When we drove up to Iowa for the Stuart Davis show, my brothers and I found cheap laughs on the streets of downtown Rock Island, Illinois. The first is a store I’ve known about for just about as long as I’ve been going to the Quad Cities: Hyman’s. Hilarious for those of us who have crude senses of humor. Unfortunately, I didn’t think to get a picture.
Next we saw a Karaoke bar that offered delivery service. We got a laugh out of that idea, and laughed harder when we realized the store had been closed. There must not be high demand for Karaoke to go. Who knew?
Just a couple doors down was Thirsty Beavers. Again, adolescent humor I know. But we laughed.
We stopped by the coffee shop where we used to see Stuart play and saw this new sign:
“There are two kinds of people – those who drink espresso, and the rest of you poor bastards.”
The next day, I went up to Chicago with my mother and fiancee to visit with my new sister whose husband recently coached his basketball team to win the IHSA championship. When we rolled into their neighborhood, we saw a few amusing stop signs:
“Whoaaa.” Apparently some effort to get people to actually pay attention to the stop signs in the neighborhood. There were others, but I wasn’t going to spend my entire evening getting pictures of stop signs.
I had the more important task at hand of getting a picture of my nephew’s basketball court bedroom floor. I didn’t bother to ask if my new sister paid licensing fees to use the logo before she painted it on his floor.
We were all quite impressed by a little classroom project one of the coach’s teacher relatives put together with the help of her students:
Finally, all that driving put the ol’ Yaris up into the quintuple digits:
And when I got back to California, I hit a little milestone in my new car:
(I know; there’s a horrible glare. I hit 400 miles.) The only problem is that I feel silly making my first payment when I’ve hardly driven the thing. Could’ve planned that better, probably. I blame the head injury!
I’ve posted a new poem and a new essay to tide y’all over until I can relocate all the old stuff. Not that anyone reads that garbage anyway. Other than that, I’ve just been trying to get over this sore throat/mild cold. Apparently the Airborne didn’t do its job. (h/t: Colinski)