BrockLi Soup

I’ve been a pretty crappy friend lately. A great many things have kept me from keeping in touch with far-away friends, and fewer things have kept me from seeing local friends as much as I really should. As more time passes, I feel like I need to do more to catchup with those long-lost friends, but the extra time it would take to do it proper keeps me from doing anything.

Personal projects have suffered for the same reasons. I always seem to have something more pressing and important that needs to be done, so my projects and friends get put off a little longer, and now simple inertia keeps me moving further away from both.

I’m working on it, friends. I keep hoping that if I just keep chugging away on this endless todo list of mine, I’ll finish the things that need to be done, so I can get back to having fun.

I wasn’t going to do anything at all yesterday, because I really just needed a day off to recover. And I did get to spend most of the day just relaxing, but last night was pretty awesome.

I spent most of my afternoon doing that boring crap I’ve been putting off - opening a huge pile of mail, copying a bunch of media off the hundreds of CD-Rs I’ve had lying around for years - then I went to see Transformers, because I like doing matinees by myself now and then. It was actually pretty good, but I went into it with incredibly low expectations, so it would have been hard to disappoint me.

After that, I stopped by Olsson’s. Both Gogol Bordello and Against Me! have new albums coming out Tuesday and I wanted to special order them if Olsson’s wasn’t going to stock them (I like to buy the actual CD for bands I really like, and I’d rather get it from a local chain than Amazon). They actually had a box full of the Against Me album in back already, but wouldn’t give me one till Tuesday (obviously), so I’ve got one of each on hold.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the more time I spend hanging out in DC, the more I like it…especially if it’s with Schmitty. I seem to meet at least two or three people every time I hang out with the guy. Fotios moved back to DC yesterday, so we went to Science Club for drinks. I’ve been there a couple times before and always liked it. The place is really laid back and they have a big chalkboard by the bar where people write out equations and stuff when they’re arguing. The last time I was there was a Wednesday, so it was pretty quiet. No one checked my ID at the front gate, on the way into their patio, so I assumed that the guy standing at the door with a book and a cigarette was the bouncer. Turns out, he had just stepped out for a smoke; he spent the evening sitting at the bar, reading about philosophy. It’s that kind of place.

So we had a good time hanging out, and later learned that more people we knew were upstairs for Compton’s birthday. We got to talking with a guy and girl that work there and found out both of them had seen Against Me! and the chick had seen Gogol Bordello (this was after I’d convinced the guy to get tickets for their show next week). In the past two weeks, I’ve met a half dozen people that know one or the other - until recently, no one seemed to know who they were. Maybe I’ve just been meeting the wrong people.

I got home around 4:30 and slept till 2. In a few hours, I’m heading down to Chinatown to see Live Free or Die Hard with the Film Club. A pretty nice weekend, I’d say.

So I bought a pack of cigarettes tonight.

And I know, I’m a terrible person, but I’ve been all sorts of pissy lately and I figure it’s best for everyone if I just go back to smoking so I’m deal-with-able. I installed Call of Duty so I could kill Nazis, but that hasn’t been as therapeutic as I hoped.

But anyway, Casey and Matt are in Baltimore for the weekend, so a few of us went up to hang out with them at Matt’s sister’s place, and then we spent the afternoon today wandering around DC and protesting a little bit, and then I took a nap. It was nice.

I’m trying to get the DC chapter of the Sunday Night Film Club going. Last week, a few of us saw Curse of the Golden Flower (which was disappointing), and this week, we were going to see The Good Shepherd, but I’ve heard it’s pretty slow and boring, so I’m going to pick a different one. But I’ll keep y’all posted on SNFC dealing.

Ed had been telling me for months that I should meet him at Madam’s Organ on Wednesdays for their bluegrass show, but this is the first week I actually took him up on it. It helped that Ricky was in town (despite the fact that he got sick and couldn’t come) and that Andy, Will, and Schmitty were also going - I’m a sucker for peer pressure.

That place is pretty great. Bob Perilla & the Big Hillbilly Bluegrass Band was playing - not half bad - and the crowd was just my type. I spent most of the evening chatting with Alicia, a Native American, and Storm, a half-American, half-Jamaican guy from London, with whom I argued about David Beckham, the ridiculous taxes on tea, and whether or not he was more Irish than I because he spent a few months living in Dublin. There was also a cute little redhead who kept scampering about - Schmitty and I agreed that ’scamper’ was a good word for her - but I forget her name. She stopped to chat at one point, and I told her that she was like a very small tornado. She took it as a compliment.

On the walk back to the Metro, I was telling Schmitty how friendly people around here could be, and in the course of the conversation, asked four different groups of smokers if I could bum a cigarette. How many smokes do you think I got? If you guessed four, you’re off by about four. In Rochester, I would have had a dozen cigs in no time, but down here, where people tend to have a bit more money, they’re stingy with their cancer sticks. Maybe folks aren’t so friendly after all.

(Blessing in disguise, of course. I’ve had less than ten since I quit two months ago, so why spoil it?)

My dear friend and former roommate Sara recently posted a video of herself doing a painting in a temporary tunnel over the Quarter Mile at RIT. The Quarter Mile (which is actually about a third of a mile) went from the sundial on the dorm side to the Infinity Quad on the academic side, so I walked it almost every day until I moved out of the dorms at the end of my junior year. The temporary “tunnel” was erected late in my freshman year when they started the Gordon Field House. I don’t remember when they tore it back down, but I remember thinking that, at that point in my time at RIT, it had been there longer than it hadn’t, so it was weird to see it go.

After the thing was built, RIT had a bunch of artists paint panels in it. I have no idea how they chose the people to do it, but Sara painted Icarus in one panel (see the final product in her gallery). I walked past it almost every day for a couple years, but I didn’t realize at the time that she had done it because I barely knew her then.

Most of my fondest memories are of seemingly insignificant shit like this: walking past a bunch of paintings from people I didn’t know at the time, watching CMT’s Top 20 with BP, our weekly Iron Chef get-togethers. It’s always the little things that seem most important in retrospect.

BP and Klem are down here for the weekend, and we’ve been having a hell of a time.

BP and I have been marauding as the O’Malley twins all weekend: our mother Shannon - rest her soul, she died when we were nine - slept with two different men, Patrick and Seamus, in the same evening, thus two different sperm fertilized the same egg, thus two twins from different fathers.

Yesterday, we had dinner at the pub and met a ton of college kids in town for this solar power contest thing, then went out to Whitlow’s to meet up with a bunch of Sharon’s friends, and convinced this chick Jen that BP and I really WERE twins. After some pant-less Scrubs and pizza, we turned in around 4.

We finally got up around one today, grabbed lunch (breakfast?) at Five Guys around four, and had some more napping, Scrubs, and beer. We were going to get drinks at Fado, but a long line sent us up to Dupont Circle, where Schmitty invited us to a full-up apartment party for a bit (just long enough for me to fall halfway down the outdoor stairway in front of a bunch of people). We wound up downstairs at The Big Hunt, then had an absolutely delicious dinner at Kramerbooks & Afterword Cafe, then met some cool chicks on the Metro ride home and spent pretty much the whole night yelling “O’Malley!”

It’s been rowdy and fun and lovely, and I wish we could do it every weekend.

UPDATE: I feel it’s worth noting that while I was writing this, they both fell asleep in front of the TV. Damn college kids got nothing on me!

This past week marked the 25th birthday of the illustrious Mr. Lee, so he decided to have a weekend-long shindig down at his place near Raleigh. I almost didn’t make it - he called me Wednesday night about it, leaving me little time to make plans (bastard), but Schmitty, Aubri, Kidder and I drove down after work Friday. We met Rhubarb and Becky - and of course, Dan and Darrin - there, and had the bitchenest weekend I’ve had in…well, in two weeks (to be fair, the Meteor Shower Party was just last month, so it’s been a pretty good season already).

We didn’t get there until after 11, but we made up for it by drinking until about 5:30 in the morning. I had forgotten how incredibly ridiculous those guys can be, and I’m not sure I’ve ever laughed that much in one night. Saturday brought Raleigh-style garbage plates (so-so), some lounge-around recovery time, and then more people and beer pong around 6 in the evening.

I had been looking forward to a quiet, relaxing weekend, and almost didn’t go. I’d had a rough week at work (particularly Friday) and two eventful weekends before, so I was pretty run-down and pissy by the time we left Friday. I couldn’t have been more relaxed this morning, though - a weekend with those guys was just what I needed. Dan and Darrin are incredibly gracious hosts, and for some reason I kind of love their house (and sort of want to move there). We had an absolute blast, and no amount of relaxing at home would have been as refreshing. I don’t get that many opportunities for spur-of-the-moment weekend road trips anymore, but I’m convinced that they need to happen more often.

Nickel Creek released a best-of album today. Sitting here, listening to it at my desk, wishing I were at the Marcera Ranch, or at least driving through the hills of PA…makes me just a little bit crazy.

Yesterday was Flugtag in Baltimore, and the harbor was absolutely packed with people for it. For the uninitiated, here’s the quick explanation: teams build “flying machines” with a wingspan up to thirty feet, weighing up to 450 pounds. They do a little performance on the launch pad, and then push the whole mess off the end into a body of water and try to make it go as far as they can.

This time round, the body of water was Baltimore’s inner harbor, and the “as far as they can” was up to 81 feet (for one team - the new record in the US). The whole thing was hilarious - one team of firefighters did a dance to Disco Inferno before hauling their massive fireman’s helmet off the ramp. Another team had a giant Dumbo that didn’t quite make it off the ramp, but fell apart and rained pieces (almost) right into the guy who had been “piloting” it before he fell off into the water (as far as I know, he didn’t get hit with anything). Some of them went really well - most of them were designed like some kind of glider, and the winning team (a Three Stooges-themed group) even made theirs glide for a bit. A team that came all the way from Bulgaria had a big blow-up glider sort of thing, and they probably would have done well if the cross-wind didn’t interfere with their take-off (they got stuck halfway down the runway).

I don’t know if Flugtag will be coming back this way again any time soon, but if it does, I want to get a team together. You spend about three weeks building a machine that can fly (or at least float, so they can get it out of the water easier), and it’s all over in the three seconds it takes to drop from the 30-foot launch ramp. How can that NOT be fun?

It’s been a couple weeks since I’ve written much of anything, but let’s make this quick, shall we?

About a week and a half ago, my parents and youngest brother came to visit for a long weekend. We hit some museums, looked at some monuments, and spent a lot of time just hanging out. I was the de facto tour guide, but since I don’t know the city terribly well, we almost got lost a couple times. I took some pictures - see?

This past weekend, BP, Otto, and Freshman came down to visit. We spent most of the weekend drinking and BBQ-ing, and I’m still recovering from it all, but it was wonderful. During the BBQ (and after a number of drinks), BP and I agreed that we would get tattoos together on Monday. Turns out, I had to work and he had to drive back to New York, so that didn’t happen, but it will sooner or later.

On Sunday night, BP and I drove up to Baltimore to see Flogging Molly (the fourth time I’ve seen them, the third time with BP) at Rams Head Live. The venue was pretty good for it - medium-sized and conveniently located on the closer side of Baltimore. Zox (not bad) and Bedouin Soundclash (”horribly average,” as a guy at the bar described them) opened the show, and thankfully, neither of them did a full set like the last time. During Bedouin Soundclash’s set, Nathan Maxwell (the bassist) came out from backstage and hung out with the crowd between the bar and the pit. I wandered over to shake his hand, mostly so I can say I touched a Molly.

BP and I made our way into the pit about 15 minutes before Molly took the stage, and, being a few beers deep, spent the entire time getting the crowd around us riled up with sing-alongs, stretching exercises, and bare-knuckle fisticuffs. It was definitely the best show of the four times I’ve seen them - the crowd was fantastic, I had just the right amount to drink beforehand, and I even managed to hang onto a bottle of water in the pit (you get thirsty in there). Dave King came back out alone for the encore and did the first half of Black Friday Rule acoustic, before the rest of the band jumped in. It was OK, but definitely didn’t touch the thirteen-minute version. The openers could have been better, and we could have convinced more friends to come with us, but really, the show was so good in so many respects that I can’t complain.

It was a rowdy rowdy weekend, and totally worth the hurt Monday morning. Right now, I think I need a weekend without extra people around, but I’m already looking forward to the next big party here at Brockstone Manor.

This was the best festival I’ve been to yet. The Grillbillie turnout was lower than usual, and there were definitely folks I missed, but there were also a lot of people that I was really hoping to see. And I got to spend a lot of time with everyone, too - everybody pretty much stuck around Grillbillie Hall.

Adam bought himself a new camper over in Delaware, and literally picked it up on his way to the festival. When he pulled in, we filled the place with people (and a tree) and did some exploring. The guy who sold it to him left everything in it (dishes, bedding, cleaning stuff - everything), and since Adam had bought the thing just two hours before, he never got a chance to clean it out or figure out where things were before we got our hands on it (FN did manage to find himself his own room).

On Saturday afternoon, Amy sent me a text message from the other end of the camper - “I deem you a official grillbillie.”

“Can you even do that?” I yelled back to her.

“Of course I can, I’m an original. Go see what Matt says.”

So I showed Matt the message, and he goes, “I thought you WERE official. You’re not going to fit into an extra large, are you?”

So I don’t have a t-shirt yet, but three years after the festival where I first met them, I’ve become an official Grillbillie. Definitely my best festival yet.

This weekend was even better than the last, and I think I’m OK with that trend.

Clerks 2 came out Friday, and we got a crew together to see it at Gallery Place. Fadó is just a couple blocks down from the theater, so after the movie, we sauntered on down there for a rowdy evening of drinking, hollering, singing along with the tunes they were playing, singing along with the tunes we were playing, and discussing the biological makeup of human genitalia (we met a biology teacher).

While there, we discussed plans to have a BBQ here Saturday evening, and I came home from the grocery store last night to find a dozen loud people in my living room. Some more folks came over, and we got to hollering back and forth with the people below us (who were also throwing a BBQ and enjoying their balcony), so we went down there and I spent some time discussing politics and sports with a couple guys from Germany.

Today was lazy as a Sunday can be. I spent some time at the gym, finished some stuff for work, and did a little reading, but mostly just lounged around. I get a wide variety of movies from Netflix and a lot of times I get them in the mail and think, “Why the hell did I rent this?” These movies are saved for Sunday afternoons like this one, unless I find a good one on TV (previously: King Arthur, Sweet Home Alabama, and Miss Congeniality 2). This week I opted for Chick Flick and Ice Cream Sunday Afternoon Extravaganza, which included How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days and some Ben & Jerry’s mint something something. It was girly and relaxing and don’t you judge me because I just might make it a weekly event. You’re welcome to join me next week for Sleepless in Seattle and Cold Stone.

As I tiptoed into the living room and quietly gathered up my pocket litter and keys this morning, I couldn’t help but feel like something was out of place. I snuck into the kitchen - nope, giant pile of trash is still there. I crept into the living room, stepping over empty cups and bottles to avoid making too much noise - those were right where we left them.

And then I realized the couch seemed unusually flat. For the first time in a month, no one was sleeping in my living room.

So I turned on the lights and enjoyed me a loud breakfast.

I had a ridiculous and rambunctious weekend at OATS, despite the fact that people kept disappearing to work the festival for a few hours at a time, which wore everyone out. There were a bunch of new folks and a bunch of not-so-new-but-new-to-me folks, so there was always someone to strike up conversation with. I rented a car for the weekend and wound up with a Taurus, and let me tell ya, it was a lot roomier than the Hotel Honda Prelude.

Bluegrass festivals with the Grilbillies are impossible to explain to anyone who hasn’t experienced it. The weekend exceeds the amount of fun you’d think anyone could possibly have in two or three days, but by Sunday afternoon, you’re ready to head home just so that you can get some sleep and a shower. And that night, you experience such overwhelming withdrawal that you wonder if it would be easier to never see them again than to feel that morning-after pain the next time around.

Thanks to the holiday, I had an extra two days to recover from the weekend before going back to work. The Monday after Abbipalooza was the longest of my life, and I’m glad I don’t have to go through that again. The toughest part is knowing that I probably won’t be able to make it to any more festivals this summer - I’m poor, I don’t have a car, and I can’t keep taking Friday’s off, so trouncing off to Pennsylvania every weekend isn’t really an option. It’s unbelievably hard to leave those weekends behind and go back to “real life,” knowing that it may be another six months before I can see them again.

I should just retire and buy an RV.

(More pics)

Abbi’s 20th birthday was this weekend, so I made the trip up into PA for Abbipalooza. I was kind of surprised I made it - Malique has been in rough shape, and I was supposed to get an oil change a couple months ago (I hadn’t hit 3000 miles, so I wasn’t too worried), but she can still do 90 on the highway. Thankfully, we didn’t have any issues, and I got to enjoy a quiet(ish), laid-back weekend with some of my favorite people. It was a smaller, low-key party, which worked out really well because I had a chance to hang out with everyone. I love meeting new people, but it can be pretty draining (I’m more introverted than I seem). I did get to meet some of Abbi’s friends from school, but they fit in so well that it just didn’t matter. As I’ve told countless people before, it always takes a lot of energy to be outgoing and extroverted, so it was nice to just have a relaxing weekend with people I like without trying to forge new friendships at the same time.

…which isn’t to say it wasn’t exhausting, of course. I met the Grillbillies because FN told me I couldn’t keep up with them, and I accepted the challenge. I don’t know how they do what they do for so many weekends during the summer, because I feel like I need a week off after spending two days with them. And I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Also, pictures are on Flickr.