Oh yea...the space is finally looking like something. Demolition and build-out is all done. The stupid flourescent tubes are gone and track floods are in. The painters swept through yesterday and today and transformed it like magic. The stock room is already filling up with merchandise that shipped just a bit early. We open in...(gulp)...two weeks from tomorrow.



Ceiling: dark charcoal
Walls: alternating here and there around the space in three tones...rich creamy khaki, silvery moss, and icicle white...trimmed in chocolate.
Floors: High gloss icicle white

I'm really happy with the results. (Kudos, John, for your vision)

It looks to me like a sound stage for a cool, stylish Kennedy-era Doris Day movie. Awesome.

We finially decided on the cash wrap. We are installing the one we found from the old 1920's cigar shop in NY. Double awesome!

Click on "heliotrope" down there under "Sites I Like" and then click under "Sneak Peek...with the do not open until Christmas icon" and you will get an idea of the kind of stuff we are going to carry...cool furniture, accessories, candles, paper goods and cards, funky entertaining and dining accessories, great and different bedding, well designed and fun kids and pet stuff...etc etc etc.

****Update 9:22...my better half Marc is dropping Love Bombs around the stream in an effort to negate some of this negativity and pettiness floating here downstream past the Dog House. Dance people!

We have a sage smudging scheduled for the store at 7pm on Friday. ONLY POSITIVE THOUGHTS ALLOWED!

T

I'm hopped up on unclaimed Halloween Butterfinger Minis and Bud Lite...a frightening and intoxicating combination of sugar, processed chocolate, and mass-market alcohol.

It's 1965. It's not Halloween, but you're dressed up in a Sherlock Holmes twead outfit, complete with the dumb double brimmed cap. The other kids in your first grade class have made fun of you all day. Your mom works two jobs and attends business classes at night. One of her jobs is at the Buster Brown plant and you are wearing a free sample of an outfit that was proto-typed and rejected, that they gave her at the end of last season's run. Your mom is single, fashionable, funny, and hard working. Her circumstances demand she be frugal.

Some days after school, in your double brimmed Sherlock Holmes cap that the other kids laughed at all day, you just wait.

You know you are different, and you wait.

You wait until all the other moms have gone. You wait even until all the teachers have gone. You wait until even Willy the janitor has gone. You stare at a fixed point of some undefined spot in the empty elementary school parking lot until your mom finally rolls up in her car.

When you see your mom's face, none of that matters anymore. That shameful cap is suddenly a crown of glory. What fools they were! That silly cap you are wearing is fabulous in the eyes of someone that truly loves and appreciates you.

Your life will be full of those moments, staring at the pointe fixe of those undefined empty parking lots of your youth, waiting for an undefined rescue wagon.

It comes eventually, when you learn how to drive, and find other people with funny hats and good heads on their shoulders.

It is what it is...until you recogize.

Peace, T.

Tonight we took the Haunted Oakland Cemetery tour. (Almost all the former mayors of Atlanta, dozens of congressmen, governors, influencial Atlanta businessmen since the early 1800's, and Margaret Mitchell are buried there.)

It was fascinating! It was a guided flashlight tour through the cemetery. Our guide would stop us in front of different mausoleums. An actor portraying the ghost of the soul that was buried in the mausoleum would creep out in period dress with a lantern and tell us about themselves and their role in Atlanta history.

One of the actors was actually a decendant of John Collier, who named Atlanta in 1845. As his ghost, he told us it was named Marthasville before that, and he decided the name sounded too small town for a city that was destined for greatness. When the city fathers refused to change the name, he changed all the signs on his railways to Atlanta, and the name stuck.

The ghost of the wife of Frank Slaton, the governor during the time of the Leo Frank trial in 1915 told us about how their house was stormed by an angry mob after her husband commuted his sentence to life in prison. Another mob broke into Leo Frank's cell and lynched him.

(The story of the Leo Frank trial is pretty interesting as well)...

http://www.ajhs.org/publications/chapters/chapter.cfm?documentID=284

***There is also a legend of a haunting at the cemetery that is recounted by a lot of sources. Near the giant statue of a wounded lion that is a memorial to the unamed Confederate dead, a ghostly voice can be heard, recounting the names of the 10,000 dead Confederate soldiers that are buried there.

Dr. Shock and his puppet side kick Ding Bat introduced me to most of the classic horror films back in the early 70s. They were on at midnight every Saturday on channel 9 in Chattanooga.

Those old Hammer horror films. Those old 50's kitcshy sci-fi flicks. They are still the best.

Dr. Shock and Ding Bat had the worst, funniest southern accents. It was hard to be afraid of them even then. The most frightening thing was their corney sense of humor as they picked on all the local politicians with their cornfed schtick. They picked the best scarey movies to show, though.

I'm old enough to remember when being scared was fun. Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster, the Werewolf, the Creature From the Black Lagoon, and The Phantom of the Opera...they were a screen away.

Hundreds of kids and I in my neighborhood set out every Halloween to go trick or treating. I remember the extreme joy and fun of filling up my bag with candy and treats, running home to dump it out on my bed, and running back out to fill it up again. We weren't rich by any means, but I felt so that night.

My neighborhood association had a really great idea this year. They have asked people to register themselves as safe homes and are handing out maps to parents in the neighborhood of registered houses that are welcoming trick or treaters. I think it is way cool that these kids are going to put down their videogames and experience some good old Halloween fun.

Marc and I registered and are stocked up on candy. I take every chance I can to feel like a 10 year old. When I was ten, I just knew I was going to rule the universe!

I mean, for real...your ten year old self was pretty freakin awesome, huh?

T

We actually are all Don Quixote and slash at windmills
We actually are all Sancho Panza and follow the dream
We actually are all the windmill
We actually are all capable of being Cervantes

The Don Quixotes are the most noble, frustrated, and vocal among us. They sizzle, strike out, innovate, and see things the rest of us do not.

The Sancho Panzas...oh yes...that's the majority of us the majority of the time.

The windmills. They thrash about and provoke. They appear to be multi armed monsters terrorizing the land, but they are basically just allegories, and are in reality just wind producing machines. E=mc2.

The Cervantes...they see it all for all that it is worth. They embrace the Don Quixotes, the Sancho Panzas, and the windmills. Those who chronicle these tales know that it takes all of these characters to make a great novel.

Wink wink nudge nudge...say no more.

***I like to give credit where it's due. This analogy aint all mine. I did have this drop dead gorgeous, crazy as a loon, insightful as all hell, party-your-ever-lovin-ass-off Lesbian professor that jerked my sophomoric mind into shape around this novel. Good times.


T