Thursday, in an effort to find some new creative inspiration, and if nothing else spend one less night drinking bourbon and watching Sportscenter in my boxers; I attended Ignite Baltimore 6 at the Walters Art Gallery. Ignite features a series of speakers, entrepreneurs, free-thinkers and such from the Baltimore area who basically get 5 minutes of public soap box time with a series of slides which change every 15 seconds beyond thee control of the speaker. It can be pretty hit or miss but it moves so fast that anything boring is over pretty quickly.
Originally I had plans to meet several friends/former classmates from UB at the event but they all dropped out through the course of the day. I almost did the same as I was having a horrid day at work; the weather was terrible due to Hurricane Nicole coming up the coast and frankly I just really do enjoy my bourbon and Sportscenter. I got as far as the parking garage before I decided to suck it up and to be a good Baltimorean, I even opted take the Charm City Circulator (CCC) up to Mt. Vernon. And so, my first mistake of the evening was made.
This was my 3rd experience attempting to make use of the CCC, each of the previous two being less than stellar. The CCC is supposed to come around every 15 minutes but that seems to never happen. It moves around town right around the speed of a duck and if the bus gets too far ahead of schedule (I’m not sure how that even happens) it pulls over for a couple minutes. Our bus stopped randomly for five minutes in Power Plant Live but luckily I had invested a solid $1.99 on downloading a Bejeweled game on to my phone so I was happily distracted.
Getting off the Orange Line at Light Street I walked up one block to catch the Purple Line to the Washington Monument. It of course took 20 minutes to show up - and while I could have just walked up Charles St. it would have just been too easy. I’m not letting the bus win. So after a 50 minute long CCC adventure I finally arrived at the Walter's ready to partake in booze and cheese.
The Ignite Baltimore event itself was OK. I like the Walter’s but they’ve really outgrown the venue. I don’t like being cramped in with a bunch of people and my view of a lot of the slide shows was obstructed - though in several cases it was just bad slide design. The speakers were for the most part entertaining. I thought Heather Holland’s 5 minute rant about not wanting to ever have kids was classic, even with the slide by slide decomposition of her uterus. The stuff about your friends disappearing after they have a kid was all too familiar. Plus she gets bonus points for incorporating Darth Vader. (St. Elvis guy was a close 2nd followed by the Republican Mayor of Baltimore).
After the first set of speakers, things started to go way over time wise. They brought up two other people who had received grants for projects from the past Ignites but I wasn’t really impressed with either of them. Maybe I just didn’t have enough background to figure what exactly they were trying to accomplish. Video taping your bike ride from Fells to Gwynn Falls hardly seems worthy of any investment. I am however interested in seeing how the next set of people fair. One woman had a really interesting project going on having inner city kids photograph the world from their prospective.
Seeing as how it was running late, I was uncomfortably cramped for space, and there seemed to be a break in the weather I decided to skip the second round of speakers and catch the CCC back to my office.
THIS IS WHERE THE NIGHT WENT STRAIGHT TO HELL
I got to the Purple Route CCC stop at 8:20 when the torrential downpour began I sat there under the cover of my umbrella and a tree for a solid 30 minutes waiting for a bus that supposedly comes every 15. I passed the time between failed attempts at flagging down cabs and counting dead rats floating down the river that used to be St. Paul Street. After a certain point my umbrella became about as effective as holding a sopping wet copy of the City Paper over my head and by the time the bus finally did arrive I had missed any chance of connecting to the orange route to get back to Harbor East as the CCC only runs to 9pm (another reason why it’s next to useless). So already soaked from head to toe I decided, with a bit of help from Capt. Morgan, that I would battle and defeat hurricane Nicole on foot in a display of pure manly stupidity.
Starting at the Hyatt, I battled the wind and rain across the pedestrian bridge over to Harbor Place, which was of course closed. A visual of the overflowed harbor showed the USS Constellation was floating unusually close to the Pratt Street Pavilion so that route out of the question. I crossed over Pratt and walked along the closed shops under the cover of trees, weaving through the passed out homeless bench dwellers.
At this point I started to rage out quite a bit. The rain had just reached the point of beyond ridiculous. My umbrella was some how making me wetter and my socks had reached critical mass. Pushing onward toward what used to be ESPNzone, I’m fairly sure somebody was about to mug me, and for the 3rd time in my life I’ve avoided it simply yelling ‘NOT HAPPENING’ and pushing past them. *Note you have to be Baltimore-born to pull this move off.
I safely got back past the aquarium, also a ghost town, only to find all the bridges were washed out or covered with harbor trash. At this point I take my first ankle deep steps in rain water and start laughing manically and how ridiculous this situation has become. Apparently hurricane water reverses the effects of Capt. Morgan’s Spiced Rum.
Past the point of even considering getting in to a cab and far too soaking wet to enter a bar, I continued on with what was now an EPIC quest. Trudging down President Street into Harbor East and past my office, I could have ducked in and at least changed in to my dry gym clothes, but I didn’t want to cheapen the experience. I had come this far I was damn well going to finish it.
When I finally arrived back at my car, a solid 1 hour and by my estimation 20 some city blocks later I sat in park, in a weird state between white hot rage and delirious laughter determined to figure out some way to turn this evening around.
My solution so nothing special, but it was simple and effective: The large #9 chicken mcnugget combo with a chocolate shake from the McD’s across from my house. I sit here enjoying it now, my shoes full of what I can only assume is toxic harbor water carefully considering just how much bourbon I should add to this chocolate shake. But hey, at least Sportscenter is on.
0 comments:
Post a Comment