Posted by gwendolyn on May 18, 2004 at 12:04 PM

All My Pictures Of You

It took the last two days of being home to recover and reflect on the whirlwind weekend I had.

The desert is beautiful. It is hotter than hell but it is a dry heat. The night was cool and I think we heard coyotes in the distance when standing on the patio of our room. I know we passed a dead one on the road at one point. I expected a Doors song to start playing in the background every time we drove somewhere. It was all rocks and dirt and desert flowers. There were mountain peaks, some snow capped, around every town we were in. Joshua trees are odd looking things. It was definitely a different place. Nothing like any place I can remember being as an adult.

Aside from Jeremiah missing his first flight out to California, Delta losing my luggage until midnight that night, the hotel giving our room away one day before we got there and having to fuss with them over giving us a room with two beds instead of one king, my camera deciding to trick me into thinking it wasn't going to work at the top of the mountain in Joshua Tree National Park overlooking the valley that is Palm Springs, Indio, Desert Hot Springs, The Salton Sea, and the San Andreas Fault, losing the skin on my forearms and calf rock climbing (and trespassing on private property) in Joshua Tree, losing my good spot before The Cure came on stage to perform and having to push my way through a zillion people to get to a spot where I could actually see anything when I could have been in the front row had I stayed put to begin with, not seeing any of the zillion celebrities that were there except for possibly Tommy Lee whom I did not see walk by us (only Jeremiah did), being so tired I could not function to help Jeremiah get us back to the hotel after the show, not filling the rental car's tank up 1/8th of a tank before dropping it off and being charged something like $5.00 per gallon for it, nearly missing Jeremiah's plane home, having "mechanical difficulties" postponing my leaving Atlanta during the second leg of my flight home and getting home at stupid o'clock at night, and coming very close to running completely out of money before I ever got home, everything went perfectly.

Actually, it was a lot of fun. I would do it again in a heartbeat. This time though, I would have never in a million years checked my luggage just for the hell of it. I would have bought tickets to both days so that I could have seen also seen Beck and The Pixies. I would have had my eyes peeled for celebrities and went to see the DJ Peretz who was actually Perry Ferrell. Most importantly, I would have planted my ass directly in front of the stage three bands before The Cure came on and stayed there at all costs because that was what I was there for above all else. I ended up pretty close to them in the end. It took a lot of pushing and being pushed. I got one good picture and this is it. The others were either dark or blurry or both.

I thought the show was pretty good but then again I have never seen them in concert before so I don't have much to compare it to. Honestly, they could have sounded like shit and I most likely wouldn't have cared. Just being there and hearing them do all of the songs I have loved since I was fourteen years old was enough for me. When they did Charlotte Sometimes I nearly cried. The whole experience was amazing. I would do it over in a heartbeat.

I probably still wouldn't have taken Jeremiah to Tijuana though. The luck we were having all weekend, nothing good could have come of that :) Maybe we would have went to LA to stalk Henry or something.