Friday evening was not a full moon night, although it seemed to have that tone. Usually on a full moon night there are the ignorant drivers, insane people on the street, and your pets all act unusually weird (I assume there is always a full moon inside my house then). This weekend was going to have a full line up since my two friends, John and Sean, were coming in. Then it dawned on me that when these two individuals are in my presence (or at least knowing they’re in close proximity) strange things tend to happen.
After work, Eric and I did a sushi run and then he left for the night. I received a phone call from John saying he was downtown and that Sean was due relatively soon. John and Sean were two close friends from college; however, John moved to the Los Angeles area last fall and Sean moved to the east coast last summer to attend John Hopkins University. It was a bit painful to see them leave Santa Cruz since they made up a good portion of my social scene while living here. This weekend, their good friend, Nick, was getting married.
Once I received the call from John that he and Nick were downtown drinking coffee, I was in pursuit to Pacific Avenue. As I went down a few blocks, I saw one of the typical Santa Cruz street people. It’s best to not make eye contact with them, but sometimes they still go in for the attack. This street culture member started talking to me as I was walking.
“When someone asks you for a drop of blood, don’t you just want to give them a tenth of a drop of blood and then do that ten times?” I really had no response; I didn’t even stop to pretend to be polite like I was interested in what he was saying. I kept walking and did not make eye contact or any other gesture of recognition. He spoke some more but lucky for me I was not able to intercept the waves of noise that were coming from his position.
After passing the wild street person and knowing that I was seeing John, it made me flashback on one of our strange encounters from the college days. Senior year, spring break, John and I did a walk downtown to go to the Red Room (a hipster bar that many college students attend when they break the 21 mark). We started at the beginning of the main street and the Red Room is a block parallel to Pacific but towards the end of the street. We had many strange interactions with many strange people.
There were the two “gangster” looking people in which gangster 1 asked gangster 2, “Man, remember when we used kill people?”
The random young man on a skateboard that decided to do a small orbit around John and me and then handed a piece of paper that simply said “Missing Dog” with a picture of some dog’s head placed on top of a Magic Eye backdrop.
The best one was once we were on the parallel street, there was a couple (a woman and a man) getting frisky against a tree. Suddenly we noticed the woman’s panties were dropped on the ground. “Those two are having sex,” John whispered.
The worst part was when I got a closer look of the woman. “Her name is [censored], she likes Josh Hartnett movies and pays with a debit card.”
John looked bewildered, “How do you know that?”
“She came into the video store this evening.”
After the series of flashbacks, I found myself at Hoffman’s coffee where John and Nick, were. We sat there for a little while discussing various themes, mostly pertaining to Nick’s future. Eventually we heard from Sean as he pulled into town and the night continued longer once he met with all of us.
The next morning arrived and John got ready and met up with Nick to buy some flowers (John was the best man for Nick’s wedding). Sean asked me to be his “plus-one” since he was dateless; I didn’t have any plans so I said yes. We made the rounds with downtown again to get some coffee, and of course, there were still strange encounters. Various people were passing out fliers that stated free screening of a new documentary called, “Psychiatry: the Industry of Death.” When reading this I thought that this had to be some Scientology bullshit; the flier indicated that it was presented by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights. Once we got back to my house, I googled that name and sure enough, it’s a branch of the Scientology church.
While we were all getting ready for the wedding, John decided to clean his contact lenses. However, due to laziness he didn’t get his own contact solution from his car, he just borrowed Eric’s solution. The catch here is that Eric’s solution is not the typical type, it’s an anti-bacterial formula, so it’s hydrogen peroxide that filters into a metal catalyst; after five hours it eventually becomes water and the lenses are thoroughly cleansed. Well, John just threw them in there for about an hour, not knowing what was actually in them. John took them out, placed one lens in the right eye.
“Oh my god! What the hell is happening?! Owwww! Oh my god!” John had his hand to his eye “Jesus!” He started to collapse, he began reaching out to anything, our books fell off their shelves as John desperately searched for the bathroom. Upon arrival to the bathroom, Eric sat there on the couch.
“Oh, he must’ve used my contact solution.”
“God! What the hell is this?!” came faintly from the bathroom. He turned the sink on and flushed his eye out as much as possible. John came out of the bathroom, water dripping off his face, his eye blistering red “man, if pain was on a scale from one to ten that was an eight.”
John did his best to get over the pain, got dressed and met with Nick to get flowers and did all the necessary deeds to make sure the wedding was going to happen. Sean and I wrapped up our current actions and eventually became decent and ready to go.
The wedding ceremony started at 1:00pm; Sean and I were on highway one, and it was twenty till at this point. Sean then spoke.
“Alright, so Peter, now I know Nick is getting married at a Catholic church in Watsonville. The problem is I don’t know where it is.”
“Have you called John?”
“I tried, it goes straight to voicemail, the same with Nick’s.”
“Bummer.”
“So, having you as navigator, once we get into Watsonville, I’m going to role down the window and you’re going to ask every person you see where is the nearest Catholic church.”
I was not quite ready to go and ask random strangers where the nearest house of God was, so I got on the phone and started calling people who may have had some kind of Watsonville connection, hoping I would get an answer on where the main Catholic church is. Nick and his wife to be are pretty devout Catholics, so we figured they would want the main popular church.
Luckily, as we drove on to Main Street in Watsonville, on the horizon was a tall gothic looking building. A very traditional church was ahead of us.
“I think we got ourselves a winner!” Sean exclaimed. We pulled into the parking lot and saw various people, all dressed up, walking into the church. They all looked ready for a wedding. As we got closer to the church, I noticed that they were all Latino. Nick’s wife to be, Rebecca, was from a Mexican family, so we drew the conclusion that these people were all from her side of the family. The doors to the church were in front of us, we walked in, took a seat on the groom’s side.
My eyes wandered around, trying to identify Nick, or any relative that looked like Nick, or looked Anglo-Saxon. The entire church was full of Latino people, the song being heard was in Spanish. I leaned my head to Sean, who took my words.
“Peter, I don’t think this is the wedding.”
“Yeah,” we immediately left, hoping no one actually saw us. After getting back in the car, our new goal was to find a phone book and look up churches. Then in the distance was a Best Western motel. Sean and I thought this was a calling for some odd reason.
“Best Western, I bet they know where the Catholic churches are,” Sean proclaimed the statement, and it made sense somehow. The motel was not busy so the two women at the front desk had our undivided attention. We proposed our current situation and then our question.
“Well, there’s St. Patrick’s off of Main Street.”
“Is that the tall creepy one?” Sean asked.
“Yeah.”
“Oh, that’s not it. We already crashed that wedding, wasn’t ours,” the lady then explained that there was another one near the Watsonville fairgrounds. The directions were written down and we went on our next mission. The church was discovered. As we pulled into the parking lot Sean pointed out his observations.
“Now that looks like a white trash vehicle. I bet the guy who drives that is from Sonora,” Sean, John, and Nick all grew up in Sonora, CA. The doors to the church were open, Sean and I slowly walked up to the steps and peaked our heads in. Half the church was Mexican, the other half was all white. I squinted my eyes a bit and saw the altar; there were Nick and Rebecca. Thank god. We took a seat and enjoyed the wedding.
After the ceremony, everyone gathered outside. John caught up with us; he took off his sunglasses and there was his eye: completely red and surrounded with a ring of mucous. I assumed it would have just been a little irritated but it looked like it was going into a more horrible route.
There was a small break between the ceremony and the reception, which was at the Chamadan resort in Santa Cruz. Sean and I made it back to my house and we did not see John. It came time for the reception and we headed to the resort. We eventually found John, who had his sunglasses still on and a glass of champagne in his hand.
“Hey guys, so I am going to down this glass of champagne and then go to the emergency room.”
“What?” came from both our mouths.
“My eye still hurts, it still burns, mucous keeps flowing out of it, and I can’t see because all the crap is covering my eyeball. I feel like I am looking through a glass of milk,” John finished the glass and Sean and I agreed we would take him to the ER.
Randomly, Santa Cruz Dominican Hospital was the next block over from the resort. We found a parking spot and came in. Sean and I took a seat and John explained his problem to the nurse at the front desk. There was a slight wait, but there was not many people in the waiting room. There was a couple in front of us, who I think were getting annoyed by us simply due to the fact that John was becoming tired and delirious and therefore was making a lot of non sense talk.
“Alright, which would you rather go without: pissing or sweating?” John asked with a serious face.
“Now, do all the post-effects come into play once I remove one of those functions? I mean, if I go without the function of peeing, does my body still require me to pee, and therefore I am in an everlasting state of pain?”
“What about sweating? Do I still get to have some kind of cooling down process? How will the water I consume be processed?”
“Do I still get to have some kind of condensation reaction? Will I know that I am being cooled down?”
“If I go without peeing, will the urine therefore just become sweat?” These were all real questions. Finally, John concluded it all.
“How about every time you sweat, pages of pornography seep out of your skin?”
“Deal!” Sean was set on that. A nurse called John and away he went. I got on the phone and went outside to hold the conversation. As I was in mid-conversation, I kept hearing this roaring noise. I looked up and about two hundred feet above me was a life-flight helicopter. I started moving away from the parking lot so I can actually hear the other end of the line, then I realized that the helicopter was actually landing. It was probably one of the most intimidating things I have seen. An ambulance met up with it and out came a child on a stretcher and paramedics loaded the child into the helicopter. It was weird to see. The conversation ended and I went back inside and saw Sean asleep.
John came out after being gone for about forty-minutes maybe. The doctor diagnosed him with having a minor-chemical burn on his eyeball. It seemed that when John was pouring massive amounts of water into the eye, there were still some remains of the hydrogen peroxide left. The doctor gave him some antibiotics and Vicodin.
We all rushed back to the wedding reception, which had transitioned into the dinner portion and we had reserved seats. However, that did not mean much because some random family members took the seats. We all had to split up and find the random available chairs at tables at different parts of the banquet hall. I found myself at a table where the wedding photographer was sitting and two co-workers of the bride.
The waiter, come to find out, was an old film major colleague of mine, who was annoying. When we were in college, he knew my weakness, that is, he knew I would listen to him because that’s what I do. He spoke to me for a good hour one time about a screenplay he was writing about a protagonist who has mental powers. After much description, his main character was a pervert and my film major colleague was pretty much writing down all his erotic fantasies into this screenplay. He later explained his methods of getting this picked up: he would move to LA, wait tables at the hipster restaurant where all the producers eat at and show them the script (of course they would buy it without hesitation), and he also stated that people have told him he looks like Topher Grace, and Scarlet Johansen dated Topher Grace, so therefore, she would date my film major colleague. He had it all figured out. I did my best to ignore him at the table but he found me, and we had a similar conversation.
I struck up a conversation with the two co-workers of the bride. I asked them what they did for a living (because I had no idea what the bride did). The woman next to me explained that they are music therapists. I nodded like I knew what that meant and she read right through me.
“Do you know what that is?”
“Yeah, it’s to make pianists less stressed out,” nothing but laughter from the woman, who I found out was named Yuriko (very similar to a friend’s name, sort of weird). She and the other co-worker went into great detail about what exactly music therapy is, but I don’t want to go into it.
Finally, I got to do one of my dreams, which was to be at a wedding and give off a false identity. I told them my name is Peter, but when they asked what I did for a living, I told them I work in San Jose as a digital text engineer.
“Do you know what that is?” I asked the two persons, both looked lost “well, basically, I create fonts for computers.” I just pulled that out of my ass. I went into great length on how my team and I are trying to reformat the Geneva font to help bridge Macs and Linux based computers better and how Helvetica is going to be the font for the 21st century. Again, I don’t know where this came from or for that matter where it was going.
The rest of the night went into the same path that other weddings do: a lot of champagne and wine consumption, and people on the dance floor. I went out to the parking lot because I do not like to dance. Let me say that again, I don’t like to dance. My friends tend to forget this and keep trying to persuade me by saying things like “it’s fun!” Well, you know what is also fun? Playing jacks. Yeah, and you don’t see me forcing that onto anybody.
As things unfolded, many people left, we all went off to other points of interest. John’s eye managed to make it through the night. We all made it home safely. The next day was something new for everyone.
After work, Eric and I did a sushi run and then he left for the night. I received a phone call from John saying he was downtown and that Sean was due relatively soon. John and Sean were two close friends from college; however, John moved to the Los Angeles area last fall and Sean moved to the east coast last summer to attend John Hopkins University. It was a bit painful to see them leave Santa Cruz since they made up a good portion of my social scene while living here. This weekend, their good friend, Nick, was getting married.
Once I received the call from John that he and Nick were downtown drinking coffee, I was in pursuit to Pacific Avenue. As I went down a few blocks, I saw one of the typical Santa Cruz street people. It’s best to not make eye contact with them, but sometimes they still go in for the attack. This street culture member started talking to me as I was walking.
“When someone asks you for a drop of blood, don’t you just want to give them a tenth of a drop of blood and then do that ten times?” I really had no response; I didn’t even stop to pretend to be polite like I was interested in what he was saying. I kept walking and did not make eye contact or any other gesture of recognition. He spoke some more but lucky for me I was not able to intercept the waves of noise that were coming from his position.
After passing the wild street person and knowing that I was seeing John, it made me flashback on one of our strange encounters from the college days. Senior year, spring break, John and I did a walk downtown to go to the Red Room (a hipster bar that many college students attend when they break the 21 mark). We started at the beginning of the main street and the Red Room is a block parallel to Pacific but towards the end of the street. We had many strange interactions with many strange people.
There were the two “gangster” looking people in which gangster 1 asked gangster 2, “Man, remember when we used kill people?”
The random young man on a skateboard that decided to do a small orbit around John and me and then handed a piece of paper that simply said “Missing Dog” with a picture of some dog’s head placed on top of a Magic Eye backdrop.
The best one was once we were on the parallel street, there was a couple (a woman and a man) getting frisky against a tree. Suddenly we noticed the woman’s panties were dropped on the ground. “Those two are having sex,” John whispered.
The worst part was when I got a closer look of the woman. “Her name is [censored], she likes Josh Hartnett movies and pays with a debit card.”
John looked bewildered, “How do you know that?”
“She came into the video store this evening.”
After the series of flashbacks, I found myself at Hoffman’s coffee where John and Nick, were. We sat there for a little while discussing various themes, mostly pertaining to Nick’s future. Eventually we heard from Sean as he pulled into town and the night continued longer once he met with all of us.
The next morning arrived and John got ready and met up with Nick to buy some flowers (John was the best man for Nick’s wedding). Sean asked me to be his “plus-one” since he was dateless; I didn’t have any plans so I said yes. We made the rounds with downtown again to get some coffee, and of course, there were still strange encounters. Various people were passing out fliers that stated free screening of a new documentary called, “Psychiatry: the Industry of Death.” When reading this I thought that this had to be some Scientology bullshit; the flier indicated that it was presented by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights. Once we got back to my house, I googled that name and sure enough, it’s a branch of the Scientology church.
While we were all getting ready for the wedding, John decided to clean his contact lenses. However, due to laziness he didn’t get his own contact solution from his car, he just borrowed Eric’s solution. The catch here is that Eric’s solution is not the typical type, it’s an anti-bacterial formula, so it’s hydrogen peroxide that filters into a metal catalyst; after five hours it eventually becomes water and the lenses are thoroughly cleansed. Well, John just threw them in there for about an hour, not knowing what was actually in them. John took them out, placed one lens in the right eye.
“Oh my god! What the hell is happening?! Owwww! Oh my god!” John had his hand to his eye “Jesus!” He started to collapse, he began reaching out to anything, our books fell off their shelves as John desperately searched for the bathroom. Upon arrival to the bathroom, Eric sat there on the couch.
“Oh, he must’ve used my contact solution.”
“God! What the hell is this?!” came faintly from the bathroom. He turned the sink on and flushed his eye out as much as possible. John came out of the bathroom, water dripping off his face, his eye blistering red “man, if pain was on a scale from one to ten that was an eight.”
John did his best to get over the pain, got dressed and met with Nick to get flowers and did all the necessary deeds to make sure the wedding was going to happen. Sean and I wrapped up our current actions and eventually became decent and ready to go.
The wedding ceremony started at 1:00pm; Sean and I were on highway one, and it was twenty till at this point. Sean then spoke.
“Alright, so Peter, now I know Nick is getting married at a Catholic church in Watsonville. The problem is I don’t know where it is.”
“Have you called John?”
“I tried, it goes straight to voicemail, the same with Nick’s.”
“Bummer.”
“So, having you as navigator, once we get into Watsonville, I’m going to role down the window and you’re going to ask every person you see where is the nearest Catholic church.”
I was not quite ready to go and ask random strangers where the nearest house of God was, so I got on the phone and started calling people who may have had some kind of Watsonville connection, hoping I would get an answer on where the main Catholic church is. Nick and his wife to be are pretty devout Catholics, so we figured they would want the main popular church.
Luckily, as we drove on to Main Street in Watsonville, on the horizon was a tall gothic looking building. A very traditional church was ahead of us.
“I think we got ourselves a winner!” Sean exclaimed. We pulled into the parking lot and saw various people, all dressed up, walking into the church. They all looked ready for a wedding. As we got closer to the church, I noticed that they were all Latino. Nick’s wife to be, Rebecca, was from a Mexican family, so we drew the conclusion that these people were all from her side of the family. The doors to the church were in front of us, we walked in, took a seat on the groom’s side.
My eyes wandered around, trying to identify Nick, or any relative that looked like Nick, or looked Anglo-Saxon. The entire church was full of Latino people, the song being heard was in Spanish. I leaned my head to Sean, who took my words.
“Peter, I don’t think this is the wedding.”
“Yeah,” we immediately left, hoping no one actually saw us. After getting back in the car, our new goal was to find a phone book and look up churches. Then in the distance was a Best Western motel. Sean and I thought this was a calling for some odd reason.
“Best Western, I bet they know where the Catholic churches are,” Sean proclaimed the statement, and it made sense somehow. The motel was not busy so the two women at the front desk had our undivided attention. We proposed our current situation and then our question.
“Well, there’s St. Patrick’s off of Main Street.”
“Is that the tall creepy one?” Sean asked.
“Yeah.”
“Oh, that’s not it. We already crashed that wedding, wasn’t ours,” the lady then explained that there was another one near the Watsonville fairgrounds. The directions were written down and we went on our next mission. The church was discovered. As we pulled into the parking lot Sean pointed out his observations.
“Now that looks like a white trash vehicle. I bet the guy who drives that is from Sonora,” Sean, John, and Nick all grew up in Sonora, CA. The doors to the church were open, Sean and I slowly walked up to the steps and peaked our heads in. Half the church was Mexican, the other half was all white. I squinted my eyes a bit and saw the altar; there were Nick and Rebecca. Thank god. We took a seat and enjoyed the wedding.
After the ceremony, everyone gathered outside. John caught up with us; he took off his sunglasses and there was his eye: completely red and surrounded with a ring of mucous. I assumed it would have just been a little irritated but it looked like it was going into a more horrible route.
There was a small break between the ceremony and the reception, which was at the Chamadan resort in Santa Cruz. Sean and I made it back to my house and we did not see John. It came time for the reception and we headed to the resort. We eventually found John, who had his sunglasses still on and a glass of champagne in his hand.
“Hey guys, so I am going to down this glass of champagne and then go to the emergency room.”
“What?” came from both our mouths.
“My eye still hurts, it still burns, mucous keeps flowing out of it, and I can’t see because all the crap is covering my eyeball. I feel like I am looking through a glass of milk,” John finished the glass and Sean and I agreed we would take him to the ER.
Randomly, Santa Cruz Dominican Hospital was the next block over from the resort. We found a parking spot and came in. Sean and I took a seat and John explained his problem to the nurse at the front desk. There was a slight wait, but there was not many people in the waiting room. There was a couple in front of us, who I think were getting annoyed by us simply due to the fact that John was becoming tired and delirious and therefore was making a lot of non sense talk.
“Alright, which would you rather go without: pissing or sweating?” John asked with a serious face.
“Now, do all the post-effects come into play once I remove one of those functions? I mean, if I go without the function of peeing, does my body still require me to pee, and therefore I am in an everlasting state of pain?”
“What about sweating? Do I still get to have some kind of cooling down process? How will the water I consume be processed?”
“Do I still get to have some kind of condensation reaction? Will I know that I am being cooled down?”
“If I go without peeing, will the urine therefore just become sweat?” These were all real questions. Finally, John concluded it all.
“How about every time you sweat, pages of pornography seep out of your skin?”
“Deal!” Sean was set on that. A nurse called John and away he went. I got on the phone and went outside to hold the conversation. As I was in mid-conversation, I kept hearing this roaring noise. I looked up and about two hundred feet above me was a life-flight helicopter. I started moving away from the parking lot so I can actually hear the other end of the line, then I realized that the helicopter was actually landing. It was probably one of the most intimidating things I have seen. An ambulance met up with it and out came a child on a stretcher and paramedics loaded the child into the helicopter. It was weird to see. The conversation ended and I went back inside and saw Sean asleep.
John came out after being gone for about forty-minutes maybe. The doctor diagnosed him with having a minor-chemical burn on his eyeball. It seemed that when John was pouring massive amounts of water into the eye, there were still some remains of the hydrogen peroxide left. The doctor gave him some antibiotics and Vicodin.
We all rushed back to the wedding reception, which had transitioned into the dinner portion and we had reserved seats. However, that did not mean much because some random family members took the seats. We all had to split up and find the random available chairs at tables at different parts of the banquet hall. I found myself at a table where the wedding photographer was sitting and two co-workers of the bride.
The waiter, come to find out, was an old film major colleague of mine, who was annoying. When we were in college, he knew my weakness, that is, he knew I would listen to him because that’s what I do. He spoke to me for a good hour one time about a screenplay he was writing about a protagonist who has mental powers. After much description, his main character was a pervert and my film major colleague was pretty much writing down all his erotic fantasies into this screenplay. He later explained his methods of getting this picked up: he would move to LA, wait tables at the hipster restaurant where all the producers eat at and show them the script (of course they would buy it without hesitation), and he also stated that people have told him he looks like Topher Grace, and Scarlet Johansen dated Topher Grace, so therefore, she would date my film major colleague. He had it all figured out. I did my best to ignore him at the table but he found me, and we had a similar conversation.
I struck up a conversation with the two co-workers of the bride. I asked them what they did for a living (because I had no idea what the bride did). The woman next to me explained that they are music therapists. I nodded like I knew what that meant and she read right through me.
“Do you know what that is?”
“Yeah, it’s to make pianists less stressed out,” nothing but laughter from the woman, who I found out was named Yuriko (very similar to a friend’s name, sort of weird). She and the other co-worker went into great detail about what exactly music therapy is, but I don’t want to go into it.
Finally, I got to do one of my dreams, which was to be at a wedding and give off a false identity. I told them my name is Peter, but when they asked what I did for a living, I told them I work in San Jose as a digital text engineer.
“Do you know what that is?” I asked the two persons, both looked lost “well, basically, I create fonts for computers.” I just pulled that out of my ass. I went into great length on how my team and I are trying to reformat the Geneva font to help bridge Macs and Linux based computers better and how Helvetica is going to be the font for the 21st century. Again, I don’t know where this came from or for that matter where it was going.
The rest of the night went into the same path that other weddings do: a lot of champagne and wine consumption, and people on the dance floor. I went out to the parking lot because I do not like to dance. Let me say that again, I don’t like to dance. My friends tend to forget this and keep trying to persuade me by saying things like “it’s fun!” Well, you know what is also fun? Playing jacks. Yeah, and you don’t see me forcing that onto anybody.
As things unfolded, many people left, we all went off to other points of interest. John’s eye managed to make it through the night. We all made it home safely. The next day was something new for everyone.
4 comments:
And ...
Give it a couple of months, then I will reveal the rest of the story.
And....??? You can't leave us with that!
(Sorry, I am just getting caught up with your blog, which makes me feel bad b'cuz you read mine all the time. I'm a bad blog buddy.)
BTW - it's the Chaminade resort.
Thank you for the spelling correction. Next time we hang out, I'll give you the end of the story.
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