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It's better to travel
Mar. 20th, 2005 11:30 pmI've been doing this long enough that my alone times when staying at strange houses always feel like prime journalling hours. I haven't written in this thing in months, but get me out of the house and routine and whoa, better start writing. I've had enough landmark trips that I wanted to record every minute of, even the mundane ones trigger it I guess. Look at my trip to California last year.
It's funny how rooted I feel in places my parents grew up, even when I've never been there. It really struck me when I went to Iowa for the reunion a few years back. I'd never been out there, but everyone around me was family even though I didn't know them, and the pace of the city felt familiar somehow, a forgotten heritage.
I get that sometimes in the southwest, but here it's easier to attribute to relatively frequent trips here growing up. There's a lot of romanticism associated with the lifestyle in these 'paradise places,' Hawaii, the California coast, the deserts of the southwest. What I love about vacationing here is that that's all you see, you don't spend enough time there to realize that despite everything looking so cheery and different, Phoenix is really just miles and miles and MILES of suburbs that happen to be stucco and tile instead of siding and shingles. And yeah it's warm and dry all the time, but that doesn't improve your life or the character of the people around you.
So being here will serve to dry me out during the soggiest week of a Bellingham March and remind me there are places that let you barbecue by the pool year-round for about $180 round-trip.
We're staying with the Gruhls, which, if the name sounds familiar, will seem really bizarre. What are they all doing down here? Well, Dick was offered a very lucrative pharmacist position down here by Safeway about 4 years ago, so him, Mona and Tony all shipped out of the house next door and disappeared. Brandon stayed in Everett for another year or two working at Red Robin, but eventually got sick of the rain and expensive housing and decided to join them. They all lived together for a while, but Brandon and Tony got a place together eventually, and right now Tony is living with his girlfriend and a roomate, and Brandon found a roomate to replace him. They both work at a nearby Red Robin, Brandon tends bar and Tony's a server. They both party pretty hard and are distancing themselves from their parents' wing (finally).
I must say the whole experience of seeing them again has been awfully weird, as I'm sure my sister![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
loladancer will describe too. These are people I'll always have an instinctual, almost familial connection to, but after highschool have had extremely limited contact with. They're really more like brothers to me than anything else I suppose. You know how some brothers just stop talking to each other after a certain age? There's less of a looking out for each other than most brothers probably have, I'm really not protective of them at all, mostly at this point I feel sorry for them. I think they're both bored out of their minds. And really, who wouldn't be? They've done nothing but get fucked up and work at Red Robin for 5 years. I think Brandon regards me the way I do my too-good friends, the guys who never cuss or argue and want nothing more than a quiet, adult life and forgot how to be teenagers. You respect them in a way for being mature and usually succeeding more than you do, but you feel sorry for them because they're missing out on something fun and maybe dangerous but definitely thrilling.
It's always awkward telling people I don't drink despite being 22, but telling Brandon was the worst. I wasn't sure what he would think. He certainly wasn't surprised. "Yeah, that's probably smart." He's had his share of problems with it. Still, it's another brick in the wall and we have too many. It's frustrating. He was never a good kid, but he was my friend and we both desperately wanted the other to think us cool. I think if he wanted anything else in this world as much as he wants to be cool, he would succeed wildly at it. He's witty and hilarious and easygoing and commanding and intimidating and it's all a mystique he busts his tail to maintain, so much so that it's really become his personality. He can impress people but he's always tried to impress the wrong ones.
All happy families are the same and have no stories. Every dysfunctional one is different and can fill volumes with exactly how.
Brandon and Tony were just visiting the 'rents so tomorrow it'll be our family and Dick and Mona. They like, work and stuff so we'll be tooling around Phoenix with nothing in mind.
It's funny how rooted I feel in places my parents grew up, even when I've never been there. It really struck me when I went to Iowa for the reunion a few years back. I'd never been out there, but everyone around me was family even though I didn't know them, and the pace of the city felt familiar somehow, a forgotten heritage.
I get that sometimes in the southwest, but here it's easier to attribute to relatively frequent trips here growing up. There's a lot of romanticism associated with the lifestyle in these 'paradise places,' Hawaii, the California coast, the deserts of the southwest. What I love about vacationing here is that that's all you see, you don't spend enough time there to realize that despite everything looking so cheery and different, Phoenix is really just miles and miles and MILES of suburbs that happen to be stucco and tile instead of siding and shingles. And yeah it's warm and dry all the time, but that doesn't improve your life or the character of the people around you.
So being here will serve to dry me out during the soggiest week of a Bellingham March and remind me there are places that let you barbecue by the pool year-round for about $180 round-trip.
We're staying with the Gruhls, which, if the name sounds familiar, will seem really bizarre. What are they all doing down here? Well, Dick was offered a very lucrative pharmacist position down here by Safeway about 4 years ago, so him, Mona and Tony all shipped out of the house next door and disappeared. Brandon stayed in Everett for another year or two working at Red Robin, but eventually got sick of the rain and expensive housing and decided to join them. They all lived together for a while, but Brandon and Tony got a place together eventually, and right now Tony is living with his girlfriend and a roomate, and Brandon found a roomate to replace him. They both work at a nearby Red Robin, Brandon tends bar and Tony's a server. They both party pretty hard and are distancing themselves from their parents' wing (finally).
I must say the whole experience of seeing them again has been awfully weird, as I'm sure my sister
loladancer will describe too. These are people I'll always have an instinctual, almost familial connection to, but after highschool have had extremely limited contact with. They're really more like brothers to me than anything else I suppose. You know how some brothers just stop talking to each other after a certain age? There's less of a looking out for each other than most brothers probably have, I'm really not protective of them at all, mostly at this point I feel sorry for them. I think they're both bored out of their minds. And really, who wouldn't be? They've done nothing but get fucked up and work at Red Robin for 5 years. I think Brandon regards me the way I do my too-good friends, the guys who never cuss or argue and want nothing more than a quiet, adult life and forgot how to be teenagers. You respect them in a way for being mature and usually succeeding more than you do, but you feel sorry for them because they're missing out on something fun and maybe dangerous but definitely thrilling. It's always awkward telling people I don't drink despite being 22, but telling Brandon was the worst. I wasn't sure what he would think. He certainly wasn't surprised. "Yeah, that's probably smart." He's had his share of problems with it. Still, it's another brick in the wall and we have too many. It's frustrating. He was never a good kid, but he was my friend and we both desperately wanted the other to think us cool. I think if he wanted anything else in this world as much as he wants to be cool, he would succeed wildly at it. He's witty and hilarious and easygoing and commanding and intimidating and it's all a mystique he busts his tail to maintain, so much so that it's really become his personality. He can impress people but he's always tried to impress the wrong ones.
All happy families are the same and have no stories. Every dysfunctional one is different and can fill volumes with exactly how.
Brandon and Tony were just visiting the 'rents so tomorrow it'll be our family and Dick and Mona. They like, work and stuff so we'll be tooling around Phoenix with nothing in mind.
