in between the time when i started this latest entry, a week or so passed. it was a fairly hectic week. details follow.
for some reason lately, around midnight or so, i’ll lay down on the floor without setting up my bedding materials, and pass out until four am, when the change in my body temperature awakens me and i roll out my covers and matt to fall back asleep on. sometimes i also fall asleep in my chair, but then soon after flop onto the floor and slumber for a few hours before getting up to close my laptop and shut off the lights.
almost every night this has happened for the last couple weeks. the two occasions where i did manage to actually go to bed properly in that time were one night when i was out in the living room after the season finales of my name is earl and the office, and one random night where i knew that sleep was fast approaching and i made myself ready in time.
it’s as if regardless of what i mentally decide, my body overrules and forces me to sleep.
not that i have been getting a world of sleep, anyways.
on the thursday before mother’s day, the grandfather of an extremely close friend of ours decided that the pain of arthritis and other ailments had become too taxing for him, and he put one of his competition pistols to his heart. after wrangling and hassling about, i was able to get last wednesday off so that we could drive to southern california for the funeral.
tuesday i already had off, which was the day we drove down on, but the memorial service itself was scheduled wednesday afternoon. however, before i could go, i had to meet up down in cupertino with david to finish recording the last of the sound effects we required for his segment of the film that he’s using as a class project. wednesday was the due date for his piece, so we had to scramble on gathering everything so that he could squeeze mixing and mastering the piece in between other classes and recording a chorale group, and we both ended up hanging out chatting and working until close to one thirty on tuesday morning. given my recent fits of random passing out, i’m thankful that i got home in one piece, as doing sixty five up fifteen miles of highway at two in the morning aren’t the most friendly conditions to lose conciousness.
seven thirty that same morning came way too soon. we didn’t leave until about eight thirty, and had to make a quick stop for coffee and breakfast pastries, making our actual departure time somewhere around nine am. dad’s a bit concerned with how rapidly we are putting mileage on the camry, so instead of taking one of our own cars down to la, a local rental company set us up with a ginormous ford 500 which i still swear to this day had a v6 engine in it (even if it was a shitty v6), though dad is dead set convinced that it was a four cylinder (is the argument even really that important? – not really).
the drive down was fairly uneventful, travel wise. i spent most of it scrunched up in the backseat, doing my best to ignore a righteous headache from the lack of sleep, listening to rush albums on the iPod, and photographing the endless landscape that soared past my window. it was actually a strangely bonding experience for mom, dad and i. with my brother off at the university of north dakota, and the rest of us working crazy schedules, we rarely get to see each other for any extended length of time anymore. i imagine it will become even more sparse should i ever actually move out of the house into my own place. traditionally, whenever we drive down to la, as soon as we get on the five, the family compartmentalizes into their own zones and pretty much stays self contained for the majority of the ride, but this time we did at one point devote quite a bit of the trip to actually communicating with each other and carrying on some noteworthy conversations.
and for the life of me, at ten pm tonight, i am totally blanking on every. single. one. of. them.
of course, that was over a week ago. everything is now a week ago. how in the fuck does that even happen?
as we dropped mom off at our old church in redondo beach to rendezvous with a friend of hers that she was staying with while we were in town, dad and i popped into the sanctuary to check out the new mixing console they recently got. nearly twelve years ago, before that church had any kind of formal sound system, dad and the other friend that he and i were staying with overnight got together and assembled a rather top-notch audio setup for the church, which lasted until last year when that church began a serious bid to replace and upgrade everything. it was about time, anyways. i’m trying to see if i can wrangle them into selling/giving me the old mackie 24×8 that is now collecting dust in storage. it may have shitty pre-amps on it, but i’d rather put the thing to good use instead of letting it take up space not doing anything.
seeing the drastic modifications to everything only highlighted this strange phenomenon of change. every time we go to visit our old neighborhoods, so much change has taken place that we hardly ever recognize deeply familiar locations anymore. i’m not talking about spans of years; these alterations to the landscape occur at an increasingly furious pace over just a few months. the last time i was in redondo beach, i completely missed a street because the landmark i was expecting to navigate by had been removed at some point in the four months that had passed since my last visit. those kinds of suburban modifications are truly terrifying; they serve to remind me just how much everything down there is transforming into something that is uniquely unfamiliar, almost alien.
of all the places i have lived, redondo beach was quite possibly the one locale that i ever really considered a home, and now that ninety percent of what is there is completely unrecognizable to me is a bit like finding out your home town had a terrible fire where everything you ever knew was completely destroyed and replaced with something else.
oh shakespeare, tremble at my melodramatically digital soliloquy.
marshalls was the next stop so i could get a tie to wear to the funeral. fuck knows i own twenty ties, and for not one moment while packing for this trip did i have the foggiest as to where the shit they are all kept. keep in mind that since moving into this house, i have had to re-pack my belongings even to simply move one room over, which is a smaller room than the one i previously occupied, so now even *more* of my crap is sandwiched into boxes up in the garage. one of these days, i swear i’m gonna go on impulse, stack all of that shit out in a parking lot, and set it ablaze. if i don’t even know what half of anything i have stashed in the garage is, how much would i really miss it if i just burned it all? obviously since i have managed to subsist for three years without needing any of it, i may as well just get it over with and destroy it all.
i suppose there is the off-chance that i might end up obliterating something that is discovered i in fact do need/want immediately after, and then i’d be totally hosed. my life is tailor made for ironies just such as those.
while we were in town, i was determined to snag a bite at chick-fil-a. there aren’t any around the bay area, and i desperately love their chicken with a passion. for reals. there are hardly any wendys down in la, and i am a huge wendys nut – i would gladly trade wendys to have chick-fil-a anytime i damn well pleased.
the rest of the afternoon was fairly chill. we hung out at our friend’s place until dinner, meeting up with mom and her friend again at chicago ribs. afterwards, i was hoping to either catch the scrubs season finale, or drive to the manhattan beach pier and take some pictures of it at night. sadly, neither of those plans came to action. instead i fired up my laptop for a short while to work on editing the trailer for land of entrapment, and then passed out somewhere near midnight, waking up at nine the next morning.
we didn’t have to be at the cemetery until two that afternoon, so the morning was spent lounging around, having a leisurely breakfast at kings hawaiian in torrance, and then checking out what used to be a really good christian book store. i dunno what holy smoke is in their pipes when charging forty five dollars for the widescreen special edition of chronicles of narnia (best buy sells it for twenty), but the real disappointment was that the sweet pro audio section they had has now been all but completely forgotten about and replaced with a few racks of compact discs.
there are only so many times in my life where i have actually dressed up all fancy like. to be quite honest, i truly despise nice formal clothes. men’s dress shirts always seem as if they are choking off your airways around the neck (especially when you throw in a tie; might as well go the full nine and make a noose out of it), and i have yet to find a pair of dress shoes that didn’t make me feel as if my feet had just been squeezed through a cider press and then steamrolled.
the service was ok. it was overcast out and there was a nice breeze, so even though it was about eighty degrees, it didn’t feel all that unbearable. there were several rows of chairs spread out graveside, and i didn’t take too much comfort in sitting on top of some random stranger’s final resting place. there are some things you just don’t do, and standing over or sitting on somebody’s grave is a big no-no.
(that may be some latent catholicism passed on by my mom since she was raised in the catholic church and only became lutheran later on in life when at the age of seven i asked her about God and she took us to a friend’s church while we were living in edmonds so i could check it all out for myself)
off in the distance over the hill sat the industrial cluster fuck that is long beach harbor. i wonder if the dead people buried there ever get pissed off that the primary view from the cemetery is an endless sea of filthy smokestacks and packing crates full of automobiles, computers and smuggled immigrants.
while we waited for the ceremony to begin, i took notice of the fact that all of the graves we were on top of were shared by couples; in most cases, the wives outlived their husbands by a good twenty years or more. makes you wonder about their lives, what they did. how they coped with the loss of their beloved. the headstone directly under my chair was for a couple where the husband was born in 1906, making him a child of six when the rms titanic launched. masato had just mentioned to me a few hours ago in a text message that there is a massive titanic exhibit opening up at the moscone center next month, and i wondered if this gentlemen had as a young boy been intrigued by what at the time was the largest ocean liner ever constructed.
after the family shared some of their fond memories of the departed, pastor john, who is the interim pastor at our old church gave a sermon that he largely phoned in. it was random and chaotic, and didn’t really seem to go anywhere. as my feet began throbbing from the pain of my toes being scrunched into two square inches of leathery torture, i made a game of trying to guess what path the minister was going to take next during his message, ultimately driving myself slightly mad as i couldn’t even begin to fathom where this guy was coming from. i only make such a big deal about this because from what we’ve been told, he is a good speaker, yet the example he provided that afternoon was certainly cause to bring his ordination into question. should the pastor at my funeral ever deliver as oddly bizarre a eulogy as this guy did, i probably won’t care all that much, seeing as how i’ll be stiffer than ron jeremy at the playboy mansion.
towards the end of the funeral, a flock of homing doves were released from a box next to the casket, who all promptly flew off towards central la, and inspired in me a possible ending to a comedic film should i ever motivate my sorry ass to actually finish a screenplay that has a definitive structure.
sitting outdoors amongst all of the graves struck up some thoughts in me, predominately what my choice would be as to the handling of my final earthly remains. so far, i know that my mom wants to be cremated, and my father hasn’t given any thought to the matter as of yet. i’m still undecided. while the ego-maniac in me has this fantasy of my corpse being preserved and held posed gallantly in a hermetically sealed viewing chamber for future generations to observe and admire, i’m more inclined to opt for having my cremated remains being fired from earth onboard a rocket bound for the sun. talk about going out in a blaze of glory.
well, not really. i imagine the rocket would likely explode long before it ever reached the sun’s corona. but that’s neither here nor there for now.
there was a reception held in the deceased’s honor after the ceremony at his surviving family’s house, which we attended for a brief period before needing to hit the road back to the bay area. all of us had to return home for commitments on thursday morning, so when the majority of the crowd began heading over to the torrance municipal airport to check out the deceased’s sister’s learjet (see: lots of texas oil money), we changed back into plain clothes and took to the 405 out of town. ideally, we were going to meet up with monica after she got off work at a fatburger in brentwood for dinner, but rush hour traffic was surprisingly lighter than i was anticipating (truly a rarity in the city of angels), and we got there a full hour before monica could make it. proceeding without her, we gobbled down some fat goodness, and then drove north on sepulveda through the pass and sherman oaks before picking up the freeway again on burbank.
originally i started off driving us out of town, and my plan was to trade places with dad as soon as we had descended out of the grapevine down into the central valley, but dad fell asleep before we reached frasier park, and mom was busy reading, so i kept on driving until we got to harris ranch sometime around eleven pm. dad took over driving at that point, which was a smart move, since i passed out dead asleep not even ten minutes after leaving the rest stop, and i pretty much stayed in a deep slumber until we got home just before two am, only drifting in and out of conciousness a few times when the road surface got vile enough that even the crappy shocks of the ford couldn’t handle.
reaching home, we all stumbled into the house weary as fuck, but i didn’t go back to sleep until about four after i woke up and dragged all the bags back in. which sucked, because i had work at eight.
four hours later. yeah. i got about two and a half hours of sleep.
and then had an eight hour shift. by four thirty, when i finally clocked out, i was beyond exhausted. somehow managing to make my way home from work without wrecking my car all over the road, the next three hours were spent taking a power nap, so that i could once again get back in my car, and head out on the road once more; this time to davis, outside of sacramento.
one of the attendees at the funeral was a guy who used to play guitar at our church before taking off for college in chico, and it turns out his band was playing the next night up around us at a bar just a few blocks from where renee lives. they’re a reggae group, which i hadn’t realized until i got there, and totally grooved the whole time they played since i’ve really gotten into reggae lately through the playlist we have at work. renee and her boyfriend david joined me and a pitcher of pabst blue ribbon to check out the show.
for the latter half of the show, there was this really attractive gal in a black skirt and top that kept looking over and eyeing me. she was fairly toasted, but so was i after downing several pints of beer, and for a moment, i realized i probably had a very good shot with her. the only thing that stopped me was the realization that i’m with ashley, and such behavior isn’t exactly the brightest thing to do in a relationship (although, i’m beginning to get the strong feeling that the future between ashley and myself may be in question – completely unrelated to my being in davis, getting drunk, and dancing to reggae), otherwise were i a single man, i totally would have been all over that.
as it stands, i kept to myself and hung out with renee and david, dancing along to the music and shouting like a wild asshole whenever it seemed appropriate, which was quite often as it turns out. it was great to hear my friend play again, as it’s been about ten years since i’ve last seen him really rip a guitar to shreds.
david, renee’s boyfriend, was kind enough to let me crash on his couch out in the living room, and after walking him to work with renee the next morning, she and i grabbed some coffee at peet’s and bagles at noah’s. there was no real pressing need for me to get back home until later that evening, so she and i walked down to the country club that her apartment gets her a discount on, and took one of the peddle boats out around the lake a few times. in spite of it being overcast (or really, because of it), i ended up getting sunburned yet again. you’d think that by now, after twenty six years, i would remember to bring sunscreen with me everywhere i go. oh well. i suppose i’ll eventually have to seek treatment should i ever develop melanoma.
renee and i grabbed some dinner at sudwerk’s, a local micro brewery (God, i fucking *love* college towns) and then i had to fight through a freak rain storm and horrendous rush hour traffic (worse than what i encountered in la) on highway eighty to get back home in time to change and get over to work for my closing shift. that night was totally bogus. even though it ended up being rather fun, out bathrooms were out of commission after a pipe exploded in our basement, and then one of the closing crew called in sick, leaving us short staffed on a busy friday night. we didn’t get out of there until two fifteen in the morning, and i had to be back once more later on at ten.
and again, it was a fucking eight hour shift. at this point in the week, i had gone three days on less than six hours of sleep, and it was definitely catching up to me rather fast. masato joined up with me for dinner at bj’s in foster city, where the lack of sleep and a rather generous pint of berry cider made me a bit loopy.
you would think that after dinner, i would have gone home and straight to bed right after.
nope.
like the fool i am, i stayed up until three in the morning. and then passed out.
the majority of sunday was spent curled up on my floor, napping away and developing a massive headache that plagued me for most of monday.
ok.
i seriously need to go to bed, since i gotta be up in six hours for work at seven. thankfully i’m only working until noon, and then masato and i have to meet up to discuss just what the hell we are going to do this weekend as far as our responsibilities go for certain projects at fanimecon.
hopefully the breadth of this post helps to explain as to why i haven’t written anything in the last several days. as always, there will be much, much more from me again.
which will be ready just as soon as i have another spare four hours to devote to craft these wastefully drawn out blog entries.