Category Archives: Civilization

Walmart: Doing Stifler Proud

November 26, 2006

Someone is trying to bring Walmart down from the inside.

I was browsing TV stands the other day, trying to find something that would hold my incoming behemoth better than cinder blocks and 2x4s. As is always the case when I shop at the Hood River Walmart, I quickly became annoyed and irritable, and then claustrophobic. My knees buckled and I collapsed to the ground a weeping heap, convinced that the aisle was closing in on both sides and I was moments from being crushed beneath twenty stacked feet of veneered bookshelves and computer desks.

It was in this agonized mental state that I managed to drag myself into the candles (and clocks, as it were) aisle, on the off-chance that the scent of Good Things would bring me back from the brink of insanity. Really, I figured I could use something holiday-ish in nature, some cruel healing salve consisting of equal parts pine boughs, cinnamon and brown sugar. In anguish I grabbed the shelves and pulled myself upright, soon to a tottering standing position, where I could browse the candles at will.

And then I laughed until I couldn’t breathe.

You see, candle scents in this life enjoy the most luxurious of names. Gone are the bland staples like “vanilla” and “pine” and “smelly hippie patchouli,” instead replaced by such gems as “Mayan Mesoamerica Vanillan Delight” and “Spiritual Quest Across The Taiga” and “In Memory Of Eugene, Oregon, Back When It Was Still Neat And Interesting.”

It is within these constructs that I managed to stumble upon the most inappropriate scented candle ever put up for sale. How it passed through quality assurance is beyond me, and I’m convinced that someone somewhere along the line must have known how this name would be interpreted. The reference requires only the most rudimentary knowledge of popular culture, and the result is absolute hilarity. Long story short, someone at Walmart must have known what they were saying.

In an alternate universe, one devoid of the lexical bastardization committed by modern-day marketing, this scented candle would have simply been known as “Apple.” Completely lacking in discipline, this candle was given a different name, one with pop culture references that are, to no stretch of the imagination, completely inappropriate.

This candle scent is known as Warm Apple Pie.

Not Apple. Not even Apple Pie.

Warm Apple Pie.

Feels like third base.

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Make Love, Not Warcraft

November 4, 2006

Until I cancelled my account on World of Warcraft, I hadn’t realized how painfully early it was getting dark in the evening. Coupled with the end of daylight saving time (a change that happened as I was freezing on a ridge in the Cascades, and one to which I was completely oblivious until Kate mentioned it in a voicemail), these long and dark nights have become unbearably dull.

For two years I avoided getting into World of Warcraft, not because I wasn’t interested in it, but because I was interested. The very make of the game frightened me. I knew that World of Warcraft was of a design that, if I were to play it, would completely consume me and my life as I knew it. I had friends who played WoW and raved about it. I had friends who assured me it wouldn’t take me over, that I would be able to quit whenever I wanted, and this did nothing to allay my fears.

You see, try as I might to resist, I love video games. I was born and raised on them, but the industry has since grown to a freakish might and power that I swear these games are no longer designed to be games, but rather full-on replacements for a normally rich human life. Modern video games subscribe so scientifically to game theory and play so well to the desires of human psychology that they are more than capable of shoving aside everything else that matters. Video games are addictive by design. They are the Soma of our century.

This fall I couldn’t resist it any longer, so I grabbed a copy of WoW and dove in. I joined a realm where some of my friends were already playing, and became a Level One Troll Hunter named Olav. I joined a guild named The Bunny Boilers. Before I knew it I was playing the game every evening, sometimes until the wee hours of the morning. My 30-day trial period expired, giving way to a $15/month subscription. When I started with the game I swore I wouldn’t let that happen, but I justified the cost in all the same ways that a heroin addict would justify his fix.

I played for two whole months. I picked up a red raptor for a pet and named him Stimpy. I explored the wide expanses of the world, getting as far as Gadgetzan and the Zoram Stand. I learned the lingo. Twinks kept camping my corpse in Hillsbrad, which is a notorious location for that sort of thing. At some point I finally knew the game well enough that I could no longer consider myself a n00b. I went on a solo excursion deep into Alliance territory to gore enemy players, which was a devilishly fun journey. Outside of Westfall a level 14 human tried to take on my level 28 troll, and I instantly pwned him beyond recognition. My friend chimed in, “That’s the ally spirit!”

I loved every guilty minute of World of Warcraft, and yet I knew I couldn’t go on playing it. I was playing for hours every day, and my appetite was insatiable. There are so many better things to do in the world besides sit in front of the computer all day playing video games. There is awesome stuff out there, like riding your mountain bike and seeing live music and cooking thai food and hiking through clouds in a freezing drizzle.

In the interest of living a better life, I needed to walk away from World of Warcraft for the very reason I was afraid to get into it in the first place. I knew that I would love the game, that it would completely consume my time and energy, and that’s exactly what happened. I knew that as I invested more time, effort and knowledge in WoW, it would become increasingly difficult for me to give it up.

That said, my subscription expired two days ago, and as of tonight I’ve been clean for 48 hours. Dangerously, Olav is still around, waiting in the Balnazzar realm should I ever have the desire to fire up my account again. I’m resisting the temptation.

I can live without World of Warcraft, but I can’t live without… well… I suppose I can’t live without long, dark and rainy evenings with nothing to do between 5:00 and midnight. Yeah, I’m not gonna lie to you, this kinda sucks. Even the financial aspect of canceling my account has completely backfired. Now that I’m not paying $15 a month for WoW, I’m looking at $1,500 televisions to fill the void. Yup, in lieu of a subscription to Warcraft, that TV will pay for itself in eight years.

Sigh. Maybe I should just develop a real drug habit. If nothing else, it would give me an excuse to hang out on my deck in the rain every night.

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Booty

October 22, 2006

Scotch on the rocks. We’ll see how long I can remain coherent.

A couple nights ago some friends and I dressed up as pirates and ran around downtown Hood River for the entire evening. Rather than simply doing this at random (which would be kind of fun, come to think of it) we were participants in this year’s Booty Hunt, a competitive bar crawl of epic proportions.

Well maybe not epic, but all things considered, pretty huge for Hood River at this time of year. For this year’s Booty Hunt we had more than 25 teams competing in a scavenger hunt, traipsing from bar to bar solving puzzles and picking up clues and drinking Full Sail Sessions until we couldn’t see straight. And once we couldn’t see straight we went to the sushi bar and did shots of sake.

All told, Sparky’s Skallywaggs came in third place, and we were pretty proud of ourselves for that. At the beginning of the night all the teams were shown a treasure chest full of loot… or “booty” I suppose. Later in the evening we convened at the Full Sail brewery where every team was given a mad-lib-esque story in which each piece of treasure filled a particular blank… trouble is, there was one extra piece of treasure. Our goal for the night was to figure out which one didn’t belong in said story.

We did pretty well, but we could have done better had we not mistook what was actually a mini bottle of whiskey, for a mini bottle of rum. Sparky is going to take it up with the storyteller, however, because everyone knows that pirates drink rum, not whiskey, and thus the part of the story that discussed the pirates drinking whiskey was inaccurate at best, and libelous at worst.

Nevertheless, our prize for third place was the treasure chest itself, brimming with the storied booty. Quite a haul, considering we’ve now got in our possession such gems as a plastic witch, a screaming knife, and a dildo.

Besides that, things have been fairly calm on this side of the world. A few days ago Kate got back from her canoe trip through Canyonlands, where they stomped through mud and carried folding chairs and dragged Grummans over rocks. She called me from the laundromat in Moab, where a week ago she had great cell reception, but this time around she just as well could have been calling me from Estonia.

Actually, it isn’t fair for me to bag on Estonia like that, considering that most eastern bloc countries have taken to cell phone technology exceptionally well and now offer widespread coverage. Honestly, the entire Orange Revolution in Ukraine was organized through cell phones.

And actually, it looks like Estonia was one of the first countries in the world to adopt a flat-tax income tax system, established in 1994 at 26% and reduced to 24% in 2005, and decreasing 1% annually until it reaches 20% in 2009. That’s some seriously progressive tax reform, there, and it makes this libertarian tingle all over.

So what were we talking about, dildos? No wait, cell phones. Suffice it to say, Kate’s cell phone provider, the famed Verizon Wireless, sucks huge ass. Their website is agonizing to navigate, and in their member’s area it’s impossible to find out anything about your account. Such basic information as “When do my night minutes begin?” and “How much are roaming charges?” are so cleverly obfuscated that they’re all but inaccessible through the website.

You can contrast this with my own wireless provider, Sprint, whose attitude towards my monthly bill is so reassuring it’s chilling. Go ahead and talk all you want Dane (their website knows my name but not much else). Talk as much as you want. Hey, even talk more than you want. Here are some pictures of svelte dark-haired women in trendy dress shirts, to encourage you to talk even more.

Look! These models use our cellular phone service! Well actually, you can’t tell from the picture that they’re using Sprint. You can barely tell that they’re using a cell phone made by one of our affiliated manufacturers. But trust us, they are! And they have phone numbers! And since you’re using our wireless network, at some point you may accidentally be connected to one of them, and the two of you could start talking!

Of course this won’t ever happen, since it’s all dependent on highly-improbable solar activity matching up exactly with cellular network anomalies, not to mention the variables of your phone habits and the habits of our models … but we promise that the odds are non-zero!

Verizon: We never stop working with against you.
Sprint: Together with NEXTEL FUCKING MODELS.

The argument clearly goes in favor of Sprint, aside from one thing:

  1. Go to the Sprint website.
  2. Note the URL in your address bar.
  3. Note how you have been redirected to http://www.sprint.com/index.html (or http://sprint.com/index.html, since they don’t have any redirect rules if you access the site without the preceeding www).
  4. Think to yourself, “Isn’t .html so, like, Web 1.0?
  5. Now, go to the Verizon website.
  6. Note the URL in your address bar.
  7. Note how you have been redirected to http://www22.verizon.com/.
  8. Think to yourself, OMFG, Verizon has skipped Web 2.0 and gone straight for Web 22!
  9. Note that while www.verizon.com beats www.sprint.com out of the water, www.sprintwireless.com destroys the hell out of www.verizonwireless.com for having, among other things, semantic markup and user-generated content.
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Delivered

October 8, 2006

Ahoy.

I have safely arrived in Oregon, the state whose motto is Alis volat propriis, which means “She flies with her own wings, but only only after she has compiled a report regarding the environmental and economic impact of her flight, and only while using wings deemed safe by the state regulatory process.”

Yup, I’m in Hood River and I’m losing my mind it’s so freakin’ awesome to be back here. However, those of you aching for a long and thoughtful post where I reflect and wax poetic about the place that Oregon holds in my heart, well, ya’ll are going to be disappointed. I have a tall gin and tonic that says this post will be long, yes, longer than hell, but it will never be able to fight its way out of the baser levels of the human psyche.

As it were, this gin and tonic is starting to freak me out… an ice cube exploded and blew its bits all over my desk, nearly shattering the glass and tearing off my face in the process. For my own personal safety and out of respect for those who would care deeply if something awful were to befall me, it behooves that I finish this drink as quickly as possible.

And then get started on a Deschutes Inversion I.P.A.

Less than a week ago I finally dropped anchor here in Hood River after three solid days of driving across the country. I took the freeway this time, the same freeway I drove six times this past summer, in contrast to my previous Oregon/Minnesota excursions where I took the long and meandering route along Highway 12. Nevertheless I got to see a lot of awesome things, like the world’s largest androgynous holstein cow (New Salem Sue has horns and an udder), a 100-foot Virgin Mary towering over Butte, Montana, and most but not all of North Dakota.

I really enjoy living in this small town again. I love being able to walk downtown, hang out while eating a burrito, and talk to old friends as they wander by on the sidewalk. I love that Anna who runs Thai Winds still remembers my name, and even remembers my stint in Bend from all those years back. I love how my social calendar fills up not through articles in the Weekend section of the newspaper, but simply by chewing the fat with people in town.

I mean, the small town thing is rather panoptic at times… as my friend put it, you can fart in a store downtown, walk twenty blocks to Safeway, and someone in there will already be giggling at you. It wouldn’t be a good fit for the overly self-conscious, nor for those who are prone to rampant bridge-burning. But then, I’ve never really been any good at either, so thus far things are fine.

Also, I’m uber-stoked to say that my abode is fine, dandy and awesome. I was really nervous about what my place would be like, and it turns out that all the worrying was for naught. The bats (there aren’t nearly as many of them as I expected) are very well-behaved, and I’m quickly training them to be my bloodthirsty army of the night. My living space is so massive that I don’t know what to do with all the space (besides permanently installing a band, a rave and a halfpipe) and the view is absolutely killer. My windows (and deck, I have a freakin’ deck!) look out over the Columbia Gorge and the White Salmon River, and I can see Mount Adams from my dining table.

I’ve been unpacking stuff and stocking the kitchen and building wares from IKEA ever since I got here, and while I still have a long ways to go the abode is starting to pull itself together. I had a drift of crumpled newspaper in the living room that was four feet tall, and I’m still hauling piles of cardboard out to the recycle bin. I spent $50 on spices at the grocery store today, and now my kitchen is finally to the point where I can cook and prepare food.

I just realized tonight, however, that I don’t have any knives. For dinner I had to slice my french bread with a butter knife. I sliced the lime for my gin and tonic with my Leatherman. Another miserable trip to Wally-World may be in order, one with the sole intent of stocking the fuck up on cutlery. Hopefully I won’t have to put any of them to use while I’m still in the store, but my mental faculties have a sorry history of being able to deal effectually with the Hood River Wally-World.

But that’s a rant that might have to wait until martini night.

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Atlas Slouches

September 26, 2006

Today I went to IKEA and walked out with a couple tons of furniture, and I’m still recovering from the trauma of this occasion. Now, I love the concept of furniture. I think it’s great how in modern civilization we live in these rooms filled with all our stuff, and we have all this extra stuff that we use to hold all our other stuff. I think that’s really innovative, having so much stuff that we have other stuff to contain it all.

Sleep for instance. Every one of us, we have all this sleep holed up inside of us, all this sleep that’s aching to come out, and we can only release it in these short, five to eight hour spurts a night. So what do we do to hold all of this sleep before we can get rid of it? We use beds, which are like sleeping bags only with more springs and less suffocation. We store all our sleep in these beds, and we take it out every night, just a little bit at a time.

To be clear, I’m not opposed to furniture. I’m just opposed to me owning furniture. I’m not a furniture kind of person. I enjoy looking at it and sitting on it and eating off of it, but I don’t like having it. I haven’t even torn open the cardboard on all the stuff I just bought at IKEA, and already it mocks me.

I enjoy going through life nimble and free, able to flit from locale to locale with nary a thought. All this heavy stuff I have now, all these desks and tables and chairs, I feel like I’m carrying it around on my shoulders at all times. Furniture is a burden I bear, my punishment for rejoining the ranks of society. Atlas carries the world, and I carry a matching bedroom set.

In the few seconds of the day where I actually forget the damning immobility of it all, I have to admit that I’m kind of excited. I mean, I have my own place for the first time in my life, and I’ll be living there for at least the next year. I can outfit my dwelling however I see fit, and I’ve chosen a route that is a bit classier than stolen cinder blocks and 2×4’s. I can’t wait to put my books on an actual bookshelf, to sleep in an actual bed, to kick my filthy-ass feet up on an actual coffee table.

I just hope that all this stuff burns really well, because there’s no way in hell I’m carrying it if I have to move again.

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“Tookits.”

September 7, 2006

Okay, I seem to be getting better at this “modern world” thing that people find so grand. I shaved my mohawk, then I shaved my head, and finally I shaved my beard (but that’s where I draw the line). I’ve started wearing shoes again, even though I have caverns in my feet that are a quarter-inch deep. I had calluses that turned into blisters, which became new calluses, which in turn blistered. I’ve been doing fun stuff like playing frisbee golf with one of my Yellowstoners and hamboning with the Como Ave Jug Band and throwing away most of my worldly possessions so I can traipse across the country again. That’s me. Fit, lightweight and liking it.

Just today I started calling around Hood River, trying to find a place to live for the next couple whiles of my life. My timeline for departure is vague, as it depends on a Yakima car topper that is slowly winging its way across the country to the local REI, but I’ll probably hit the road before the end of the month. Looking into rental property, and crunching the finances thereof, really drove home the possibility that I may starve to death this winter. I’ve reflected on this a little bit, and have decided that it is a calculated risk. The world may be relentless and unforgiving, and running your own business carries its own special responsibilities, but in the long run it sure beats a real job.

If all else fails I can live off sugar packets and non-dairy creamers that I gank from local coffee shops. And I’m sure that lots of restaurants in Hood River don’t even lock their dumpsters.

As Hoagie would say, “Tookits.”

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Wilderness Survival

September 3, 2006

I don’t think I have the survival skills necessary to live in civilization, anymore. I’ve been back amongst the world of thumping bass and flashing lights and extended middle fingers for nearly a week now, and I can’t yet say that my acclimatization has been successful.

I run red lights. On purpose. Well, I don’t do it on purpose, but my brain does. I can sense it processing the decision, and I can feel that it’s the result of a flawed fight-or-flight response. My mind has decided that yellow lights are not worth hanging around and fighting, and instead it’s best to get as far away as quickly as possible. Yellow lights are not grizzly bears, the brain says. If you run they will not chase you down as prey. Yellow lights will not shred you into ribbons. Do not waste time standing your ground against this foe.

The trouble being, of course, that yellow lights are rarely yellow for long. They quickly turn into red lights, which are a different beast entirely.

Also, shopping is weird. I typically wander around stores in a daze until something catches my attention, and then I’ll stare at it for a couple minutes. Now, products that I am actually interested in buying rarely grab me… most of the time it’s a bookcase or a cooler or a prepaid phone card. Sometimes it’s a metal hatch in the floor. Extra points if it’s something shiny.

When I finally zero in on something I actually want to buy, it becomes a whole new ordeal. At Target I almost bought two of the same shirt, and only caught myself at the last minute in the checkout lane. By the time I got home I was wishing I had bought both of them anyway. What if something happens to one of them? What if I want to use one for trail and the other for camp? What if I become rich and I want to use it to wipe bugs off my car?

Another problem is feeding myself, mostly that I forget to do it. This isn’t a good thing, seeing as how I lost 15 pounds over the summer and I didn’t have much meat on me to begin with. The problem is that I’ve gone from stomping around the world all day with a fifty pound backpack, to hardly doing anything at all. With this sudden onslaught of inactivity I don’t really get hungry anymore, but I still get grouchy. The grouchiness goes away when I eat food, so I find myself eating only as a means to regulate my mood.

As far as meals go, I am hopelessly ADD. I will put on a pot of tea and crack open a Pepsi two minutes later. When the teapot whistles I can’t figure out what the hell that awful sound is. I lost a banana somewhere in the house the other day. I was trying to eat it while doing other things, and I think it ended up going through the washing machine.

I have an established routine after breakfast, too. The cereal goes in the refrigerator, the milk goes in the cupboard, and the toast gets rinsed off in the sink for some reason.

So yes, it seems like I have a long ways to go before I will be a well-adjusted, productive member of society once again. Fortunately, even with all the troubles with integrating myself back into modern life, I can still make one hell of a martini.

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