August 9, Wednesday—
And a Few Recent Vignettes
I finally went to Rathaus Press! It’s in the old factory on the next street. We made Risograph prints! It was cool.
The Sheetrock hallways were dusty with renovation, and a Riso guy said displaced Hungerford artists were moving in. We could we have a “Hungerford” at the end of our street? When I woke up at midnight to anxiously stare out the window, I realized I was looking at the soft lighting on the Roc Paper Straws manufacturing facility.
I guess gentrification is bad even when people own the houses?
“Not trying to be the gentrifiers,” Rachel texted from Detroit. “But I think we are a sign of the times.”
“I walked into the house tonight, a queer person with a handful of Riso prints,” I conceded. “So, yeah.”
The Doctor is In
The lady across the street styles hair out of her home, we think. Two hair-drying hood chairs sit on her porch. A young Black woman sat by the front door, the other day. She smiled at an approaching second lady. They both wore partially combed out hair. I think the first was waiting to get her hair done, and the second was trying to decide if she could wait that long.
Thirty minutes later, a third woman walked to her car with a tall, “new hair, who’s this?” posture and beautiful braids. The neighbor sat against the wall inside, her red sleeve visible in the open window.
Trader Joe’s
Two TJ visits ago, a woman in her 70s noticed my T-shirt with the big black cat captioned “Chonk.”
“Excuse me,” she said. “What is ‘chonk’?”
“Big!” I said. “Like, fluffy.”
One visit ago, a deaf lady asked me something about size in relation to the 10-min farro I had grabbed. She formed a round shape the size of a sofa pillow above her head. I had just petted this fuzzy toy in Barnes and Noble, so that’s what I pictured.
Recalling the excellent graphic novel, El Deafo, I spoke in a normal manner, assuming she could read lips, and said the farro was a bigger than rice, but mostly just more chewy. She held up two fingers, and I said yes, the bag should serve two people. Big smiles, and “thank you” in sign language.
“Isn’t that written on the bag?” Rachel asked. Rachel, Rachel, Rachel.