to our friends in the great white north
im sitting on my mother's couch in auburn, california, waiting for her to get off work and take me to the airport. since this is pretty much the end of my "vacation" i thought i might as well recount how it went. i stayed away from the internet (for the most part) until the last day or so. now its time to get back to LA and do the thing i call my life.
so i arrived at sacramento int'l last monday. my mom picked me up and we ate lunch at some little mexican resaurant and drove back to her place. she "got into" real estate right before the housing market crashed and so ended up with three houses that she cant sell. so to save money, shes not only renting out the houses she doesnt live in, but renting out the rooms in the one she does. so i met a nice man named marcel from germany. his soon-to-be ex-wife convinced him to quit his job and move to auburn so she could get a job teaching. soon after, she decided to divorce him. so hes having a bit of a rough time and living in my brother's old room. the room i would have lived in if i was still living with my mother when she bought this house is now rented by a woman who is also having marital difficulties. but she has a history with my mother and seems to be a nice enough person.
anyways, my little brother, dre (andreas), came over with his girlfriend, genevieve. theyre really cute together and im amazed theyre still sticking it out. i think its been two years or so. theyre kind of clean neo-hippie types and they live in truckee with a couple of other kids in a cabin-looking house. they had driven all the way from fort bragg just to have dinner with my mother and me. because genevieve's primary source of income comes from taking care of three young children. the children's parents happened to be taking a vacation in fort bragg and so she was asked to come along (with my brother) and tend to the kids when the parents were doing "parent" things. still sounds like they had a lot of fun because they went ocean kayaking and diving for abalone and such. but they also wiped a lot of little kid's dirty butts. the latter seems to be working as a form of mental birth control for the two of them.
so the next morning i went to breakfast with my mom and afterwards, she drove me to my father's house in nevada city. he still lives up on banner mountain with his wife and two golden retrievers. they actually have a pretty cool setup. they grow most of their own vegetables and get a good deal of their power from solar panels on their roof. in any case, none of my friends were immediately available so i went with my step-mom, victoria, to the gym and by the time we were done, one of my really close friends from high school had gotten off work. his name is nick.
i drove down to meet nick at his new place, which is probably the most economical living situation i have witnessed among kids my age. hes basically sharing a three bedroom duplex with two other people. because the house in foreclosure and the mortgage is worth about twice as much as its worth, the owner has given up hope and is renting the whole thing out for $450 a month. this means my friend is paying $150 for his share of the spacious, two story apartment/house.
anyways, nick seems to be doing really well and in some ways, despite having lost daily communication, we have ended up progressing at the same rate in different tastes and thought processes. for example, we both were really into metal/hardcore as kids. and now we both listen to much more grind/goregrind and electronic music. from our conversations, we also seem to be undergoing our own forms of existential crisis and hold similar political stances... though i must admit he gives much more clout to the conspiracy theorists of the world. perhaps hes right, but im still not too convinced FEMA is planning to imprison or kill off 90% of the population at some point in the near future. i dont think he is either, but he considers it a realistic possibility.
anyways, the next morning i met up with my friend vanessa, who is actually going to be married in october (this is still a bit of a mindfuck for me, but i am being as supportive as possible). i got to meet her little sister and hang out with her fiance as well (i knew her fiance from school but we were never that close... but he seems like a really good guy). her sister, on the other hand... hah. she is also a really cool little girl (when i say little i mean 18), and totally cute (shes kind of exactly the type i make up in my head... complete feminine looks but dresses like a boy and wears lots of american apparel... except shes apparently into old dudes). but at a couple points she completely weirded me out (not necessarily in a bad way). apparently, she was and still is a fan of the "mailbag" videos dana and i used to do together. if you dont know what that is, its basically when my ex-girfriend would read all the crazy myspace email she received on a regular basis. she got the idea to have me film her while she read them outloud and made little comments. they eventually evolved into something else, in which i played a larger role (it was still centered around dana), but i digress... the thing is: vanessa's sister, natalie, actually memorized a bunch of the videos. you have no idea how weird it is for someone you've never met to recite pieces of your own life back to you.
but vanessa, natalie, the fiance (nathaniel), and i all went down the yuba river, which was beautiful and relaxing and completely what i needed. we hiked out relatively far so there werent too many people... only a couple of naked hippies, one of which took a picture of us... that was sort of sketch but not too big of a deal. the point is it was really fucking great to see vanessa. i love her energy and despite seeing her so rarely, we seem to get along just fine.
when we got back to her house, though, she had family friends over for dinner and so i took off. my other really good friend from high school (actually we met as toddlers), corey, was also supposed to hang out with me. hes had some harsh shit go down in his life over the past couple years and i think has been dealing with that emotionally ever since. so when i called and his cell phone was disconnected, i thought maybe he was just hibernating and didnt want to see anybody. but i ran into his little brother at an indoor soccer place and asked for his mom's phone number. i got corey's address from her, and then called up nick to see if he wanted to go on a little adventure and see if we could track down our friend. we ended up somewhere in roseville that evening and parked in the driveway of an empty house that looked like it was for sale. discouraged, we looked back at the address i had written down and found that it was not the same one in the GPS. corey actually lived down the street and was pulling up when we got there. so we found the little fucker and ended up having a really late night full of conversation and driving around blasting animosity and other deathy metal stuff (all the time in search of food).
so i got to bed around 4 in the morning and then woke up to have coffee with vanessa and her sister to say goodbye.
that evening i met up with my little brother, dre, once more. we ended up in grass valley at a street fair (there are so many young hipster kids wandering around my hometown now... weird) and then congregated with a bunch of old friends/acquaintances at this little folk rock show at some music cafe. jesse, the other guitarist and vocalist from one of my first bands was there, and it was really great to see him.
after the show i drove to truckee with my brother and his girlfriend. the next morning i met his roommates and watched my brother play alot of FIFA soccer on his xbox, and then we went for a run, which at 6,700 feet elevation made me almost keel over. i am not used to that level of oxygen in the air.
note: i did not finish this entry in time so now i am back in my apartment in korea town.
so where did i leave off? oh yeah...
my brother drove me from his place to my grandparent's cabin in lake tahoe for a family reunion dinner. my ancestors on my grandfathers side were irish immigrants who were some of the first white people to settle in lake tahoe. way back in the day they purchased all of Meek's Bay and the surrounding 650 acres of land for $250. they were cattle ranchers. their descendents ended up selling most of it for barrels of butter. but my grandparents were able to inherit a cabin at the end of it. so a bunch of my extended family that come from that family tree got together in lake tahoe to celebrate our togetherness or something. i must say there are a lot of us. a bunch of people were there that i have never met. the weird thing is now a bunch of the cousins that are my age or slightly younger are married or have kids or both. all this marrying and child rearing is making me feel old.
well, the following day was more of that reunion. i went swimming in the lake and talked briefly to a bunch of relatives... more so to my uncle steve who is a lawyer in petaluma. he always tells me the same story about writing a law and order style screenplay a while back that wasnt any good. but he also talks a lot about human rights activism and so we kick around ideas in that realm of thought. i also met my recently divorced aunt's new boyfriend. hes a fifty-something metalhead from the bay area. hes a sweet guy but super dorky. he put me in his truck to blast the new exodus album and his own solo metal project, which is not that great in my opinion but at least hes trying. i guess he ended up causing some drama with my grandma. im not exactly sure over what but i assume its his teenage-like drive to consciously stay in the minority, as if part of his identity is entrenched in the idea of being discriminated against for really strange reasons. example: whoever organized the event made blue t-shirts for the family to wear so that people could identify who was who. also there was a picture with all of us and maybe they wanted everyone to look like a team. anyways, this guy said something to the effect of "oh man, i better wear this blue t-shirt or else everyone's gonna be like 'whos that guy that looks like a heavy metal musician on the beach?' theyre gonna wanna kick me off or arrest me or something." just to let you know, he was wearing a black quicksilver shirt and a baseball hat.
umm... so after the reunion i went back to my brothers house. we played halo 3 with my mom's roommate, marcel. and i got food poisoning and kept shitting in the middle of the night and probably waking everyone up by flushing the toilet constantly. my brother and his girlfriend played soccer in the morning and i stayed in bed to read and write.
the last night i went back to my mothers. she said a friend of hers, who is the mother of a really old friend of mine from like 5th grade, invited us over for dinner. i thought it would be cool to see my old friend. her name is grace. apparently, she lives in san diego now and goes to radiology school. she turned out to be a beautiful girl, but i was kind of taken a back by a lot of the things she said. so i ended up being pretty quiet. everything she talked about basically revolved around her church's youth group, complaining about the mexican population in southern california, and her crazy russian roommate (who is a fullbright scholar). at least the dinner was alright.
well, thats it for the short version which is already pretty long for live journal. so i guess ill stop there.
so i arrived at sacramento int'l last monday. my mom picked me up and we ate lunch at some little mexican resaurant and drove back to her place. she "got into" real estate right before the housing market crashed and so ended up with three houses that she cant sell. so to save money, shes not only renting out the houses she doesnt live in, but renting out the rooms in the one she does. so i met a nice man named marcel from germany. his soon-to-be ex-wife convinced him to quit his job and move to auburn so she could get a job teaching. soon after, she decided to divorce him. so hes having a bit of a rough time and living in my brother's old room. the room i would have lived in if i was still living with my mother when she bought this house is now rented by a woman who is also having marital difficulties. but she has a history with my mother and seems to be a nice enough person.
anyways, my little brother, dre (andreas), came over with his girlfriend, genevieve. theyre really cute together and im amazed theyre still sticking it out. i think its been two years or so. theyre kind of clean neo-hippie types and they live in truckee with a couple of other kids in a cabin-looking house. they had driven all the way from fort bragg just to have dinner with my mother and me. because genevieve's primary source of income comes from taking care of three young children. the children's parents happened to be taking a vacation in fort bragg and so she was asked to come along (with my brother) and tend to the kids when the parents were doing "parent" things. still sounds like they had a lot of fun because they went ocean kayaking and diving for abalone and such. but they also wiped a lot of little kid's dirty butts. the latter seems to be working as a form of mental birth control for the two of them.
so the next morning i went to breakfast with my mom and afterwards, she drove me to my father's house in nevada city. he still lives up on banner mountain with his wife and two golden retrievers. they actually have a pretty cool setup. they grow most of their own vegetables and get a good deal of their power from solar panels on their roof. in any case, none of my friends were immediately available so i went with my step-mom, victoria, to the gym and by the time we were done, one of my really close friends from high school had gotten off work. his name is nick.
i drove down to meet nick at his new place, which is probably the most economical living situation i have witnessed among kids my age. hes basically sharing a three bedroom duplex with two other people. because the house in foreclosure and the mortgage is worth about twice as much as its worth, the owner has given up hope and is renting the whole thing out for $450 a month. this means my friend is paying $150 for his share of the spacious, two story apartment/house.
anyways, nick seems to be doing really well and in some ways, despite having lost daily communication, we have ended up progressing at the same rate in different tastes and thought processes. for example, we both were really into metal/hardcore as kids. and now we both listen to much more grind/goregrind and electronic music. from our conversations, we also seem to be undergoing our own forms of existential crisis and hold similar political stances... though i must admit he gives much more clout to the conspiracy theorists of the world. perhaps hes right, but im still not too convinced FEMA is planning to imprison or kill off 90% of the population at some point in the near future. i dont think he is either, but he considers it a realistic possibility.
anyways, the next morning i met up with my friend vanessa, who is actually going to be married in october (this is still a bit of a mindfuck for me, but i am being as supportive as possible). i got to meet her little sister and hang out with her fiance as well (i knew her fiance from school but we were never that close... but he seems like a really good guy). her sister, on the other hand... hah. she is also a really cool little girl (when i say little i mean 18), and totally cute (shes kind of exactly the type i make up in my head... complete feminine looks but dresses like a boy and wears lots of american apparel... except shes apparently into old dudes). but at a couple points she completely weirded me out (not necessarily in a bad way). apparently, she was and still is a fan of the "mailbag" videos dana and i used to do together. if you dont know what that is, its basically when my ex-girfriend would read all the crazy myspace email she received on a regular basis. she got the idea to have me film her while she read them outloud and made little comments. they eventually evolved into something else, in which i played a larger role (it was still centered around dana), but i digress... the thing is: vanessa's sister, natalie, actually memorized a bunch of the videos. you have no idea how weird it is for someone you've never met to recite pieces of your own life back to you.
but vanessa, natalie, the fiance (nathaniel), and i all went down the yuba river, which was beautiful and relaxing and completely what i needed. we hiked out relatively far so there werent too many people... only a couple of naked hippies, one of which took a picture of us... that was sort of sketch but not too big of a deal. the point is it was really fucking great to see vanessa. i love her energy and despite seeing her so rarely, we seem to get along just fine.
when we got back to her house, though, she had family friends over for dinner and so i took off. my other really good friend from high school (actually we met as toddlers), corey, was also supposed to hang out with me. hes had some harsh shit go down in his life over the past couple years and i think has been dealing with that emotionally ever since. so when i called and his cell phone was disconnected, i thought maybe he was just hibernating and didnt want to see anybody. but i ran into his little brother at an indoor soccer place and asked for his mom's phone number. i got corey's address from her, and then called up nick to see if he wanted to go on a little adventure and see if we could track down our friend. we ended up somewhere in roseville that evening and parked in the driveway of an empty house that looked like it was for sale. discouraged, we looked back at the address i had written down and found that it was not the same one in the GPS. corey actually lived down the street and was pulling up when we got there. so we found the little fucker and ended up having a really late night full of conversation and driving around blasting animosity and other deathy metal stuff (all the time in search of food).
so i got to bed around 4 in the morning and then woke up to have coffee with vanessa and her sister to say goodbye.
that evening i met up with my little brother, dre, once more. we ended up in grass valley at a street fair (there are so many young hipster kids wandering around my hometown now... weird) and then congregated with a bunch of old friends/acquaintances at this little folk rock show at some music cafe. jesse, the other guitarist and vocalist from one of my first bands was there, and it was really great to see him.
after the show i drove to truckee with my brother and his girlfriend. the next morning i met his roommates and watched my brother play alot of FIFA soccer on his xbox, and then we went for a run, which at 6,700 feet elevation made me almost keel over. i am not used to that level of oxygen in the air.
note: i did not finish this entry in time so now i am back in my apartment in korea town.
so where did i leave off? oh yeah...
my brother drove me from his place to my grandparent's cabin in lake tahoe for a family reunion dinner. my ancestors on my grandfathers side were irish immigrants who were some of the first white people to settle in lake tahoe. way back in the day they purchased all of Meek's Bay and the surrounding 650 acres of land for $250. they were cattle ranchers. their descendents ended up selling most of it for barrels of butter. but my grandparents were able to inherit a cabin at the end of it. so a bunch of my extended family that come from that family tree got together in lake tahoe to celebrate our togetherness or something. i must say there are a lot of us. a bunch of people were there that i have never met. the weird thing is now a bunch of the cousins that are my age or slightly younger are married or have kids or both. all this marrying and child rearing is making me feel old.
well, the following day was more of that reunion. i went swimming in the lake and talked briefly to a bunch of relatives... more so to my uncle steve who is a lawyer in petaluma. he always tells me the same story about writing a law and order style screenplay a while back that wasnt any good. but he also talks a lot about human rights activism and so we kick around ideas in that realm of thought. i also met my recently divorced aunt's new boyfriend. hes a fifty-something metalhead from the bay area. hes a sweet guy but super dorky. he put me in his truck to blast the new exodus album and his own solo metal project, which is not that great in my opinion but at least hes trying. i guess he ended up causing some drama with my grandma. im not exactly sure over what but i assume its his teenage-like drive to consciously stay in the minority, as if part of his identity is entrenched in the idea of being discriminated against for really strange reasons. example: whoever organized the event made blue t-shirts for the family to wear so that people could identify who was who. also there was a picture with all of us and maybe they wanted everyone to look like a team. anyways, this guy said something to the effect of "oh man, i better wear this blue t-shirt or else everyone's gonna be like 'whos that guy that looks like a heavy metal musician on the beach?' theyre gonna wanna kick me off or arrest me or something." just to let you know, he was wearing a black quicksilver shirt and a baseball hat.
umm... so after the reunion i went back to my brothers house. we played halo 3 with my mom's roommate, marcel. and i got food poisoning and kept shitting in the middle of the night and probably waking everyone up by flushing the toilet constantly. my brother and his girlfriend played soccer in the morning and i stayed in bed to read and write.
the last night i went back to my mothers. she said a friend of hers, who is the mother of a really old friend of mine from like 5th grade, invited us over for dinner. i thought it would be cool to see my old friend. her name is grace. apparently, she lives in san diego now and goes to radiology school. she turned out to be a beautiful girl, but i was kind of taken a back by a lot of the things she said. so i ended up being pretty quiet. everything she talked about basically revolved around her church's youth group, complaining about the mexican population in southern california, and her crazy russian roommate (who is a fullbright scholar). at least the dinner was alright.
well, thats it for the short version which is already pretty long for live journal. so i guess ill stop there.