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I’ve been sketching all sorts of city scenes lately and finally decided to go out to a café and work on getting it sketched out onto some watercolor paper.

I miss working on art at Bauhaus café. It wasn’t as dead as I would have expected it to be on a Wednesday night in Missoula, but it definitely wasn’t alive. Probably the wrong place. I wish I could find where other artists go instead of overhearing flirting about how she is crap with art. The cliché can’t draw a stick figure line en cue.

I started reading Down and Out in Paris and London and the first chapter renewed my love of falling apart compact architecture (as if it needed a renewal…).

I got a lot of complements today for looking “sharp.” As well as a complement from my French professor who said that I should be in the higher level class because it seems to come so naturally to me and that he thought it was surprising that French was the class that would bring down my grade point average back in high school … I kind of wonder if he thought that by bringing down my grade point that I didn’t mean the occasional high C or low B. I don’t really exude the honor class student image, or at least I don’t think so.. Then again I am the only one who wears a tie to class, or other nice (alright most of them have tears, or holes, or stains, or sewed back together with dental floss, but they still look nice) formal clothes.

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Windy Coffee. [part 1]

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French underworld tattoos at the turn of the century. The man sports a tattooed mustache intended to foil the prohibition of facial hair in the Foreign Legion. The World of Tattoo by Maarten Hesselt van Dinter. I can only dream of being anywhere near that combination of badass and crazy. Though at that point the Foreign Legion was probably still the best place for criminals to get their record cleaned so perhaps he is as well quite legitimately scary upon all of that. I find myself flipping back to this page time and time again to romanticize the French underground from around 1900. Give him an accordion, a beret, and some braces. Prostitutes who could easily kill you if you ever come up short and tattoo the names of their ‘actual’ lovers between their breasts, close to their heart. Tattoo ‘Je mother fucking t’aime’ in a tattoo cursive along my collar bones.

The adventure continues.

So, I haven't written much lately.. but from the doldrums of the end of semester I then entered a time period of a flânerie across France. A last hurrah. Jessye came to visit again and the tiny room was packed up all into a few suitcases, the largest being named Bertha, and Rennes was left behind, although not before having a picnic in Thabor for the last Saturday market... We got the essentials. Madeleines (where as I reached the front of the line the vendor greeted me with a question of, '6 madelines?') with a few more of that vendor's delicious delights, like those bite size rolls with jams and caramel and chocolate.. Then of course the impossible cow cheese that acted like goat cheese and was rolled in Provencal  herbs. And of course a baguette from the amazing bakery covered in tiles. A trip to Thabor with Jessye was never complete without a stop at the aviary. And some people watching. A mohawked punk rocker walks a little girl hand in hand through the park.