not the best day to play hookie

I skipped work to meet my friends for lunch in the East Village and buy some new soccer cleats. Lunch was great, but unfortunately an alien from an alternate dimension was also shopping for some new cleats. It ripped through the space-time fabric of 9th street on a Tuesday afternoon. All anyone could see anywhere were these giant purplish tentacles, which started grabbing shoes and people who looked like they might be good at soccer (apparently this was also a recruiting trip). Luckily, I'm not such a hot player these days, and I escaped with my shoes and headed over to Troy, Michigan to meet my friend Steve for a drink. He took me to this members-only hipster bar on Big Beaver. No one seemed happy to see me. No one there seemed that happy to see anyone, actually. There was a walk-in clinic next door, so I decided to go get some alien-related injuries checked out while I was there and then head back to work to at least put in an appearance.

stolen cars, road trips, bad paint jobs

My friend roped me into helping him hand out fliers for a new local restaurant outside the long-established local homeless shelter. I spent about two hours standing there in the cold and snow, only to discover that my friend had been sitting inside the restaurant the whole time.

He felt really bad about the whole thing, so he stole and hot wired a really shitty car for me. "It's all yours!" he said, and I putt-putted off into the night.

For some reason, driving a stolen car made me really uncomfortable. The first chance I got, I ditched it on a suburban street and wandered around until I was totally lost and would never be able to find it again. Then I found myself an equally shitty bike and rode it to my soccer game in Golden Gate state park.

After that I had to go on a road trip with my family. We got stuck in traffic just outside Detroit, so we got out of the car and sat down in the median with a large group of German exchange students. They were singing boisterous German national anthems, and it drove us nuts.

Eventually we managed to make our way to our actual destination, a very small political convention at my parents' neighbors' house. The neighbors made us dinner and pulled out the sofa bed for us. The next morning, my grandfather and I spent about half an hour trying to figure out how to put the couch back together. Then I had to repaint all the walls in their family room. I chose tar black, and came up with the brilliant idea of pouring it on really thick at the top and letting it drip down. Unfortunately, it didn't stop dripping when it hit the bottom of the wall. It leaked over onto the floor and formed strange goopy paint formations. I crawled around on my knees, trying to scoop up the extra paint with a spoon before it could dry. Everyone else was in the kitchen eating breakfast. It sounded delicious.