What a weekend. My brother is married and off to the Cayman Islands for his honeymoon. His wife was stunning and very nervous, but it all went off without a hitch. It's been rainy and dreary, today was hot and summery, and tomorrow it's back to San Francisco having no more obligations, no need to be anywhere or do anything on the horizon. Just a plan in the coalescence to visit Portland and Seattle in July.

I drove down to Philadelphia on Friday for the last night of my brother's bachelordom. We went to a place called Capitol Grill and ate red meat, drank stiff drinks, and smoked cigars (I passed on the cigars), then went back to my brother's place and continued drinking single malt scotch until we crashed. I was actually the second to crash, reinforcing their erroneous perception that I'm a lightweight, and didn't try the single malt until the next morning. Single malt - I think I'm in love.

On Saturday my brother disappeared early to attend to wedding stuff and I was left with Rob and Gene to recover and overcome queasiness that was compounded by a veinte cup of coffee, the first cup of coffee that I'd had since Tuesday, which set my overblown head on trigger's edge ready to explode. A Cobb salad and a beer for lunch set things right, and then it was time for me to head back to the apartment to suit up in a tux and head off for the family pictures. Thrillsville. But really, it was all very harmless and I'm happy for my brother. They're a great couple, and I think his wife is the one.

I didn't have to do a toast for my brother, but I had one loosely prepared if my mother pushed me to say something since she had been hinting that I should. In attendance were some of my brother's high school friends, his closest college friends, and his more recent Philadelphia friends. I was going to point out these fellas and expound on the high caliber of people all of them were. I'd have to qualify that it was only my subjective opinion, I'm sure none of them would accept my assertion of what amazing people they are, they are of course far more aware of their faults and shortcomings than I am. I've mentioned this before, but I would have told how I haven't seen much of my brother over the past ten years. I could round off story after story from our upbringing to say something about his character and what he was to me as an older brother. From the past ten years, I have very little, but there is so much to be said about my brother's character from the friends that surround him and who have lasted through the years. I'm glad I wasn't pushed to do the toast, it would have been pretty lame. No one would have known what I was talking about.

But there was much drunkenness, much revelry, much catching up with these friends of my brother's, meeting up with even more of my brother's Philadelphia friends, all of whom hold him in unbelievably high esteem. One woman who is my age and has 3 kids including 18 year old twins, and believe me I'm not that old, dragged me out onto the dancefloor, and *whew* that was *ahem* hot. I was told she had a googly-eyed crush on my brother, despite being married with 3 kids, so I figured that she figured that the little brother was the next best thing. My superficial impression was that she was kinda halfway between my brother and me, having the intelligence and professional drive to be in the medical field to know and get close to my brother, but also having a foot in the alternative life, a bit unstable and fragile, and loving music (like Phil Collins' drumming) so that we could hit it off. In ways, she made my evening.

After all that it was just Rob and me at my brother's apartment and Rob crashed pretty fast. I finished watching "Spiderman" on DVD and likewise crashed. Rob left early the next morning for New York to meet up with his girlfriend and told me to call him when I got back to New Jersey. I got up shortly after, watched another DVD (King Crimson's "Deja Vroom" concert DVD), and headed down to DC as planned to meet up with Meghan. It's incredible how this was the third time we've met up face to face and it was just so comfortable, no needing to prove or hide anything in the face to face interaction. There's so much we don't know about each other in terms of the face to face, but it was like we could assume a lot about each other, and in the moment we could just assume it was right. If what we were assuming was wrong, we would just have to deal with it as it came up, but as it was it was open and free, and I am starting to take issue with all these people who seem to be out-drinking me!! Goddamit, I am an alcoholic, I swear!

But then the spontaneous decision to catch Peter Gabriel that night is what it's all about. "You know who's in town . . . " We both knew who was in town, and we both knew that we both knew who was in town. It was the first non rainy day in a while, certainly since I've been on the East Coast, and it was a gorgeous evening at the Nissan Pavillion to catch the concert. It is always worth it to catch Peter Gabriel, and I don't have anything to add to my review of the Shoreline show except that they had cleaned up a lot of the rough edges. He muffed a few lyrics, but not entire verses like he did at Shoreline. He got the bounce down during the "Growing Up" hamster ball sequence, and solved the problem of the limited space by rolling around in it more slowly than he did at Shoreline. He went out into the audience during "Solsbury Hill" which was pretty cool. I don't know why, but that song has been getting to me as of late.

I wanted to head back to New Jersey that night because I was supposed to meet Rob today. I left DC at 12:30 and the four hour drive back to New Jersey was a throw back to when I lived on the East Coast. I haven't been here in warmer weather in years, and I live for hot weather. There was a lot of evocation of embedded memories going on this past week. I tell myself none of it is real anymore.