My old friend P.H. is moving out of a warehouse space, so I have accepted his offer to move in. Rent is cheap and a screen and print shop runs presses during the daytime in the bay next to mine. M.C. arrives in town and is looking for places to rent for work purposes. P. says goodbye and the day slowly turns into a mess of chaos.
A big downpour of rain begins as I walk over to the print shop. A man there starts telling me a story about buying a press he cannot afford for $3,000 and how his wife did not approve. He seems to be a printing press nerd who hopes to make money off of his hobby. I walk over to a screen print press and an employee wants me to approve the screens he’s burned and the test prints for a college-branded towel. I tell him he might be confusing me for someone else and he then shows me a burned screen with dozens of tiny images on it. We discuss the techniques for printing with that screen. I make a note to call P. to tell him that he might need to approve those screens and then walk back to my bay.
I see men running around and the large garage doors open. One man is sweeping up near a corner, standing on my carpet that now is covered with white-blotches. What the hell is happening?! One guy with holding a piece of wood shows me the water run-off from the warehouse next door. Standing at the open garage door, I see a grown-over and crumbling gutter that does not take the water to a drain near the street. Instead, it is all coming into my bay! I wonder how bad the flooding would be if it rained for hours and days at a time, and get angry at the idea of just moving into a moldy new space.
I walk away and go down the street to find M. standing at the door of a well-built wooden storage space. “Do you need a room mate?” I ask him and then explain my situation. We go back to my space and he pulls at the soggy sheet rock, telling me it’ll be OK. A woman walks in to talk about business with M. I go over to my bed to try to relax and realize that the guy that was holding a piece of wood to stop the flooding ripped it off my bed. I lay in my bed, extremely frustrated, and then other parts of the frame fall onto me.
I walk over to the other bay and find M. and the woman at a table discussing things. S.N. is there too, being extra smooth and charming with the woman. “We’ve kept track of our progress,” S. tells the woman, pointing to two pieces of paper on the wall. I look at the paper and see shapes of child-like drawn parachutes in rows on one page. The other has even more child-like drawings of parachutes. S. then starts asking the woman for her number as M. and I walk away. “I knew he was going to try to get her number,” M. tells me.