For my husband and I, yesterday was not a picnic and firework-filled day of fun. It was a work day. We have some mutual projects to take care of, so day off = getting shit done time. And since we live in Southern California, almost everything was open in spite of the national holiday, which left us with no excuse to play hooky.
Unfortunately, sometimes we get caught up in minutiae.
Around mid-morning we decided on some props that were absolutely necessary for a photo. Searching for props, by the way, is like a black hole for us. We become fixated with an idea, and suddenly a wild goose chase begins sending us all over town. Yesterday, that prop was an ashtray. Well, actually it was an ashtray and a scalpel. But we quickly determined the scalpel wasn’t going to be easy to find, and settled instead on some tortuous looking apparatus we found at a gargantuan nail salon supply warehouse, which was so filled with gnarly chemicals that I’m pretty sure we upped our cancer risk tremendously during our five minute visit. Anyway, after that we focused on finding an ashtray, because how hard could that be?
Pretty freaking impossible, as it turned out.
Our search took us to vintage stores, thrift stores, the freaking 99 Cent Store, numerous liquor stores, and my personal favorite, a smoke shop. All I can say is…wow. An incredibly interesting group of people congregated, it reeked of weed and cigarette smoke, and the girl working the counter looked like a complete and utter train wreck. I’m talking I’ve been partying three days straight and the only thing keeping me standing is the bucket of coffee I consumed. And meth, kind of train wreck.
My husband stood out like a sore thumb. I, on the other hand, fit right in. Yup, everyone checked out my man like he was the po-po, but they took one look at me and saw a kindred spirit (mistakenly, I might add. For whatever reason, every time I ever attempted to smoke weed, it made me feel like I had jam, or some sticky substance, on my hands. Spending two hours repeatedly washing them is not my idea of fun, thank you very much). I mentioned a few days ago the fact that I still can’t wear contact lenses, but because I am stupid stubborn, I popped in a pair anyway. Of course they only made my eyes redder, and every place we went into yesterday I got stares of disapproval. I kinda wanted to blurt out, ‘hey I’m not stoned, it’s just a nasty case of pink eye’, and then touch the folks that gave me the dirty looks, but I didn’t want to contract any stranger’s germs. The peeps in the smoke shop, however, took one look at my agitated eyeballs and gave nods of approval.
What a weird place for me to fit in…
So we never found an ashtray, or not one useable for our purposes, I should say. The smoke shop had pot leaf and Hello Kitty (geez, what won’t that cat put her face on?) ashtrays, but nothing plain and normal. I’m not a smoker, but I know tons of people smoke, in spite of unbelievably high taxes and, you know, lung cancer. Where do they ash? Surely they don’t all use coke cans and coffee cups? Right? I mean, what are they gonna do when coffee is declared evil, and regular soda is banned for sugar content and diet soda for chemical sweeteners, and cans are banned because…whatever? Huh?
What about you guys? How did you spend Independence Day?