homeless, but will live in suitcase

Last night my friend Cam and I went to Chada Thai for soup. Actually, we were supposed to go to Tengu but it was closed last night for a maintenance issue. She looked at my broken toe, which has a weird thing on it, which might be a blood blister, and said I should tape it for surf camp.

WHICH STARTS IN A FEW DAYS!!!! HOORAY!!!!!

And yes, I am already packed. And have religiously followed my training plan. And I've been practicing my pop ups with my neighbor who learned to surf when he was 10.

In fact today I finished the last of my errands, which included getting enough books to read (from Tattered Cover, of course), getting a pedicure (which ended up being the worst pedicure I've had since Abu Dhabi), and digging out my beach hat which is made of recycled paper but which has survived 3 trips to the beach. My neighbor came over earlier this week to watch movies with me (as a break from pop up practice) and said "you are the only person I know that gets ready for surf camp by watching surf movies and shark attack documentaries."

my beach books - for the record, I've already started reading the senate intelligence committee report on torture and it's riveting

I've also, through my end unit neighbor, met a homeless guy name Darren that I might hire to fix my back fence which was damaged when my neighbor's tree fell on it. Darren's a friend of my end neighbor's cleaning lady. My end neighbor let Darren and her cleaning lady stay in her house while she was in Costa Rica last fall because Darren and the cleaning lady's house burned down and they were homeless (the house burning down is a long story).

Darren is still homeless but has a camper and he has devised a scheme to stay in an office park parking lot because he doesn't like camping out at the local wal-marts or trailer parks. He's a bit of a raconteur and has tons of crazy stories about his life (for example, he knew Buck Owens and a bunch of other singers because his mom made vests for all the country singers back in the day; he was once given $20,000 and some city award for stopping an armed robbery in a bank in downtown Denver - he tripped the robber).

He said he wants to introduce me to a friend of his who has an art gallery on 16th Street who has visions that come true. He said "the guy is such an amazing artist that his paintings look like pictures but he won't be able to draw you even if I paid him a million dollars." I was like "why wouldn't he be able to draw me?" and Darren said "because you know things and so all he would be able to do is draw you as a stick." Um, okay. There is a side story about this artist and a table he made which Darren bought before he knew the artist. The table was possessed and caused people to bump into it and hurt their shins so Darren took it into the woods and burned it. But then it turned out the artist had made a twin table and he offered it to Darren one day when Darren was visiting his studio years after he had burned the other table. Or something like that.

In any case I've foisted the details of the fence rebuild on my neighbor. And Darren asked me to write down his stories and maybe put some of them on my blog. Unfortunately most of his stories take 45 minutes to tell and involve detailed descriptions of cars (Darren was born in a '54 something or other car), tv references, and references to events that happened in Denver before I was born so they can be difficult to follow. Darren suggested I make a video of him telling his stories and then asked if I have any contacts with TV people who could give him his own show.

For the record, I do find him more entertaining than the things I've seen on TV.

Also, he asked if he could hide in my suitcase when I go to surf camp because he's never been to Costa Rica. I was like "even if my suitcase was big enough to hide you where would you stay?" and he said "I could live in your suitcase...if it was big enough."

For some reason I keep visualizing the steamer trunks in Joe vs The Volcano...