Les Blank
various
various minutes
You are now standing on the corner of Howard Street and 25th Street in Baltimore. You are in a bad mood from yet another shopping misadventure at the Safeway. Someone yelled at you and tried to start a fight with you inside the grocery store for not moving your cart out of their way fast enough. They were quick to call you a faggot, but you're not sure exactly what about your appearance may have given them that impression. Maybe it's just their go-to insult.
The Ottobar isn't open yet. Normally you would be heading in to wait for trivia to start, but the bartender isn't there yet. The bouncer informed you they probably wouldn't be opening for at least another half hour. You wearily asked him if you should go fuck off somewhere else in the meantime. At this he looked at you a bit sadly, sizing you up to see if you were going to be trouble for him, before calmly telling you that you were welcome to wait outside but you couldn't go inside until at least 7:15. You felt a little bad at passing on the negative vibes. You've been in that position several times, and you appreciated his professionalism at deciding you weren't trying to start a fight and trying to calmly de-escalate tensions.
In any case, it's damp and chilly and the wind is blowing and you're uncomfortable and bored and miserable. You decide to kill some time watching Werner Herzog eat his shoe. You've probably seen this before, but at least now you have a bit more context for it. You pull up the short documentary on this topic and stand there shivering as the story is told about his bet that Gates of Heaven, an Errol Morris documentary about pet cemeteries, would never get a theatrical release. To be specific, he had said he would eat his shoe if it happened. It happened, and Herzog was true to his word. A camera crew recorded him cooking and publicly eating his shoe in front of a live audience. This ends up being a decent way to spend about half an hour in the cold while waiting for the bar to open.
The next day at the coffee shop you watch a bunch of other shorts that were actually directed by Herzog just to get them out of the way. You will remember little about these except for the one that involved children bullying each other over something or other. But you remember being grateful for having a hot cup of tea in your hand while watching them on a laptop screen, off the street and sheltered from the wind.
Time to choose something different: