Mark "LeahAndMark.com !" T.'s Profile

I love going to this bookstore.  Mainly because I love large bookstores that also serve coffee, and this is the closest one to my place.  I am always asking my beautiful, amazing, mind-blowingly awesome fiancee if she would like to go here with me.  Every time we go to Kroger, or Willy's, or Target, or Cold Stone, or Figo, or Ru San's... hey!  We're in the neighborhood!  Let's go to Barnes and Noble!  For some reason, though, I always call it Borders.  I don't pay attention to details as well as my beautiful, amazing, mind-blowingly awesome fiancee.  But she loves me anyhow.

The bookstore can be really crowded and it can be difficult to score a seat, which is a slight downside.  But it makes for good people-watching.  Not a place I would pick for a quiet study session, though.

DIALOGUE IN THE DARK IS an interesting exhibit/experience. I'm not sure what is included in the installations located in nations outside of the US - but I'm pretty sure the one in Chicago and Atlanta are essentially the same. The stories are true. It really is everything that those commercials make it out to be.

When the exhibit begins, you're sitting on lighted cubes which start to dim until the room is completely dark. Much more dark than any other room you've probably been in over the last few years - especially for any extended period of time over five minutes. It's an interesting feeling - of being in an open black space.

Like other descriptions of the experience have mentioned, you go through several rooms, all of them designed to be common spaces that blind people must live in and go through on a daily basis - like crossing the street or moving around your own apartment (but I'm trying not to give it all away so that you can experience the surprise for yourself when you go.)

As far as your other senses being 'heightened' - for myself, I know that I really had to use the obvious sense of sound to a larger degree, but also memory and spatial awareness - things we usually don't have to deal with since with vision we instantly process the information right before we need to use it. With no light and only information available at the time of it's use or circumstance - everything else has to be kept in your head, such as where you initially hit a wall, the path that it follows - once you step away from the wall you have to remember where it is - and this goes for the entire layout of the room - if you explore enough to map out the room in the short amount of time your group gets in each space.

Because you generally follow a path with some open spaces of probably around 6x6 - you don't get to experience the vast open darkness as much as I would have liked - because you'll quickly hit a wall. For myself, it was when I was in the middle of a room, without the security of a wall to follow - those were the times when I felt most uncomfortable. And I think realistically, these are the times when most people would also feel the most disoriented. Without that automatic frame of reference and degree of security, you're truly left to rely on your other senses.

When you run your hand along a wall, even without sight you 'see' the wall and where it's leading you in your mind's eye, for those of us with vision it's natural to continue to rely on our 'sight' even when we don't see anything. Rather than relying on other senses in their own right, we'll use touch, and sounds to help us create pictures so we can at least 'see' in our mind's eye. The effect I'm describing is a bit like watching TV with the sound off - you'll use visual cues to create the 'sounds' in your head - but for most people, sound is still connected to a visual memory. For those with sight, nearly every sense memory is tied to a visual memory.  Smell a pizza and you automatically conjure up an image of a pizza or better, a memory of eating one. One might argue that even blind people create these visual images in their heads - but what about the ones who are born blind and have never really had visual inputs that resemble anything we know?

At the end of our tour, our guide told us of another one of the guides who had lost his sight when he was two years old and had forgotten colors - not only that, but when he dreamed, he dreamt in sound. I can hardly begin to imagine what that would be like.

Now, among the many goals of this exhibit one of them was also to give jobs to many blind people who otherwise cannot work. The unemployment rate among blind persons is around 70%. While it's easy to say that obviously blind people cannot do many jobs because many jobs do in fact require sight - the fact is that all of us people who have our vision, have created a world where everything we do relies on vision. The many rooms you go through in Dialogue in the Dark really enables people to finally begin to experience what blind people have known all along and that none of us really could understand any other way - that there are many perspectives, views, and parts of this world and this life that we are missing out on because of how heavily we rely on our sight.

And I must admit, I didn't realize that I thought any of what I just wrote until now. If you would have asked me yesterday what I thought soon after having finished the experience, I probably would have just said it was like walking around in the dark for an hour. It is so much more than that.

You should go to this and not only experience it, but also take the time to reflect on the experience afterwards at some point (days, or even a week later) and not let it slip away like we do with so much visual input that we're bombarded with on a daily basis.

Metro Cafe Diner... is awesome in a 1980's neon-retro sort of way.

The food is alright, the bar is a loser, and I have no idea who regularly comes here on a nightly basis that would constitute the need for having karaoke available EVERY night of the week.

On the night I went with Leah F., Rick & Amanda W. - we ran the Karaoke Mic. When you can easily sing 4 or five songs without a serious wait, then you know that this is your night to sing everything you ever wanted and anything that you really shouldn't.

However, as the bar filled up with regular folks who were definitely not there to hear or sing karaoke, it only became more fun - As Amanda W. belts out a song by Danzig, Rick dedicates Fat Bottom Girls to all the 'large broads', and I end the night butchering Wilson Phillips song - Hold On -

You know we had a great night but that's because we made it happen.

Dancing Goats is awesome for those times when you don't feel like being in a cozy little coffee shop full of college students or art wannabes clammoring for outlets so their laptops live on while they avoid doing school work and instead update their facebook or wordpress blog.

Just a quarter mile down the road from Java Monkey but completely different, Dancing Goats is much more accessible with it's own substantial parking lot, and there is arguably more seating. Also, it's just a nice place for anyone with kids, or a dog, or friends, or wanting to do work.

Starbucks is Jealous of Dancing Goats. They wish they had coffee that was anywhere near as good as the DG-blend. With free WiFi, and some of the absolute best plain sugar donuts on the planet, this place is an easy winner when we think about getting coffee these days.

Located next door to a StarSux and barely noticeable from the street or even the parking lot, Bagel Boys Cafe is quite an awesome secret in Alpharetta and it's sad that it took me a whole year to actually try this place out.

Clean, corporate looking-but-not and with food that actually taste good - I tried hard to not come back and avoid spending the money, but I failed miserably on a weekly basis.

The coffee is some of the best I've had - and that's only because they usually have a cinnamon hazelnut blend that's as awesomely fake sounding but delicious tasting as it can be.

Couple the coffee with their bagel melt - and I'm done - all for under $5.00 - I probably lose 20 minutes on my way to work when I stop here, but knowing that if I don't I'll be sitting there at my desk, in a cold cubicle and a starving stomach - and I realize that I have no choice at all in the matter.

Add this to the very short list of reasons why I don't feel so bad about living in Decatur and working in Alpharetta.

As if I needed any excuse to give a steakhouse a chance. I'll give any steakhouse a chance. Why not - with so many ways to prepare steak and make it great - some of the best have been the most simple - because at some point, you realize that a majority of the task is in the technique and it becomes an art form for those who elevate their skills.

McKendricks is nice in an old New York steakhouse fashion. Don't come wearing your torn jeans and emo/hipster/whatever clothes - unless you're dining with your parents or grandparents who will dress appropriately for this steakhouse.

With meats cooked closer to the rare side, the beef is good. While the sides of meat is generally better quality than you'll find at many other places, I did find the taste to be a bit plain. Sure the all out beef flavor was there but it felt like something was missing. Some slight seasoning of any sort of would've been nice - although I sometimes I do appreciate a plain piece of meat cooked without anything else other than... itself.

The service is generally top notch and they'll cater to you in any way you would like - if you receive less than stellar service it's because your individual waiter sucks, not really the restaurant itself - at least that's the case we experienced during our visit to this spot across from Perimeter Mall and hidden in the back of a shopping center.

It's good here, but there are many other places I'd choose before I ever made it back to McKendricks.

With so many options for southern greatness located in and around Atlanta, it's hard to imagine any reason for driving out to Social Circle, Georgia. It's difficult to justify, to provide enough reasoning that it would compel you to load up into your car and drive nearly 2 hours east to the relative middle of nowhere.

Because you took the scenic route. The route that winds between towns with barely a name and pass by in a blink or less and before you realize it, you're at the next field, the next pasture or farm with horses and cattle grazing.

On a cloudy day you arrive in Social Circle, Georgia and pulling up to the parking lot of the Blue Willow, you immediately notice how grand, how immense, how deeply southern and traditional the scene feels. A historic house and tour buses parked in the lot out back. Not school buses, chartered buses, the kind people pay good money for in order to travel in large groups. What's so special about this place? Why drive out to the middle of nowhere or the edge of somewhere and visit Social Circle?

It's simply because of the food. The service is adequate, but it's the food that draws the people. Without getting too intense and overdoing forever made dishes, The Blue Willow Restaurant and Inn is actually a southern comfort food buffet - of the highest quality possible without going much further than the epitome of the greatest dishes any matriarch of a Georgian family could pull together for a special gathering.

Fried chicken, collard greens, mac & cheese, sweet potato casserole, mashed potatoes, seafod au gratin, meat loaf, and a host of other dishes.

The deserts are all fine, but as if it were state law, the pecan pie is the best.

The Blue Willow Restaurant is an excellent slice, of Georgia, of southern food, and of road trip destinations that should be on anyone's list of options for a day trip - when you want to leave Atlanta for something else, for something different, when the roads all lead to possibility simply because you've left the main highway and drove until you arrived, wherever you ended up.

Very few things in life have ever taken care of me as well as my vehicles - even when I've treated them so poorly. My latest was purchased at the beginning of one of my incarnations, the first of a string of rebirths where I presumed to have the answers until I repeatedly found myself deep in a dark wood in the middle of life's journey.

No matter how bleak or suffocating the situation, like a desperate lifeline or an extension of my legs, my car took me away - running from any problem, person, or myself, much faster than a posted speed limit.

With scars and wounds from a life of mistakes, I always arrive unscathed and as if I was Dorian Gray, my car shows how I feel.

It's difficult to trust anyone. I've decided that I trust these guys at this location. I trust them to fix my car, to tell me when it needs something done and that they'll do it right, and fast - even if they bill me professional prices with rarely an attempt at a discount I've always chosen them to take care of things.

I don't bring my car here to save money. I don't end up at this garage because they charge the least or throw in an extra tire or any other gimmicks. Oil changes, creaking sounds, belts, screeches and howls, I come here because they fix everything I need them to fix with the car that I regularly anthropomorphize.

Rather than a separate entity, it's an extension of me, a machine enabling my impulse to escape and flee, and once when love left and I decided to run away, driving all night to reach the ocean for a chance to breathe new life - I understood that if my car broke down halfway between Phoenix and the Pacific that it would only be my car's heart breaking in accordance with my own.

I wish all Irish pubs had a requirement that one of the staff, no matter the night, must always be dressed as a leprechaun. Maybe I'd like them more. Maybe then I'd consider it worth noting that a pub considers itself an 'Irish' pub. I just don't identify with the whole game.

What I DO identify with is that when you find a great one, an Irish pub that attracts customers that lose themselves, and forget any pretense of pretending to be something else for everyone else... you meet some awesome people. In Phoenix it's Rosie McCaffrey's, and here in Atlanta... well, It's not Pub 71 - but that's okay.

As the second stop on the 100 Strong Attendance MARTA pub crawl, Pub 71 was as loud and overwhelming as it should have been. Like a million-man march for alcohol, the bar and main dining area was overrun and the servers tried their best to stick to their designated cuts of area. By chance I met a knitting chemist and a bbq foodie that answers rental ads only to be propositioned by the man answering the door - circumstance and chance are lucky signs in an Irish pub.

With the servers doing their best to handle the crowd, and the drinks flowing everywhere around, we ordered food. Just the basics, a bag of salt & vinegar chips and calamari. It's comfortable here. I can see it being a Meehan's Public House long ago, but not as elegant and fake upscale as the newer locations. The salt & vinegar chips were some of the best I've had, and the soaked through bag made it exponentially better in every way possible, but the night was early and the hundred-man pub crawl moved on.

A GOOD STEAK BELIES BLOOD AND MUSCLE FIBERS no matter how you cook it - and I've had a couple of great ones. When the slab comes out and you hope for the best, you hope that it's not cooked through and what's left are shades of red that serve as evidence that this meat before your eyes was once alive.

You're optimistic that no matter what, it's not fully cooked and the bloodiness of the meat is preserved and protected at all cost. As if any side of beef that's cooked all the way should be thrown out, or served to the less worthy.  

I have to hand it to them. This Longhorn steakhouse cooked the meat to the definition of  'medium'. A fine cut from a perfectly decent and dead cow. With the gaudy 'Texas' paraphenalia hung from the walls and ceiling, joined by the elegant servers dressed in western-wear as if the Lonestar state vomited all over them, I still enjoyed my steak.

When you get down to it, a dead cow is a dead cow - unless it's from Japan - then it's magic. They don't serve magic at Longhorn but it's still good enough to eat.