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Detroit Trip: the rest

2006-07-02 - 4:35 p.m.

I'd like to say for the record that every time people talk obnoxiously loud in a cafe where other people are trying to work, a dog explodes in Thailand.

By my last count, the country has to import 400,548 dogs every year to meet the demand.

It's cruel.

Be kind and unwind with the volume at half mast.

Rest of Detroit Trip

Alright, I have 4 shots of espresso in me; let's do this.

The last several days were a blur-blend of good, long days. I'd wake up, get my bearings, promptly throw an energy drink into my veins, really wake up, then get into things. There was talking with Mari via e-mail here and there, watching something from David Cronenburg, editing photography, reading Neuromancer, or any combination like that. I lived off of deli cafe niblets while marinating in the motor city.

A typical scene was me sitting in the Cass Cafe, flanked by net-folk on laptops, middle-somethings talking and eating, or the occasional bar junky. I got to know the workings of the staff to snowglobe that dynamic. I'd gotten the bright idea to bring a book during these sojourns, which made for great fun and much less boredom on my part. You can only stare at post-modern montage artwork for so long. You know, the stuff with newspaper clippings, nipple clamps, half-broken prose written in chicken blood photographed in black and white, all neatly framed. Their scat sandwich, my turkey pita with spinach and lettuce.

Nicholas was mostly down for the count in the afternoons, but we'd have dinner or do something in the evenings.

One of those afternoons was going over to Tom and J's place to kibitz and eat. I went by myself along Woodward, parking and promptly getting a permit from Tom as a gift and--

Wait I already wrote about this.

But not the last two days. Seester had been wanting to drag our asses out for some powwow banjo wagglin'. The prospect of dinner and fun loomed. Nicholas was game, I was game. We crashed at Benihanas. Apparently it was customary for the parking attendants to be bald and butch-ly spacy. The sushi chefs inside were quiet and the waiters ephemeral in that asian restaurant 'what, you have something ELSE to do besides eat here?' way.

Nicholas was supplied with Kirin and Dewers, Tania an iced tea, and me the same. I figured it was sushi, sushi is expensive, and did I really need to get liquor at 5pm? We drank, we ate, we talked about all the cool shit happening in Detroit the next week (where I wouldn't be around). We then headed back to Tania's apartment out on the golf course. We set up stereo speakers, patchily played Elvis Costello, drank, and talked. Tania's neighbor Laura had come over to do the latter two. She seemed hung up on death and ghosts. This picqued my interest, given the occasional dealings in that arena. We were treated to the sob story of a saint of a person dying before their time, and how tragic it was, and blah blah blah. I'd heard something similar from the 30-something chick in New Jersey that I saw when I was 16. Both cases involved men no longer around, attempted and failed attempts to get over the case, and odd death-related obsessions with said person.

Still, Laura seemed cool. Her, Nicholas and Tania talked about Elvis Costello and David Bowie and Kurt Cobain for awhile. All of them at one time or another had either talked, sung, or hung out with one or more of them. I have no such claims to fame, although mom knew and listened to Aerosmith rocking out in clubs before they were big.

Somehow this eventually translated into me showing Laura and Tania my photography online. Tania has seen, new person hadn't. I got the usual lines and thanked Laura, who wanted to buy some of my stuff. She then got into a mindframe of me photographing ghosts out on the golf-course, and hanging out and such. I'd originally planned on doing industrial photography until dawn, but somehow and for some reason this alternative seemed interesting.

I had to drop Nicholas off at his boyfriend's place first. That was done with a goodbye hug and directions to some place to get vodka. I ended up finding the one liquor store open in Detroit until 2am. The whole facade and interior were sketchy. The people were extremely sketchy. Thankfully the drug deal around the corner was happening around the corner, instead of in front. I got my shit, paid for my shit, and booked back to the hills. Well, the opposite direction first and THEN to the hills. I had a bitch of a time finding my way back to the golf course apartment complex. The detours didn't help, and the lack of a neon-sign landmark that'd made it place obvious was also missing. The whole trip took forever.

Tania more or less promptly went to bed, leaving Laura and I to meander, me to take photographs, and her to repeat the same things 3 times in a row to me. It was an amazing feat. She'd originally seemed interesting but I quickly ran aground on personality and mental shoals. Ghosts, death, her husband, drama related to said husband, and wanting to be a photographer. She talked about how she'd been set up by her husband's friend to potentially go for a guy who was making the moves on her. Apparently said guy had been influenced by the friend to do this. She was planning payback but on the fence about it. At the time I found this and other stuff she mentioned to be interesting. I'm guessing it was the vodka, because thinking back I can't believe I missed photographing to just sit around and talk about boiler-plate issues.

And her feet. She'd had surgery on them recently. She went on about this for awhile. At one point she declared me to be psychic and asked me to heal her feet or use a "spell" or something. I did a few massage techniques to get that out of the way.

At one point she gave me a paperweight plastic red heart, the same one given to her by the guy macking on her. I didn't know how to interpret this but took it.

She also wanted to show me some picture that she swore were images of ghosts captured on film. But those were on her computer, which was around her grumpy and awake husband. She suggested I wait around until 9am when he was out golfing, then I could see them, then we could hang out more. I said no, I was leaving tomorrow. I got back something punctuated by "whatever," with all of the passive-aggressiveness of a 13-year old, as if I were slighting her by not changing my plans right there. I wasn't about to skip a day of work for someone's pet fetish.

At around 5:30am her husband came by. She was right. He was a dick. She should be sleeping, he said, and look at what hour it is. She bitterly said she was staying right where she was. I got a barely concealed "you been fuckin' my wife?" look. I wasn't about to get between fighting spouses with a marriage on the rocks. Been there, done that, saved the postcard. So I said my whatevers, that it was time for me to go, and went about packing up my stuff to emphasize this. I got the sense I was expected by her to do something.

Nuh-fucking-uh.

So they left, then I left as dawn was breaking. It was a quiet drive back to Nicholas' place. I crashed on Nicholas' bed with Bugwee, slept 'til noon, then started packing up to head back to Madison.

Nicholas and Steven had gotten stuck on the freeway and were getting a tow. This was actually funny, given that about the same thing happened last time. So I packed up my shit, doted over Bug, said goodbye to the cats, and dropped Nick's keys off. I did this through the landlord's mailslot. This didn't work so hot the first few times. This prompted his 2 year old to be staring at me in rapt fascination when I tried to push them through a 3rd time. I waved, said "hi", pushed in said keys, then "bye."

Driving home was surprisingly lacking in mental pain. For the first several hours I was ecstatically happy for some undefinable reason. I'd chosen to completely avoid Illinois' godless toll routes, so I never once had to open my car door to throw change at a cup or an attendant. I'd continued with the happy deal all the way up to Chicago.

Chicago crushes joy like bulemics eat cake.

So the price of no toll-roads was driving through downtown Chicago. On sunday this wasn't a bad thing at all. At one point I jumped because of the sound and sensation of being shot at by handguns. This just ended up being some assholes exploding multi-colored bombs over the baseball stadium. And because I was low on gas at that point, I had to get off the freeway and refill.

Now, downtown Detroit is a 70/30 mix of blacks and whites, with a genial air and people just saying 'hello' or 'what's up, B?' for the sake of being decent human beings. Downtown Chicago was downright oppressive. As I pulled into the BP, slotted my card and paid for my gas, I looked around confused. I was the only non-black son of a bitch everywhere. 5 long minutes passed. A child across the way looked at me as if I were an exotic imported beast from some land far away. Yeah, yeah I felt just a tad uncomfortable. That and gas was 3.20.

The last few hours were tough. Chicago had left me gently bitter. Rain began to come down softly, then in sheets, then in a torrent so heavy I couldn't see the yellow or white lines in the road. This made passing semis and other drivers kinda difficult. But pass them at vaguely the speed limit I did.

And I was needing me some food. I refused to stop at any of the usual places. I was trying to stick to eating semi-healthy. This translated in trying to find a subway to get out of the rain, finding myself in a largely abandoned parking lot 15 minutes later, and bitching under a lightly raining sky about the place being closed at 9pm and it being 9:08 or something.

But several exits later, I pulled off, drove toward the indicated subway area, and suddenly realized I was in Johnson Creek. I was happy I was so close to Madison, and the coincidence that I'd bought jeans and shirts at the outlet stores there made it funny. So I went into subway, briefly chatted with the ditzy and pierced young 20-something there about the power going out and her manager possibly getting mad at her for burning the wheat bread. She figured she couldn't be blamed for it because of said outage. I said that was right and she certainly couldn't have burned enough coal to keep things going right. Somehow the joke was lost in translation.

I ate in one of the megolithically empty, mostly dark parking lots, promptly fled when a giant cleaning thing came through, then headed back the rest of the way to Madison.

* * *

And the first week back has been, well, laid-back. Sure I did some stuff for my current project, worked on data analysis for another one, and basically worked part of the time at the lab...but compared to last summer it's been really easy, really casual. It might've helped that my advisor was gone for a conference, too.

Next up: this weekend.

I'll get to the rest of the PNI conference soon.

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