Monster Art Show

One of the Sesame Street episodes Molly regurgitates in her echolalia has to do with Elmo trying to get ready for the 'Monster Art Show.' Our usual Saturday routine of seeing a move put us on a collision course with the Plaza Art Fair, which is the same basic concept. The theater we go to usually is right there in the thick of it, so my first thought was to park and get on the MAX out of midtown and bus in to the Plaza, then walk through the fair to get to and from the movie.

But show times and whatnot, as we got closer to midtown, I realized the movie I was wanting to see, mother!, would start pretty soon and my second choice was over an hour later.



Whatever the director may say about telling the story of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel and God and all that, I see this as a perfect expression of the effects of fame and how easy it is for someone to chose the adoration of nameless masses over the genuine love of one person, no matter what consequences come.

So we got parked, level five instead of the usual two and got to the movie, and after I went walking through the fair with Molly. I can't tell, sometimes she seems to dig this stuff, sometimes she seems to think it's bullshit. When we got heading back the direction of the car she got hard to keep up with and usually I'm prompting her to come on, so I guess that's a thumbs-down review.

So we got to the parking garage, almost to the elevator, when Mo peeled off. I almost got a hold of her arm to steer her down to a seated position on the curb, instead she fell down and hit her head. Not hard, from what I could tell, shoulder first, and the head didn't go down fast like it would if the neck was limp at the time. But still.

It was a seizure. About a minute to ninety seconds I think, it's hard to tell, when someone you love and are supposed to be protecting seizes, time gets distorted, take my word for it. Seconds become weeks, it's true.

Thanks to the art fair, there were a lot of passers by to witness this, so while I'm holding her jerking head to keep it from hitting the pavement a few more times, I'm trying in vain to tell well-meaning bystanders that this isn't a 9-11 situation. The kid has had so many seizures and been transported after so many of them, it's not that I'd never go that way, but it would take more than this. As ridiculous as that sounds to the uninitiated. If I thought she'd hit her head hard enough to have concussion issues, if she'd say puked in the aftermath or acted otherwise out of the norm for postictal Molly, I wouldn't have hesitated to let the paramedics transport her but as it is I signed the waiver and went and got the car.

One of the EMT's was asking her, "what's your name?" And when he got nothing, was like, we have to transport when they can't even give us a name. I'm like, trust me, before the seizure you'd have have gotten the same not-answer. If you ask her "how are you" she'll say "happy" even through tears. I get that the feedback you're getting is outside the norm but for this kid, it's normal as grilled cheese sandwiches and wearing out Liz Phair videos on YouTube.

As they by default loaded her onto the gurney and into the ambulance even as I tried to tell them the ambulance was overkill, just give us a golf cart ride up to the fifth floor where I'm parked, I think I felt a little like Jennifer Lawrence's character in mother!, it's hard to not be listened to. Not be heard. I'm not taking concussion risks lightly, my wife has a TBI with profound consequences. A friend of mine almost lost a kid to a brain bleed after a skateboard incident and he was totally ready to sign off to not transport his kid who was just a couple of hours later in emergency surgery. I get it, but I saw the impact, it didn't look severe, and Molly wasn't acting differently than she does when she has one of these on a nice soft couch or something.

And she was fine. She soon after ate a couple of egg rolls and a bag of 'cheese chips' (her favorite snack of all time, Sour Cream & Cheddar Ruffles), guzzled some Diet Coke, came home and watched a little YouTube, unloaded the dishwasher and slept like a baby.

Confluence

So I set out to ride 70 miles last Saturday, RAGBRAI is coming up fast and my conditioning ain't what it was two years ago. My friend Michelle was having a bicycle pub crawl birthday party that evening, so I figured I'd try to include that in it. Between the heat, wind and social interactions, I got to the Red Front where the wild rumpus was to begin exhausted. And with text messages from my wife to bring home groceries.

I ended up at home with barely over 60 miles, having bailed on my friend's party without even getting a good photo of her. I got a couple of our mutual friends pretty good, Pete and Ann, but Michelle doesn't dig being photographed and it takes some time and frames to get her with her guard down. I guess given how she feels about being photographed, my birthday present to her is her picture isn't in this blog post.

It's not much of a gift, it would have been better if I hadn't burned myself out before the party.

Oh, and I got a pic of the new sculpture in the West Bottoms, Confluence. I'm not sure I get it but I think I like it.

Midtown Tags

I used to be fairly obsessed with documenting the tags that beautify Kansas City. Then I got, uh, distracted or something. But these new-ish pieces off Broadway and Westport Road were worth stopping to shoot. They've blacked out the murals that were there last time I explored this alley with my Nikon.

Scribe at Work

So riding home from work, looking to meet up with Corinna, she texts me that Scribe is working at Foxx down on the Boulevard.

Scribe is one of my favorite artists, a national treasure really. I've done my best to photograph all his work, but he's too diligent for that to be a real possibility. But I do have a poster sized print of a photo I took of his Resound Fields II billy goat on the All Packaging building on my living room wall. You might notice it on this blog as the wallpaper, too.

When you have the chance to witness greatness, you do it.

Trashboat Regatta VII

I wasn't going to float the Regatta this year. What with planning the Post Modern Pentathlon, extra hours at work because it's an election year, building a boat just didn't seem to be in the cards. Plus, I did it last year so I reasoned it was Corinna's turn, I'd hang with Mo and take pictures. I'd arranged for the following weekend to be my bachelor weekend on account of aforementioned Pentathlon.

So then Corinna dug out the hot tub lid that has been down the river so many times now (it wasn't part of H.M.S. Charlie Foxtrot last year, but it was part of Safety Third, H.M.S. Detour, H.M.S. Road Closed, and the unnamed first boat we went down that was the trashboat analog to those massive cargo ships that made them build a new Panama Canal.

Corinna hauled the boat to Kaw Point with her bike, and me and Mo went there by car, floated the river and Corinna picked us up after. A team effort, she wasn't feeling up to the float, I wasn't feeling like towing a barge with my bike, and Mo was definitely keen on floating the river.

Mo answers no to pretty much every option we give her for activities. Going to the movies, getting a Sprite, these are exceptions to the rule, but generally she's a No Nelly across the board except for watching YouTube on her tablet. So imagine my surprise when we were tucking her in on Saturday and asked if she wanted to float the Trashboat Regatta. She'd done so two years ago, and it must have been a positive experience because she answered with a resounding 'Oh yay yay!' At that point, I couldn't not go.

So go we did. I bought a half a case of Sprite to go with a few PBRs in the cooler on board ship and off we went. Well, everyone left all of a sudden, even before Michelle said go, and we scrambled down and got in the water to demonstrate the power of Slow.

This is not the first time the trashboat I'm on has been DFL, not the first time it's been the slowest craft on the water. I don't know why, it seems like we're all on the same current but the rest of the boats just drop me like a bad habit.

I guess I'm extra glad the route got reset to Kaw Point to the park right past Pile of Debris Casino. Michelle had, for entirely sensible reasons, planned to have us put in on the Kaw at 7th Street and pull out at Kaw Point. Sensible, for sure, but compared to the Missouri, the Kansas River speaks in quarter inches. And given how slow I seem to float on the fast, dredged Missouri, I might still be 100 yards downstream from 7th Street if that launch hadn't been, in Michelle's words, locked up tighter than the Seventh Seal.

There are definitely dangers to the Missouri. You want to keep between the bridge supports, getting pinned against one of those is a Mistake. And getting over to the edge for the pull out, you need to plan ahead on that shit. But other than that, it's relatively tame for the stretch we float. And there are two jet boats full of firefighters just dying for something interesting to do like save your ass.

Friends on bikes followed us down the river as usual. And as usual, I had to call out to them, where is your boat? You can't be too broke to float the Trashboat Regatta, the rules say you can't spend over $100 and most of us are way, way under budget.

Lots of stuff people throw away is perfectly buoyant. And just ask my kiddo, there's not much more fun things to do of a Sunday afternoon than to float on some trash down the Muddy Mo.

Michelle did promise that the trophies would 'blow.' But I like mine. I liked mine last year, too, it's proudly displayed on my desk at work. This year's has the bonus that it included a bottle of Two Buck Chuck cab sauv. I'm not a big wine drinker, but when I do drink wine I like big, dry reds and this is one of those.

The Cure for the Motel Blues

I don't mind camping, but with a CPAP, I have to camp near an outlet. Then there's the climate control issue: on RAGBRAI last year, I camped out and there were so many nights when I was bone exhausted but it was almost impossible to fall asleep in the heat of the tent. So while my wife generally prefers tent camping, I generally prefer a bed in a climate controlled environment. Except it's expensive.

When I decided to register to judge in Indianapolis at the Indiana Brewers' Cup, I got on Expedia and started looking for bargain motels. I thought, since the competition is part of the Indiana State Fair, that I was actually going to be there during the Fair: which I figured might mean camping at the fairgrounds was a possibility but a lousy one, with the noise of a State Fair and a definite possibility of blistering heat through the night. I planned to bring a bicycle, that's just common sense: who wants to wade through 50,000 Hoosiers in their cars in an automobile when a bicycle gets you right to the freaking door?

Anyway, I'm searching Expedia for cheap thinking that I'm probably going to be out, minimum, $80 a night. And I see $26. It seemed so impossible (even a joint with bed bugs runs more than that in Motel Land), I called the place. The girl who answered said "Yes, that is the rate, unless you want to camp, that would only be $10, and oh wait, we're sold out for camping that weekend. Or unless you want a private room."

So what you get for $26 is everything I ever wanted in a motel room: a 110 outlet for my CPAP and iPhone charger, and a bed in an air conditioned environment. It's a bunk bed in a coed dorm, but I'm just going there to sleep, and I'm a sound sleeper.

And as I enjoyed the first Three Floyd's Alpha King I've had since the Kansas City Bier Meisters hosted the National Homebrewer's Conference (in Y2K if memory serves), I got to thinking: motel rooms are fucking depressing. A hostel is not, it is chock full of people from all over the country and world, who have an international pot luck on a nightly basis ("I have more salad than I can eat...I love free food, and it's healthy food...help me finish this bottle of wine...")

A hostel is full of vibrant, interesting people, a motel room has HBO, a parody of art on the wall, and if you're lucky a mini fridge (where a hostel has a kitchen, so if you're feeling a little broke restaurant-wise, you can just go to a grocery store and cook up as if you were home).

I told Nick (from Brazil, about to get his mechanical engineering degree and move to Italy, talk about interesting folk), I didn't know there were hostels in the United States. Nick said, 'this might be the only one.' But then Sam (from Wisconsin) piped up and said, no, there's not a lot of them but they exist, mainly in big cities. Sam said there was one in Chicago that tried to keep Americans out, be strictly international, but he got to crash there when he had a Japanese girlfriend.

The only real drawback I could see to the hostel is I have trouble putting myself to bed. It's not insomnia, once I head to the dorm and put on my CPAP it's pretty much lights out, the moans of Marley's ghost won't wake me. I'm not even aware of my hostel mates coming and going in the morning and whatnot. But while there's a half dozen interesting people having a rambling conversation in the living room, how can I go to bed? Even as I try to get there, I find myself on multiple digressions and sidetracks and tangents. So I guess if I'd payed three times as much, I could have spent my three nights in Indy in some shitty isolation chamber watching a few minutes of cable TV to remind myself why I quit owning a TV or a cable subscription, and gone to the Brewers' Cup sessions (and my drive home) better rested? No sale.

No, from now on, if I'm looking for overnight accommodations I'm searching for hostels first.