What Would George Bush Do?

Adapted for reality from the otherwise excellent www.wellingtongrey.net.

Weddings simultaneously impress and depress me. The amount of optimism, joy, decoration and, of course, booze at the things makes me all misty. The amount of religious cant, denial of reality, and of course, the booze at the things makes me believe all mankind is insane.

My Uncle’s wedding was no different, though as always it was lovely to spend time with the “kids” in my generation. Spookily (that fucker tempus fugits) there is a new generation of kids below us who will no doubt some day come to our late-life events and sit at a table far in the back, drink our champagne, and honor and mock us at once. It is a ritual of premature burial that all generations are subjected to. It is just a shock that it might come to mine. ;-)

I woke up without the hangover I had hoped for. This was disappointing, as I had put the work in the night before. I was amused to see, as I searched for the coffee-maker, which was inexplicably hidden under the sink, that the tea-maker was on the counter, as was the automatic rice-cooker. I'm just guessing the hotel gets a lot of Asian Trade. The ride up to the church was brief and easy, and I arrived to quite a lot of people I didn’t know, milling about outside a church I was even less familiar with. The service was nearly endless and replete with the idiocies of two religions, Catholicism and Urantia. It is a point against the orthodoxic stupidity of Catholicism that the quotes from the Urantia Bible (Instruction Manual?) seemed the height of rationality compared to the “we betrayed God so in time he betrayed his son” babble of the priest.

As I thought this sort of thing throughout the entire ceremony, and since I did not have the cheat-sheet in the program (lyrics to songs, prayers, call and response shiat, and the like) I couldn’t play along, I suppose it is only due to Gawd’s mercy that I wasn’t smoten by a plague of some sort.

Still, the venue was nice, and whatever else you can say about my uncle, he is a creative mofo. In the last month before the ceremony he decided (perhaps his bride had a hand, or clenched fist, in the decision – there were various tales floating about the reception) to create some artwork for the wedding. He made 7 incredible fabric/painting pieces which you have seen strewn throughout this little post. Two are recreations of actual weddings, and the others are multicultural type representations of idealized weddings (though I can't say why he made the Thai wedding picture with George Bush's face?)

The pictures don’t do justice as the textural differences between the paint and fabric, and the richness the fabric brings the pieces, was quite amazing up close.

As mentioned above, the ceremony not only mentioned eternity, but also approached it. The head.. uh.. Catholic, did quote his “favorite theologian, Elton John” which gave me quite a start as I thought the Churches’ formal stance on the ghey was that it was only appropriate for priests and the like.

The words I have to say
May well be simple but theyre true
Until you give your love
Theres nothing more that we can do

Love is the opening door
Love is what we came here for
No one could offer you more
Do you know what I mean
Have your eyes really seen

You say its very hard
To leave behind the life we knew
But theres no other way
And now its really up to you

Love is the key we must turn
Truth is the flame we must burn
Freedom the lesson we must learn
Do you know what I mean
Have your eyes really seen

Just when I thought the long nightmare was over, the head dude called us back together for the “first eucharist” of the married couple. My uncle informed me this was not an event that should be photographed. This made me the only photographer at the event who wasn’t flashing away with abandon through the entire ordeal ceremony.

No matter, I was beyond bored at that point. I like me a little ritual, but for chrissakes.. the champagne out there at the reception might be getting warm, and the icing on the wedding cake running like it was abandoned in MacArthur Park. Think of my gross physical desires you great drunken pederasts, and get this wedding over with!

OK.. that sounded a little weird.

Anyway, we sat around for about 4 hours drinking champagne, red wine and coffee. The last two hours of this binge were spent discussing what our plans after the wedding should be. I made any such plans moot by choosing the wrong direction on the 110 when I tried to head back to the hotel. I was past downtown when it occurred to me that I was going the wrong direction, and at that point I just decided to keep heading down to the airport. It was a beautiful day in LA, the traffic was reasonable except around USC (Hah! USC went on to lose to lowly Stanford!) and I got to the airport, then home, with little difficulty besides the truly enormous woman who was in the seat beside me on the plane.

And since I may get home and never post to this topic again, I give you a sprinkling of photos from the blessed event:

The Headerast (of course that’s a totally unfair characterization. Duh!)

Bride

Groom

Wedded Bliss


Crazy Weiner Dog

One Ring to Rule Them All

Holy Crap.. As I sit here “Running on Empty” comes on yet again… it’s like a message from Jackson Browne, or something.

That message is.. ‘get drunk ya fat fuck!’

And so, with an hour to go until boarding, it is time for this little patriot to go salute his fine country the only way he knows…

Some Sam Adams Lagers, and then a wide stance in the airport restroom.

Pics from the Heat Of Los Angeles....

Want to go, go without a map
Far away, away, I won't get trapped
By the sound, a town, the sun beats down
In the heat of Los Angeles

Want to fuck, fuck, fuck this up
Gonna feel, feel, feel you up
Had enough, enough, enough's enough
In the heat of Los Angeles

Approach..

Consultation with MAF and BAG suggest I should approach tomorrow with a hangover.

I can't say "Mission Accomplished" (since a chimp has already ruint that phrase) but I can say one last trip to the bar on the 4th floor might help..

;-)

Belly, Beast, Beer...

LA is, as it always is now that I have the means to sort of enjoy it, a beautiful nightmare. My Mapquest directions, which I had plenty of time to read in the driving longeuers (that can’t be spelled properly) of the 110, included the odd advice:

Take the US 101 N exit…..(to) …. Merge onto US 101 S

This probably would have worked, but I got trapped in the right lane during rush hour and kicked off the freeway somewhere in downtown LA. By a stroke of luck some freeway shadowing led me to Sunset, which I know from my years of gay hustling as a youth, and I did a bit more highway shadowing and soon ended up on Los Angeles Street, which is where the New Otani Hotel actually is. And really, what could be more right, more ‘here I am in LA’ than being on Los Angeles Street, right off of downtown? If I only had some sunglasses to wear tonight.

After a false pass at the parking lot exit I was in to the hotel parking lot entrance and registered. The room was bit odd. I had trouble getting the light to turn on, and while I was bent over the switch, something lightly smacked me on the top of my head.

When the light did turn on, it became clear that what had hit my head was a bit of the near torrent of a leak coming from the air-conditioning unit on the ceiling. There was a nice little puddle, which wouldn’t have concerned me much. But there was also the steady dual smacking onto the carpet of nearly matched dual leaks in the conditioning unit.

Those who only know me for my crudity and insensitivity will be surprised to hear that sleep is my “Princess and the Pea” issue. I love sleep immoderately, but find it difficult to achieve. Any noise alerts me and I start predicting the local hell of regular noises. I’m sure this was a positive trait back when saber-toothed tigers were on the loose. I’d have saved the whole tribe several times over. But in this day of garbage collections, cars containing sound systems worth twice the value of the car and, not to be too blunt, the BAGs otherworldly assortment of snores, googles, hoots, and rumbles (most of which suggest the four horsemen of the apocalypse are losing a close football game to the Hell’s Angels)?

My asleep vigilance is a positive negative (which I leave to the mathematicians amongst you to sort out).

Anyway… I turned the fan on to see if it would cover the sound of the drip. It would not.

So, I went downstairs to request a room-change and, bango-bingo, mysterioso.. was upgraded to a lovely suite. Completely unimportant for a one night stay at a hotel (most of which has already been spent in the bars – and they have THREE bars here… I can be a “nearly” drunk three times while actually working on a staggering hangover for tomorrow’s wedding. If that isn’t a good vacation, I don’t know what is)

So I got all set up in the new room, and headed down to bar number one in the lobby. Two Mex-Am women already drunk and highly entertaining. A guy from El Salvador. Some woman (probably my age) in vast need of stick-reduction-surgery so her lower alimentary tract could relax and so she could shut down “Outlook” and at least touch the one light beer she had ordered.

A grand time was had by all, except the woman with the broomstick impacted fundament.

Then, as the lower bar closes at 10, I moved up to the upper bar.

Where I still sit, having left two messages for my alleged relatives, who are apparently off in Japantown eating at some restaurant that is soon to show up on “Kitchen Hell” with a floor manager pleading, “you can’t kill the cockroaches, we’d have to come up with a new ‘sweet and crunchy’ sauce.”

I suspect I will have one more beer, hook up to the tubes here (THEY FREAKING CHARGE BY THE MINUTE! THAT IS NOT A SIGN OF A QUALITY HOTEL!!!!) and then see if they have porno on the cables.

That should pretty much bore me to sleep.

And as I sit here preparing to go, I see something new.. the bartendress tosses a handful of the (hottish) party-mix (nuts, chex, that kind of thing) they serve into a Styrofoam cup and then pours diet coke on top of the thing. Is this a drink, appetizer, or emetic?

It shocks me so badly I order another beer.

Just for my nerves.

Which are also rattled by the effeminate faced and hair-doed Japanese guy here in suits sharper than razors.

But now it is time to focus on the Angels game. Since I’m here in the city of angeles and all.

HAH.. just as I typed that, some Red Sox dude with Predator hair hit a game-ending home run and totally bummed out this room….

It’s enough to give me hope --- that when I head up to my room and chew a half a sleeping pill it will send me to the Emergency Room and I will have an excuse to NOT attend my Uncles’ wedding in the AM.

I am never that lucky.

In The Outer Circulatory System of Darkness...

The journey of a one mile, much more the journey of one thousand miles (roundtrip, you skeptic), begins with a cocktail. This is folk wisdom I am sure I have noted elsewhere. And so it is that, yet again, I found myself in the Monkey Bar in the Big City Airport. This time I arrived at the airport sober, so I could actually make some judgments on the drinks. Well, the two I had, which were both margaritas. Excellent. Baby crushed the limes in front of me and I sat there working on my conference paper. The flight was a bit delayed, so I was able to order the second one.

When I got to the gate, the little Filipino dude who took about 30 seconds comparing IDs to tickets (yet oddly never once looked at the ID and compared its picture to the person presenting it) pulled out something like a mascara pencil and made big old circles around the two instances of SSSS on my ticket.

Turns out I’m a potential terrorist.

I always suspected this.

Sadly, as usual, I squandered any potential I had, and after something resembling a heavy-petting session with an even older Filipino than the one at the gate, I was let through. The nice woman at the gate warned me that this would happen again on my way back, as I had purchased my tickets within a week of my travel.

Huh?

So terrorists don’t plan their attacks? They’re just sitting in the cave, partying madly for guys who don’t drink, do drugs, date women, or shave, and all of a sudden Abdul jumps up and yells, “Hey, Abdul! And Abdul and Abdul and Abdul and Abdul Mohhamed. Oh, OK, even you Abdul! Let’s get tickets on some planes, before the weekend, because my uncle Abdul is visiting on Saturday, and we’ll do some terrorism! Let’s go!”

That doesn’t make sense…

I realize that I’ve typed more than a page of academic text here, and all that tells me is that I should have had one more drink. It’s far too early in the day for me to get into any of the codeine or few vicodins that I have as a result of my various joint pains.

On the other side of this flight I have to pick up a rental car and part of my strategy there is to be able to speak and have control over my drool, bowels, and eyelids. Mixing drugs with these drinks would be bad (I hasten to add that they would be bad only because they would result in denial of my rental car. Let no man claim I’m against any kind of mixing of things that alter mood. All by responsible adults. Of course.).

But I swear to god.. if they push this flight back anymore than the 20 minutes they already have? I’m swallowing everything in my kit bag, including the shaving cream and slightly soiled thong underwear. And for those of you who are grossing out at the thong underwear? Of course I don’t wear the things. What kind of idiot do you think I am?

I found them in the airport parking lot.

And now, with the flight complete it is really only about a half hour late, not nearly as dire as the leaving an entire hour late might have suggested.

"SLO" Instructors? Redundant, right?

MCAA Conference paper is growing in leaps and bounds, since I am at a conference on "Strengthening Students Success." The conference is at the Moderately Nice Conference Hotel, and as a volunteer my only real job is to drink coffee and ensure that session evaluations aren't filled out by the session leaders.

About 200 educators are here from around the state, which virtually guarantees that Student Success will increase, at least for a few days, in their districts. The "theme' is Student Learning Outcomes (SLO), which is the flavor du jour in semi-administrative academia. It comes with the standard, "how dare you judge me?" reaction from faculty.

But all this nice time allows me to search the web for examples of conference papers (and boggle at how stupid I am - my writing style is linear as algebra compared to most of this papers) and lift little bits and approaches. Between this thing and a quick round-trip flight to LA this weekend, I should have the paper done by the weekend's end.

And the presentation I was going to wait for on Sunday seems to have been cancelled, which will save me the cost of another night in the Hotel. All goodage..

Semi-Oldies

Some pics from a trip up to the Mountains almost 2 months ago. Sorting through my laptop for things to toss out (you will erase my pornography when you pry my laptop from my cold, dead, and grossly gunky hands!) I came across these pics and liked a few.

The click to bigger versions....

The Bee and the Butterfly

Bird in Air

Down in the TrainStation at Midnight

I'm not sure I want to be my degree online.
Partly because I don't know what it means..

Bee-Movie Scenery

The Korean Embassy is normally a calm place (as that apparently placid picture to the left demonstrates). The BKF and JAE attend to common household chores whilst also making a meagre living selling jujubes and crude handmade crafts to soldiers. The Great Unifier is still far to young to marshal his powers and make us all his pawns in his single-minded drive to reunify Korea. At this point he can’t even control his bodily functions, so all is pacific. I might also note that he is, so far, not a complainer of any sort and that’s just the kind of kid I want for my Godson.

Mission Accomplished.

So I drive down on a Friday. My relentless drive for success at work (for I am steely-eyed, slightly graying at the temples, rugged-chinned and intense) means that I have maxed out my vacation time. So I was able to take Friday as a vacation day and drive down to the embassy.

There is something very nice about bailing on work and taking a day off to drive somewhere. I was even unfazed by the fact that the splendid array of rock-songs-from-wayback-then that I heard on the way down, included the back-to-back combo (on different stations to boot) of “Time” by Pink Floyd and “Running On Empty” by Jacksone Browne. This is a terrifying combination of songs about age and lack of meaning for a man of 32 years old, much less for 41 year old (muscular and attractive though I am), but ruggedly handsome survivor such as myself.

Still, I made it down and much of the day was quotidian, even by cross cultural standards. The rice and beer of arrival, the telly-vision. and the attack of the killer bees.

The BKF is uncholeric by nature, and when he wandered back (from a bathroom break) to Mission Impossible playing in the living room he was preternaturally composed when he said… ‘AAAAAAIIIIIIIIIEEEE3EGHGHHH! THE BEES HAVE COME FOR MY CHILD!!!!”

Well, or asked “how do you tell if bees are trying to start a hive?”

As it turns out, I have some knowledge of this. When I was but a young sprout, a cluster of bees looking for a new place to chill came swinging through my elementary school playgound. This was at lunch so all the kiddies, young (me) and secretly homicidal (my sister) were watching. The hive was relatively spread out and I, and some other kids, took too running through it. We got through so fast no bee had a chance to sting us.

Except I was a stinking hippie. With long, flowing, honeyed locks. Filthy and down to my ass. My little statement of rebellion against the man managed to catch a bee.

Like the cheese-eating surrenduuurrrr(!) monkey I was, I ran whimpering out of the swarm. Towards my sister, hollering, “get it out of my head!”

To this day I’m not certain if my BS was trying to kill the bee, or the voices she surely believed I was in thrall to (Zepplin, man!).

But, responding to either call, she took the plastic pony she had at hand, and beat my head (not using the body of the horse, rather using the spiv-sharp front hoof of the thing) until no bees could possibly still be alive, and the buzzing in my head could not possibly recede.

Really, it IS all about family.

Once I was out of the hospital I went to my 5th grade teacher who explained that bees, sometimes, would move nests and it would be in a big old fly-by.

Which, after that long and completely supernumerary digression, is what these bees were doing.

BKF is un-Korean in some ways. He is the guy who introduced me to the “Why The Fuck” theory of Korean response to a problem. This is the reverse of the Mexican versions which means, ‘Why the fuck fix it?” To Koreans the question is “Why the fuck not fix it?” And like Mexico, Korea has plenty of workers. Unlike Mexico, their workers. Er…. Work…

But BKF was unimpressed, or nonplussed by the attack… he tried to figure out who you might call to respond to such and insect attack.

But JAE’s old man was entirely bored.

So that little bee problem you see above (First pic is long shot; second is where something with a bolt was pulled off the wall creating the hole; third a picture is of the hole crawling with the evil, stinking (Japanese or American, depending upon you Korean orientation) bugs that was gonna have to be fixed!

Brah!

Take it as a parody, or take is as proof of the efficacy of the Korean “WTF” theory, but the pictures you see here document the short but deadly war on the bees.

The old man first had to gird his loins. In this case he donned a heavy coat, a mesh bag for holding vegetables, a plastic bag, and some dishwashing gloves which were pulled on outside of the arms of the coat. This process took about 20 minutes and the entire nuclear family was involved in it. It was something very Korean, and something I can’t quite categorize other than to say it was amusing to watch but something deadly serious for the old man..

Then came the machines of war. The old man marched off to battle with two cans of bug spray, stick, a tube of joint-compound, and an old table. The boys brought the table round and it was on.

The attack was frontal. Two handed spraying of the hole with the contents of the two spray cans (which certainly hadn’t been full to begin with, but the bug spray cascaded down the side of the house like a waterfall. When the cans began to run out of propellant, the first work was done and you could watch bees fly away from the wall in uncertain spirals, and then at a certain point fall out of the air. So much spray had been applied that I’m certain several of the bees died of drowning long before their central nervous systems began to fire uncontrollably. One of those pictures over there is of Jong Qu nervously watching this part of the spectacle.

Finally, came the salting of the earth. The joint compound and a stick turned the hole in the wall into an Apiary Cask of Amontillado. There were only two kinds of bees, the ones trapped inside the wall, and the ones trapped outside the wall.

After a short interregnum in which scairt and lost bees beat about the sealed wall, all was calm.

Until the ghosts of the bees trapped within the walls rise from their mortal graves, enter the home through the power outlets, heating vents, cooling system, and around the light fixtures.

Then they will kill and kill AGAIN!

And just because, a relatively high-res picture of the lovely infant himself..