So today I played hooky from work for the first time in years.
It felt amazing.
For a few minutes.
Then I realized I had a lot of shit to do:
Go to post office to hold mail
Get Mother's Day card
Find moustache wax
Grocery shopping
Catch up on this fucking blog
I rode my bike on a beautiful day. The line at the post office wasn't overly excruciating, and I was out of there in about an hour and forty minutes. Okay, fifteen minutes.
Moustache wax was found way up in Roger's Park at a Sally Beauty Supply. It hung on the lowest rung in the bottom corner of the tiny men's quarantine.
A wonderful blank card of the indie variety cost only $5.
While grocery shopping, my friend Holli called. She's a production coordinator for various film and TV projects. She needed a production assistant to buy light bulbs and drive cameramen to Peoria at 5pm. It would pay well.
Holli's trying to save part of my life. The part that makes me most miserable: the day job. If there's a way for me to do more of this PA work, I would have more money and more time. And that would make me less miserable. When I get back from the tour I will pursue this further.
In the meantime, I had some light bulbs to buy and some cameramen to chauffeur.
The light bulbs were found at a hardware store, along with a complimentary styrofoam cup of coffee and a peanut butter sandwich cookie.
I met the crew in Logan Square and we were off to Peoria, a 160 mile drive.
As the stop-n-start heart attack on the 55 opened up to sunset farmland, the talk of shop (gear and lenses, the nature of the business, Los Angeles) turned toward energy (windmills) and then to silence.
I dropped them off at the Par-A-Dice Hotel and Casino, located on 21 Blackjack Blvd in East Peoria. The room overlooked the magnificent river and a multicolored variety of gambling trash. I filled out some paperwork and visited briefly with Holli before hitting the road around 9pm.
The drive back was nice. I got lost on a rural road and had to make a 7-point turn on a gravel road. It made me notice the stars.
A sign on the road indicated a 24 hour restaurant lay ahead: That 50's Place.
Ooooh! This would be fun.
And it would have been. If the sign had been correct. The restaurant was closed.
They should have told that to Betty Boop, who stood holding a tray for eternity while Jake and Elwood Blues remained frozen in mid-cocaine smile. Ah, the 50's.
I ended up in Dwight, Illinois at a place called Vivid Spirits. It was anything but. A giant cleanly, dimly lit barn with 30 foot ceilings. It's something you might see after hours in the fictitious cowboy town of Crawford, Texas. The spirit of the few patrons inside was local and bored. But it was open and they were nice and served me food.
I enjoyed a patty melt while alternating between Letterman and Nightline on a variety of flat screen TVs.
Back on the road, Lauren called right when I was starting to get dangerously tired. She kept me company all the way to Lake Shore Drive. I got home around 1 and was asleep on the couch with my contacts in by 2:30.
Verdict: Win
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