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Feb 23, 2008 :: top: Blake. bottom: what Blake's looking at.

Today, the walk takes us to Little Five Points. I have only some collected rambling thoughts today. I am very fond of lists, so let's do that.

• Little 5 Points is the first place inside the perimeter that I lived in Atlanta. After 5 months in northern Gwinnett, an afternoon of calling interesting places out of the Loaf, and one day of driving around checking out various locales, I settle on a tiny, cheap, cabana-like place just off Euclid Avenue. The buildings are flat-roofed, have nice iron terraces, and are painted ice-cream flavor colors. Within a month, homeless people are sleeping in my station wagon. In five, a friend from Indiana will move in, but not before she comments "It looks like people have been murdered in this parking lot." In 8 months, I will have an eviction notice slipped under my door. 48 hours later, I will have a new apartment. Years later, Blake will tell me that his friend Dustin was my neighbor, and that he (Blake) had spent a large amount of time in his apartment. They refer to the complex as "The Pastel Palisades." I love it and can now think of it as nothing else.
  
• Savage Pizza (where the photos above were taken) is one of my first restaurant memories in Atlanta. I've been there with nearly every person I've known well in Atlanta. My parents have eaten there twice--most recently last weekend. Blake and I had lunch there today. I've had their food delivered to both my favorite apartment (on Blue Ridge Avenue) and my new house.
• I have walked: with four different dogs (at four different points in my life); for fitness; soberly, sadly home after bad nights and stupid fights; so drunkenly I could hardly see; dressed as Nancy Spungen; dressed as a vampire; in stillettos; in Vans; in pursuit of loud outdoor, Criminal Records concerts; and arm and arm with Blake...through the streets of this neighborhood.
  
• When my parents visited me for the first time in my first big-city apartment (the Pastel Pallisades), they were early, and drove through L5P proper--past the stores and the bars, the punky panhandlers and the tourists. Their assessment, "This place looks exactly like where we thought you'd live."