My Weekend, The Wedding, Lost, and Bored.

I'm sitting here in Pittsburgh bored out of my mind so I decided to write about my day yesterday. I'm rarely serious but I'll warn you that this particular post isn't going to be funny. Most won't even find it entertaining but it's giving me something to do.

Friday afternoon I drove down to Virginia as I usually do on my weekends. I didn't get to stay long because we had to come back north to Pittsburgh for a wedding on Saturday night. So basically I drove 6 hours on Friday only to turn around and drive another 4.5 back to Pittsburgh the next day. It's a good thing that I really don't mind driving. I should have known that there would be problems when I got to Virginia late due to spending too much time at the Harley dealership shopping for parts I really didn't need but thought I should have.

I didn't make it to the end of my trip, or so I thought, until just around 3:30 pm when I approached within about 2 miles of the beltway traffic fucking stopped. I should have known better than to even get on the beltway but since I don't really know the other roads in the area well I had little other alternative. Usually traffic doesn't get this bad until later around 4:30 or 5 from my experience but today I was wrong. My original arrival time was supposed to be 4:10 but I had still only moved maybe a mile by 4:10 so I got pissed off and changed my gps around in an attempt to find a suitable alternative route. This was also a bad idea. I did finally manage to get off the beltway but the route it chose was either just as bad or even worse.

I ended up being taken through what I suspect may have been Arlington and right through downtown. Between stoplights, and people who try to beat the yellow by driving into the intersection where they sit blocking traffic until the opposing light turns red again, I sat and sat and sat, moving nowhere. I actually sat at one stoplight through 7 green lights because of people doing exactly this. I was nearly homicidal by the time I finally got through. When I finally got to Alexandria it was more than 2 hours later than it should have been, actually turning a 5.5 hour trip into nearly 8 hours.

Anyhow, Saturday my girlfriend and I met up with her sister in law and set out for Pittsburgh. We thought we left in plenty of time to make the wedding at 6:00 pm but in a manner true to the beginning of the weekend we were so very wrong. We got to the hotel at about 5:00 pm because of ridiculous traffic again. We simply couldn't win. I needed a shower badly because of sweating and stress and by the time I was finished and they got ready we had about 40 minutes to get there which should have put us there with 10 minutes or so to spare.

It turns out that the two freeways that the gps wanted to take us on were closed for work all weekend so we had to find an alternative route. Since I'm too cheap to buy a good gps and pay for the subscription for one that updates best routes and traffic patterns it turns out we were fucked and didn't even know it yet. We had to drive all back roads through traffic and lights and by the time we thought we were getting close we were going to be 6 minutes late. If only.

We drove around and around and eventually the gps brought us to our destination which was supposed to be a church but it turns out that it was directly under a bridge in what didn't appear to be a very good part of town, there was no church to be found. There was a building with a man in it though so I decided that I would go ask him since I thought maybe there was a restroom in his building and it was worth a try so we might get there without me pissing myself.

The very helpful and friendly man let me use the restroom and even printed out mapquest directions for us since the multiple calls to my girlfriend's family were not helping and everybody was stressed. We attempted to follow the mapquest directions and ended up in another shady part of town where we actually drove by some interesting looking characters playing dice or some shit, betting on the sidewalk in basically a back alley of a derelict building. That was pretty nice, we sped through there at about 60 miles an hour trying to avoid getting shot at because we were out of place to put it mildly. Mapquest directions weren't working.

Eventually, somewhere near an hour late for the ceremony and pretty sure we would miss it, somebody decided to double check the gps. It turns out that when the gps was programmed it somehow got programmed with two addresses in it as one, this is why were were getting nowhere even though it pretended it knew where we were going for an hour. Reprogramming the gps we soon realized that if we had programmed it properly we would have been where we intended to go at least an hour sooner and maybe even early. At one point we had been less than 2 blocks away.

Fortunately due to a slow start we managed to get there just in time for the "I do's". It was a pretty interesting wedding I have to say. I kinda liked it. I normally try at all cost to avoid this sort of thing, I hate weddings most of the time, they're stuffy and overly dressed and extremely boring but this one turned out to be not so bad.

I've actually never seen anything like it. The groomsmen all were black jeans and basically the rest of those who attended wore whatever it was that they felt like wearing or so it appeared. I'm not sure how to describe it all without seeming judgmental because for once I'm not trying to be. Since I'm a bit out of the loop I fail to have the proper term to describe the fashion of the wedding goers. I don't want to use emo because that's not it though some may mistake it for that. Punk could possibly also be used but I don't think that's totally accurate either. It was just a really interesting bunch of people. I've never seen so many tattoos in one place except maybe a biker rally and this was a wedding.

Most of these people I think are also very religious. It's sort of a punk church. In fact, it's the church of the guy who did my last tattoo and he was there. So died black hair, tattoos abound, rockabilly, punk, emo, everything was present in abundance that one does not picture when one pictures a wedding. I was definitely entertained. If these people walked into a normal church, the usually uppity crowd would probably shit themselves thinking they were being invaded by a group of post apocalyptic heathens but they would be quite wrong.

I didn't spend much, really any time mingling because they weren't my people, I didn't know anybody and I was only there for my girlfriend but it wasn't bad, I liked the relaxed atmosphere and all of the people seemed from what I could gather to be a personable and fun loving group. The music was terrible and I'm not sure if that was planned or not but it wasn't what I was expecting. Basically it was all 80's music.

The highlight of the night was watching a group that I now call the Punk Wedding All-Star Dance Squad get down all spastic-like for at least a half hour. There was a dude with some long ass hair and big mutton chops who was the life of the party. I think it was Neil Young. Even if it wasn't Neil Young that's what I called him because it looked just like him. When I get married I'm finding Neil and inviting him to my wedding because dude was awesome.

All things considered, the night wasn't so bad. We eventually left the wedding and came back to the hotel room where I drank some absinthe while we watched Monty Python and The Holy Grail. Now I'm stuck in the hotel by myself since my girlfriend had to go home.

It's official, having a girlfriend in another state makes it so one lives only for the weekends. It's pretty goddamn depressing when you lose those weekends to work and that's putting me in a rather shitty mood since I have to teach next Saturday, a class I don't want to teach on a day I don't want to teach it, keeping me from the one person who keeps me sane. Two more days in this damn place to attend class and then I have to muddle through two more weeks of shit before I get my weekends back. Fuck, I hope I live through this.