Generally Discontent

Well, I sort of got up at ten with no trouble at all. I was glad that I had stopped drinking around 2 a.m. the night before, since I was more tired than hungover. We headed out for Asheville around noon and got there at two. But first, a little tangent:

Before I left Maryland, Vani's friend Ellen insisted that I go to Asheville, since it's a haven for artists and creative types. Sure, maybe I'll go, I thought. Then Seth's friend Michelle, who is from Asheville, said that I simply must go upon learning that I'm "the artsy type". Well, that's kinda strange that two women in two different states would tell me the same thing! But then another Charlotteite, Elizabeth, after hearing where we would be going the next day, demanded that Seth (who she said was being a poor tour guide) take me to uptown Charlotte to watch football and drink beer instead of "antiquing". Her vehemence seemed slightly unbalanced with the situation, but I'll chalk that up to the large amount of alcohol that she had consumed. Anyway, finally, after returning from Asheville today, I get an email from Andrea in Connecticut that if I was still in NC I should go see her sister-in-law's bed & breakfast in - you guessed it - Asheville!

So, what was so great about Asheville, you ask? Well, I'll tell you! For starters, we ate at an exotic sea food restaurant called Long John Silver's, where I had some tasty chicken planks and A&W root beer and that was good. Then we parked in downtown Asheville and walked around for two hours. It's a pretty nice place, a little hippie town nestled in the low mountains of North Carolina, a beautiful place, really. Reminded me a lot of Woodstock, NY or some Vermont town. And yes, it was very artsy. Seemed every damn building had some kind of art gallery in it, including the local Best Western.

Now, art galleries are great and all, and I fully support them, but I can't say that I get art all that much. I really don't. I mean, I can look at a piece of art and say it's good, or it sucks, or it's weird, or whatever, but that's about it. I look at art and I see something that someone else made and that's fantastic and okay, let me go do something else now. I almost felt bad coming to this town since I really had no intention of checking out all the art galleries. Hell, the motorcycle and car museum, and the earth science museum sounded a heck of a lot more interesting to me. I'm a bad artist, I guess.

But that doesn't mean that I just ignored all that art. Many shops had stuff created by local artists, some of it really good, a lot of it just plain silly. I guess tearing the side off a video camera and sticking it in a store window is art. Or maybe that was a video camera repair shop. Shit, I don't know. Anyway, there were lots of artsy fartsy things all over the place, and the town itself was very artistic in its strange-yet-typically-American mishmash of old department stores converted into art galleries and hardware stores; ancient, gorgeous banks now the breeding ground of small, swanky, overpriced shops; facets of the city twisted and transformed into art or something a little more functional.

And the people were okay, I guess. Lots of really well-dressed and evenly matched couples wandering around, lots of "wonder what'd happen if I stuck my clothes in a blender then put them on" punk-types, lots of bums. LOTS of bums. I think they have their own union for bums in Asheville, because those guys were organized. After buying a guide to North American birds at a small, swanky, and overpriced shop, and having the book placed in a bag with the word "NOKIA" plastered across it for some reason, Seth and I headed down the street to find something else to do. We passed a gang of bums hanging out in front of the library, and one of them tried latching on to us.

"Scuse me...scuse me!" he burbled behind us.
"Huh?" I said.
"Issat one o' them NO-KEE-YA phones in that bag of yers?" he said. In that moment I wondered A) what his scam was, and B) what the hell he was talking about, as I hadn't yet realized that my bag said NOKIA on it. I looked down at the bag, then told him nope, it wasn't a phone. That seemed to disappoint him and he wandered off, leaving us to ponder what the fuck that was all about. But that seems to happen often in these small hippie towns. Lots of bums, lots of beggars, and lots of places that charge you twice as much as anywhere else in the world. Huh.

Anyway, we ended off our tour of Asheville by stopping by the Earth Science Museum, which was awesome. It wasn't too big, more of a small section of the basement, really, but it was packed full of dinosaur bones! The helpful and nice lady who was running the joint (and the only other living being down there) explained that this dentist guy spent a good deal of his life collecting and cataloging fossils, and after he died a whole lot of them went off to the Smithsonian and some other museum. But there were lots of fossils left, so the dead guy's friends thought it'd be a swell idea to donate them to the museum, since the guy was from Asheville. So here were bones!

And rocks, too. Most of the geological displays were blocked by the various dinosaur skeletons, and none of the nifty displays in the kid's learning room worked, but it was a nice place. And the old lady was sweet and let us take some stuff from the baskets of tiny shark teeth and rocks on her desk. After that, we made our way back to the car and, after a brief stop at a Krystal so I could experience the wonder that is the tiny cheeseburger, took the two hour ride back to the house, where we proceeded to be lazy for several hours before going back out to pick stuff up for Thanksgiving dinner.

So that's what I've been up to. I've got four days left in Charlotte, as we'll be heading down to Savannah on Friday. In that time, I need to do a few things: send out postcards, go to downtown Charlotte and walk around, and...uh. I guess that's really all I need to do. Oh, and get a haircut! Woo!