DISCLAIMER: Similar events did take place. However, this author makes no guarantee as to the accuracy of the depiction of events presented below. Some parts of this harrowing account may have been exaggerated for dramatic effect.
Reader discretion is advised.
It is, I believe, a basic fact of life, alongside death and taxes, that the most disagreeable part of any trip is neither the physical travel nor the activities planned thereafter (although this of course does not preclude either from being particularly dreary). It is neither the laborious hours in a vehicle of choice, hurtling off at unsafe velocities towards some exotic destination, nor is it the hours of pain and discomfort that follow.
It is, almost certainly, the packing.
Luckily, I do not have much to pack because I do not have much. (Personally, that is.) Aside from the obvious clothes, I just had to bring my devices, for obvious reasons, a little stuffed bunny, because, and I’m not afraid to admit this, i bring him everywhere I go, a hundreds-page long binder of piano sheet music that definitely isn’t pirated, because there’s a piano over here at my cousin’s and I might as well practice, and Murderbots 3-5, because I need to finish those and SJPL I swear to god I know they’re due like yesterday but I’m in LA there’s not much I can do whaaaaaaaat you’re breaking up
So the night before the trip, which, at the time of writing, was yesterday, Friday the 18th, I was actually done really fast. The only hiccup was that my mother questioned why on earth I had to bring such a gigantic binder, and before I could explain that a lot of my songs have double digit pages she was telling me to pick out a couple and stuff them in a smaller folder. She, of course, changed her mind a few seconds later when she realized that a lot of my songs have double digit pages. Go figure.
I had to go to sleep at a somewhat reasonable time Friday night, because the plan was to be up at 8, off at 10 (in hindsight, I have no idea what on earth we were planning to do for two hours we went to all the work of packing at night so we wouldn’t have to go to all the work of packing in the morning), and then drive the six hours to my cousin’s house in LA and be there by four. Thanks to the heat, my brother was sleeping downstairs, and so before I headed upstairs I decided to mess around on the piano a bit, just to mess with my brother. My dad made some comment about how perhaps I was trying to put my brother to bed with piano music, and so I said to myself, hey, that’s a good idea, I need to go to sleep anyways, and I have literally the perfect song.
Alright, buckle up, this background is going to take me awhile. I went to piano school for a number of years, never mind how many precisely, and while I was there one of my teachers noticed that I had (and still have) a penchant for playing film score tracks. So promptly I was handed the sheet music for Max Richter’s “Sorrow Atoms”, from Mr. Richter’s score to the 2013 romantic drama Perfect Sense, a film which I had never seen in my life and never plan to, to prepare for the upcoming recital. Which doesn’t sound to bad, except for one small problem.
“Sorrow Atoms” is just fantastically boring.
Like, it’s almost amazing how boring it is. It literally takes talent to be this boring.
You can look it up on Youtube if you like – perhaps you’ll decide that I’ve been too harsh – but, in almost certain violation of several US copyright laws, I enclose here an image of the first two pages of “Sorrow Atoms”:
Those of you that can read your sheet music should be cringing by now.
For those of you that can’t, let me sum it up like so: this is an extremely repetitive piece of music. The bass notes here are octave notes, which in and of itself isn’t so bad, but they are octave notes that fill up whole measures and, often, multiple measures. That means I’m just holding the same note for long periods of time, before moving to hold a different note for a similarly long period of time. The treble notes are, inconceivably, worse. It’s an eighth note rhythm that, if you’ll believe it, does not change for the entirety of the piece. And not only does the rhythm not change, but the very notes that are played repeat over, and over, and over, and over. I get the impression that Mr. Richter (or at least the arranger of this piece for the piano) came up with exactly three musical phrases, then said “Why don’t I repeat that for four pages with an incredibly low level of variation?”, and then did that, and called it a day. This does not make for the most dynamic playing experience, nor does it make for the most interesting listening experience. What it does make for, is an excellent sleeping experience.
I mean no disrespect to either Mr. Richter or Perfect Sense. The latter, from what I can tell from the Wikipedia article, is a film based around the rather terrifying premise of all of humanity contracting a virus that gradually but completely saps them of all their senses by the end of the film. (Oops. Spoiler alert.) It also happens to star Obi-Wan “High Ground” Kenobi himself, Ewan McGregor, which is a win in my book any day. Perfect Sense doesn’t seem like a bad movie, except for perhaps the slight flaw that it is in fact a romantic film, just like Mr. Richter does not seem like a bad composer. On the contrary, Mr. Richter is a supremely talented composer who “stands as one of the most prodigious figures on the contemporary music scene” (hey, that’s his website’s words, not mine) and has far more musical knowledge than I could ever hope to attain. It’s just that this is, bar none, the most boring, tedious, uninteresting, dull piece I have ever had the displeasure of playing.
In case you were wondering, I did eventually have to play this for my recital all those years ago. Anyone ever go to a piano recital (or anything, really) and become so immensely bored that you are lulled into a dreamlike stupor? Or fall asleep outright? That was me that day at the recital. And I was the man playing the music. You can imagine how that went.
So yeah, I inadvertently fell half asleep at my piano recital one year. And so, digging up that sheet music last night, I knew it was going to be just the thing to help me fall asleep. “Sorrow Atoms” is actually a fitting name for the piece – for when one plays it, “Sorrow Atoms” may very well describe one’s own atoms, as one’s limbs become deadened, and fingers grow heavy, as the sheer repetitiveness of the song bores you to sleep. After laboring through the piece I had just enough consciousness left to set an alarm to wake me up the next morning, and then promptly fell asleep at once.
The next morning, I wake up a few minutes ahead of my alarm. It is a little too early for me to be getting up properly, so I stay in bed a little. Big mistake.
My alarm goes soon after. I am blasted fully awake, for the moment, by the sweet sound of 80s music. I leap out of bed to shut that off before the rest of my family wake up and start asking questions about my ringtone. That’s not a metaphor, by the way. I literally have to jump over half my bed to reach my phone and shut the alarm off.
Naturally, that move takes a lot out of me. I trudge back to my bed and, after scrolling through a few news articles, almost make the grave mistake of falling back asleep. Luckily (or unluckily) when I “shut the alarm off” five minutes ago, it turns out that I didn’t quite do that. I kind of just blindly hit a button until the alarm shut off. So I didn’t actually hit the “off” button. I hit the snooze button.
Exactly ten minutes later after I briefly turned into Spider-Man, my phone goes off with Rick Astley. Again. This trip has not even started, and I have already figured out a way to rickroll myself twice. There’s a metaphor in there about the ultimate hubris of humanity and “the early bird gets the worm” or whatever. I’m not smart enough to figure that out so I’m just going to say that was a dumb move.
I eat a small bowl of cereal in the darkness, alone. That makes me sound really edgy but it’s just a Saturday for me. It will end up being the only thing I eat for the next six hours.
In the course of the next two hours, I do absolutely nothing while my parents yell at each other while they pack. I count a total of three arguments before we even back out of the driveway. This is fine.
The plan originally was to fly down to my cousin’s house in LA, and a week earlier to boot, but it turns out my niece and nephew don’t get out of school until a week later than we had originally planned. So naturally we canceled the plane tickets, delayed the trip to this week, and then had the bright idea of driving down there instead.
I understand a lot of my peers are studying to learn how to drive right now, and some (many??) of them already have a permit or whatever you’re supposed to get. Personally, I don’t see the appeal. Or the logic. But whatever. I’m not the one driving (and I hope I never have to be, for a long roadtrip like this one).
We leave the house at ten o’clock exactly, just as planned. This is the only thing that will go to plan for the next eight hours. We decide quickly to take a different highway in order to avoid the sweltering heat. My dad tells us it will only lengthen the trip a little. In the end, it tacks on one hour to the drive.
It’s also an incredibly bumpy road. Turns out that if you put me in a car on a bump road for long periods of time, I get carsick. I spend the next five hours of my life seconds away from being forcibly reacquainted with my breakfast. It’s like the sensation of wanting to sneeze, knowing you have to sneeze, trying to sneeze to just get it over with – and then not sneezing. But worse.
I do not eat anything on the car ride, except for a handful of Cheez Its at our rest stop about four minutes in. I know that will only make things worse. What goes in must come out after all. It’s just that today stuff is probably going to come out the way it went in.
My father and I make the rest of our family listen to the European Championship games that are going on while we drive. Germany beats Portugal 4-2. It sounds like a fun game. I would like to have watched it. But unfortunately the Euros game I decided to catch was the England 0-0 Scotland “thriller” yesterday and I’m sitting here in traffic while Kai Havertz buries another for Germany.
My dad describes LA traffic like “a big parking lot”. With the amount of traffic we ran into, I’m inclined to think he’s right.
I figure out how the /fill command works in Minecraft. I finish in ten minutes a project I have left unfinished for years.
I don’t remember a lot of the ride, now that I think about it. I was mostly concerned with not hurling my guts all over the place. There’s a little anecdote I could tell you about what I ended up doing instead of vomiting, but it’s really disgusting and my family already had to put up with it. That “reader discretion advised” disclaimer was kind of a joke, if you can’t already tell.
I take the following photo:
I’m not sure why I did this, but all the satellite dishes kind of look cool. I also take the featured image all the way at the top. That’s the oceanfront highway we took. Like the sand which borders it, it’s coarse, rough, irritating, and it gets everywhere.
About an hour away from my cousin’s house my niece and nephews call us. They ask why we are not there yet. Traffic, we say. It’s true but undersells just how much traffic there is. My nephews shout excitedly and show my brother some new things they have around the house, including a literal menagerie of birds. My niece just demands to see my sister. My sister refuses. My niece will not do anything else the rest of the call except demand to see my sister. Please is not in her vocabulary.
At the end of the ride I feel as if I have been run over by a truck. This is what I get for sitting in a car for seven, eight hours.
Once I arrive at my cousin’s house I am mobbed by small children. They are very happy to see us, and vice versa, but they are also very loud. Small children on constant sugar highs tend to be loud. I eat my intended lunch at six o’clock. My niece calls me, in quick succession, disgusting for liking ketchup, disgusting for liking hot dogs, and disgusting for having a face. She then proceeds to pay me $1.75 to take off my glasses for two minutes. That “candy from a baby” simile/metaphor/proverb/thing is really prudent right now.
I don’t exactly remember a lot of the next five hours either. I know it is loud and tiring. I have a headache by the end of the day because as much as I love my niece and nephew they are constantly turned up to 11, and there is no way to turn them down.
I fix a lego AT-AT for them. It is still a very flimsy set. I would not recommend buying it. I sight read a medley of Marvel music, because there aren’t enough cards for me to play with the rest of them. My niece says my piano playing is bad. I tell her I’m sight reading it off of a tiny phone. I don’t think she knows what that means exactly, so she just says my playing is bad again.
We play hide and seek once. That’s not as silly as you might think. My cousin has a really big house. I say we played it once because I beat them so hard at hide and seek, they didn’t want to play anymore afterwards. I’m not sure exactly how I managed to do that, given a) I am by far the biggest guy there, and b) my hiding space was underneath a tiny towel that only covered two-fifths of my body, but whatever.
My nephews try to get my brother to play Super Smash Bros Ultimate. It devolves into a lot of chaotic shouting. In fact a lot of things they do devolve into chaotic shouting. It’s fine, though. I haven’t played SSBU in literal years, so I look up how on earth to play and why on earth I remember being a Game and Watch main. They move on before I get my chance to answer these questions.
That’s about all I can recall. I begin writing this account of the first day at 11:30 pm, while the rest of the children are still screaming about downstairs. It is the most productive thing I have done all day. I feel like I’ve been listening to music using headphones for far too long. I manage to get as far as the “Sorrow Atoms” account before I collapse on a gigantic bear and go to sleep.
…Day 1 survived.
