(no subject)
Alright, I'm back from vacation.
If you are so inclined, you can read all about it and see some pictures in my super extremely long winded recap of the whole experience .
So let me start by saying that this trip was completely freaking awesome and a perfect extension of the bizarre string of good luck and general bad-ass-edness that has been life as of late. Allow me to follow that up by saying that the best way to travel is with a few plane tickets, a list of people you'd like to see, an open schedule and no expectations.
and now, into the gritty.
Thursday
I should really begin the story last Wednesday, because in all of the madness of getting my vocal recordings finished and off to my friend Carleen so she could deliver them to Matt to work on editing while I was out and going out to Konkrete Jungle to talk shop and do a bit of networking before heading out of town I somehow forgot to eat dinner before drinking copious amounts of beer. This would set the tone for the entire next week. After vaguely remembering making it home Wednesday night I woke just in time to feverishly stuff a backpack full of clothes and not make it in to work early as I said I would. That didn't really bother me too much, mostly because I was still kinda drunk and in a really good mood from the night before I think. About half way through the day of insane amounts of work to finish before leaving on vacation the hangover started to settle in, but I had little time to give it the attention it was demanding and plowed through my work. At 5 O'clock my ride showed up and by 5:30 I was wrapped up with all the last minute emergencies and headed straight to the airport. Things at the airport went pretty smoothly, as I've been hassled so much in the past I've learned to make things easy for them and myself. Now before I get to the part about landing in LA I need to backtrack to earlier in the day when within hours of each other I learn that the friend who was going to pick me up at the airport and give me a ride to the club got called into work at the last minute and couldn't make it, and the friend who was supposed to meet me at the club and let me crash at her place was not going to be able to make it due to school work. Either one of these things could have gotten me down and put me in a bad mind space for the trip before it even started, but instead I realized that both were simply favors my friends had no real obligation to, that I was lucky to get the offer in the first place, and that being the resourceful and generally lucky guy that I am everything would work out. Regardless (or maybe irregardless), I was now blindly flying into a strange land with little certainty of anything that would follow and decided that I was completely OK with that.
So after a largely uneventful flight I turned on my phone while being taxied back to the terminal and found that in the short flight from Seattle to LA that everything had indeed worked itself out. Brandon had made it to town hours before me and gotten a room at the Renaissance Hollywood which has shuttles from the Airport for $15 and is only a mile from the club where the 'Respect' drum & bass night is held. Even tho I was off the plane by 10:30, there was some confusion as how to contact the airport shuttle and where to wait for it, plus traffic, so I didn't make it back to the hotel until around midnight. By the time I had, Brandon was already well into putting a nice sized dent in the-mini bar but had saved the last of the Maker's Mark for me. This is the part where a hungover Mike starts drinking after having forgotten to eat dinner for the second day in a row. By this time we were running late to meet Scott and Sean down at the club so we grabbed a cab and headed out. Respect was totally fresh. When I got there they had DJ Cassein (OG Konkrete Jungle head from NY) playing along with MC Deco Comprehension, who was actually a good MC *and* put me up on the mic for a few tracks. That's right, I MC'd at Respect, what I think is the longest running D&B night in the country! The headliner was some guy named Jason from SanDiego. He had a lot of choice cuts from back in the day that kept me moving on the dance floor. I met Machete, which was cool, and sat around and talked with all those cats for a minute after close before heading back to Sean's house for a smoke and a few rounds of Xbox racing and ultimately taking a cab back to the hotel.
Friday
It wasn't until I woke up friday morning that I realized how pimp our hotel room was. It was on the like the 18th floor or something high up like that and one of the walls was a huge window with a view of the hollywood sign and all of the shenanigans happening down on the street below. That's where I saw Superman walking around nonchalantly with his cape flying in the wind behind him. It also wasn't until I woke up friday morning that I noticed I had left my debit card at the bar and had somehow managed to lose my camera. As unfortunate as both those things were, they were both inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, and neither was going to keep me from having a good time, so B and I decided to take a cab down to Santa Monica to meet up with our friend Carole and this girl Stephanie that she has been trying to introduce me to (I recommend never taking a cab from Hollywood to Santa Monica in Friday mid-day traffic unless you're prepared to shell out $45 bucks). Santa Monica was cool, we met up by the beach and went out for lunch at this incredible vegan restaurant called "Real Food Daily". It was delicious. We stopped by the co-op for more vegi treats and generally dorked around town until Scott called and talked us into heading down to San Diego a day early with him and Sean, and therefore bypassing the $30 train tickets. Scott's a pretty persuasive guy being a lawyer and what not, so it didn't take long for me to cave. However, this of course meant passing up the opportunity to return to the club to get my card back, but no worries. I just went to the bank and pulled out a bunch of cash to last me for the rest of the weekend.
In lieu of another $45 cab ride Brandon and I hopped on a bus to head back to meet up with Sean and Scott, which was an adventure in itself. First off, the bus was packed full when it rolled up, with a bunch more people waiting to get on, and Brandon and I had to squeeze in with our backpacks and his giant suitcase, then the cross street that Sean told us to get off at never existed, so we ended up taking the bus to the end of the line then sitting in a Starbucks parking lot drinking red stripes until they came and picked us up. Lucky for me they brought my camera which I had left in Sean's car the night before. The trip down to San Diego went pretty quick. Sean has an Audi Quattro and drives it as it was intended to be driven. I loved it, except that he would constantly and without warning slam on the breaks to avoid denting his rims on a pothole. We stopped at Taco Bell on the way down, which meant no food for Mike, so the closest thing I had to dinner Friday night was the raw food Macaroons I had stocked up on earlier at the co-op. Our first stop in SD was to drop our stuff off at Tyler's house who was putting us all up for the night. Then it was off to the clubs. The clubs in San Diego were mostly what I had expected, only with more beautiful women than I had imagined. I almost didn't get into the first club because I was wearing my System Addict sneakers that I painted for the Artifakt art show back in December, but then I started raising a fuss saying "these are one of a kind designer shoes" and what not. In the end they let us in because we were from out of town and didn't know about the dress code. Anyways, we all drank until close, and then went to an after party at Moody's house up in Ocean Beach. Scott Sean and I stopped at a stairwell where the beach should have been and played around for a while before heading back to Tyler's to crash.
Saturday
Saturday morning we drove out to Mission beach to get breakfast at the restaurant with the slowest service in the entire world. Then we went to the beach and saw some dolphins or sharks or something out in the water and Scott told us a story about there being documented reports of dolphins raping people. We dragged that joke on for way longer than necessary and then headed up to some park on top of the hill where Tyler showed us some martial art stuff about focusing energy and expanding our physical presence through our awareness. Cool shit, seriously. We did random stuff like that for the rest of the day before heading out to mine and Scott's show at the Kava Lounge. The show was pretty fun, but not everything I had expected. Aside from the technical difficulties that got us off to a slow start. it's normally a D&B night, but Scott was playing mostly breaks, and the crowd just didn't seem to be feeling it. By the end of the night I was completely exhausted from numerous days of copious drinking and smoking on little food. Everyone else thought it would be a great idea to score some magic fairy pixie dust and go kick it. I however, being of the persuasion of people who can't stand that shit decided to stay at Tyler's and crash in order to get some sleep before having to head out to the airport the next day. Realizing that they weren't going to get any sleep Scott and Sean headed back up to LA that night.
Sunday
It's a good thing I did too. After waking up refreshed, I noticed that Brandon hadn't taken into account that it was daylight savings time and that the alarm he set wouldn't have given him enough time to be ready for our airport shuttle. So I was able to fix that problem before it became one. It also afforded me the time to have a deep conversation with a guy named Ciardha who was moving into the same apartment community about controlled breathing, collective consciousness, economic structures and the impending doom in 2012. We talked about networking our efforts and providing a structure for a working example healthy community living once the world goes pair-shaped. SanDiego has a kinda shitty airport, and they threw away my toothpaste cause it was more than 3 ounces. I arrived in SF on time with Brandon on a separate flight a half hour behind me. Joe drove into the city from Modesto early, but had also fallen victim to the ridiculousness that is daylight savings and was late to pick me up. It worked out for the better tho, because Brandon had gotten in by the time he got there and we all rode back into the city together.
First thing we did was head down to the Mission for drinks at place called the Cha Cha Cha where Joe immediately started flirting with our cute bartender and talked her into making us all some drink that he saw in a movie. My friend Summer who also had driven in from Modesto came and met up with us there. By the time we left I was pretty much plastered and Joe had managed to slip a fancy looking pint glass into his jacket. From there we went to meet up with Dave, Marika and Ronnie for a smoke. having to work in the morning back in Modesto, Joe took off from there. Brandon called up and got himself a motel room in the Castro, and I ended up heading out with Summer to her friend's place up in the hills to crash. On the way to drop off Brandon he noticed he had left his phone at Ronnie's so we called her and told her we were coming back to get it. Only we must have forgotten before we got there because somewhere en route Brandon said "pull over, this is where I need to go", grabbed his bags and jumped out of the car. Summer and I headed off toward her friends place and then I got a call from Ronnie asking if we were still coming over. This of course posed another obvious problem, but being on vacation I wasn't going to worry about it. So I didn't.
Monday
I'm not sure what time we actually passed out the night before, but I woke up early and refreshed. Early enough in fact to watch the sunrise from the deck of Summer's friends place. It was gorgeous. The rest of our day was spent hanging out at some secluded beach off Golden Gate Park separating all of the pebbles on the beach by color, shopping on Haight St and watching the sunset at Ocean Beach. Then we went and met up with Dave again and Summer took off for Santa Cruz. At this point I was completely brain dead from an awesome vacation full of drinking, smoking and all around kicking it so I passed out early.
Tuesday
I slept in, had lunch downtown at Pacific Place and then took the BART out to to Oakland and flew home. Oh yeah, and I almost missed my flight cause I went to the wrong terminal first, and by the time I had checked in they had put me on a later flight, but I made it through security in time to get my original plane just as it was finishing boarding so they let me on. I slept the whole way back to Seattle and was ready to go home and go straight to sleep as was my original plan, but Brandon's ride (him and Katie flew up to Seattle from SF a few ours after me) bailed on him so Cheston and I went and picked them up, extending my vacation back into my home town. Naturally we had to go out for drinks so we met Juju at her house and ended up at the Baltic Room where Brandon couldn't get in because he lost his ID.
Wednesday
Today was my turn to get burned by the sinister daylight savings time. I made it in to work late, where I've spent most of my day writing this masterpiece. I hope you've enjoyed it.
If you are so inclined, you can read all about it and see some pictures in my super extremely long winded recap of the whole experience .
So let me start by saying that this trip was completely freaking awesome and a perfect extension of the bizarre string of good luck and general bad-ass-edness that has been life as of late. Allow me to follow that up by saying that the best way to travel is with a few plane tickets, a list of people you'd like to see, an open schedule and no expectations.
and now, into the gritty.
Thursday
I should really begin the story last Wednesday, because in all of the madness of getting my vocal recordings finished and off to my friend Carleen so she could deliver them to Matt to work on editing while I was out and going out to Konkrete Jungle to talk shop and do a bit of networking before heading out of town I somehow forgot to eat dinner before drinking copious amounts of beer. This would set the tone for the entire next week. After vaguely remembering making it home Wednesday night I woke just in time to feverishly stuff a backpack full of clothes and not make it in to work early as I said I would. That didn't really bother me too much, mostly because I was still kinda drunk and in a really good mood from the night before I think. About half way through the day of insane amounts of work to finish before leaving on vacation the hangover started to settle in, but I had little time to give it the attention it was demanding and plowed through my work. At 5 O'clock my ride showed up and by 5:30 I was wrapped up with all the last minute emergencies and headed straight to the airport. Things at the airport went pretty smoothly, as I've been hassled so much in the past I've learned to make things easy for them and myself. Now before I get to the part about landing in LA I need to backtrack to earlier in the day when within hours of each other I learn that the friend who was going to pick me up at the airport and give me a ride to the club got called into work at the last minute and couldn't make it, and the friend who was supposed to meet me at the club and let me crash at her place was not going to be able to make it due to school work. Either one of these things could have gotten me down and put me in a bad mind space for the trip before it even started, but instead I realized that both were simply favors my friends had no real obligation to, that I was lucky to get the offer in the first place, and that being the resourceful and generally lucky guy that I am everything would work out. Regardless (or maybe irregardless), I was now blindly flying into a strange land with little certainty of anything that would follow and decided that I was completely OK with that.
So after a largely uneventful flight I turned on my phone while being taxied back to the terminal and found that in the short flight from Seattle to LA that everything had indeed worked itself out. Brandon had made it to town hours before me and gotten a room at the Renaissance Hollywood which has shuttles from the Airport for $15 and is only a mile from the club where the 'Respect' drum & bass night is held. Even tho I was off the plane by 10:30, there was some confusion as how to contact the airport shuttle and where to wait for it, plus traffic, so I didn't make it back to the hotel until around midnight. By the time I had, Brandon was already well into putting a nice sized dent in the-mini bar but had saved the last of the Maker's Mark for me. This is the part where a hungover Mike starts drinking after having forgotten to eat dinner for the second day in a row. By this time we were running late to meet Scott and Sean down at the club so we grabbed a cab and headed out. Respect was totally fresh. When I got there they had DJ Cassein (OG Konkrete Jungle head from NY) playing along with MC Deco Comprehension, who was actually a good MC *and* put me up on the mic for a few tracks. That's right, I MC'd at Respect, what I think is the longest running D&B night in the country! The headliner was some guy named Jason from SanDiego. He had a lot of choice cuts from back in the day that kept me moving on the dance floor. I met Machete, which was cool, and sat around and talked with all those cats for a minute after close before heading back to Sean's house for a smoke and a few rounds of Xbox racing and ultimately taking a cab back to the hotel.
Friday
It wasn't until I woke up friday morning that I realized how pimp our hotel room was. It was on the like the 18th floor or something high up like that and one of the walls was a huge window with a view of the hollywood sign and all of the shenanigans happening down on the street below. That's where I saw Superman walking around nonchalantly with his cape flying in the wind behind him. It also wasn't until I woke up friday morning that I noticed I had left my debit card at the bar and had somehow managed to lose my camera. As unfortunate as both those things were, they were both inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, and neither was going to keep me from having a good time, so B and I decided to take a cab down to Santa Monica to meet up with our friend Carole and this girl Stephanie that she has been trying to introduce me to (I recommend never taking a cab from Hollywood to Santa Monica in Friday mid-day traffic unless you're prepared to shell out $45 bucks). Santa Monica was cool, we met up by the beach and went out for lunch at this incredible vegan restaurant called "Real Food Daily". It was delicious. We stopped by the co-op for more vegi treats and generally dorked around town until Scott called and talked us into heading down to San Diego a day early with him and Sean, and therefore bypassing the $30 train tickets. Scott's a pretty persuasive guy being a lawyer and what not, so it didn't take long for me to cave. However, this of course meant passing up the opportunity to return to the club to get my card back, but no worries. I just went to the bank and pulled out a bunch of cash to last me for the rest of the weekend.
In lieu of another $45 cab ride Brandon and I hopped on a bus to head back to meet up with Sean and Scott, which was an adventure in itself. First off, the bus was packed full when it rolled up, with a bunch more people waiting to get on, and Brandon and I had to squeeze in with our backpacks and his giant suitcase, then the cross street that Sean told us to get off at never existed, so we ended up taking the bus to the end of the line then sitting in a Starbucks parking lot drinking red stripes until they came and picked us up. Lucky for me they brought my camera which I had left in Sean's car the night before. The trip down to San Diego went pretty quick. Sean has an Audi Quattro and drives it as it was intended to be driven. I loved it, except that he would constantly and without warning slam on the breaks to avoid denting his rims on a pothole. We stopped at Taco Bell on the way down, which meant no food for Mike, so the closest thing I had to dinner Friday night was the raw food Macaroons I had stocked up on earlier at the co-op. Our first stop in SD was to drop our stuff off at Tyler's house who was putting us all up for the night. Then it was off to the clubs. The clubs in San Diego were mostly what I had expected, only with more beautiful women than I had imagined. I almost didn't get into the first club because I was wearing my System Addict sneakers that I painted for the Artifakt art show back in December, but then I started raising a fuss saying "these are one of a kind designer shoes" and what not. In the end they let us in because we were from out of town and didn't know about the dress code. Anyways, we all drank until close, and then went to an after party at Moody's house up in Ocean Beach. Scott Sean and I stopped at a stairwell where the beach should have been and played around for a while before heading back to Tyler's to crash.
Saturday
Saturday morning we drove out to Mission beach to get breakfast at the restaurant with the slowest service in the entire world. Then we went to the beach and saw some dolphins or sharks or something out in the water and Scott told us a story about there being documented reports of dolphins raping people. We dragged that joke on for way longer than necessary and then headed up to some park on top of the hill where Tyler showed us some martial art stuff about focusing energy and expanding our physical presence through our awareness. Cool shit, seriously. We did random stuff like that for the rest of the day before heading out to mine and Scott's show at the Kava Lounge. The show was pretty fun, but not everything I had expected. Aside from the technical difficulties that got us off to a slow start. it's normally a D&B night, but Scott was playing mostly breaks, and the crowd just didn't seem to be feeling it. By the end of the night I was completely exhausted from numerous days of copious drinking and smoking on little food. Everyone else thought it would be a great idea to score some magic fairy pixie dust and go kick it. I however, being of the persuasion of people who can't stand that shit decided to stay at Tyler's and crash in order to get some sleep before having to head out to the airport the next day. Realizing that they weren't going to get any sleep Scott and Sean headed back up to LA that night.
Sunday
It's a good thing I did too. After waking up refreshed, I noticed that Brandon hadn't taken into account that it was daylight savings time and that the alarm he set wouldn't have given him enough time to be ready for our airport shuttle. So I was able to fix that problem before it became one. It also afforded me the time to have a deep conversation with a guy named Ciardha who was moving into the same apartment community about controlled breathing, collective consciousness, economic structures and the impending doom in 2012. We talked about networking our efforts and providing a structure for a working example healthy community living once the world goes pair-shaped. SanDiego has a kinda shitty airport, and they threw away my toothpaste cause it was more than 3 ounces. I arrived in SF on time with Brandon on a separate flight a half hour behind me. Joe drove into the city from Modesto early, but had also fallen victim to the ridiculousness that is daylight savings and was late to pick me up. It worked out for the better tho, because Brandon had gotten in by the time he got there and we all rode back into the city together.
First thing we did was head down to the Mission for drinks at place called the Cha Cha Cha where Joe immediately started flirting with our cute bartender and talked her into making us all some drink that he saw in a movie. My friend Summer who also had driven in from Modesto came and met up with us there. By the time we left I was pretty much plastered and Joe had managed to slip a fancy looking pint glass into his jacket. From there we went to meet up with Dave, Marika and Ronnie for a smoke. having to work in the morning back in Modesto, Joe took off from there. Brandon called up and got himself a motel room in the Castro, and I ended up heading out with Summer to her friend's place up in the hills to crash. On the way to drop off Brandon he noticed he had left his phone at Ronnie's so we called her and told her we were coming back to get it. Only we must have forgotten before we got there because somewhere en route Brandon said "pull over, this is where I need to go", grabbed his bags and jumped out of the car. Summer and I headed off toward her friends place and then I got a call from Ronnie asking if we were still coming over. This of course posed another obvious problem, but being on vacation I wasn't going to worry about it. So I didn't.
Monday
I'm not sure what time we actually passed out the night before, but I woke up early and refreshed. Early enough in fact to watch the sunrise from the deck of Summer's friends place. It was gorgeous. The rest of our day was spent hanging out at some secluded beach off Golden Gate Park separating all of the pebbles on the beach by color, shopping on Haight St and watching the sunset at Ocean Beach. Then we went and met up with Dave again and Summer took off for Santa Cruz. At this point I was completely brain dead from an awesome vacation full of drinking, smoking and all around kicking it so I passed out early.
Tuesday
I slept in, had lunch downtown at Pacific Place and then took the BART out to to Oakland and flew home. Oh yeah, and I almost missed my flight cause I went to the wrong terminal first, and by the time I had checked in they had put me on a later flight, but I made it through security in time to get my original plane just as it was finishing boarding so they let me on. I slept the whole way back to Seattle and was ready to go home and go straight to sleep as was my original plan, but Brandon's ride (him and Katie flew up to Seattle from SF a few ours after me) bailed on him so Cheston and I went and picked them up, extending my vacation back into my home town. Naturally we had to go out for drinks so we met Juju at her house and ended up at the Baltic Room where Brandon couldn't get in because he lost his ID.
Wednesday
Today was my turn to get burned by the sinister daylight savings time. I made it in to work late, where I've spent most of my day writing this masterpiece. I hope you've enjoyed it.