Sometimes, I think I go out of my own way to annoy myself. This is called being a masochist, and there’s no good excuse for it other than maybe I’m not so right in my headmeats.
Anyway, I went to a friend’s show at the Honeytree Gallery on First Friday (this past Friday), and that was awesome and excellent and fun. Her wall of art was charming and showed to its best advantage, and I got to meet a couple of other really great women there, with whom I’m probably going to be doing some craft-crap swapping. So that part of the evening was actually fabulous and entirely annoyance-free.
But I had a bit of time to kill before the open house opened, so I decided to mosey around the Crossroads district and look at things.
Sadly, ACME Bicycle Company closed its doors last November, so as is the way of things, a new business has opened in the building that formerly housed my erstwhile favorite LBS. The new tenant of 414 E. 18th St., is a bizarre bazaar dedicated to fortune telling, dream interpretation, aura-cleansing, crystals and semiprecious stones, big flowy cheesecloth skirts, and batik handbags. The place was teeming with vague, diaphanously clad women, so I figured it might also do a brisk sideline in essential oils, which despite my fundamental mistrust of all things woo-woo, are relevant to my interests (perfume making).
So, I locked up my bike and decided to have a look and see what their tenant finish looked like and whether they had anything good smelling on offer.
2. No, they weren’t selling any perfume ingredients. They had some clear Christmas balls filled with dubious potpourri, and the aforementioned herbal wands, but no oils or extracts.
Determining that they, in fact, had nothing I was interested in, I made for the door but was intercepted by a sonsy, purple-haired matron who pressed into my hand a pamphlet explaining all of their services. She jovially and earnestly recommended that I look into their dream interpretation, aura-manipulation, or fortune telling services. I thanked her for her time and brochure and thanked whatever gods may be that mind reading isn’t really real, otherwise I would have deafened many a third ear with my mental exclamation of “give me a fucking break!”