weekends are made of chocolate
don't you love mondays when you're still buzzing from the weekend? not alcohol buzzing, necessarily, but energy buzzing. the energy of a weekend where everything goes perfectly past your expectations and nestles right into the blow-your-mind territory. i wish you all many weekends like that.
last friday i had plans to spend all day snowboarding at the mid-sized ski resort by my house. they had some deal where it was $11 bucks and i can't pass that up. my little cousin, who is 17 i think, came down for the day to learn and practice... she had only gone once before and i've been doing this for 9 or 10 years, so i was going to help her out. i invited another one of my buds who was around her age and they showed up at my place all on-time and bright-eyed and i had totally overslept, of course, and was in my underwear. well, after frantically getting ready, i went to get my snowboard from the garage where i keep it... and it was gone.
now i had moved over the summer and everything was scattered everywhere and then there was some remodeling going on downstairs so everything was scattered again and half my junk went to off-site storage so after searching the best i could for half an hour, i figured my snowboard went into storage for some reason, or that it was somewhere in my place but i wasn't going to find it anytime soon.
so after making us like an hour late, i just decided to rent a board. this is upsetting because i really like my board and i'm comfortable with it and i don't like spending money to rent when i already own. but i was going to be hitting the slopes for such an amazingly cheap price today, that i could afford take a hit and rent.
we got to the hill and the kids went wide-eyed right away. neither had boarded anything that tall before. i had to try to refrain from telling them that this was just a little bunny hill compared to places i've been in montana and colorado {and soon to be swiss alps!} because i didn't want to ruin this moment for them. but turns out that they would have been just as at home in tahoe or whistler -- these kids were naturals. for only her second time on a snowboard, my little cousin was screaming down the mountain and carving both directions as well as stopping heel-side or toe-side. she's going to be good. and my buddy had never seen a terrain park before but he was hitting all the big jumps with me anyway. it was such a fantastic day.
there was one major faceplant, made on my part, unfortunately. i hit one of the smaller jumps and got way more air than i had intended and landed flat on my chest, knocking the wind out of me. you know, where your lungs simply refuse to take in a breadth for about the scariest minute of your life? it was an elementary school fall off the jungle gym the last time that happened to me. and now, after the weekend, i still have a one little pink, puffy rib that's kinda sore. but it's fine. i've yet to break anything snowboarding and i wont start now!
so by the middle of the day, a bunch more of my friends started showing up and we had an amazing time and came over to my place afterwards for beef stew and homemade frothy hot chocolate, but i had to cut out early and head to band practice. -- oh yeah, i found my snowboard, right where i left it, only it had fallen over and behind a rack of other crap. i'm so retarded. --
well, we ended up practicing until about 2:30 in the morning and i was completely spent. but we had a wedding gig the next day {the wedding of a friend, so i would know everyone there} and we were nowhere close to being ready. there were a few songs that i could only get through with my notes... which is not good.
saturday we arrived with all our band stuff at the ballroom and after stepping through the entrance, started laughing and whooping like the giddy little boys we are. the ballroom was very large and beautiful, but the stage was massive. it was bigger than any other gigs i've played. it was like back in high-school performing on the massive theatrical stages. we were definately going to be the featured center-of-attention tonight. and we love that.
i had a little bit of a phreak-out before the show because at that point, my mind was blank and i had completely forgotten how any of the lyrics went in our 25-30 song set. but i knew it was always like this and that by the time i get to the mike, i feel right at home and whatever comes out of my mouth feels right.
it was a little shaky at the start... i had to announce the entrance of the wedding party and each couple's names and try to sound cool with some witty banter... and i'm so not cool. and then we started playing and it became painfully obvious that we are so not a wedding band. we have maybe 1 typical wedding song. the rest are just songs we really like and yes, they are entirely danceable but they are just not standard wedding fare, so people who are coming to shake their thing to Dancing Queen and Celebration and Brown-Eyed Girl, well they just sit and stare at us like we were all performing naked.
... that is, for the first song or two.
then some unmistakeable foot tapping starts taking over their legs. these may be songs they don't know... but they realize, these are songs they SHOULD know. these are good songs. these are dance songs. and they just gotta dance.
suddenly the dance floor is packed and people are whooping and hollering and raising up their hands. this can only spur me on. now i've got the mike in my hand and i'm on my knees. then i'm jumping around the stage and punching the air. then i'm out on the dancefloor, slow dancing with an amazing girl through the closing minute or two of a song. then i'm running back to the mike just seconds before the first line of the next song. the guitar wails on an awe inspiring melody, picking a fight of competition with the keyboard to try and imitate his licks. back and forth they trade lines, trying to outdo eachother. then the conga and bongo players take a solo. the drums come back in and the bass line starts me and the acoustic guitar player all over again. i pick a verse and repeat it and somehow this time, it's so powerful. i shout the name of each player as they take a solo and the crowd goes wild each time. and as a fitting ending to our last note, we blow a breaker and the stage goes dead for about 30 seconds. when else has a wedding band ever rocked so hard?
and this is why we live for weekends. this is weekends on steriods. this is my life and the moments between and i am incomparably happy.
so the latin dj that went on at 10:30 or 11:00 was the perfect night cap. i spent the rest of saturday salsa dancing with my closest friends. the wee hours of sunday morning were spent hauling all our amps and crap back to the practice house and more hooting and hollering, albeit tiredly reserved, about what an amazing show we had just had.
sunday morning was lazy and sleepy. met with the parents in the afternoon to hear my dad give a public talk on the Bible's view of child rearing, in which funny stories of trying to train me in my youth were shared with loving, but complete strangers on the north side of town. we three were the only white people in the building, but you never would have guessed it by the friendly way we were treated.
then the parents took me out for a steak dinner at bartolottas, which had to have been way more expensive than i even want to know.
if we have to be one of those people who only live for the weekends, because our mid-week lives are boring and tedious, then the weekends need to be a breath of fresh air. weekends need to overwhelm you and last you through till thursday night. maybe it's not balanced, but it's all we have. otherwise you'll look back on your life one day and wish you hadn't stayed in that one night because now you can't even remember the tv show or movie you watched... but the nights out with your friends, living and doing, being the person you want to be... those are the days you'll look back on, proudly, without regret. we're only given so many weekends. don't lose them, use them!
Posted by heydomsar
2005-12-19
go back | random brainstorm | go forth
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