Archive for the ‘Concerts’ Category
Sight-seeing!
I’m currently testing out how well wordpress works with on opera mini for my blackberry, thanks to the hour and thirty minute train-ride back to Waukegan. My pops and step-ma came out for a day of sight-seeing and a weekend of non-ohio scenary. We went downtown and saw quite a few of the sights, as well as the raggae bands at the music festival at millenium park. They finally got a taste of some authentic chicago deep-dish at Luke’s, a street down from the Sears Tower (get the signature pizza if you ever stop by the place). I’ll have some pictures up (provided by my new camera!) sometime tonight.
A lot of bullshit has happened over the past few months regarding my marriage. In case of anyone that’s been in the dark, Jessica had and accident and miscarried then proceeded to inform me that she’s been miserable with me for a while and now wants a divorce. Apparently my humor and demeanor has changed (deteriorated according to her) so much over the past few months that she can’t handle it anymore. Three months, that’s got to be a fucking record! Pleading and begging was to no avail, and I’m slowly coming to the conclusion that maybe its a sign from some asshole of a god, and that the whole thing was just a joke in his eyes, and something she wasn’t aware of the workings, but also that after as much I’ve tried to play things over that I might just be better off dealing with my ships than with her and realize what’s important and what’s erroneous in life. It really pains me to think of this whole situation as something I’ve wanted nothing of and tried to avoid during my whole relationship with her and it happened regardless, but I find it increasingly hard every single day to realize that this is by far my greatest folly in life.
I’ve come to accept my lack of understanding as something that will turn into a true lesson learned and hopefully someday I’ll benefit from this at least to an amount equal to what I’ve lost.
Music as a Weapon Tour
Boy was this an awesome weekend! As I was on watch Thursday night Moore asked me if I happened to be going to the ‘Music as a Weapon’ show down at the Chater One Pavilion down on Northerly Island, not a bad venue for being outside. We took a taxi (for some reason) from the Great Lakes stop to the Red Roof Inn downtown pretty early in the evening. After starting quite a bit of festivities we ventured down the Magnificent Mile and watched the city and a few hundred prom-goers enjoyed their beautiful Chicago evening.
Saturday we had a few problems with our second night of reservations (apparently the dolt at the desk Friday night didn’t reserve us for Saturday night like she said she was). After we had that all settled we decided to save a few bucks and walk the 4 miles from our hotel to the Charter One venue to see if we could find the box office and purchase tickets, fortunately we got there and got our tickets within a good 2 hours (going from north to south is sometimes a bitch). Its amazing how public transportation can be at such a conveniently simple system to follow, especially when the bus driver isn’t a middle-school drop-out like a few of them can be sometimes. We simply took one bus from the gate of the venue straight to North Michigan and a few blocks later we were back at the hotel. Planning is an essential item when it comes to orchestrating something like a liberty weekend, and to do it successfully you have to just consider options really. We g0t a good hike in, a nap (I took a shower and napped), and partied a bit all within 4-5 hours prior to the shower. Doing so made the show so much better since we were well rested, awake, and really drunk and fucking amp’d for the show.
The show was absolutely awesome. I’ve never been a big fan of Lacuna Coil but their performance was really good, so good I was deep enough in the pit to get my face elbow’d/headbutted/punched a few times. Chimaira played an awesome show as well (like there would’ve been any other way they’d play) and since they’re from back home its an even better show. Killswitch Engage played an equally good show, just like the other two, unfortunately I spent most of their show trying to get away from all the reefer (every time I found a good spot, someone right next to me would try and pass me a blunt). Disturbed played just completely kick-ass. Every time I’ve seen Disturbed live David always has a really good way of getting the crowd going, as well as sounding awesome all throughout the show. One of their last songs, Indestructible, was played with the members each representing a branch of the service (except the fucking USN) while David was in Marine digis.
The weekend ended like usual, a good night’s sleep saturday night and a bit of hiking around downtown before making our way to Ogilvie and riding the blue line back to base. As I’m writing this up now I’m watching Angels & Demons (its pretty good so far, but I’m a sucker for this kind of stuff) and waiting for Star Trek to finish loading, I’ll try and update sometime this week with pictures (I’ll ‘up’ them to picasa), so stick close.