5:44 p.m. - 2002-08-10
Wednesday
Forgive me if this entry is really garbled and incoherent. The last few days have just been too damn eventful. Like I'm too old for these sorts of days...
Let's see...We'll just talk about Wednesday. On Wednesday Bruce and I went for out long awaited massage from our friend Patty, who was kind enough a few months ago to give us gift certificates. She has just gotten her massage therapist license and is building up her business, and I had given her some art, too. We drove down to Birmingham midday and met her at her office which is in the Magnolia Financial Center, which has just been bought by some alternative, hip sort of people and is becoming the Energy Point Center. It's a classic, ugly, late 70's office building with black reflective glass, really corporate, and I love the fact that it's being transformed into workspace for all sorts of alternative healers.
It even has an organic garden in the back where a vacant lot used to be. Patty took us back there and we munched on cherry tomatoes before our massages.
And while I'm so tired and spaced out, I might as well go into the rant that has been on the tip of my tongue for the last three months, ever since we started negotiating Hickory Hill. You know, the rant about how someone needs to take all these ugly buildings and make them useable and beautiful and how that is a more political and spiritual act than just buying some trendy house in Five Points and pretending you're the most cool and trendy person in the world because of your readymade hipness...
Oh dear. Perhaps I better not go into this rant. Perhaps I should keep it to myself.
Anyway. Patty did my massage first. Patty does deep tissue massage which is not always the most pleasant type, and I had big, egg shaped knots in my shoulders, so by the time she was finished leaning on me I was really actually a bit nauseous. When I sat up, though, I realised something really exciting.
I could move my neck without loud, crunching noises. I could actually move my neck all the way around, and my shoulders were even.
Mmmmmm! Amazing!
While Bruce went in for his turn I wandered out to 23rd Street to Alabama Art Supply. I must have looked a bit stoned because the friendly sales staff kept asking me if I felt alright. Did I need any help? I spent 25 minutes looking at the same watercolour set and then realised I was looking stupid, so I went across the street to an antique store, where the owner and two other elderly folks were playing a card game at one of the antique tables.
It was the kind of antique store that goes on and on, room after room of good junk, bad junk, ugly junk, your grandmother's junk, your white trash neighbor's junk, junk you had when you were a kid. Junk you wish you could have and junk you wouldn't take if it was given to you with a ten dollar bill inside. All of it covered with a thin layer of dust and some rotten pieces of wood.
In amongst all this junk was a wall of shelves which held the motherlode of the sort of tacky English dinnerware that I've developed a real fetish for lately. Unfortunately, though, it was all absurdly overpriced.
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