We passed our halfway point on this trip as you saw from last week’s episode. That trailer was a coffee fueled multi-hour in-the-zone type project. I was sitting at my favorite coffee shop in Minneapolis (on our week long break from the road) and I thought, we need something to get people psyched about the show. People on the internet love montages, they love sequences of pretty video with emotional music… THAT is what I’ll do, maybe it’ll go viral like that EAT video (which is cool and all, but I swear our stuff is cooler). I thought if that video could get 1.5 million views, shouldn’t our cross country thing do the same? Its been popular, but apparently I haven’t figured out how to crack the viral code… if anyone knows, do clue me in. Looking back at the video, it doesn’t seem quite gimmicky enough – I’ll work on it for future viral efforts
Anyways, we are back on the road, and I’m going to start writing more of the day to day experiences. Perhaps you will be interested, perhaps it will just be my way of processing what is happening as we go across America. Whatever way it is, it will be spur of the moment and it won’t take all night to write. So… we are in Detroit, in a hostel. We usually stay at cheap hotels or with folks from our episodes, but in Detroit there are only fancy Casinos or hotels with reviews that reference Crack, Bedbugs or violent managers – so went with a funky hostel in pretty desolate part of town. Motor City is like no other city. Even after seeing all the poverty porn pictures out there, nothing could quite prepare me for this. Its beautiful, scary and exciting all in one lonesome swoop. If you haven’t been yet, I recommend a visit, or even settling down. I don’t know of many places out there where you can buy a house for a grand and then farm an acre of open space right next door, or perhaps open a hipster business and have lines out the door, its an anomaly. I tried to get Mirra to think about moving here and though she appreciates how unique it is, she’s having none of it. I can imagine the winter’s being bleak like Siberia. Anyways, in one last ditch effort to convince Mirra (and because we are in Detroit and are super dorky), we are going to watch 8 Mile off of Netflix. Eminem isn’t the detroit I’m trying to sell, I’m more into the stuff we’ve been filming – urban farming, giant compost piles, awesome farmer’s markets, lots of ideas.
