31 July, 2012

Intermission: Lovecraftesque

I wrote a quick poem to see if I can still horror goodly. You tell me what you think, dear readers, though I am expecting the rotted tomatoes in short order. In any case, this shall provide some surcease of the nigh endless stream of amazing funtime entries I've been writing about the awesome experiences you're not having.

The haggard souls all know this well,
In maddening, awful, frightening hells,

On sordid grounds stained with men's blood,
Neglected by figments far above.

But myriad still are things unseen,
Devils, they, with words unclean.

From across the Aether, a slithering voice,
Invades my mind, with tendrils moist

It calls from Ynith with tones of rock
To terrify and senses shock

And now, though late, awake a lie
I wish one thing before I die

And that is that these foul and awful beings
Should only free me from their wretched schemes.




28 July, 2012

Berkeley Travelogue Part V: The Berk

I awoke early the next day, though as was my custom, I still woke latest. I embraced Weishan, so thrilled and touched to finally be reunited with her at long last. My heart fluttered, awe struck by her beauty. Sadly, she had a class to attend to that day, and my traveling companion Elisabeth was due to see her long missed relatives across the Bay in Frisco - and so I was left to the oh so miserable and not at all enjoyable company of my good friend Katie.

Katie made it a point to make me as familiar as a crippled Georgian can be made with the nearly vertical climes of the area surrounding the UC Berkeley campus. I remember distinctly my remark that the trip would be much better served by mounting rappelling ropes on the hills. I would much rather that than try to do the climb without them. It was on one particularly long hill that my love of the city was made concrete. I saw the Berkeley stadium, regarding it as a Dwemer ruin of some sort, as that is exactly how it appeared: a large, granite, art deco construct.

Traveling further up the hill, I had some overly-sensitive prat praising the culture of political correctness stuck behind me. I was just silently absorbing the details of his life I'd need to hunt him down later via his monologue to his no doubt lobotomized friend when we surmounted the hill. I immediately followed Katie off towards the campus, as I decided my first day in Berkeley would be a lousy day to acquire my first felony.

The Berkeley campus was truly a sight to behold. There were great redwood trees, incredible architecture of epic scale and scope, laboratories where brilliant minds pushed back the boundaries of human knowledge inch by enlightening inch. It was almost too much for me to take in, actually. It was all so surreal to see. I began seriously entertaining the thought of living there, a thought made all the more real as we entered a gelato shop and I proceeded to eat the best gelato of my life. And that was when we reunited with Weishan...

27 July, 2012

Berkeley Travelogue IV: A New Hope

It was in baggage claim that I reunited with Weishan, embracing her with all of my love, much to the audible disgust of Elisabeth and Katie who waited nearby. Unfortunately, time was working against us. We had just arrived and due to the fact that United's disembarking schemes had likely been formulated by some low functioning specimen of primate (although, arguably, a primate might be more clever) we were forced to speed through the concourse as if on an Olympic sprinting track in order to make the last BART ride across the Bay to Berkeley.

The ticketing process for the train was, for whatever reason, extraordinarily slow. After we left the tram to the BART station, we had to wait on a considerably broken ticketing machine to deign us worthy of receiving its product before we could enter the station, and then a further 30 minutes for the train to show up. Finally, it did. Unbelievably, we had made it just in time and we were soon aboard what had to be the most crowded train I'd ever ridden. Scores of drunken hippies and hipsters packed in like Vienna sausages, pressing the four of us quite tightly together. While this was no problem for Weishan and I - who had not stopped being awful since we first saw each other that day - Elisabeth and Katie were hurriedly constructing nooses. Whether for themselves or for us, we did not know, but thankfully, we arrived before they could hang them on the hand bars of the train.

We had safely arrived past the transbay tunnel and exited into the cool, crisp air of the Berkeley night. After a short walk through the surprisingly bustling college town - very cool compared to the oppressive Georgian heat of the season - we arrived at Weishan's apartment and, after having all three of them haul my wheelchair up the stairs because lol teh cripplez, we were safely inside. We enjoyed a filling dinner thanks to the generosity of my fiancee and settled in to watch - COMPLETELY LEGALLY COUGH COUGH - A Cabin In The Woods. Afterwards, we all settled in to our respective beds. For sleep, obviously. 

25 July, 2012

Berkeley Travelogue, Part III: SFO sho.

Without any real means of distraction, the flight from Houston was a nightmare of tedium and antici... pation. I was by this point stone sober again and there was no amusement to be had. I had powered off my phone, so that upon arrival I could communicated with my beloved fiancee and my friend who would meet us there as Elisabeth's phone had developed some sort of allergy to electricity and, thus, refused to remain charged.

The hours crawled by on hands and knees, as if each minute were locked in a heated contest with the last to see which could be the slowest goddamned minute in existence. It wore on me, and the fact that I'd downed three caffeine laden complementary sodas in the past hour or so likely exacerbated the issue considerably.

After far too long, though, the captain's voice filled the cabin. "Please stow your trays in the upright position, we're now on approach to SFO, San Francisco International." I couldn't listen to the rest, excited as I was. In clear defiance of FAA protocol, I took out my phone and once we were within service altitude, texted her that we were almost on the tarmac. I wish I had waited some time, though, as disembarkment took forever.

Once Elisabeth and I were in the loading ramp, we immediately proceeded to the tram. The tram journey left my knuckles white and my palms sweaty. If I could feel my knees as we navigated the kafkhaesque labyrinth of SFO, they'd have felt akin to freshly boiled spaghetti as we made our way to baggage claim. Upon arriving and claiming my bags, however, I saw them: Katie and my beloved fiancee, Weishan. The disgustingness was about to commence, and there was nothing that Elisabeth or Katie could do about it.

22 July, 2012

Berkeley Travelogue Part II: Houston

It was mid afternoon in the local time when we touched down at George Bush Intercontinental - a well laid out, thoughtfully designed piece of architecture in Houston - the first land outside of my time zone I had ever laid tire upon. Exiting the plane was as much an ordeal as entering it, but as soon as I was in the terminal - and after fighting a crowd of my fellow passengers for use of the restroom facilities - Elisabeth and I began our epic journey across the airport to the flight that would, ultimately, land us at SFO.

It was apparent that we were in Texas from the get go. The air possessed a beany, meaty quality and the whole of the place smelled of beer. Contrasting this, the walls of the terminal were curving and polished white, possessing a space station quality about them. This is in difference, mind you, to the space stations of today - metal cylinders screaming through space, packed with technology and held together by hope in an apt analogy to modern air transit. No, this place resembled a great Asimov-esque vision of a tomorrow that will never come.

I could easily envision such a place playing host to elegant dignitaries from the horse head nebula, or brutal mercenaries from Gliese 581. This illusion was aided by the fact that people were zooming about in golf carts, and the automated messages in the trams were in far more than simply English and Spanish. The myriad of languages felt so cosmopolitan - so fresh. "Why don't we get this shit in Georgia?" I remember muttering.

It's rather sad that I didn't have time to appreciate the place better - to stop and smell the whiskey, as it were - for we were late for our connection and time was of the essence. We even skipped the duty free store - horror of horrors - just to make it to our plane in time. When, at last, we arrived, we boarded the great United 767. After again getting stuffed into an aisle wheelchair and rolled down the impossibly tight aisles to what would be my confinement for the next four hours, I remembered my brother - a pilot in training - warning me about how shitty United was. I had thought he was exaggerating and that my experience on the regional jet had just been due to it being a regional jet, but the second I was aboard those corporate vampires began their god awful cocktease.

I was glad of the TVs at each seat, filling my brain with endless distraction from the fact that I was not yet in Berkeley. Cruelly, this was torn from me by their demands for money upon takeoff. They dangled the hope of diversion before me, like keys before a baby, snatching them away once we were in the air and forcing me to be neighborly. And so, I turned to Elisabeth... who was neck deep in Plants Vs. Zombies. Ruing my cruel fate, I turned on my music player, pulled up some Alexandrov Ensemble music, and began wishing Aeroflot did US routes. I went to order a vodka, only to notice that it was the gutterwater commonly known as Absolut and decided to stay absolut-ly sober for the duration of the flight.

19 July, 2012

Berkeley Travelogue, Part 1: Leaving Lanter

Some weeks ago, I went on my first flight. It was also the first time I'd left my beloved Dixie and even ventured beyond the confines of my time zone. Needless to say, it was thrilling. I got to hang out with my beloved fiancee, Weishan, and meet for the very first time my good friend Katie. All in all, a thrilling excursion. Presented below, a vaguely 'dramatically enhanced' and somewhat semi-accurate retelling of my trip.

It was the late afternoon. I sat at the United terminal at Atlanta's Heartsfield International Airport, nervously biding my time before boarding. I turned to my friend and traveling companion, Elisabeth. Deeply involved in her laptop game, I could see that I would have to find my own entertainment before the flight. However, as shouting 'bomb' and stealing a jet were out of the question, I stuck to bothering Elisabeth with niggling little factoids and banal topics of conversation. It was like our constant texting, but in real life; because that's exactly what it was.

I had found myself, through strange luck and the utmost of Elisabeth's benevolence, with a free plane ticket to fly to the San Francisco bay. It probably helped that this is where my fiancee lives and Elisabeth, with her insatiable lust for exceptional breasts and Asian women, has something of a crush on my wife to be. Whatever the circumstances, I was allowed passage into this terminal, to this flight to the other side of this great nation. Somewhere along the chain of command, it would seem, someone had miscalculated greatly.

I was shocked, actually. I had somehow made it through the TSA without provoking a headlines making incident, nor had I alleged that I'd shout 'rape' the moment one of the uniformed thugs frisked my junk. This was unprecedented, and the minute I was stuffed into a special wheelchair and eased down the aisles of the regional jet that would convey me to the airfield in Houston, I decided to congratulate myself on my restraint with a $20 cocktail. However, there was a true and pressing problem with this course of action.

For whatever fiendish reason, some debased bastard in some insulated Washington law office - presumably the same place where they wrote the Hughes Amendment and thus finally murdered The Great God of Fun - decided that booze could not be served until after takeoff. This infuriated me, but now I was beyond the hall monitor like gaze of Atlanta's finest. No, I was in the big leagues. The FAA and the DHS were in charge on the streamlined silver snake that was my conveyance. The booze sweats began to sink in, a scream of rage welled up in my lungs. Bad enough they wouldn't let a man bring aboard a bit of herb, but this? It was the height of fascist excess, and any of a number of suits in our company could be air marshals.

"My god, when will we get in the air?" I asked Elisabeth, not five minutes after I was seated. The ground had taken on a sinister and unsettling vibe, akin to the shackles of a great slaving ship. The oppressive air filled me with ominous terrors. All at once, there was a great thundering. The air outside began to darken as lightening filled the skies. The runway itself splintered and cracked, lava issuing forth from the ground. It was pure bedlam. All at once, a great moaning began as surely the grizzly reaper had come to claim me. There was a tremendous shaking, as though the ground itself refused to have anything to do with me. This was no ordinary decay of American infrastructure. This was the end!

The moaning grew in intensity. I felt I could scream before I was jerked back to reality. We had just touched off. The ground fell beneath us as I whiped my brow gingerly. Still alive. Such rapturous joy. "We made it." I said confidently as Elisabeth rolled her eyes at me. I was pleased at this reaction and once the plane lurched up to cruising altitude, I tucked into my much deserved booze.