I just came back from a midnight screening of Crank. I don’t blog about anything, much less movies, but here I am.
Crank is the most rocking movie I have ever seen. I left the theater speechless. There is more rocking in that movie than an entire Slayer discography being catapulted straight into the sun.
Everything is downhill from here on out, folks.
School started and we’re living in a significantly less shitty place, codename Fire Island.
The Fire Island blog is here: http://6dudes3rooms.blogspot.com/
The class I’m taking is 310, which is me and my partner shooting two 5.5 minute movies on film. It’s supposed to be balls time consuming.
A couple of days ago, I went to Krav Maga with Logan. During blocking drills, he punched me in the mouth, and I punched him in the eye. It was a good day.
-fw.
My blog statistics counter indicates that over 3% of the readers of this enjoy the puns in the titles.
The chime of the onboard P.A. system and the sonorous voice of the cruise director jolted me rudely awake at the ungodly hour of seven in the morning. I didn’t hear what he said – it was slightly muffled through the door, as well as two pillows I strategically placed between it and my ear.
Ketchitkan is a fishing town meets massive cruise tourist industry, something like a bastard child of Juneau and Sitka. The sprawling main city center was chock full of a smorgasbord of conflicting architectural styles and designs, as if, speculated my dad, the architectural firms were all in some other city and they designed each building at random without ever coming to Ketchitkan to see the environment. And like every other city we’ve hit, the seaside roads were full of jewelry shops and even more Alaska themed items. Just beyond the edges of the streets by the water layed a sleepy fishing town, the harbor chock full of ships, and the houses drab and standing guard in a row.
After some speculation and deep thought, I’ve finally come up with the ultimate Alaska themed t-shirt. It is a lone wolf on a snowy crag, howling at the moon which sits atop the flowing Aurora Borealis. In the background, a gold panner looks on as a majestic bald eagle, despite not normally being a noctural beast, swoops in and grabs a jumping salmon in its razor sharp talons. Ideally, we would use the latest in thin LCD technology to animate the eagle on the shirt, as it swoops in majestically, as it grabs its prey heroically, as it flys away victoriously, and as it poops into the eye of a black bear in the forest freedomly. Upon closer examination, the gold panner is wearing a large tanzanite spinner pendant, as well as diamond encrusted rings. You wonder why you didn’t notice this detail before, but before you can give it further thought, an unstoppable stampede of the elderly crushes you as they rush to buy the items which bear this awe inspiring design, your cries of pain falling on literally deaf ears.
I stole a few minutes away to get on the internet, and had a brief conversation with G, who told me that Ketchitkan was "tight" and he had come here to do salmon fishing before. I was incredulous. I promised him a sweet Alaska sweatshirt, but I had to return to the ship before I could pick out a suitable one. Truth be told, once I had my ultimate design in mind, every other design fell short and failed to move me in any way, shape, or form. We left at 12 noon, spending a scant five hours in town. Jimmy told me, as we walked to the boat, that we must’ve lucked out because we arrived on one of sixty days in the year where it didn’t rain.
Jimmy is one to talk about luck: he’s made another $30 playing Blackjack, turning his initial $40 investment into a fairly respectable $110. In fact, as I type this, he’s at the tables tonight once again, for one last hurrah, plopping $30 on the table. I started to watch him, but left as soon as the first few hands of his busted. "I’m a bad luck magnet," I tell him, leaving him to his de-vices (hah hah).
One game I cannot get enough enjoyment out of in the casino is "Hi-Roller," which is of the coin pushing variety. I’m sure many of you are already familiar, or have at least seen one of these casino coin pushing machines before – there are three slots where one can drop twenty-five cent tokens. The tokens are subsequently launched up into the machine, falling in front of cycling metal pusher blades, which add your modest sum to a pile of tokens, in the hopes that your coin will push a few over the threshhold into the lower level, where you hope those coins in turn push more coins into the return slot. Holland America, in a stroke of greedy genius, added a twist – a fat stack of dollah dollah bills, what looks to be a hundred dollars in singles, sitting tantalizingly close to the edge of the return slot.
But if you’ve watched anybody play the game for any amount of time, it becomes immediately obvious that appearances are deceiving. I’ve seen old ladies (and so far, it’s been only old ladies) plop in a hundred dollars in coinage without moving the stack of bills so much as a centimeter. The stack sits atop a layer of tokens which, although appearing to be on the edge of tumbling over and taking the stack of bills in turn along with it, are surprisingly resiliant to the advances of flat cylinders of metal. Rather than drop, they’d rather layer, much to the chagrin of the players. The stack of bills has in fact dropped once this trip, to a young man who watched countless old ladies prime the machine for him, and then dropped about ten bucks in coins before getting it. He was either very lucky, or smart enough to know when to play.
Later on the afternoon, Jimmy egged me on to participate in the shuffleboard tournament, which consisted of four people, meaning it was 50% dominated by the Wongs. With my few minutes of curling experience, as well as the cold, keenly calculating mind of a brilliant tactician, I won, and got a mug (they didn’t have any ones with lone wolves, unfortunately). Right afterwards, we rushed all the way to the first deck, to participate in a putting tournament. Holland America, it seems, has a whole lot of ridiculous time wasting activities scheduled. Jimmy and I unfortunately lose this one, as well – a few days earlier we tried another putting tournament, with the same results.
A long blonde haired girl, looking around her mid twenties, was running the competition. She seemed clearly bored to be there, and the first tournament was full of unbelievable dickheads. These portly assholes surrounded the putting pad, leaning back and cocky as all hell, and were quick to loudly correct the poor girl if she made any sort of tabulation mistake. "No," they would say with clear derision, "That was only ten points, not twenty." These were the same kind of abusive dickweeds that were competing in the Blackjack tournament. They were being impolite, cocky douchebags to some hapless employee over a fucking coffee mug and hat. These competitions seem to bring out the most ridiculous attempts to justify one’s masculinity among the over-the-hill crowd. I nearly delivered a set of devastating elbows to faces. The only saving grace is that the girl didn’t seem to care enough to be offended. Seriously though, some of these guys need to chill the fuck out. If they’re acting like this over a coffee mug, I’d hate to see what kind of assholes they are in day-to-day life.
Speaking of assholes, there is one lady in particular I wish to hand deliver an ovary punch to. She sits next to us in the formal dining room. One night, the sea was particularly shakey, and halfway through dinner, my grandma started throwing up. She insisted she was fine, but threw up again. This lady sat at the other table glaring at her. Afterwards, she made a vocal complaint to the waitstaff about our table, and has glared at us ever since.
At first, I thought she did have a point – it’s disgusting to see someone else throw up, and maybe we should’ve took my grandma back to her room immediately. I talked to my dad about it, who changed my mind in a few sentences: "Freddie," he sighed, "I’ve been a doctor for many years, and I’ve seen every kind of suffering. What this amounts to is a complete lack of compassion – yes, sure, that woman may have been disgusted by grandma throwing up, but whatever discomfort she experienced paled to what grandma must have went through. Instead of showing human decency and compassion at another’s misfortune, she could only think of herself, and her own discomfort."
I need to vent a little bit. Some of these people on this cruise are really beginning to get on my nerves, and some of them, from what I’ve seen, just straight up aren’t decent people.
I know I should leave them be, and just let it go, but its hard when you’re on a freaking boat. There’s a reason Buddha sat under a tree and went for the enlightenment thing rather than paddled out with a bunch of other dudes into the middle of the ocean. Maybe even several reasons.
Great. Just now Jimmy flashed me a toothy smile as he strut out of the corridor leading to the casino. "I made another $70," he tells me. Just great.
In the morning I am awoken to the inexplicable sounds of what appear to be jackhammers, drills, and Demons from Hell cavorting outside the cabin window. Turned out the crew was lowering the massive motorized lifeboats that consisted of our view from outside, and lowering them into the water. These boats would serve as ferries between the main ship and Sitka.
Going up onto the damp deck, Sitka is a small city, larger than Juneau it would seem, and spread out amidst small islands and mist. A medium sized traffic bridge can be seen in the distance, and just below it, the ferries have already begun to drop passengers off at the small dock.
Sitka, for whatever reasons, sticks in my mind as a name, until I finally figure out on the short ride over that the name is familiar for the type of spruce tree that the region grows. I’ve seen fairly high end acoustic guitar manufacturers proudly proclaim that their guitars are using "Sitka spruce" wood, which is why I feel like I’ve seen the name of this city somewhere before.
Disembarking and walking on the streets, Sitka is refreshingly less tourist oriented than Downtown Juneau, but it still has its fair share of Alaska branded memorabilia. Added into the mix are a great number of small shops displaying wood carvings by local artists. Walking along, I realize now where all those sweatshirts and mugs with "Alaska" on them come from – grandmothers and grandfathers taking cruises and stopping by these bustling tourist shops with the intent of bringing back a keepsake for the little ones. Naturally, the second best way to remember the majesty of the untouched wilderness of Alaska than a generic totem pole design on a 100% Cotton sweatshirt?
The first best is obviously a fresh, decapitated bald eagle head. Bald eagles, I might add, happen to be in greater abundance up here, and I’m sure the feds wouldn’t mind a sportly culling of the herd for the purposes of treasured memories. (Incidentally, the third best way to remember Alaska happens to be a photograph of you holding a decapitated bald eagle head, which is then printed onto a mug, or ironed onto a sweatshirt. Some people argue that this is better than just a plain old vanilla Alaska mug or sweatshirt, but I say the eagle loses much of its appeal at a smaller resolution, and plus iron on transfers wash off).
Sitka stands out because of a palpable Russian influence. In the center of town, a large Russian Orthodox church stands, roadways curving around its imposing steeple. The doorway is flanked by cracked bells with cyrillic writing, and a hand lettered sign asks for two dollars to view the icons contained within. I just about march inside with a fanfare, confident that my semester spent in Wolfson’s Russian class at USC would elevate me to the status of "lesser master" when it came to iconography, but instead was served up with a cold reminder about knowledge, and how lack of use is very closely tied to retention. My enjoyment of the iconostasis was, at least, partially informed with some semblance of knowledge, but as I walked around inside, I couldn’t help but hear Wolfson’s voice chiding me for not paying more attention in his class, or not doing more primary source readings in his class. I shout my apologies to the voices in my head and quickly beat a retreat out.
Further on, about a half mile out of town along a two laned road, lies the Sitka National Park entrance. Along the way we pass a large, orange, Orthodox Bishop’s house, preserved by the park service, as well as a huge fat orange cat licking its crotch (I’ll take a moment to note that people tell me they read this blog because they think my writing is lyrical and poetic, but I prefer to think people read this because I deal out the straight shit, unfiltered).
The Sitka National Park visitor’s center is home to some impressive totem poles, as well as a clearly bored native Tinglit carver. In his workshop, he fielded all manner of hard hitting questions as "Did you carve all these yourself?" and "Are these pictures in this photo album of carvings all yours?" and "Where’s the bathroom?" I just miss the showing of the 12 minute introductory film, and walk around a bit looking at the displays instead. The rest of my family starts chomping at the bit, and we return to the boat.
On board, I fall asleep for four hours straight, and can’t remember any of my crazy dreams. I wake up again to the rattling sounds of the crew, this time reattaching the lifeboats, and the engine rumbling to life, headed towards Ketchikan.
The lack of activity means that, for once in the history of this thing, I’ve been doing daily updates and dumping them online whenever I get the chance. Don’t get any ideas – I fully expect this pattern to stop as soon as I hit land.
Jimmy bumbled in at around 1 A.M. last night, Juneau safely behind us. "I doubled up in Blackjack," he said non chalantly, "forty bucks." I suggest he push his luck and enter the $500 slots tournament tomorrow, but he doesn’t seem to want to sit around elderly ladies pumping coins and pushing buttons for a few hours. I can’t see why not – proximity to folks dumping away hundreds of dollars of their retirement funds or hours of their wages in the space of minutes can be exhilarating. Not exhilarating in the sense that there’s the inherent possibility, however slight, that they’ll nail a jackpot, but exhilarating in the sense that you could be so lucky and find yourself in a room full of so many rich idiots.
I read somewhere that casinos will use chips both out of convenience when it comes to dealing with money, but also to make the very concept of money more abstract – a player is not throwing down a hundred dollars in dollar bills, but five colorful chips, as far removed from the green paper money as physically and metaphorically possible. There’s no chance that a player, perhaps a little woozy under the influence of a few too many Cosmopolitans, would start to hallucinate that Abraham Lincoln and the whole gang of our great nation’s forefathers would lie there on the felt, their faces scrunched into piercing, accusing stares, their lips intoning curses, and eyes seeming to say, "You who would sacrifice your earnings in a heartbeat, you who would act so callously towards the symbols of our capitalistic society, you who would try to exploit that very same system by games of chance, shortcutting your way around hard work and honest labor, you do not deserve freedom, nor do you deserve to even kiss the same ground that your fellow honest citizens walk upon." Lincoln, from the slight weaves of the ten dollar bill, might add, "Listen, bitch ass, I wrote my homework on a motherfucking shovel. You bet your fucking balls I didn’t throw my money around like a prancing ninny."
This morning, we arrived at Hubbard Glacier. The ship’s director told all on board to dress warmly when viewing the glacier, as if mere proximity by several thousand feet to a massive wall of compressed ice would somehow change the fact that we were in motherfucking Alaska and it’s already cold as shit outside. The ship took a leisurely lap in front, allowing for some spectacular views of the glacier. The sea was a blue gray. Chunks of ice broke off infrequently and made massive rumbles as they tumbled into the water. I speculated that Holland America flew in at night and laid explosive charges deep into the ice fissures, and the captain of the ship could detonate these at will, in order to rally wavering attention spans of those on deck, and also ensure that the Holland America cruise goers got a full serving of the Alaska experience. A few explosions later, we had turned around and chugged out of the bay, bound now for Sitka.
My brother and my cousin and I, bored out of our minds, snuck into the exclusive TEENS ONLY area (13-17 according to Holland America), where we were greeted by a table chock inexplicably full of empty water pitchers. The sole attraction of this hip hangout was a touch screen computer which allowed one to cue up songs and music videos that would play on screens scattered around the room. The fact that this room appeared, for all intents and purposes, to be completely devoid of any sort of teenage activity meant that we owned the place, and could cue up whatever nasty ass music videos we wanted. Upon discovering that 90% of the music videos already were sexy and violent hip hop videos, we cursed silently and left. We were too late, it seemed, to corrupt the minds of the nation’s youth.
On the way down to lunch, I passed a Purell hand sanitizing station, an automated Purell dispenser that would squirt one serving of Purell alcoholic gel rub into your eagerly awaiting hands so you could get them dripping and rub them all over themselves. The memo in our cabin noted that there has been an increase of gastrointestinal illness lately (i.e. people be throwin’ up and poopin’ all the time), and these hand sanitizing stations were the first line of defense against unsightly dining room incidents. Employees stationed at the door of all the meals were instructed to let nobody pass without getting Purelled. Whether or not there really is such a risk, or if it’s a brilliant marketing scheme devised by the heads of these two cruise ship and evaporating hand sanitizer giants remains to be seen. One fantastic use the Purell stations have is they dispense just enough Purell to have a good flinging mass, and when the opportunity to brutally sanitize the back of my brother’s neck presented itself, I took it.
Another activity that I’ve begun partaking in, despite how uncharacteristic it must be for me, is running, doing laps around the ship on the Promenade deck, jumping over outstretched lawn chairs and juking out walking snuggling couples. The backdrop of the ocean, and clouds, and mountain peaks in the distance couldn’t be more conducive to exorcize, and it doesn’t hurt that sometimes some morbidly obese moron will squeeze into an elevator to go up one freaking floor. This has happened three times now, all three times from deck eight to deck nine. Deck eight consists of the more expensive staterooms and cabins, and deck nine consists of, surprise surprise, the all-you-can-eat buffet line. One flight of stairs is apparently one flight too many when it stands between them and bottomless pasta.
Needless to say, a cruise ship is probably the worst place when it comes to obesity. Sitting on the promenade deck since starting to write this, I tally a full 90% of the people who passed would probably need to grease up their stateroom door to fit inside. Darkly fitting, perhaps, that today’s activity is sitting around viewing a glacier six miles wide. In the deep blue compacted ice, does the land whale see their own reflection staring back at them? Does that stony wall, silent and towering, cry an ominous warning? Probably not – at least, if it did, it’d be hard to hear over the din of the buffet line.
This morning, we pulled in early to Juneau, Alaska. Nestled between dark green mountain slopes, and right up against the water, Juneau looked to me more like a quiet, small town than a state capital. The large population is mostly spread out in suburbs, somewhere behind the city’s massive limits. The downtown area is flat and sparse, and the crowd gathered on the top deck didn’t seem to be there to take pictures as much as get out and look at something that wasn’t simply bare expanses of gray sea.
Holland America had arranged a whole smorgasbord of shore excursions, most pushing the $300 mark for a single person. These were all mostly helicopter tours of Mendenhall glacier, a massive glacier that sits a short bus ride (or a massively expensive helicopter ride) out of downtown. Otherwise, you were expected to mostly fend for yourself. Perhaps somewhat pessimistically, I noted that they had scheduled a putting tournament and a bingo contest a few hours after we were due to dock – I guess Holland America wasn’t too optimistic as to what entertainment Alaska’s state capital might offer its well fed and overly pampered guests.
The sky was clear, although the forecast called for clouds. "This is the first day in about two weeks without rain," the bus driver noted as we rode the mile or so into central downtown along the shore line. We disembarked, and the few streets that ran through were packed on both ends with gaudy tourist shops and jewelry stores, many likely being paid or run by the cruise lines. All manner of cheapo gemstones set shittily in silver bracelets, and all manner of Alaska branded t-shirts, mugs, teddy bears, and drug paraphernalia didn’t interest me, although it apparently interested enough of the cruise riding crowd, as nearly every shop I passed had at least a few golf visor, white shorts, and fanny pack wearing grannies and granddads browsing through their wares.
I passed one jewelry store with a woman leaning her elbows listlessly against the otherwise spotless glass display case, clearly depressed that the only hope of human interaction that she could look forward to on a Monday would be crowds of self-appointed cocky cruise ship bargain hunters, educated the very day before by a fifteen minute seminar onboard on how to bargain for jewelry, and how to "spot out fakes."Another similarly empty jewelry store along a side street proclaimed, in a loud printed sheet taped to the front door, that this shop was "Locally owned!" and "Not run by cruise ships!!" The location of the shop was not within easy striking distance of the main drag, and subsequently suffered for it.
Tour busses to Mendenhall glacier were advertised at a steal of some $22 round trip, so while the chumps on the boat all went the "flightseeing" route, packed into cabins of floatplanes and helicopters, the Wong brigade went in style in a baby blue converted school bus. The driver was not a local – he was a young Korean guy with a shaved head who came up to Alaska for a summer job. He had a healthy disrespect for the cruise lines, pointing out several onshore activities (such as a brewery tour for some $200) that would be free if you just went on your own. He suggested renting a car in some of these cities, and simply following the tour busses around and joining the group when everyone got off. He had an open personality, and admitted he was bumming around and seeing how long he could sustain himself post-college graduation without having to get a "real" job.
Mendenhall glacier was a pale sea blue, and sandwiched between cliffs, only visible across a wide lake. The rocks nearby all displayed the layered scars of a much earlier glacial retreat. My cousin offered a thousand dollars to swim across to the glacier and back, but quickly withdrew said offer when it was apparent I was deeply considering it. Not much to do here but take pictures, and within the hour, we were back on the bus towards town. As we drove away, we noticed a group of local kids wearing trunks and carrying an inflatable orca. "They go swimming whenever it isn’t raining," said our driver, "I don’t know how they do it – they’re crazy. The water’s always right above freezing."
The streets were even more packed as a result of two other cruise ships having disembarked their passengers, and the jewelry shops were bustling with activity. A very young girl stood on the sidewalk sawing at her violin for extra cash while her dad and sister sat a safe fifty odd feet away, watching the cash flow in. On top of an electrical box, a group of long haired teens sat strumming a guitar and belting out folk songs, knitted cap outstretched and jingling with coins. And out from the shops and novelty bars emerged the cruise ship tourists, dazed into the overcast skies, blinking and walking aimlessly, flitting in and out of these bright storefronts in turn like flies throwing themselves against windowpanes.
As night fell, the engine of our ship rumbled to life and we started to pull away. I wandered up to the top deck. It was cold, empty, and damp. Lights flickered as Juneau retreated into the darkness. Outside on the deck, it began to rain.
If you’re reading this, I’ve succeeded in finding a Starbucks or somesuch internet cafe in Juneau, Alaska, where I will have likely bitten the bullet and paid for internet use.
Given that internet use (via super modern satellite technology) is available on the boat, at the abhorrently premium price of $0.75 a minute. To put this in perspective, that means an hours worth of internet costs you $45. In some countries, it would be cheaper to pay a dark skinned native to physically run pads of scrawled ones and zeros back and forth, and a crowd of similarly dark skinned natives to translate this data and report back to you its contents, while you lavishly sit on a bleached white throne made of dark skinned native bones, with a D.S.N. acting both as a footrest, and a translator.
Indeed, similarly priced footrest/translator devices are available from the Sharper Image for about the price of three hours of internet!
Or $0.75 a minute could pay for a near infinite number of replays of the Cruisin’ Exotica racing game, available for your driving enjoyment 24 hours a day on the Deck 1 video arcade. Why one would even fathom racing around the virtual tropics while on a freaking expensive cruise brings me to my next point:
I have been puzzled, as the entire ship runs out of activities and things to do at approximately 10:30 PM. This is puzzling, because I have been on one other cruise in my life, this one in the Caribbean. This other cruise was much more eventful after sunset – I have fond memories of nearly throwing down with some punk ass rich white kid for calling me a "gawd damned chink" on the basketball court at about 10:30 PM. But alas, here at 10:30, I have no such ignorance to violently suppress, and nor have I met any such individuals my age who would even consider spitting racial slurs at me.
A shame, because I have aged, and while all those years ago, I walked away from the situation and cried in my cabin, I cannot say with any honesty that a similar incident now would result in such a Buddha-like tranquility. I would dare say that I would express a secret inner glee as I snuck out my adversary’s unconscious body onto the Promenade Deck at two in the morning, and would barely be able to suppress the tiniest shout of elation as I dumped him unceremoniously overboard.
In the brief moment it takes for me to light my cigarette with a worn chrome lighter, I would quickly shuffle through a list of suitable last words for my perished foe, looking out upon the black Alaskan waters. Upon taking a quick drag, I would exhale the smoke quickly into the brisk night air, barely enjoying it, and settle on the subtle yet biting, "Sorry kid, but you just got iced."
It only took a few minutes of playing a simple word association game with myself to figure out exactly why this particular cruise was so mind numbingly boring at night (the fact that I’m even updating my journal indicates how bored I am, I’d think). I’ve copied down my notes below:
Carribbean : Hot, exotic, beaches, bikinis, college kids, parties, alcohol, swimming, accidental pregnancies
Alaska : Houses made of ice, totem poles, cold, looking at whales through binoculars, arctic, the unyielding approach of death
And exactly as I should have expected, rather than the predominately teenage crowd I met in the Carribbean, here I’m surrounded by rich old people. Rich old people who go to sleep at 10:15 and get up at 5:30. And not only that – fat old people. Just as racist, not nearly as vocal, and not nearly as socially acceptable to choke out or dump off the stern at two in the morning.
Clearly, I’m on the wrong cruise.
Today before lunch, hanging around outside the restauraunt, I noticed a young woman, part of the Holland America staff, standing and looking around. A man, I would guess mid-twenties, wearing a beer t-shirt and sandals approached her: "Is this where the singles lunch meeting is?" he asked, hopeful and non-chalant. She said it was. I noticed that total, there were about six "singles" who showed up, and most of them, women pushing forty and looking like they probably watched a lot of the Maury show, and had at least three cats back home.
I felt sorry for the guy, but then again, lunch was fantastic. Holland America has, at least, a well deserved reputation for fantastic food, and of the limited amount I’ve partaken in insofar, it’s looking like really good food is going to be one of the few highlights of this trip. For those unacquainted, each meal comes with an appetizer, a soup, a salad, a main course, and a dessert, all included in the price of admission. The menu is devoid of combo numbers, freedom fries, and what’s more, uses an elegant cursive font, as well as numerous lines and slants over vowels to indicate how high class and foreign all the food is.
As for onshore activities, nearly all of them cater towards the rich, the immobile, and some combination of the two. Helicopter rides (with an small fee for those who are over 250 lbs), private yacht tours, and riding on various moving vehicles and looking at things tend to comprise most of the activities. My best bet, I think, is to just hump it on my own, or keep going for that Cruisin’ Exotica high score.
The only other activity that I can really partake in is good ol’ gambling, which becomes much more legal once you’re in international waters. Sunday afternoon saw the opening of a Blackjack tournament. Jimmy and I, both fancying ourselves Gods of Gambling, paid the $20 entry fee. Needless to say, we both didn’t even come close to making the finals. Dropping by at around 4:45, we both were surprised to see the Finals table –
Somehow, my freaking dad had qualified for it. Here he was, surrounded by stuffy rich old assholes (assholes who would insult the dealer, threw chips around, and generally acted like they really thought they were Gods of Gambling). "Dad," I said, shocked, "Are you that ‘Kent’ on the leaderboard?" "Yes!" he said. He had played on a whim with my uncle and bet everything he had on the last two hands of his qualifying round, and nailed blackjack twice. "Dad," I said, now concerned, "Do you know how to split, or double down?" He looked at me blankly and the game started.
Unfortunately, he lost early, but he did get a sweet XXXL T-Shirt that says "Casino Winner" on the back of it for all his troubles. The dealer said the only size they had was XXXL, which ended up being a little tight for most of the people at the final table (I told you they were fatties – I still can’t figure out how they all crowded around the Blackjack table). My dad seemed unphased by loss. "Don’t worry," I told him, "You might not have gotten the $500 grand prize, but then again, you don’t have to worry about Type-II Diabetes."
It’s really not so bad – I’m looking forward to revising my script for a pretty big film class I’m taking this next semester, as well as doing a lot of reading. A lot of reading.
This is my personal seal and mantra courtesy Reed. One of my friends set my crest as her desktop pic and set it to scale so it would take up the whole screen and then the next day she didn’t feel so good and was throwing up and shit and she went to the doctor and the doctor told her she was pregnant and then nine months later she had the baby, but it wasn’t a baby but a Marshall half-stack that she spent eight hours pushing through her baby-hole. The umbilical cord was actually a guitar cable that led to 1959 Stratocaster guitar and when the midwife tried to high five her because she was so excited, she missed and instead twanged a E7sus4add9 chord which resonated through the amp and ripped my friend in half.
The wake is this Tuesday. Fuck yeah.
-fw.
I finished recording a CD of stuff similar to the music I did for my senior project.
It’s available here
-fw.
I rolled over to Reed’s pad in Pomona on Friday. Together, us intrepid adventurers, as we did the year before, were driving up to Seattle via Wongmobile, the most luxurious and opulent form of travel known to man. Legend has it that the Pharaoh of Egypt once was offered the bitch seat in the Wongmobile, and politely declined, saying that even the bitch seat was “far too great a throne for a man so humble as I to sit upon.”
I stepped into Reed’s room aghast. Reed had accumulated, over the course of his college career, an amazing amount of shit, a great deal of which, was to end up in the back of my car. Hours of me yelling at him to pack and clean while I watched Google videos later, we gave up for the night and fell asleep at 5 am.
After a great amount of effort, negotiations, and damaged egos, we finally loaded up the car and left Pomona campus at around four in the afternoon, but not before taking 96 Mexican freezepops (which Reed calls “El Sabradors,” for some unexplained reason) and crushing them all with my car in a spectacular fountain spray of sugar syrup and good ol’ fashioned American wastefulness. As we drove away, the syrup dribbling down the concrete, Reed non-chalantly waved out his window, and I thought that overall, it was an awfully unique way to bid the college experience farewell.
Me, full on Pimpin Mode
Unlike most years, where we’re both so gangbusters to get up to Seattle that we would urinate out of the side windows if that meant we’d get home sooner, this year we decided to peace out and take it slow. The first day was slow going, having been stuffed by as much Pomona cafeteria food I could eat after bumbling my way past the card scanning lady and getting a free meal (which I assure you, I fully took advantage of – I had pepperoni pizza leaking out of my freaking ears.
The first night, we rode across the 210 to I-5 North, we ended up in a small town called Buttonwillow.
I might note that I initially only read the first half of the sign, and in filling the rest in with my perverted mind, assumed that we had arrived at Buttsville, USA. This moniker stuck, for reasons that will become clear, and various more colorful versions all were acceptable substitute names for this place (Anusland, Coloncentral, etc. etc.)
Being as it was our first night, we decided to hop into the Buttonwillow McDonalds for some McChickens, thems being the greatest dollar sandwich ever concocted by the hand of a clown. We wanted to start this trip off right – well fed and well rested. Last year on the road trip up, Angee, Reed, and I stopped at a Monterey McDonalds and brazenly declared our demand of seven McChicken sandwiches. We were greeted by stunned silence by the man at the drive thru – “Pull… pull ahead into the drive thru waiting zone, please… sir.” His shaking voice indicated great fear at the kind of man mountains who would place an order of such magnitude, I noted as I pulled into the space and set my car in park. We could only imagine the general tremblings of knees inside the McKitchen as the McEmployees fired up the McFryers and went into overdrive to sate the hungers of the veritable titans, who grew more impatient by the moment just outside, who had so generously graced their humble store with their awesome presence. The McManager, standing at the head of the kitchen, would shout, barely able to keep his voice from shaking in fearful pride, that TODAY, Ladies and Gentleman, TODAY was the day the drills and the training and the blood and the grease and the sweat and the tears would pay off! Like a proud commander of a German U-Boat, machinery steaming around him, he raises his fist in the air and all under his command return a sharp “hurrah.”
Meanwhile just outside, the three of us were getting bored. There was a homeless man who passed by, asking for change. Angee one upped that request and gave him several bottles of Liz Blizz, aka the worst tasting Sobe we had in the car. We started jumping in our seats, pounding our fists, and shaking the car in anticipation and impatience. “Where the FUCK are our McChickens?” I shouted.
Just then, a timid tap at my window. A frail Indian man stood there, obviously having drawn the short straw, and forced by his coworkers to approach the vehicle of the Gods in the parking lot. “Hello,” he said, voice heavily accented. “Seven McChicken.”
While Reed and I could not hope for such an epic McDonalds experience this time, we expected it, at least, to not be completely ridiculous. Unfortunately, the signs seemed to point that way. Across the street was a pupuseria drive-thru, and being both well known connoisseurs of Salvadorian cooking, we checked it out on a whim before pulling into the McDonalds. This was the drive through sign:
That’s right. Nothing. What the hell was going on here? Was it just a drug front? We may never know.
Pupuserias notwithstanding, we walked into the McDonalds and we were both FLOORED by how cold it was. It was seriously like walking into a meat locker while crappy muzak played and people getting paid minimum wage blew dry ice into your face. I went back to get my sweatshirt from the car, wondering what the hell was going on with these people. Reed noted that behind the counter, there was manager, as well as five employees. Seeing as, over the course of about an hour, we were the only people to use this restaurant, it seemed like a fantastic waste of money. I was forced to conclude that the McButtsville McDonalds was seen as some kind of last bastion of employment for local youth.
As I ordered my food, I attempted to engage the humanoids behind the counter in petty banter. “It’s pretty cold in here, yeah?” The cashier ignored my offhand comment. Reed had a little better luck – he managed to get the cashier to admit that it was much warmer behind the counter, and by extension, admit that this particular McDonalds could give two fucks about the comfort of their patrons. We sat down, rubbed our hands until the blood started flowing through them again, and proceeded to consume.
Finished, we got a room at the cheapest motel in Buttonwillow. As the clerk gave me a key, she offhandedly commented that I ought to open up the windows because the room was probably pretty warm.
I assume she spent her childhood living on a house in the center of the Earth, because this room was like a freaking sauna. Reed, having come from one temperature extreme, confidently declared this was the hottest room he had ever been in. Not only was the humidity stifling, the fan was completely broken, and offered no air flow whatsoever. Our shirts were almost immediately damp with sweat as we pried open the only window to the outside world. The temperature difference from outside was astounding – we concluded that this room somehow lied in the center of an invisible volcano, or was perhaps one of the secret gates to Hell. All that stood between us and the outside world of reasonable temperatures was a flimsy screen, which will become important in a moment.
Not wanting to sweat our balls completely off, I suggested we return to the McDonalds. We got ice cream and watched movies off my laptop there. This was, in my mind, a somewhat inauspicious beginning to what I assumed would be a fantastic road trip. “Oh well,” I thought as I finished off my crappy McDonalds ice cream, “There’ll be plenty of time to improve.” At about 11, we returned to our sauna room and proceeded to sweatily fall asleep into a light, uncomfortable slumber.
It
‘s 2:07 AM.
I’m up. My mind is foggy.
My heart is pounding, and I’m at full alert. I don’t know why yet. I’m confused.
Loud, hard, repeated pounding on our door. Silence. Now I’m up completely.
I elbow Reed. He shushes me and we lay there, balls well sweated off, in complete absolute terrified silence. Ten minutes, and then more pounding. Utter silence, and then more pounding. The person pounding does not identify himself.
This continues until 3 AM, when it stops.
We flip the fuck out. Reed ducks into our bathroom and dials 911, while I stealthily approach the door and check outside. Nothing. A white SUV circles the parking lot twice. Reed indicates that he’s been on hold for five minutes – we both wonder what the hell kind of stuff Kern county PD could possibly be dealing with? Cow tipping?? If they don’t answer soon, they’ll have a double rape/homicide on their hands to clean up! Finally he gets through, and twenty minutes later, a McButtsville cop shows up.
“What’s up, bro, what’s the problem,” he tells Reed. I have placed myself strategically behind the door in case he is a crazed homicidal rapist. By placing oneself behind the door, I ensure Reed goes down first, and I can maneuver around them to get to my car. Reed explains the situation and the cop leaves as suddenly as he came, seeing as the threat was no longer there pounding on our door. Needless to say, this is reassuring. We close the only window we have and decide to fall alseep in the sauna.
Before any of you internet tough guys call us wimps, I’ll let Reed explain. As he says, “Freddie and I are both certified Real American Heroes, and we were scared. Understand that means that a normal person would have had fifty heart attacks that night.” An hour of pounding on a door with no answer is enough to scare most people to death. Us? We are only mildly freaked out. Ok. Really freaked out.
It is dark and hot and we don’t get to sleep for another couple of hours. The next morning, as I check out, the clerk asks me what the hell was going on last night – this was the first time police showed up. She scolds me, and tells me to call the front desk next time a potential murderer is banging at the door. “Thanks for the advice,” I tell her.
It’s a bright morning, and I pop a Dublin Dr. Pepper from my soda stash in my cooler. Chugging it down, the fright of the night before disappears, and things begin to look up. The road lies before us, beckoning, as I get in and gun the throttle to get the hell away from this forsaken town. As we start again, I tell Reed that it’s a good thing that we won’t have a night like that again.
And once again, as I have countless times before, I prove myself completely wrong.
-fw.
