Wilting at Windmills

I got back not long ago from the desert. Palm Springs, to be precise. I'm not quite sure why we all went out there, as there isn't much to do in the desert that you can't do in Los Angeles, which has the added advantage of already being where I live.

My high school friend Dave is getting married in May, you see, to (I'm told) a lovely young woman named Jen. They live in Pittsburgh, so I will regrettably be unable to attend the wedding. Oh, I'd like to, as I've never been to the wedding of a peer before, and I expect it would be a fascinating and highly bloggable experience. But I can no more afford a trip to Pittsburgh as I could a trip to Ganymede.

Oh, look it up.

So, anyway, I can't go to Pennsylvania, but Dave was good enough to fly out this weekend to visit some of his California friends for a sort-of weekend bachelor party. This is nice for me, I suppose, because none of my peers thus far have gotten married, so I've yet to experience a true bachelor party.

Okay, well, one of my friends did actually get married, but he eloped and didn't tell any of us until afterwards, so it doesn't count. This guy actually did assemble a "second wedding" for the benefit of those of us on the Left Coast, but no "second bachelor party." No bachelor party at all, from what I understand. This is clearly cheating. He's not even married any longer, but I still think we ought to just throw him an impromptu make-up bachelor party, just so we don't fall behind. Really, I just need more good excuses to go to a strip club.

But anyway, back to Palm Springs. We went out there for some reason, even though it was hot and we're all under 70 years of age, and none of us really golf to the best of my knowledge. It's about a 2 and a half hour drive due East. This is probably the dullest drive, scenery-wise, in all of Southern California. You can't really drive a few hours in Southern California without bumping into, merely by chance, some incredibly beautiful vista. Yeah, sure, most of the city of Los Angeles is a real garbage dump, even on the coast, but drive for a few hours and you'll get somewhere that looks like a postcard.

But when you drive East, you're mainly going through San Bernadino and Oxnard and Colton and other miserable little dirt pockets where the chief natural resource is leftover LA smog. Seriously, San Berdoo may be the least attractive city on the planet. I've seen dust bunnies with more lush greenery. And then you get to the big fields filled with half-working windmills, and then you get to Palm Springs.

When we got to the motel, I saw a weird brochure. It turns out, they actually run tours around the windmills! For real! I mean, you've already passed them on the road when you get to Palm Springs. Isn't that enough, really? Do we need to learn all about how the windmills work? Who cares? They work, kinda, but not too well, or we'd all be using them. That about does it for me.

I recall one trip to Las Vegas with my family where we took an afternoon to drive out to the Hoover Dam. The Hoover Dam is a very impressive thing to see. It's absolutely massive, and when you really think about the effort it must have taken nearly 100 years ago to construct something like that, it's difficult to even imagine. But you really really really really so don't need to go on that tour. I suspect even a structural engineer would have been bored on this tour. The building of a dam just isn't a tourist-friendly activity, I suppose, unless the crowd you're entertaining is a large group of beavers.

Where was I? Oh, yes, the motel. It smelt vaguely of bug spray. The lobby and the rooms. That's a real glass half empty-glass half full, optimist vs. pessimist kind of observation.

An optimist would say, "It's great that everything smells like bug spray. That must mean the hotel is very clean and and diligent about pest control!" A pessimist, such as myself, would (and did) say, "Why does the entire hotel smell like bug spray? What are they trying so desperately to get rid of?" I imagined a bizarre sighting in Room 237 that compelled the hotel manager to hose the entire place down with enough Raid to kill every insect from there to Indio.

As for the "party" itself, four of us went to see Sin City and then were joined by a fifth for drinks and dinner at the Yard House next to the theater. Two of the attendees, Dave and Chuck, were old friends of mine from my high school days whom I haven't spent a lot of time with since. They, however, have remained close throughout this past, well, decade.

And it has been almost a decade. Dave reminded me that our 10 year high school reunion will be held next year. (Class of '96, baby!) Yowza. This will not be a fun event for me to attend. I'll be meeting up with old classmates who have spouses, families, careers, money and significantly less acne, whereas all I have to show for the past decade are a few good screenplays and a quickly-receding hairline.

Anyway, it was strange to see my old friends who have stayed so close while I fell out of touch. We slipped surprisingly easily into our old conversation patterns, but it did feel different, especially when Dave would discuss his upcoming nuptials. That's a weird word, nuptials. I tend to avoid it as I'm always afraid I'm going to use it incorrectly.

Dave and I are on pretty much polar opposite paths. He's always been in a hurry to grow up. He graduated from UCLA early as an undergrad to move back to Orange County and start working. He was eager to get into the business world and start a career. Now, he's going to have a wife and a home and a suburban middle-class lifestyle at 26.

I, on the other hand, have been trying to regress as far back as possible. I was pretty miserable as a teenager, yet I try to duplicate as much about my teenage lifestyle as I can, right down to the contempt for authority and occasional failure to shower. I crave free time and hate structure. I live as cheaply as I can without finally caving and going on the collegiate all-Ramen diet. I can no more balance a checkbook than balance a coffee table on my head. I do my laundry about as frequently as the Vatican switches popes.

What...too soon? Do I have any Catholic readers? If so, please send hate mail to Lons@getbent.org.

My point is, though Dave and I still get along, it's clear that we're headed to very different places. Him to a comfortable family life in a nice suburb of Pittsburgh and me to Fatburger for some chili fries.

I don't really remember where I wanted to end up when I started writing this post. As you can probably imagine, it has been a while. Just wanted to let you all know where I've been, really. I imagine people thought it was strange that a day went by without 7 or 8 updates.

Oh! One more thing I wanted to talk about! Quoting from movies and TV! This is a habit that I have had all my life. When I see something funny in a movie or TV show, I tend to memorize it. Not intentionally, mind you. I don't stay up nights looking at myself in a mirror repeating old jokes from movies. Just thinking about that image kind of weirds me out.

No, I just remember them. Always have. I can't remember where I park my car most of the time, and I never remember to buy paper towels when I'm at the grocery store, but I can recall several entire films verbatim, and many comedy scenes and sketches, stand-up routines, even (and now I'm embarrassing myself) cartoons.

In middle school and high school, I would have whole conversations with people made up of quotes from "The Simpsons" or Spaceballs or Princess Bride or other highly quotable movies and shows. I've since stopped doing this (for the most part), because it's pretty lame, and because most of the people I spend time with now couldn't compete with me in this manner no matter how hard they tried. Except with The Big Lebowski, which basically everyone I know can recite word-for-word. It's just that good.

But when Chuck and I got together this weekend....WHAMMO! That guy has a steel-trap comic mind that kind of scared me a bit. Monty Python, "Family Guy," you name it, Chuck could come up with a conversation-appropriate sound bite. I hadn't even thought about this kind of behavior in many many years.

What could possibly be the psychological cause? Is it to fill empty conversational space that would otherwise be occupied by uncomfortable silence? I don't think so, as we actually had plenty of non-quoting things to talk about, and rarely had conversational lulls. Is it the fact that, long ago, we bonded over this material, so discussing it again satisfies some sort of need for nostalgia and authenticity? Maybe.

Or perhaps we're simply huge dorks.