Lisa's Wedding

Image hosted by Photobucket.com

This past weekend I was in Sagautuk, Michigan for my friend Lisa’s wedding. Sadly she was not marrying me (I’ll find a way to go on, somehow…) but a great guy named Matt. It was really clear to see at the service how much they love each other, how happy they are and will be. It was a perfect day for a wedding. Everything was fantastic, from the weather, Lisa looking gorgeous in her dress, and oh yeah, the open bar.

I’m so glad I was able to go. For a while I didn’t think I could, money being what it is, but my friend Mandy just moved back to Des Moines from Alaska/Portland/Etc. (there’s only seventeen states she hasn’t been to; we counted) and let me tag along with her for the long drive to Michigan. We had a lot of fun and I feel like I got to know her a lot better. It’s great you can know someone for years and feel like you’re meeting them for the first time. And even though Mandy hid off to the side to avoid the bouquet, it zeroed in on her as if laser guided.

Image hosted by Photobucket.com

We picked up fellow IWP member and my Girl Friday (aka Erika) at the Grand Rapids airport (after a two hour delay, but Mandy and I found a nice brew pub, and a ginormous moon, after turning our noses up at $6 pints of Guinness) and finally we made it to Sagautuk and the lovely, the thinly walled, Ship N’ Shore Botel. Conan, Amy, Andrew, and his girlfriend Whitney were waiting for us, and the next morning, Ilona flew in from Paris. I figured she’d be exhausted, but she had the time of her life. She was brighter than I’ve ever seen her. She danced like it was going out of style, and even danced with me outside the tent, where I had to retreat after I’d gone deaf.

Image hosted by Photobucket.com

We endured kamikaze bees (two bullseyed Mandy’s beers), and later, the most lewd, horrific, beyond-words piano singer in the entire western world. In the basement of a nightclub playing Britney, no less. He sung of porno tapes and Cheeto’s, two things that should never go together, but he did it, and we’re scarred for life. We also avoided paying $3 cover charge just for pizza, played pitch, went to the beach, and made prelimnary plans for the 10th Anniversary Reunion back in Ireland.

Image hosted by Photobucket.com

It was a great, fast, tiring two days, but like every other day I’ve spent with these friends, I never wanted them to end. We weren't all there, but we were in hearts and minds. I suppose Friday would call our group The Parenthetical 11.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Visit From The Goon Squad: Charting New Territory

Image
 Credit - Tessie Girl I recently finished A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan and it's one of the best books I've read in a while.  It flows from one character to another in a kind of narrative relay.  At first it's disorienting and honestly I lost track of who the focus was or was supposed to be - the point, I think - and it required me to stop and start again once or twice.  The book also caroms from one era to another.  This narrative river just flows along and then washes ashore deep in the future, providing a brief, sober glimpse of the fate of the character we follow, before retreating back to the sea of the present.  At some point you almost long for a chart mapping out all these people, these places and times, and then as if on queue, Egan actually depicts an entire sequence of the book in a succession of flow charts.  I wa struck at how effective, and affecting, this was; the PowerPoint slides gradually became thought bubbles...
Read more

Moebius, 1938-2012

Image
Jean Giraud, better known as Moebius to comic book and cinema fans, has died.  Sad news on the heels of Ralph McQuarrie just last week.  The two of them had an incalcuable impact on the look of genre filmmaking and the minds of impressionable young artists over the last generation or two.  I knew of him mainly through Heavy Metal and the magazine-size Epic comics in the early 80's.  I remember seeing reprints of The Airtight Garage and being a little unsure of what to make of the grandiosity of it all - at that point I was very much still planted in the grungy feel of Star Wars.  Actually it wasn't too long ago that Giraud did a piece based on Episode I that recalls Airtight Garage so much that you tend to look at the prequels as closer to him than McQuarrie: That's actually Jerry Cornelious (sorry, Lewis Carnellian ) up there in the corner.  Giraud's influence is most heavy in Tron and Alien, as well as The Fifth Element, which came later. ...
Read more

Get Lost Writing

Image
Writing for me has always been an act of discovery.  At various times you will feel like Magellan, or Columbus.  Others you will feel like the Donner Party.  You will feel these at varying times throughout the process of writing the same novel, if you're anything like me.  And at some point, you will experience another feeling - the sheer elation of knowing you are the first person to ever lay eyes on this undiscovered country of a novel.  That's the way it feels to me when a novel reaches that tipping point, when the mass is so great that the collapse from dust into light becomes to powerful to deny.  I've felt this feeling before, a couple times.  It's a great feeling.  I feel it now, as I'm 211 pages into the novel that I've documented here recently on the blog (otherwise known as the #scifijohnhughesbook ).  A lot of the disparate threads - fits and starts really - that I've experimented with over the last few years are finally bearin...
Read more