Travel Guide – Places You Can Rollerblade To In My Drug Dealer’s Neighborhood

Are you feeling the traveling bug, but your busy schedule won’t allow it? Do you wish you could just blow off your whole day and go sightseeing, without having to spend a small fortune, most of which is already earmarked for your upcoming custody hearing, on airfare and lodging? Heck, do you just want to get outside for a while?

Well, I’m here with some good news – your next travel adventure is just around the corner! That’s right, you live in one of the most exciting cities in the world, probably, and you don’t need to move far from your own front door to take in some truly exhilarating sights! You can turn any errand into a rich local color segment worthy of the Travel Channel or Anthony Bourdain, if you have the right attitude and the ability to Google recent news stories. Here’s a travel guide I prepared for myself to turn a normally boring regular errand, the rollerblading trip to my dealer Toilet Wine’s apartment to buy heroin, into a self-guided tour of local history. Why rollerblades? Because it saves money on an Uber, Toilet Wine’s apartment is too far to walk, and I need my fucking heroin.

Here are just a few of the places of interest you’ll find roller-skating, but like in a cool way, around Toilet Wine’s neighborhood.

The Gigantic Stain on the Corner of Tilden Ave

One stop you’re definitely going to make is by that mysterious gigantic stain on the corner of Tilden Ave, which is close enough to my front door that you can probably reach it before the first person honks at you and tells you 1996 called and wants its novelty athletic equipment back. Searches reaching as far back as March of 2015 have been unable to discover this stain’s origins, leaving us to debate where it came from. Is it a bloodstain, left over from some horrific crime that was never reported? Or is it something more mundane, like mere discolored cement, or a sewage leak. We may never know, but it gives you something to think about while you blade to your next stop.

The Haunted Vape Shop

Supreme Leader Smoke (formerly Vape Escape), on the corner of Elm and Magnolia, has been open for over three years, so it’s basically an institution as far as brick and mortar stores go. And like any neighborhood relic, it has its fair share of ghost stories. Legend has it that Vape Escape was forced to re-brand after rumors surfaced about it being haunted by the spirit of Duane Sutton, who opened the shop with his brother Leon in the fall of 2014. But shortly after local regulations forced them to start checking the IDs of their customers, Duane disappeared. Witnesses who were at the Baskin Robbins next door claim they could hear the brothers arguing late into the night over the new guidelines, and at one particularly heated point, Duane allegedly shouted, “Screw this, I’m just going to start selling heroin!” Nobody has seen him since, but legend has it that if you wait in the Vape Escape parking lot alone after dark, you can still hear the beep of his e-cigarette. Toilet Wine apparently lives in Duane Sutton’s old apartment, which makes this particular local “haunt” a required stop.

The Scalded Dog Tavern, From Which I Have Been Banned For Life On Three Separate Occasions

The Scalded Dog Tavern is a tacky, hideous building full of unattractive people. Its only noteworthy contribution to local history is a patio that stretches too far out over the sidewalk, so you have to slow way down or risk spilling out into the street, and of course you can’t keep your balance on rollerblades if you’re going too slow, so you have to grab the patio railing for balance, and the bouncer immediately reminds you that you’ve been banned for life and cannot come inside, even though you weren’t trying to come in, you were just holding the railing for balance, and who would want to go into the Scalded Dog anyway, that place is crap.

These are just a few of the breathtaking landmarks you can stop and marvel over as you rollerblade your way to Toilet Wine’s apartment. Make sure to check out my next installment, in which I’ll detail all the Civil War battlefields you can stop and visit on the trail between Long John Silver’s and the storage unit where my band practices.