And now for a little local flair...
There is a crack-smoking ghost who regularly sits at the bus stop across the street. He wears a white blanket over his entire body and sits for hours, ghostly sheet flapping in the breeze, to hide the fact that he is smoking crack underneath, or so I was told. Or maybe he just does that so he can sleep in public in broad daylight. No one's gonna bother a ghost at a bus stop. He doesn't even have eye holes! When I look out my window and see a lone ghost at the bus stop, I'm just like: Mood.
You won't find journalism like this anywhere else folks.
In other local news, a man broke into my building and all residents were told to stay inside and lock our doors until police came. It took several hours of investigating before they determined he is no longer in the building. Thrilling.
Yoga made my morning better. I don't know what it is about simply stretching and breathing, but it seems to lift the emotional nausea that accumulates in my gut at times. A mini full body reset.
I re-read my old journals from the 90s-00s. I'm glad i recorded things in words, because you can't photograph certain moments, and words can remind you exactly what you were thinking, how you were feeling, physical sensations, what it smelled like... Details one might forget otherwise. My favorite are my travel journals! It's very uplifting to revisit my favorite places in my memory.
Afterward i revisited those places in a vr app called Wander that is basically google maps in 3d with more features, like you can travel back in time, and your 3d avatar can explore anywhere in the world with friends' 3d avatars while you talk and point to things. If facetime was like this I'd talk on the phone all the time again like it's the 90s!
I excitedly talked to someone about pogs recently and he had no idea what I was talking about.
In my day...
I made my pog board out of a pizza box covered with contact paper. I had tons of pogs and a metal slammer. I remember how it smelled each time I opened the pog tube, slightly sweet, and filled with prismatic printed 8 balls and other popular 90s imagery. The liquor store man kept a small basket of new pogs behind the counter that he'd reveal when kids like me asked for it. I'd walk into the air conditioned shop in the peak of summer in my painted converse with funky shoelaces (i was an "artsy" kid) and sift through the basket to choose only the best pogs, then go home to play with my neighbor on her carpeted floor in her bedroom. Just a couple of kids getting excited about cardboard cutouts. I even made a few of my own.
That too -- the crafts we girls used to do! Best friends embossing stamped letters made with such care. Weaving our friendship bracelets. We crafted everything ourselves. How wholesome and constructive we were with our time.
When I move, I want to build the craft room of my dreams, and maybe invite the neighbor kids to use my supplies on certain days. I'd love nothing more than to be a volunteer neighborhood art teacher. I could host classes out of a garage, or just provide a space for kids of all ages (adults too!) to let their imaginations run wild without restraint. I'd have a free library too of course! A lot of cool adults did these sorts of things in my small town when I was young, so it would be very cool to pay it forward, and also get to be a kid again too.
I'd also love to transform a porch on halloween for the kids, since I haven't been able to do that in so long, being an apartment dweller in a city with very few children. These ideas make me excited about the idea of moving.
- 2022-08-25