Road tripping

I just woke up from a night on my former roommate Erin's floor, and man is it good to be out of town. I firmly believe it's important to wake up in a different place every so often. You should take at least one week-long holiday every year, and get out of town at least every month. I'm better at road tripping in the summertime. I have friends with which to stay, even if it is only a side trip to Lincoln -- an hour away.

I'm thinking about a theme/concept from William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. The idea is that our souls travel more slowly than our bodies. This is accounts for jet lag. It's our souls catching up. I believe it our hearts are similarly slower than the rest of our lives. For weeks, months, years after relationships are over, we feel the effects. Right now, I'm probably just an hour or two ahead of my soul, and my heart is on time. I feel great, especially waking up at a friend's place with a wedding to go to.

I've known Micah since High School, where he was my mentor on Newspaper staff. He was the Art Director his senior year, and I followed in his footsteps my the following year. I just recently found some of the things he did back then. Besides being a brilliant visual artist and graphic designer, Mr. Laaker is a sharp wit and a consumate prankster. Our friend Maher has been on the receiving end of Micah's comedic acumen more than once. After some conflict between Maher's acting schedule and a newspaper or social obligation, Micah began the Persecution of Thespians Campaign. All very tongue in cheek, but played with an excellent deadpan. That may be Micah's strong suit. The ability to convince you he's totally serious.

I remember one time Micah wanted to start An Anti-Tree Campaign -- this is especially funny because Nebraska is the home of Arbor Day. His logic was that trees have got us hooked on oxygen from an early age, and that it's just an addiciton like any other. "This crack is free, the first time..." This is the reason we grow orchards and why environmentalists are so keen to protect the forest. I think some of this is only funny when you know Micah & see the materials, but then again it's brilliant satire when you consider some of the arguements of the current administration to open up virgin timber for logging interests.

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I'm looking forward to this wedding. Weddings are a bit of a chore when you are a kid, but it is so much different when the people who are getting married are your friends. It makes a difference when you grew up with them. If you don't know the bride or groom, you want to meet the person your friend has chosen to marry. I'm not much for ceremonies, but I like the social aspect. I prefer simple weddings.

When my friends Amy & Sean got married, it was immediate family & only a couple of friends. They got married in California, and they are hippies, so it was pretty non-traditional. They are also poor, and not into all the usual wedding crap. It was a lovely ceremony. Non-denomonational minister. Gazebo on a cliff overlooking a beach. I took lots of pictures. I just made them an anniversary gift of sorts using some pictures I took and other memories from the trip. I still have to mail it off, so let's all keep it on the down-low, okay?

Maybe my friends just aren't as religous on the whole as our parents' or especially our grandparents' generation. I've heard more than once that the ceremonies are largely for the family. It's something to fulfill their expectation of what a wedding should be. More often than not, I've seen the bride's mother get into a tizzy, when the bride couldn't care less. But my friends are all pretty cool and low-maintenance that way. Most of them anyway.

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One of my other favorite memories of Micah was singing four-part harmony.

Back in the early 90s, a bunch of kids from Millard North High School called themselves The Gypsies and did sketch comedy. This took place at Noodle's comedy cafe. [It's no longer there.] We'd go Wednesday nights, drink cokes in this underground performance space and laugh as they'd stuff fruit and vegetables down their pants, make jokes about video arcades, superheros, and whatever else caught their fancy. It was really solid for a high school troupe.

One night, after the show, Micah, Maher, Sean and I were feeling pretty inspired. These are they guys I did newspaper with, and we made each other laugh a lot. We would freestyle our own comedy routines, though never in a performance setting.

In order for this story to work, you have to understand we went to a pretty urban high school, and there was large R&B influence in pop culture. En Vogue was huge. BoysIIMen's first album has just come out. We were all in love with the music. Or, at least, we couldn't get away from it. I believe the class song that year was "It's so Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday" or maybe "End of the Road." I'd also like to point out that Maher was the only one with any real musical background. In any case, we decided to start singing.

Try to imagine four white guys from somewhere in Middle America singing four-part harmony on a downtown street corner on Wednesday night.

Another imporant detail is that there was a Shriner convention in town. Parked across the street was a tour bus full of Shriners, or Masons, or some other fraternal organization of older men. I think they had fezes on, that's why I'm say Shriners. I can never recognize them without the little cars. They would hobble off the bus, look our way, and promptly cross the street in the other direction. I think one or two of them actually walked by and dropped a nickel or something. We should have put a hat out, but none of us wore hats. Maybe we could have borrowed a fez.

In any case, the performance was entirely a capella, and entirely improvised, though not entirely bad. Just mostly. I think each of us had a solo, or break down. I think breakdown is probably the more apt description. I can't remember if it was Micah or me who was slipping into a falsetto, trying to hit the high notes,. I know that we gave each other props at the time. What I wouldn't give for a tape of that performance.

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A couple of years ago, I went to visit Mr. Laaker in New York for St. Patrick's Day. I took the cheapest flight I could find [into Baltimore] and took the train up to the city. The sequence went Plane, Train, and Automobile. After getting off in Grand Central Station, I took a cab uptown to Micah's apartment. [Editor's note: While I had a functional understanding of the geography of New York City at the time, it was my first and only time there. I have no idea whether I went up, down, or across town. Uptown sounds right, and knowing.]

I met up with Micah and our friend Aaron Steckelberg. Aaron and I had been roommates in college at UNL. Actually, he gave me a place to stay, which worked out perfectly since his roommate Carlos had just moved out. [Another story] I hadn't seen Aaron in quite some time, probably since 1996 or 1997. He is now an art director at the Philadelphia paper.

Micah, Aaron and I met up with some of Micah's friends, and my other old roommate who lives in NYC, Joe Krings. Joe was living in Brooklyn at the time, and came to Manhattan to hang out with us. We had bomb-ass Chinese food, which seemed to be what everyone could agree on. We didn't want to fight the crowds for corned beef and cabbage. However, we did want to get a drink in an Irish Pub, and found one not too far away.

We managed to get a table, and found out soon enough why. The round consisted of Guinesses and Black & Tans. We toasted, drank deep, and were surprised how bad the stout was. Get this. Even though it was an Irish Pub, they didn't have Guiness on tap. Now, I'm no beer snob, I rarely even touch the stuff. I'm a whiskey man, myself. [Or wine. Or anything not-beer.] But this was unexcuseable. Guiness from a can on St. Patty's?! What was wrong with the world?

We finished that round, and made off for better digs. They're lucky we didn't sing.

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Micah has always been a good friend and mentor to me. He taught me the fundamentals of graphic design -- concepts and techniques I use to this day. He taught me about hip-hop, played A Tribe Called Quest for me for the first time. He, along with the newspaper crew, played along with my Ben Stiller Show obsession. Monday morning in the journalism lab, we would do all the jokes from the night before. I remember vividly walking around with paper mustaches that we made that morning, so we could re-create the T. J. O'Pootertoot's skit, a joke that would recur for years.

He has been an inspiration, a fellow conspirator, and a great friend. There should be some good pictures afterwards. There will be drinking, singing, dancing, hijinx, and laughter. Lots of laughter. Maybe not so much during the ceremony, but soon enough.

It should be a great wedding.

Comments

[micah]

[email from Micah -ed]

The tree-hatin' ain't over... I put up "www.treehater.com"... with many manifestos... also, just for full disclosure, Steck came up with the Anti-Arborial Assoc. idea... I just went crazy with it... kind of like how Malcolm pumped Elijah's message to the masses... but I can't forget the true prophet... :)