mychai's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mountains, mountains everywhere, but not a hill to see! It was a whirlwind trip from here on Friday morning to Gatlinburg, spending one full day there, and coming back on Sunday morning. The actual wedding was beautiful. If/when I get married, I would prefer to have it in a small, intimate atmosphere like my mom had hers � in a wedding chapel on the side of a mountain, with a full palette of autumn colors as a backdrop, the familiar and missed cool breezes that come along with late October. It made me miss Missouri. I was always at my happiest during the autumn month(s) in Missouri. Mississippi doesn't have autumn. Someone forgot. I walked down the ten-foot aisle with my mother on my left. She was holding back tears of happiness. I was holding back tears of my own. I love seeing my mom happy, finally, after ten years of being alone. My new stepfather treats her very well and gets her out of the house on the weekends to go dancing, see live shows, and get coffee at Starbucks. What more could you ask for when it comes to having a mate (eww) for your mother? I had to leave the hotel at 5:00 Sunday morning in order to make it to the airport in time for my 7:00 flight. I asked the guy who was checking us out how to get to the airport. "Oh. Easy. Get off on exit 385, take that road all the way down until you get to road 113, and you can't miss it." And he was right. He led me straight to an airport. It was a cow pasture with a long area of grass not dissimilar to a putting green. There was one airplane sitting under a little metal shed. If I ever get to live this life again, I will make a mental note to specify exactly which airport to go to when asking directions. I finally made it to the right airport with three � count'em three minutes to spare. That was excitement! Gatlinburg is horrid. It should win the award for "World's Tackiest Town" or "The Absolute Worst Spot You Could Possibly Go To Relax." Actually, it would probably come to a close second, losing only to Niagara Falls, Canada. The only roads into or out of Gatlinburg, Tennessee are two-laned roads. The town, for some reason I could never quite guess, is a tourist Mecca, supporting literally tens of millions of people per year � half of them driving 50-ft. RVs � with only a permanent citizenship of maybe 5,000 poor souls. Gatlinburg celebrates the great American quest to be as tacky and ecologically irreverent as humanly possible. In just a five mile stretch, I counted eight combination mini-golf and go-cart racing facilities; there were at least three different car museums touting the exact same cars from famous movies (the stupid VW beetle from that Walt Disney movie, the original Batman car, etc.); there were dinner shows every few hundred feet � some of them Christmas shows that seemed like they went on all year round (when given a choice between working at one of those Christmas shows and taking on Sisyphus' curse, I would gladly push a boulder up a hill for the rest of my days); and the "As Seen On TV!" stores are the Starbucks of Tourist Trap, Tennessee. They are f'n everywhere! Oh, and not to mention the litmus tests for when a town becomes the epitome of unharnessed tourism: the Ripley's Believe It or Not museum and the Guinness Book of World Records museum. There were three or four Ripley's museums in Gatlinburg. Believe that or not. I'm not even mentioning the uncountable number of T-shirt stores carrying shirts with a different funny saying on each one: "I'm not BALDING, it's a solar panel for a LOVE MACHINE!" I saw a hat with a really long bill, and the hat had, "Mine is bigger than YOURS!" printed on it. And one hat had "Bear Attack" on it with the bill ripped up a bit and fake blood splattered across the front. Pure class. Thankfully, the wedding chapel where my mom got married was well out of town. Thank God. I'm back. Back on the Air Force base. Back to where life is� I went to the doctor last Wednesday. An old problem has come back. Hard. Severly hard. For those of you who have been reading for a while, you know what condition I am talking about. Life has been a hard, long chore for the past several months. It came in rather gently, and before I knew it I was having problems thinking of anything else besides what I would like to do to myself if I weren't afraid of pain. I feel cursed. I feel like someone in the Upstairs Department is sitting back and having a good laugh. I live in a world of black-and-white. And what's worse � terribly worse � I live in an environment that you have to be careful what you tell people. Say the wrong thing, and you disappear for a while. Seriously. And I just hate talking about it to people. It makes me feel like all I care about is me, me, me, and it just makes me feel like I am coming across self-important. It's really not an illness you can kind of laugh about later. Like I went in to get my butt cut on last October. Now that was funny. So, yeah, that's how I'm doing. How are you? 8:17 p.m. - Sunday, Oct. 26, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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