SOE Fan Faire
Or, How I Got To Hang Out With My Bruthah From Anothah Muthah at the Geek Fest of Geek Fests
So there I was. Anticipating a great time yet nervous about it at the same moment. My brother and I were heading to the SOE fan faire in Las Vegas, and his ultimatums (no drugs {cannabis} and no strippers {it’s been at least 18 years since my libido, in connection with my body, entered a strip club}) were kind of a hassle since I entered into no dire ultimatums with him. Yet I had agreed to the terms and was packed and ready to go. After calling my mom and letting her know about the website and how to get there, a needed thing as anyone with computer illiterate parents knows, I grabbed the back pack and the flight bag and went outside. The plan was my sister was to arrive any moment, she was at least a half hour late, and I was to get a ride with her down to the broskie-in-law’s place of employment, then from there we would motor down to his mothers house where his children would be cared for by her, therefore giving his wifey, my sis, a break for a few days. So I went out the door of the apartment I share with my beautiful wife and children, locking it behind me, and headed out to meet the sister so she wouldn’t have to come to the front door to get me.
I sat by the back end of the car and whipped out the notebook I’ve been carrying for about a month so far and as Murphy’s Law states she shows up. I load it all back in to the pack, and climbed in the van. The niece and nephew were spazzin pretty much as always, the sister and I vary on our views on children and caffeine, and so I tried to let it all wash over me as we sped down the road to the bro-in-law.
We got to his job, loaded up the car with kids uncle’s bro-in-law’s and packs, suitcases, and we went on our way. The ride was not too painful to the bro-in-laws mothers’ casa, though there was in my mind a slightly perverse amount of the Christian tune thing goin on. Since I hadn’t done the “ultimatum” thing and hadn’t brought any of the serious thrash metal “devil” music as my unenlightened family puts it, I begged repeatedly for other music(I would have accepted jazz at this point), but then we arrived and hugs were handed out and lunch was grinded down, whence his father arrived. Lunch imbibed, hugs once again were handed out and we, as they say, got on down got on down, down the road.
The ride from the central coast area of California is sort of pleasant and painful all at once. As a traveler you’re leaving the great Pacific Ocean for the desert, yet in the desert is Vegas, the ultimate in freaky adult entertainment. The true saving grace was that we entered the desert in the evening, so it was relatively cooler (98billion degrees versus 110billion degrees) and the desert in the night is a truly beautiful yet strange and disturbing place. It seems as if as you cross the mountains and you climb through them you find Joshua trees and other types of cacti and it seems as if you’ve entered an alien landscape. Another world stretches before you, the landscape sere and scorched yet beautiful and stark. In the winter it snows here in the high desert, the weird gates across the freeway attest to that, and yet in the summer the temperature climbs into the triple digits. We talked of different things like religion and the amount of drinking I was thinking I would do, listened to a little coast to coast AM I had on CD along with some other music ( the Christian stuff had been shelved ) that I had brought with me. Most of it was synthesizer stuff Jean Michel Jarre, some Orb I had gotten my hands onto, nice smooth catchy stuff, and the desert flowed by. Some traffic slowed us a bit out there before Baker which then smoothed back out again and we rolled into Vegas around 230 in the AM.
