Sunday, May 27, 2007
"Alice in Chains stroked her velvet revolver while the slow children at play used sex pistols on the marcy playground."
So, on 7 May, after being back from Utah for less than 24 hours I was on another flight, this time to Asheville, North Carolina. I arrived without incident and proceeded to Kenneth's dorm where we drank some but we were clever enough to drink slowly so that we stayed sober while Kenneth got drunk and amused us..... okay, okay, the staying sober part wasn't intentional, but somehow it happened.
The following night, Kenneth and I hopped in his car and hit the road for Knoxville, TN. The drive was a bit windy but quite pretty overall. When we arrived in Knoxville, I must admit I was a bit impressed. Somehow my brain had confused Knoxville with Fort Knox... which is in fucking Kentucky, not Tennessee... so what I had expected was some super-security, suit-people kind of town. Instead, we found a slightly run down, but old town with some personality. I was actually a bit entranced and wished that we had gotten there earlier so we could see around a bit, but given the time, it was necessary to find parking for our concert. Afterall, that was the entire reason I flew to North Carolina. We walked up to the venue, which I fucking adored. It was a two-story bar that holds 500-600 people and it has a gated courtyard outside. In the courtyard are trees, a disco ball against one of the buildings, an old fashioned phone booth, and tables to sit at. The whole place, both inside and out, reminded me of nothing less than the romantic notions of New Orleans that I have in my head. It was one of those romantic dirty kinds of feel rather than a grungy dirty feel. The first two bands were Stolen Babies and In This Moment. I'd never heard of either before, but enjoyed both performances. Stolen Babies even had an accordion. How cool is that? The band we went there to see, Within Temptation was next. With one exception, their performance was wonderful. The one exception was that in a song that on the CD has a guest vocalist, they used a recording of him rather than having someone else sub in the part. We felt honoured to be present at a show on their first american tour and grateful that we wouldn't have to scrape up the money to attend one of their shows in europe, as amazing as that would be. Following them was Lacuna Coil. One thing they definitely had going for them was a strong, very aggressive stage presence right from the start. The tour was meant to highlight some of the women in metal (the lead singers of all 4 bands are female), so it got on our nerves a bit when the male singer in Lacuna Coil acted a bit like he was trying to hog the show. One thing they did a lot in their show was to build up a lot of energy with their songs and then just jam a bit instrumentally to let everyone bask in the energy a bit. Kenneth found these segments boring, but I found them neat and wished that I knew how to experience what many people in the front of the crowd were experiencing.
Another event on the trip was that we took a 22-mile stretch of the Blue Ridge Parkway up to Mt. Mitchell, the highest point in the eastern US. At the beginning of the drive to the parkway itself, we had to leave the paved road and go up a very windy gravel road. While a bit unnerving at the turns, it was kind of exciting. Looking at our mile marker, we began to wonder if we'd taken a wrong turn, but this windy road was interesting enough that we decided to continue regardless of where it spit us out. To our good luck, it was, afterall, the correct road and dumped us back on pavement and the blue ridge parkway. I was glad Kenneth was driving because I rather enjoyed the scenery and probably would have given us both a spectacular death by accidentally driving off of the edge of a mountain just to get a good look if I'd been driving. When we reached the top of the mountain, we were buried in clouds, but it was neat to see how fast they move as they wrapped around the building. On the way back, we stopped at several overlooks. At one of them I convinced Kenneth that it was worth our time to hike up a 0.7 mile trail that I found. I was primarily interested in it because we got to walk through some plants that to me looked like they had tiny bananas growing all over them. Kenneth couldn't see how they looked like bananas and only conceded they looked like anything else when I reduced it from bananas to green beans. They were kind of like this. We got to a split to a lower overlook and a higher one and, not being one content to settle, I insisted upon the higher one. When we got to the top it was well worth it and we were both damning ourselves for not owning cameras and not thinking to buy even a disposable one. We got a nice 360 degree panoramic view of mountains and valleys. On the way back down, we visited the lower overlook too... the higher one was indeed far superior.
The last major event in North Carolina was Kenneth's graduation from UNC-A. We worried that it might rain, but were lucky to avoid that. The commencement speakers were good, definitely better than the political bore that spoke at mine, but I did tend to wonder how their speeches were at all related to graduates rather than just talking about themselves. After graduation, we helped Kenneth move his things out and had dinner with his family.
I then road back to Georgia with Matt through the rain. While there I got to finally see Andrew's house, which despite being relatively small, is plenty big enough for the two of them and I no longer feel any need to rag on their choice. ;) I also got to see Jeremy again and meet his girlfriend. I would have gotten to see Greg and Miranda again, but they decided they were too good for me and left to go back towards Florida a few hours before I got to Georgia. ;) (you know I love you guys)
Now that sleeping pill I took an hour ago is killing me off as you can see from the increasing amounts of time crammed into tinier paragraphs so I'm going to bed since I gotta be up in 3.5 hours...
