were empty so I just decided to start driving to whole foods in Ann Arbor to have breakfast and refill my water because whatever, who really needs to see Detroit, right?. About 10 minutes into my drive, my booth sitter wakes up and calls about breakfast and our driving tour of Detroit so I turn around and of course his house is like one street over from where I had been parked the night before – so no big deal, just a little morning joy ride, I get like 8 miles per gallon so who cares. Haha. (sarcasm)
We make breakfast, he’s got a badass herb garden and I don’t know if I’m going to be able to accurately describe how hilarious the timing of this situation was, but I’m going to try. So we’re walking back inside after breakfast (we ate in the backyard) where beans was hanging out, laying in the grass, and trying to steal pieces of egg, and he sits down a bottle of juice on the step, to have a free hand to open the door, his other hand has a some other dishes in it. And I call to beans to come back inside (she’s just smelling around the yard) and like a bat out of hell (she often does this when she’s going inside or outside) just sprints towards the door and has to be the first through, he doesn’t realize she’s coming, she doesn’t realize that he isn’t opening the door just for her and just as he picks back up the bottle of juice to walk inside she just barrels into it knocking the bottle out of his hand and one of the dishes out of his other spilling the juice all over the steps but luckily not breaking the dish. We both cracked up, and I’m now sitting here at my favorite cafe in greater Cleveland in my pajamas, drinking a smoothie recapping this story and cracking up again as I notice the fully made-up ladies sitting around me glancing my way to see if I’m crazy.
So the driving tour of Detroit was largely as you might expect – Detroit… I mean its not Maui. But we went to a “beach” (I use this term verrrrryyyyy loosely, so loosely, I don’t even want to use it, but that’s what everyone else calls it because it’s a dirt area next to a river) where this girl who was super duper pale in the strangest bathing suit I’ve ever seen was slathering on sunscreen but didn’t have a towel to lie on(??). My Booth sitter asked her a question and I’m not even going to try to recall the hilarity of the conversation but I couldn’t keep it together, I was actually laughing while she was talking. The only thing I can even remember was her saying with a completely straight face “I’m taking my tan very seriously this summer” and I think it all went blurry after that- the dryness of her delivery of that comment just really hit my funny bone. As we walked away I was informed that she was a hipster and I guess I’ve never really thought of what a ~girl~ hipster would be. There are no hipsters in Maui, there are no hipsters in key west, and there are no hipsters in my RV, so my personal experience is very limited, but my booth sitter would have put his entire life savings on the fact that she doesn’t own a car, is a barista, is going to college for some unemployable liberal arts degree and racking up as much student loan debt as possible, and likes craft beer.
So this prompted our now Hipster driving tour of Detroit-
for my educational purposes of course.
Next on the list was juice, I love fresh pressed juice and there is a
company called “drought” that I guess his friend owns that sells cold pressed
juice in the strangest of places. We
walk into this weird, I guess hipster, boutique
that happens to have a juice bar in the middle of it. The guy manning the juice bar starts telling
me they used to be next door at a place he assumed I’d heard of, but obviously hadn’t
so he decided to show me that place too. As we walk out of the juice
bar/boutique, I said that was the most hipster thing I’d ever seen. And I was
wrong. So next door was a store that
made custom fixed gear bicycles with leather seats that had their name on them
and leather wallets and watches. And there
was an espresso bar in there. And the place was packed! Packed full of old
ladies and people who I would have never in a million years guessed would be
purchasing bikes or watches- I guess wallets make more sense, but this is just
a world that I am not part of I guess.
And in conclusion THAT was the most hipster thing I’ve ever seen.
So later I drive to Toledo and was planning to get a tattoo the following day on my birthday, but just decided to go ahead and do it Monday night instead. I go into the tattoo shop and its pretty normal, the artist who tattooed me was everything you expect in a tattoo artist and as we’re mixing a bunch of colors to come up with the perfect shade of blue for my little finger wave, he mentions that all of the inks are vegan. I had never thought of them not being, but said that was cool and that I’m vegetarian, turns out so is he and he told me about an Indian restaurant in town that’s awesome. I actually had been planning on getting Indian food myself for my birthday and he invited to take me for my birthday instead.
So Tuesday morning I go to this park to paint for a little
while and run before Indian lunch. I fed
beans some salmon I had gotten her the day before as my birthday present to
her. As I’m painting, like 20 minutes
later she walks to the door to go out and I said no, until she started heaving
so I let her out and she puked up all the wild caught Icelandic salmon I had
just fed her :/. Or so I thought.
Because
about 10 minutes after that she puked up even more, but atleast it was
outside. I painted some more, we went
for a jog, then went and met up with the tattoo artist and he drives none other
than a hearse!!! It went with the whole persona to a tee. It was just
perfect. Once upon a time when I was in
8th grade I think, I went with a friend of mine from school to the
mall for her birthday in a limo because her dad owned the company, and now, 15
years later, I’m having birthday Indian lunch buffet in a hearse with stickers
of bats and spider webs and all things Halloween on the sides. Movin’ on up!
And now I’m 28
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