Blaine had been studying his phone since Thursday.
Not studying it the way normal people study their phones — mindlessly, guiltily, in thirty-second increments between other things. Studying it the way a general studies a map before a campaign. He had a vision. He had a concept. He had, and I want to be very precise here, a "2016-core World Cup hype video" that he was going to film while walking to the new Publix by the old Varsity, because — and I'm quoting directly — "Athens locals are going to lose their minds."
"Which Athens locals," I asked.
"All of them," he said.
It was already eighty-six degrees at ten in the morning, the kind of heat that sits on your shoulders like something personal, and the whole downtown grid was partially rerouted for Hot Corner Festival. This was publicly known information. It was on the county website. It had been on the county website for days. Blaine had not visited the county website.
What Blaine had visited was a TikTok comment section where someone called @ugadawgforever2009 described the new Publix as "literally already open, bro" and a Reddit thread from three weeks ago that he'd interpreted, generously, as confirmation.
The aesthetic he was going for, as explained to me on the walk over, was "vintage 2016 energy, like before everything got weird, but layered with local content and World Cup timing." He had a specific song queued. He had a caption drafted. He had positioned himself as a man who, in his words, "actually knows this city," which is a thing you can only confidently say if you have never tried to cross Hull Street during a festival weekend while carrying a phone at chest height filming a hype reel.
We found the detour at the corner. We found another detour after that. Blaine filmed both of them, pivoting immediately to a "documentary lens," which meant he tilted the camera slightly and started narrating under his breath like a field correspondent.
The Publix, when we finally got within visual range of it, was a construction site. A full, active, vertical construction site. There were cranes. There was signage. There was a man in a hard hat who looked at Blaine's phone and then at Blaine and made the specific face of someone who has seen this before but has not yet made peace with it.
"The Reddit post said it was open," Blaine said.
"The Reddit post was from before they broke ground," I said.
He stood there for a moment in the full sun, t-shirt already going dark at the collar, phone still raised like he hadn't fully committed to lowering it. Somewhere behind us, down toward Washington Street, a band was doing a sound check for the festival, something with real brass and momentum, the kind of sound that makes a city feel like it's happening. The air smelled like funnel cake and hot pavement.
Blaine slowly turned the camera toward the construction site. Held the shot. Added a pan.
"This is actually better," he said. "This is like, metaphorical."
"What is it a metaphor for."
"Growth," he said. "The city and also me."
He posted it twenty minutes later from a bench in the shade, where we were splitting a lemonade from a vendor who had correctly identified where people would end up after making bad decisions in the heat. The caption said: found the new Publix (it's not done yet but honestly neither am I) with a World Cup flag emoji and a small Athens flag emoji that I'm not sure is the right Athens but he used it sincerely.
It got four hundred and twelve likes by evening. Someone in the comments said "this city jumps off bro." Someone else said "the Varsity erasure is real and I am not okay." Blaine responded to every single one with genuine enthusiasm, like a man who had executed a plan perfectly.
Here's the thing about Blaine, and I mean this warmly, I mean this with my whole chest: he walked forty-five minutes in ninety-degree heat through two festival detours and a road closure to film a construction site by accident, and he came out of it feeling like he'd cracked something open.
And the city was loud and bright and full of people, and the lemonade was good, and I'm not sure he was entirely wrong.