Saturday, August 14, 2004
(1:06 AM) | Anonymous:
What I Did On My Summer Vacation: A Disquisition
I have returned. And I have found out many things. About myself, about humanity, and about Mountains. If I may, I'd like to briefly describe the way things were. It was perhaps the greatest two weeks of my life, except that 2 week span encapsuling the day where Stephen Case brought me the Go-Bots lunch pale from BotCon. That was incredible.I learned many things. The beginning was about friends. I found that I have some. I was asked to be a groomsman in his wedding by a great friend from work. So, I take back every time I've ever said I didn't have friends here in the city. This wedding turned out to be cash money too, as the groom, we'll call him Adam, though not Smith, Kotsko, or Schwer, got me a freaking hockey jersey from the old Soviet Socialist's Republic. I also managed to usher the family out entirely out of the correct order on the way out. I think I even got someone not related to the family in there. However, it was a great wedding, and just a good experience in general. As weddings normally are. Except the wedding of rap and rock, which destroyed our souls.
The very night of the wedding, my best friend throughout life, Ben, and his fiancee Stephanie came into town. I didn't take my cell phone to the wedding because I didn't want my "Raspberry Beret" (by Prince) ringtone going off in the middle of the service. I didn't fear the polyphonic spree of sound that might come from my phone, but rather the irresistible urge to start singing "She wore a raspberry beret, the kind u find in a second hand store. Raspberry Beret, and if it was warm she wouldn't wear much more." in the middle of the service. I can not resist The Artist when that sweet as yams voice begins to belt such sweet melodies. However, not having the cell phone meant my friends wandered aimlessly around the city with no one to guide them, after driving some 16 hours. It was okay though, I just told them I wasn't 2 bright, but I could tell when she kissed me, I knew how to get my kicks.
A military friend of theirs stationed at Ft. Sill and named Josh, whom they knew from college in Ann Arbor also joined us for a saturday filled with the OKC tourist events: The Bombing Memorial, Cattlemen's Steakhouse for the secret off the menu blue-ribbon cut of steak, Ted's Cafe Escondido. That was about all I could think of, except that there's this building downtown where the fire escape is just a massive 37 story slide. Apparently, legend has it that the emergency exit alarm is broke, and you can just go up there and slide anytime you want. But, we weren't that daring.
Having done those things, we also went down to Norman, to see some of the campus, engage the challenges of Perfect Swing Family Fun Center Mini-Golf, and eventually heading to The Opolis to see Ghosty, David Dondero, and The Helio Sequence (featuring Benjamin Weikel, the drummer of Modest Mouse, who owned that place, if I can be 1997 for as long as it takes to say this sentence.)
Somewhere over the weekend, we also watched Spellbound. That one kid was all like "Does this sound like a musical robot?" and was really freaking annoying, and that made me laugh. A great flick, folks. I give it Five Gum Drop Holidays.
We also watched the video montage of The Cure's greatest hits which Josh bought at Guestroom Records, a long with a handfull of many other things. At first it was really goof-troop meets Goth, as the videos were really cheap and had lots of plaintive looks plastered everywhere. And then suddenly there were lots of like, carnivals and men in wedding dresses and stalactites and smiling men wearing goth clown makeup strewn about the place. And then it got really great. The music was a heck of a lot better than my general impression of The Cure, and I think I made the mistake of only hearing stuff from the pre-Disintigration era before (I only own Staring At The Sea). Who can blame me though, I just really liked "Love Cats", and stuck to that album. However, since discovering that they do have more than one good song, I've decided to go about the rest of my life wearing lipstick, eyeliner, and FUBU apparel. The FUBU thing is my own addition to the Robert Smith legacy, for me, by me.
Oh, we stopped in a 7/11 on the way back from the concert. Does anyone know why they now call the slurpees "Icee Drinks"? It's possible this is just in Oklahoma, but I interrogated the lady working to try and find out. I was up like "Hey, do you know why slurpees are now called Icee Drinks?" and she was gettin down like "No, I'm not in charge of that sort of thing" and I was like "I notice you're a night-shift manager, I mean, don't they give you some sort of manual explaining those kinds of changes?" and she was like "No, we don't have a manual for anything, I mean, we get a training manual, but we don't get to keep it. I don't think that was in there." I was then like "Well, do you have a supervisor I can call or something, cause I really need to figure this out, or heads are gonna roll." and she stared at me without responding. Needless to say, she was having none of my jovial spirits, and was glad when Ben, Josh, Steph and myself rolled on out with our Dr. Pepper Icee Drinks.
The best part of the weekend, of course, was simply talking and making stupid jokes and staying up way too late. But, inside jokes and jokes only funny at 4:30 AM rarely make for good blog fodder. Needless to say, the phrase "cocoa beans of love" will never be the same for me.
Dang, now I really wish I had an inside joke about my "cocoa beans of love". Someone commiserate with me in such a way that we can infuse this term with private meaning! Quickly!
So then I went on vacation with the family. It's strange, but I really, really had a lot of fun. That's weird. I'm 23. I should hate every waking moment with my family, like all the rest. But, really, I had a blast hanging with my parents and sister! I'm never going to get married at this pace. Dangit.
Anyway - here's the list of what we did: Royal Gorge, The Mining Games and Burro Races of Boom Days in Leadville Colorado, highest city in North America. We took a train up even higher, close to Mt. Elbert, the tallest mountain in Colorado. After staying five days in a cabin there in Leadville, we went to Denver. There we went to a Rockies game, and ate at Casa Bonita, a Mexican place with cliff divers, skeetball, magic shows..and people in gorilla costumes. Basically, they should have called the place Chuck E Queso..except they market it to adults. Still, the tacos were right tasty. Then we went to Colorado Springs. This brought about "Convert Robb day" in which we went to both The Air Force Academy. and Focus On The Family.
In actuality, the Air Force Academy was pretty interesting, and everyone was cordial, and so forth. Still - their football team is expected to be dead last in the nation again, as they have every year since people first noticed that some football teams were better than others. So there!
And then we went to Focus on the Family, the very home of the gay-bashing terrorists which called this site's procuror a "hate filled slanderor", the home of the 12 steps, and perhaps, somewhere deep within their sprawling campus, the home of The 13th Step as proscribed by M2 and that scary old dude in Requiem For A Dream. (Really, who knows what's in all of those red brick, green topped buildings? Is explicit sex-for-drug rings really out of the question?) I had time to notice that the place is run by female college interns as these were every staff person I saw in the welcome center. Then we went to the book store, and that's as far as we got. My dad's blood sugar dropped, and he got all sick. Like the caring son I am, I instantly took him to the car and gave him some Jolly Ranchers I had stored in my pocket. I then trecked through the wasteland of Whit's End, my own Adventure in Odyssey, if you will, and secured a hamburger. I went back through all the little kids, and gave the hamburger to my father, along with a tangerine diet rite from the trunk. I then offered to drive to the hospital. Repeatedly. Aren't I sweet?
But the thing is - God did this. Oh, don't be short-sighted and say that the fact that my diabetic father ate 2 Apple Turnovers for breakfast and then nothing for 5 hours did it. The truth is that God saw my suffering at the thought of the Full Tour, a sacrifice I was willing to make for the sake of my family, and yet, at the last moment, by virtue of the absurd, I saw the time I'd sacrifice restored to me. Proving once and for all that Kierkegaard can totally kick Dobson's teeth in, even when Dr. D gets home turf.
No, in all honesty, there wasn't really a pervasion of evil coming forth from that place. But, I did find it funny that when I went to the "Politics and Social Issues" section, there were two shelfs of books devoted to how homosexuality was going to destroy the world, the need for Christians to be intolerant of all other worldviews, the need to defend against Goddess Worship, the need to protect against sex. That's all. Wouldn't social issues maybe include helping the poor? Restoring the impoverished? Bringing justice to injustice? Learning to put aside prejudices and biases? Basically, loving others as ourselves? I thought a Christian take on Politics and Social Issues would clearly be motivated and driven by love, but all I found was books (at least from the blurbs on their back covers) advocating the need for Christians to build defenses against everyone else in the world. Perhaps it's not accidental that the section was right next to the "Grief/Mourning" shelf.
I also found it funny that Dr. Dobson's son had a book he'd written on how tolerance is destroying Christianity and is the greatest tool of Satan, and what Christians need is total discipline amongst each other (again, just from the back cover blurb). Forgive me for voicing the Olivet Rumor mill, and someone with more steady info feel free to correct me, but isn't this the same son who was expelled from Olivet for drunkenness, sexually harrassing women, and about everything else, many times doing all these things at once? Isn't this the son who harrassed a certain professor's wife? It seems to me that if his family and friends had cut him off and stopped "tolerating" his presence, rather than loving him, he'd probably be dead today. I mean, he was at Olivet, what? maybe 10 years ago? And now suddenly, because he gets cleaned up, he's going to condemn every other person who breaks certain rules he's determined to be "Christian"? I don't get it.
Anyway, after Focus, we then went up Pike's Peak, and some other stuff, I think my mom and sister went to the Current outlet. But, the best part of the trip was just hanging out in the mountains, and constantly being able to hike and explore through the woods, coming up on streams and rivers and lakes. Some of the most beautiful scenery I've ever seen, easily. It's hard to describe, but it goes along way toward clearing the head.
And, now I'm home, sitting here, listening to Of Montreal, reflecting on the best two weeks of my life. Amazing.
And, you may ask, what else made this the best weeks ever (screw you various VH1 pundits for not giving me the nod)? Well, Pitchfork did an interview with Sufjan Stevens, Alf was just released on DVD, I think I may just go see Bela Fleck and Yonder Mountain String Band in Tulsa tomorrow, the Museum of Art is showing the original Godzilla this weekend, I finally bought Harvey on DVD for 3 bucks, Tilly & The Wall came out with their debut CD - which features percussion done solely by a tap dancer, and my new band As Long As I'm Stuck In This Apparatus I Won't Go Anywhere Without You sold out the Cow Palace (capacity 12,953). Oh, and upcoming concerts: Thursday - Rogue Wave, Saturday - Magnolia Electric Co., Sunday - Freakin' Sebadoh!
Add all that up and then compare it to the negatives - The Beta Band broke up, Smarty Jones officially became a stud (like he wasn't one before!) (Oh wow, I just made inuendos about a horse) (Gross), Julia Child and Fay Wray are cooking and screaming for Jesus now, Mike Wallace got cuffed, and the Governor of Mark Miller's own New Jersey publicly went gay in his resignation speech, much to the shock of his wife.
I think you'll see the ledger is clearly balanced in my favor. Notice I didn't include the death of Rick James. But really, events like that simply can't be counted in reality, it's simply to big of an outlying factor, skewing the whole thing up the hizzy.
