Bounceville

This past weekend Danny Glover and I hung pretty low since we had both contracted cases of death flu the week before. The death flu basically felt like a mix between a sinus infection and a really bad hangover (of the vomiting variety). But we did manage to find the energy to make it out to the Brooklyn Flea and walk around for a bit.

Whenever I get angry about one of the many delightful "quirks" of our 1920s apartment building—how one wall in our room does not match the others, or the fact that our shower spigot faces the wrong direction and therefore floods the bathroom and puts my skin in contact with our disgusting shower curtain way too often—I try to focus on the fact that we live only a few blocks from the Brooklyn Flea. It happens every Saturday outside a nearby high school. The clothes are kind of overpriced and I always end up wanting to buy a bureau or some other old-fashioned shit that we don't have room for in our tiny apartment. But it's a lot of fun to wander through the stalls, thumbing through records and laughing at weird, creepy knick knacks. Jewelry also tends to be nifty and very reasonably priced.

And the food. Oh god. The food. There's one stand that's completely devoted to different kinds of grilled cheese sandwiches. And sometimes they also have a dark chocolate milkshake with fresh strawberries in it, and to drink it is to send your taste buds to the moon to dance among the stars.

Most importantly there is a beef jerky stand where they have two kinds of jerky—classic and Korean BBQ. Classic is good and Korean BBQ, if it were a person, would be a muscular fireman with a black belt who you would never feel nervous letting hold your child. You would in fact think that it would benefit your child's overall development to be held by a fireman of this superhuman caliber.

Unfortunately, a very small bag of this wondrous jerky is like eleven dollars. It's pretty tough to convince oneself to make these purchases when one is as broke-assed as me and Danachu. Considering the fact that one of us (pretty much always Danverine) occasionally does buy an absurdly overpriced handful of this dried meat, I feel kind of okay about all the other times we've taken free samples with no plans to buy whatsoever.

Once we'd had our fill of jerky and disconcertingly meat-like tasting vegan chorizo at the Flea, we headed over to a cafe. Lieutenant Dan got mint green tea for his ailing throat while I irresponsibly got my third cup of coffee for the day. Dan of Green Gables sat with me for a few minutes on a bench outside the cafe. On the blacktop across the street, something called "Spring Fest 2012" was going on. They were playing such eighties-tastic jams as "Pour Some Sugar on Me" and "Eye of the Tiger." There were a bunch of kids eating tasty snacks and there were two enormous bouncy castles.

One of the things I miss most about childhood is the easy access to bouncy castles that it provided. Can adult bouncy castles become more of a thing, please?

Soon Inspector Spacedan decided to return home to give me a chance to read more of my assigned book for the weekend. Right before he left, he glanced at the loud party going on across the street and chuckled. "All right, I'll let you read your book," he said. "But I guarantee you will not get any work done. You'll be too busy thinking about how much you want to go jump in that bouncy house."

This is what happens when you date someone for five and a half years—you become very sensitive to each other's bouncy-house-related hopes and dreams.

About five minutes after Sir Dan left, this texting conversation commenced:


Me: The desire to bounce is strong

Me: Dude one of them is a 2-level bouncy house!

All Dan on the Western Front: Yea ever since the bouncy house real estate collapse it's been very easy to find 2 story inflatable bouncy domiciles

Me: I will single-handedly solve the bouncy house real estate collapse by buying ALL of them

Danbo Baggins: You can open up a whole inflatable town called Bounceville

Me: Tourism poster: Bounceville: We have 10,000 fucking bouncy houses. Do I need to say more things?


Five and a half years in and we're already thinking up ingenious real estate ideas which will of course make millions. Where will we be in the next five years, I wonder?

Oh right. In our fifty-story bouncy motherfucking skyscraper.