My Dad's Wedding

This is a late post, but I decided to post it late than never.

Over the summer I stayed with my dad in Reno. I was to come back up to Sacramento and stay with my grandma after summer was over to finish my senior year. Before I came back, however, I went to my dad's wedding in August. He was getting married to his fiance, Tara.

A week prior to the wedding I went and stayed with my dad's friend, Jim, in Incline Village. That was fun for the most part. We went to the lake down the road and swam. Shit was it cold, but it was refreshing and felt great afterwards. Then later on that week we went on a little hike through a meadow next to Mt. Rose highway. The scenery was nice, but the mosquitoes were a bitch. The air in some parts was thick and black with them. . . . But even with the mosquitoes the trip was still great. There was this tiny stream that went straight through the meadow. It was at most 3 feet wide, but other times it would only be half a foot wide and ten times as deep.

The lighting was absolutely perfect for taking photos. The clouds were just faintly obscuring the sun (as it was setting). I did bring my digital camera, but I would rather have a film camera, like a 35mm or something. The camera I brought took some okay pictures, but other times it was shit. But atleast it was something.

My dad's wedding was fun. The last wedding I went to was my Uncle's when I was a little kid. I suppose it was fun because I was playing an arcade game most of the time (which was broken and kept letting me play free games...). The wedding really didn't mean much to me then. But now it took on a new meaning. I was the usher, I had to seat each of the more "important" people of the ceremony. The ceremony was pretty short. Then the reception came, the best part.

If you've ever been to a wedding, you would know what a normal reception is like; dinner, gifts, cake, music, dancing, etc. etc. We had a local band come play. They weren't that bad. I forgot their name. I mentioned something to Jim about me playing the bass, and how great it would be if I could get up there and play a song or two with the group. He talked to one of the band members and they called me up and I played. I played three songs...well two if you want to get technical. The first one was "Johnny B. Goode." The second one, a completely improvised song since I never played it before, was "Wipeout." Then the last one was "Johnny B. Goode" again, but I played with a different variation and scale. Don't get me wrong, I am a much better bass player than you think. It's just that, at the time, "Johnny B. Goode" was the only song I could think of that they would know as well. After a while, the bass player was jonesing for his bass back, so that was the end of the road.

FAGGOTS!

As I arrived at school this morning I saw a truck parked out front promoting anti-homosexuality. It had a wooden cab on the back and all over it were posters emphasizing their message. One poster was a picture of two men kissing, then over top of that was a red circle with a slash through it. Below that were the words, HOMOSEXUALITY IS SIN!

I was not the only one to the truck, because if I was, that would mean that everyone had gone blind. The priapic truck had stirred both emotion and satire, a collection of wanted attention that, by the end of the school hours, had grown like a colony of rabid bacteria. As far as I could tell, the truck had mostly attracted negative and neutral attention. There were only a few people going up to the truck to buy bumper stickers, and the rest were making subtle remarks, both serious and funny, about the "protesters" and their "message."

Back at the front of the school as I was heading home after my last period, people were shouting and making vulgar remarks and sour interjections toward the truck and its occupant. One girl in particular, a rather fat girl, was shouting, FUCK YOU, continuously at the driver, a man with a long, wispy gray beard and a sullen face darkened by the silhouette produced by the roof of the truck and the angle at which it slowly drove off. The man and his truck were apparantly leaving, but I didn't put my attention there. I let my attention fall to the outlandish and foolish remarks people were making. One kid goes, Someone hand me a rock!.....as if the idiot had the balls to do such a thing as throw a rock at the truck, and if he did he would have been shaking in his boots the whole time, more aware of the piss trailing down his leg rather than his aim. Stupid remarks like this and others clouded the once cloudless, sunny sky. The fat girl kept on repeating, FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU! Then one thing she said made me laugh; as she was stomping of down the road she shouted: FAGGOTS!.....How brainnumbingly ironic and stupid, having a fit over people exercising their own freedom of speech about homosexuality, then turning around and calling them "faggots." Why the fuck can't people just keep their mouths shut? Opening it and saying things without giving it first thought just makes you look like a fool. I myself don't have strong opinions either way in terms of homosexuality. I like to stay neutral about most things, and I would have been happy to not have heard a word from both sides of the story. I'm just glad the promoters didn't have a megaphone. Thank God for that.

Genocide

Of all the movies that I have seen regarding the Holocaust, and anything related to it, for some odd reason this one hit me in a way that no other movie had. It wasn't bloodier, or more graphic than any of the others; I had just stopped and really put things into perspective. After a while, the movie was bringing me down and taking chunks out of me and all I was left with was the feeling that all other suffering, besides that which flashed before me a thousand frames a second, was irrelavent and diminutive.

And another thing I have been reflecting on lately...
I had just got done reading a book called "Glue" by a writer named Irvine Welsh. He is mostly known for his piercingly eccentric novel, "Trainspotting;" a story about the life of a group of friends, most of which are addicted to heroin, yet try to "kick the habit" every once and a while. Anyways, that was his first book. "Glue", which was published in 2001, is again a story about friends, four of them, and their lives throughout four decades. Through the years they each fall further away from eachother, questioning the friendship they use to have. The full force that drives them away from eachother seems to stem from the experience of the death of one of the four friends. (I'm not going to say who, for those who haven't read the book and plan to read it.)

I've thought plenty about death before, but this got me thinking about it again, and I began thinking about it on different terms. I was thinking, maybe death isn't so bad. The only reason we, as existant beings, fear death so much is because we are merely just that: existant. When we come to think about death, most of us can't stand to believe that when we die, we just die. There is nothing after death. Just nonexistance. We either can't understand what it exactly means to be nonexistant, or we do and we just can't stand the thought of it. The thought of not being able to process thought....So some seek christianity, or whatever, to push out that thought and give themselves a fantasy in which they can warp their beliefs and morals around. Just something to make death seem less intimidating.

But, I have no religion whatsoever, and I don't limit myself to believe in one thing over the other. I still think that death and nonexistance is not so bad. When you're dead, you don't have to worry about bills or health or children or money or love. Or pain. Even if you are left with a bad reputation after death, it doesn't matter because life itself can't go on forever...not with the universe stretching, churning and retching the way it is.

I don't fancy death, however. I like being alive.

Reno, NV

Just over the weekend I went down to my hometown, Reno. It's not really my "hometown" but I consider it to be, since I spent most of my childhood there. And that could be while I like it so much, or it could be the certain atmosphere about it that attracts me. I'm in California now, but it isn't like Nevada. Plus, everyone here is stuck up and retarded, save a select few... It was my dad's birthday, that's why I went. It was actually his birthday the weekend before, but I couldn't make it down then. He just turned thirty-five. April 10th. Next time I should be going down there for the summer and in August I will be there to go to his wedding. He's getting married to his fiance, who's 21...or 22...can't remember...but I'm closer in age to her than my dad is.

Anyways,
back to Reno...

I love Reno. Due to the mountain range and rain shadow, it isn't as green and humid as Cali; it's more dry and desolate. But the desolateness appeals to me, and I may move back because of it, or maybe Arizona because of the cheap housing. But I like being near the city, so Las Vegas is an option as well.... My favorite part of going back over the hill into Nevada is definitely the scenery. All the green and steep mountains, then the transition to...again steep mountains, but less green and more dust and sage. The scenery fell to crap once we got into the city, but it has its own unique beauty through it's dry banality. When we got onto one of the main roads heading to the Silver Legacy I noticed a new wall, an ugly way, that scaled the length of the road. It was gray with an embossed, ridged pattern going along it. The pattern was in the shape of a mountain range with writhing trail following along it. I thought it was the most retarded thing I had seen constructed in a city. It wasn't all because of the stupid design, but also because of the fact that it was put up to hide all the mounds of dirt and gravel and all the constuction equipment that had been abandoned. It was like putting cologne on a lump of feces---it still stunk. After we got off that god-forsaken vein, we came into the heart of Reno city and entered the Silver Legacy parking tower. Finally we found a parking spot after climbing four or five stories. Then we entered the lobby and got registered for a room. While I waited, my mind wandered back to the rest stop where three people with a seedy, pockmarked mobile home waited out in front. One sat on a milk crate holding a sign, another one played hackysack, and the last on sat inside the vehicle, looking out. I couldn't tell what was written on the sign, but I assumed that it said something like, HELP US PLEASE/ALL OUT OF GAS/NEED MONEY, and sure enough I was right. The ironic thing about the person holding the sign was that he was dressed as if he didn't need money, with his business-like attire. And I could tell that others were thinking the same thing through the lines in their faces as they walked past. My attention left the man with the sign when I noticed this other guy, not with the group, that was wearing a shirt that said, GOT CRABS?, and I had a small laugh at that. Then I thought, I bet the shirt is about crab fishing or something, and it was. Then I saw the shirt again in the lobby and found that it was the same guy from the rest stop. I was going to say somthing, but I figured he was already too busy and didn't want to be interrupted. Instead I just went up to the room and settled down. Outside the window was a great view. We were plenty stories up and I could see over all of the building tops, down over the winding roads that merged with the mountains far away. The fog that whitened the mountains and the superimposed, crystal clear city made the view look like a cheaply augmented photo. Nonetheless, it was still beautiful. The luggage came a little while later and soon after that we left for my dad's house.

We all were originally going to go out to dinner that night, but my dad's fiance just gotten back from the dentist and she didn't feel well enough to eat, and there were other things to boot. So me and my dad just went by ourselves. We were heading for a Mexican restaurant nearby, and on the way I let my dad listen to a tape I made. The tape had eight tracks on it, each one about 2.5 minutes long, and they all were just me playing my bass. The music on the tape is actually for a short film I am making with a few friends, just a simple project that's still only in the pre-production stage. After the tape was over, he gave me his opinion; he said it sounded good and it reminded him of Pink Floyd. That's basically the kind of sound I was going for too, and I told him that. Later on we arrived at the restaurant, and inside while we waited for our food I talked to him about the film and other, various topics.

The next day we ALL went out to dinner, to this place called, FAMOUS MURPHY'S, an Irish restaurant. The food was great. I would definitely go there again sometime.

On Sunday, I left for home early. Early enough for me that when I got home, I had time to go to Dimple Records and buy a couple CDs. After about an hour of searching, and without luck in finding what I originally wanted, I found two CDs I were content with: A Silver and Gold Collection Iggy Pop CD, and Pink Floyd's The Delicate Sound of Thunder. I was planning on swinging by the local library, but after walking in the blistering heat for an hour I found out that they were closed on Sundays. I cursed inwardly and walked on home. I was slightly upset, but mostly because I just had to walk more through an already blazing day. I was relieved when I got home because it was cool it the house. Then I put the CDs on and melted away to the music.....