Category Archives: Life

Slayer

November 23, 2007

Phew. It’s been a busy holiday, though hardly in the conventional sense. On Wednesday they sent me home early from work, partly because I was sick, but mostly because I was being a regular old sourpuss on account of being sick. I went home and took a three hour nap, and then loaded up the Subaru and started on my way down to Bend for Thanksgiving. The plan was to celebrate with my friends Shane and Brandee again, and perchance do some mountain biking or snowboarding or whatever, as dictated by the weather.

When driving to Bend in the winter I typically like to drive out to The Dalles and turn south on 197, so I can avoid going up and over the saddle of Mount Hood. The route barely adds fifteen minutes to my drive, and it lets me avoid the Cascades and do the bulk of my driving through the dry high desert landscape. Despite my careful planning for this trip, I never made it to Bend. I barely even reached the first exit for The Dalles.

I swerved to avoid the first deer.

And that’s when I hit the second deer.

He was a huge feller, much bigger than the doe that I didn’t hit. For one thing I am a gentleman, and I would never hit a lady. For another, I live by the conviction that if anything is worth doing at all, it’s worth doing right. If you’re going to hit a deer, hit a huge fucking deer. That said, I have nothing on my uncle, who suffers from Parkinson’s and just recently shot an eight-point buck from his freaking wheelchair.

The buck did an incredible amount of damage to my car, smashing in the headlight, mangling the fender and the hood, shattering the windshield, snapping off the side mirror, and denting in the passenger doors. Fixing it is going to be ridiculously expensive. While I’m kinda pissed about the whole thing, I do realize that I still have my life and liberty, which is more than I can say for the deer.

Meanwhile, my hobbies lately have included sneezing, coughing violently, and talking to my insurance company. I’ve been doing my best to fight off this virulent plague I’m hosting, and so long as it’s not the Killing Cold I think I’ll be able to come out on the other side of this one. I’ve been pulling down hard on the Western Family Orange Juice, a from-concentrate concoction that’s so delicious you can actually taste the municipal water source.

Also posted in Civilization, Oregon, Travel | Comments Off on Slayer

Hot Air

November 19, 2007

The other night I went to see Playground, Warren Miller’s new ski flick. I believe this was about my third or fourth snow pr0n movie of the season, and to be perfectly honest I’m going to vomit if I need to sit through another half-hour of Alaska heli-skiing. Seriously, I don’t care how hardcore the terrain might be, or how many times you can say “stoked” in a sentence, your big-mountain shit bores me to sickness.

I suppose Playground was decent, in that it was just like every other flick I’ve seen so far this season. Except, what the hell was up with the ten-minute spot on Bode Miller? How the hell do you toss that f-wad in the middle of your ski movie, with nary a hint of irony, and expect to be taken seriously? The ass didn’t even bother to shave for your interview, for chrissakes.

Additionally, there were times where I felt like I was watching an ad for Corona. After about the fifth hot tub shot (in the Alaskan Chugach Mountains, natch) framed with a half-finished bottle in the foreground, I became a bit suspicious. Indeed, I came to discover that Corona was one of the major sponsors for the movie.

In wholly unrelated news, I got a flat tire today. After spending fifteen minutes trying to fill it back up at the Chevron’s broken-ass air compressor, I went across town to the 76 Station next to the freeway, where you can enjoy Oregon hospitality at Washington prices. One person didn’t know what I was talking about when I asked if they had compressed air, and the other person looked at me funny.

“Compressed air? Do you mean air? Like, just, air?”
“Uhh, yeah. That’s right. Air.”
“Oh yeah, we got that. Blue hose, right over there by the propane tank.”
“Blue hose? Now, you’re sure I won’t be filling my tires up with propane, right? Because I don’t want that.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m sure.”

He seemed a bit too sure.

Also posted in Hood River, Oregon, Outdoors, Snowboarding | Comments Off on Hot Air

Xenakis

November 12, 2007

I yearn for those olden days where we would write at length of such subjects banal, yet of recent my limited mental faculties have been tied up with liquor and graduate statements. Sometimes these two will act in concert with one another, usually to amusing but altogether useless results.

With that noted, allow me a moment to discuss what I have recently discovered as an absolutely worthless writing stratagem, detailed here in an effort to save you from pursuing a similarly fruitless endeavor. Lacking any true and particular clarity of term I shall refer to it as asynchronous writing, much to the amusement of few and the befuddlement of most. Nonetheless, such shall be the topic of question.

Asynchronous writing could be compared similarly to stream-of-consciousness composition, differing only in how it utterly lacks the comparably rigid structure of such mental drivel. You would not be faulted for terming it diarrhea of the mouth, excepting that it is indeed not the mouth from whence the bowels be cleared in this instance. Rather it is a far more efficient transmission taking place directly from brain to paper, or to a Terrible Digital System, bypassing the verbal entirely in favor of the written word.

The result of this process is no shortage of words, lest it be a concern of yours that the asynchronous methodology would lack in producing so much quality offal. Rather, the process creates a limitless trove of precious ideas that are useless when attempting to frame a more coherent composition. This collection is naught but a burlap sack brimming with stray words, that would be best topped off with stones and cast from a bridge. Left to its devices, an asynchronous writing regimen will cycle upon itself, producing drivel ad infinitum and smothering you under its sheer girth.

Even when arbitrarily limited to a hundred pages the system continues its ceaseless recursion, impossibly increasing in complexity within its closed informational system and still producing nothing of value. The only hope is to abandon asynchronous writing in favor of the more traditional synchronous writing, which makes the bold assertion that related words should follow one another in a general succession that facilitates understanding.

Also posted in School | Comments Off on Xenakis

Gauntlet

October 29, 2007

As of this weekend, Kate and I are finished with the GRE. Honestly, the only way they could have made this process worse is if they tested us under conditions similar to the short-lived game show The Chamber. After about the third hour of taking the test I was ready for the blasts of cold air, the flame throwers, the electric chair, the occasional boot to the groin, but apparently even the barbarity of Educational Testing Service has limits. I tried to convince Kate that they required you bring them a pint of your own blood on the day of the test, but she didn’t believe me.

We’ve narrowed our selection down to four graduate schools, and with this test out of the way we are finally on the last stretch of the application process. Honestly, applying to graduate school is so time-consuming it’s like having another part-time job, on top of your existing full-time job and your other part-time job. Every evening for the last two months I’ve come home from work, only to dedicate 2-4 hours a night to applications. I find it ironic that polishing up a resume and applying for a great job is a piece of cake, while the process for wanting to give someone else $30,000 a year could be so intensive.

Also posted in School | Comments Off on Gauntlet

Sum of All Futures

October 1, 2007

After a three-month leave the rains have returned. They arrived Saturday night as we were camped at 6,100 feet up near Cloud Cap on Mount Hood. We had a wonderful evening gathered around the campfire with bellies full of Pibber, and irreverent of our most optimistic hopes it never dropped below freezing that night. Thus, despite the patchy snow in the campground we were treated to a night of rain, and I awoke with a river running under my tent.

We clutch our season passes in our tiny meaty fists even though it is not yet snowboarding season, and with the whispers soothsaying the end of the kiteboarding season having now reached a chorus, it is unclear how we will busy ourselves in the coming weeks. Gin has the potential of being an obvious component, but if we are truly honest with ourselves we have, to be blunt, more than enough shit to do.

The future is uncertain in much the same manner that a particle’s history is uncertain. I’m taking up an awkward space, where I feel as though my current position is merely the sum of all futures. There are so many paths from this point, so many damnable paths, and most of the desirable ones run right through four-hour exams and gauntletian application procedures. Intellectually I have a good idea where I want to be a year from now, but geographics are an entirely different matter. My future could hold anything from nine months of incessant rain, to ski resorts built on piles of garbage, to trees adorned with hippies and chains.

The good news being that it would involve the love of my life finally living in the same state as I. Perhaps the same zip code, even.

Also posted in Oregon, Weather | Comments Off on Sum of All Futures

Cool Down

September 14, 2007

The sun still feels hot but the air has taken on a distinct chill. The Cascades are whispering, and once again the cold breath from the upper elevations is winding its way through town, carrying with it the taste of nameless forest groves. Hood River has all but emptied out, and while we certainly appreciate the great attention doted upon us during the summer months, there’s definitely a feeling of shared relief among those of us left behind.

Out on the water the wind continues to blow, but it now follows a fall schedule of unpredictable nuclear winds and random easterlies. Yesterday evening it was gusting to 42 mph at Swell City. Today it was so windy that someone was actually kiteboarding on a trainer kite. I had a good session on my seven meter kite after work on Wednesday, suddenly realizing how much more power I could handle when I stand up straight and actually use good posture while riding.

I took my Omega out of its mushy 2:1 pulley configuration and now ride it in 1:1, which makes it a much more fun, but ultimately less forgiving kite. The stock 1:1 configuration recommended by Cabrinha is awesome in that it’s incredibly reactive and completely eliminates bar pressure, but it destroys the range of depower to such a degree that by the end of one of my sessions I found my waist harness up around my armpits.

I’ve since rigged my bar and kites in the unofficial 1:1 configuration, which increases bar pressure and reduces responsiveness when compared to the stock 1:1, but grants a much wider range of depower. Seeing as how I’m typically riding in conditions that range from 13-30 mph, I’ll take the added depower range any day.

Last weekend I got out to the Oregon Coast for the first time in years, camping at Oswald with Kelly, Jason and their friends from Beaverton. The drive out was full of firsts for me, including visiting Trader Joe’s and eating at Jack in the Box. Kelly and I ordered our food to go, stole a bag of Jack in the Box sauces to complement our Trader Joe’s “snausages” that we eventually devoured at the Coast, and ate our questionable meals ghetto-style, sitting on the curb under the florescent lights of the parking lot.

There was a family at Jack in the Box who was treating their foreign exchange student to a fine meal out on the town, and in recognition of this occasion the husband wore his cleanest Hooter’s t-shirt.

At the Coast I tried surfing for the first time in my life, and I managed to keep it together for some time out at Short Sands, despite the fact that I found the water to be unbelievably cold at 49 degrees. I’d paddle and ride until I found myself absolutely gnarled by a wave, at which point I would hand the board over to Kelly so she could do the same.

We kept up this pattern until the sun fell into the ocean.

Also posted in Hood River, Kiteboarding, Oregon | Comments Off on Cool Down

Vertigo

August 17, 2007

I’ve been going full-throttle for so long that it’s hard to believe the summer is almost over. In two weeks the tourons will go their separate ways and we’ll get our quiet little town back, for better or worse. Then in two months the rains will sock us in and even amongst us “locals” we won’t see each other until next summer.

I say “locals” because while I’ve lived here since October, and while I’ve survived one whole and two half winters here, I still remember nearly getting in a fight with a “true local” in a bar, a fellow who was born here and took offense by anyone who was not born here and called themselves “locals.” You see, it’s a polarizing issue. An issue that would never again present itself if I had my mohawk and beard, but an issue nevertheless.

As for my kiteboarding, I’m pretty much out of control by this point. I’ve got my heelside carves completely dialed, and I’m almost there with my toeside carves. I’m slashing back and forth in the swell and getting huge air off waves, and my control is such that the kite is increasingly becoming an extension of my body. I’m sure Justin, an awesome surfer hippie fellow who lives in the woods and is the only person I know who can speak entire sentences in English that I find absolutely captivating but utterly incomprehensible, would have something eloquent to say about this.

A few days ago I tried out a directional kiteboard from North Pacific Surfboards, a local custom surf shop that’s run by an awesome fellow named Art. A directional kiteboard is like a miniature surfboard, ranging in size from five to six feet long. We’ve been selling Art’s works of art at our shop all season and he’s got quite the fan club, but it wasn’t until now that I’ve been solid enough with my kiteboarding to know what all the fuss is about.

Holy. Shit. Wow.

There’s no way around it. Art’s boards are fucking incredible and they have totally changed the way I kiteboard. The day after I tried his 5’8″ round squash board I was already at his shop, placing an order for my own custom board. Sean let me borrow his 5’3″ board for the last few days, with the suggestion that the smaller board would be a better match for my size and the conditions I typically ride in.

I’ve been out on the 5’3″ the last two days in a row, and damn if he didn’t call that size perfectly! Art is off to Japan for the next two weeks, but as soon as he gets back I’m going to have him shape a 5’3″ to add to the Burgs’ ol’ quiver.

In contrast to the twin tip kiteboards that I’ve ridden since taking up kiteboarding (and the boards ridden by nearly every kiteboarder out there), directional boards have a super loose feel when you ride. You can effortlessly carve back and forth from toeside to heelside, and completely shred the hell out of swell and waves. They edge upwind like crazy, opening up an incredible third dimension to your riding.

When I was on the 5’8″ I reached the White Salmon Bridge in two reaches, completing in five minutes a trip that usually takes me half an hour. By the time I tried out the 5’3″ I was confident enough with my riding that I would do a toeside carve at the end of my normal reach, and then do an entire reach riding toeside. Toeside is typically associated with riding downwind at an incredible clip, but these boards ride so efficiently and edge so well that I can actually edge upwind while riding toeside.

What’s more, as I became increasingly comfortable with slashing the board I felt my snowboard skills start bubbling to the surface, which only enlivened my desire to push it to the limit. On a single reach I’d carve back and forth like a madman, grab some huge air off a wave, edge upwind a little it, throw into a toeside carve…

…and completely eat it. I would ride so hard that my sessions with the directional never lasted long, and I’d soon cruise back to the beach smiling but completely worked. This morning I found myself awkwardly stumbling around the house, and it dawned on me that it wasn’t because I was drunk (unlikely as my honey lager isn’t done fermenting yet) but because there was so much of the Columbia stuck in my ears that it was affecting my balance.

So really, that’s what I’ve been up to lately. Loads of kiteboarding, punctuated with the occasional web design binge, a bit of writing, lots of photography, a smattering of web advertising, and personal drunkedness inventioning.

Also posted in Hood River, Kiteboarding | Comments Off on Vertigo

Burns

August 4, 2007

From Minneapolis to Hood River, everyone I know is safe. I emerged this evening from The Simpsons Movie to stinging eyes and the taste of smoke thick on the air. At 4:00 this afternoon a wildfire started in someone’s backyard up near Country Club Road and Frankton Road, on the west side of Hood River. Helped by the awesome winds that made my afternoon on the water so much fun, by 8:00 tonight the fire had burned to 50 acres and they’ve been evacuating homes in the area.

This fire is completely unrelated to the twelve acre fire that popped up on the east side of Hood River last week, which started when a trailer lost a wheel and threw sparks into the grass. That one struck as I was out kiteboarding last Friday, and it was a bit scary to have this huge kite in the air as all these low-flying planes and helicopters were swooping about. I know they only look close, and they’re still probably 500 feet or more in the air, but there’s just something about a crowded airspace that puts one’s nerves on edge.

My session that evening came to a graceless end as I was sitting on the beach packing up my kite. All I remember is my friend Jason yelling “Oh shit!” and diving for the ground, as I was suddenly enveloped in someone’s kite lines. I cursed like a sailor at the offending person as the lines raked across my skin, one of them wrapping itself around my ear. I freed myself from the lines as they ascended with the kite, but I was caught off-guard when they immediately swung back for a second round. We made contact again, and by the third passing I had finally rolled off to the side and out of harm’s way.

The next thing I saw was a gal being dragged head first on her stomach across the sandbar, and Jason running to grab the handle on the back of her harness. As it turns out, a complete moron was teaching her to kite, and he had opted to teach her directly upwind of Jason and I, upwind of the only two people on the fucking sandbar. She had lost control of the kite and had put it into “death spirals”, where the kite loops repeatedly in the same direction, crossing the lines and making control nearly impossible.

After watching me go toe-to-toe with the kite lines, the guy had the sense to see how I was doing once his girlfriend had been rescued from her kite. I asked him to look at my ear, and he told me it was scratched up but otherwise it looked fine. I pressed him, insisting that he tell me whether it was still attached to my head. He chuckled, and assured me it was still attached.

He chuckled. At the time I wasn’t in the mood for confrontation, but it made me realize something startling. The fact that he laughed at my question suggests that he totally did not understand the gravity of what he had just done. Those kite lines could very well have taken my ear off, possibly more. They use string to cut clay, and the spectra line used for kiting is good to 700 pounds before it will break.

This guy’s sheer stupidity could have killed two people. He should not have been teaching his girlfriend so close to land, he should not have been teaching her directly upwind of people, and most of all, he should not have been teaching her in the first place. This is the reason we have certified, professional kite instructors. Please use them, people.

As it is, I now have rope burns across the back of my ear, my forearm, and four long gashes under my arm. They didn’t look like much the night they happened, just grazes through the first layer of skin, but man have they ever scabbed impressively over the last few days. I look like I’ve been whipped.

As for the girl, she emerged from the fray considerably shaken, but otherwise unharmed. She told her boyfriend that she had had enough, that she was frightened, that she wanted to be done with kiting for the evening. It sounded like a reasonable and intelligent request. Instead, the guy relaunched her kite, took her back upwind, and made her keep practicing.

Jason and I made a quick exit from the beach.

Also posted in Fire, Hood River, Kiteboarding, Oregon, Outdoors | Comments Off on Burns

Deeds

July 17, 2007

Friday at the shop I was helping a gal with some windsurfing harnesses. Unfortunately we were sold out of the model that she really wanted, and none of the ones that we had in-stock fit her as well as she would have liked. She was especially bummed as she had lost her harness a few days ago, and was now trying to shop for a replacement.

Regrettably shopping for an item when you had a perfectly good one until just recently, and especially when it went missing unwillingly, is absolutely no fun. Just tell me about it. I offered her some words of comfort:

“That’s a total bummer about your harness. If it eases your frustration at all, I lost my kiteboard last Thursday. That’s going to be a bit more painful to replace.”

“Really? You lost your board on Thursday?”

“Yup. Sure did.”

“Did you lose it by the White Salmon Bridge?”

“Heh, yeah.”

“Was it a white board?”

“What? Are you kidding?”

“My friend was trying to rescue someone else’s board, and he had attached it to his board with his leash so he could tow it in. It didn’t work so well, and he ended up losing both boards. I came up to him in the water and he asked me if he saw the boards anywhere, but I couldn’t find them. It was really windy and I was overpowered, so it was impossible for me to do a good search the area.”

“Okay, whoa. Wow. Whoa. Wow.”

She gave me the fellow’s phone number, and I called him and left a message on his voicemail. The other night I heard back from him, and without a doubt it was my board that he was trying to rescue. He described it perfectly, even down to where I wrote my name and phone number on it.

The world is smaller than you could ever imagine.

He had found the board 200 yards upwind of the White Salmon Bridge, which is significant as I had lost it about 100 yards downwind of the bridge. He was rather perplexed by the whole thing as there was no one in sight who appeared to be missing a board, otherwise he would have tried to reunite the board with its owner. Judging by the distance the board had traveled downstream by the time he had found it, I was probably well on my way back to the beach by then.

I thanked him profusely for his recovery efforts, and apologized for my board’s unfortunate act of cannibalization. He said not to worry, and sighed that no good deed goes unpunished. He was optimistic, though. Six weeks ago he lost a kite down in the San Francisco Bay, and just the other day he got a phone call that his kite had been found.

Somewhere between here and the Bonneville Dam are two kiteboards leashed together, with names and phone numbers to match. With any luck they won’t get jammed in a turbine, won’t shut down the dam, and we won’t be sent $100,000 repair bills.

Also posted in Hood River, Kiteboarding | Comments Off on Deeds

Chill

July 12, 2007

After a couple weeks of 90-degree temperatures, and four days in the 100s, I finally installed my air conditioner today. This was all thanks to the expert consultation of my neighbor, who introduced me to the “ghetto fab” method of using cardboard and duct tape. It ain’t pretty, and it introduces an unfortunate second-rate motel room vibe to my bedroom, but at least it works.

The air conditioner itself is a nice piece of work that I got from my friend Leslie while she was moving last fall. It even has a remote, and while it only gets one channel it’s the only one with anything worth watching. Cold.

Today I lost my kiteboard. Maybe I’ll see it again. Maybe I won’t. I’m pretty bitter about the whole thing, because I had thought I was a better kiter than this. I was on my first reach from The Spit, lit up on my seven meter and headed towards the Washington side. I made it a super long reach and got all up in Washington’s grill, as the most consistent wind and best swell is over on that side. When it came time to head back to Oregon I missed my turn (this has been a theme as of late) and dropped my kite.

Somewhere in the whole deal my lines got twisted, and because I was bobbing in five-foot swell it was difficult to get a complete visual on my bar and lines to isolate the problem. Finally I realized that one of my control lines had wrapped around my bar, and after correcting that I was able to launch the kite without a problem.

The whole ordeal took about five minutes, by which point I was certain my board was long gone. Luckily I saw it nearby, back towards the Washington side, and I started body dragging in that direction. However, all it took was the passing of a few large swells and my board disappeared from view. I spent the next twenty minutes body dragging back and forth, both upwind and downwind, in desperate search but to no avail. I even boosted myself a couple times to get a better view, but the board was nowhere to be seen.

Somewhat exhausted by this point, I decided it would be best to begin my long slog back to Oregon, rather than keep bobbing around waiting for a new disaster to strike. I was just about as far from The Spit as I could get, and all told I probably had to do about two miles of body dragging to get myself back to the beach. I made it back safely, only managing to swallow a small portion of the Columbia.

While my session weighed in at about ten tons of suck, I was surprised at how comfortable I felt during the whole episode. While I may be a pretty shitty kiter, at least the sport doesn’t scare the shit out of me anymore. I suppose that’s worth something.

Hopefully it’s worth as much as a new board.

Also posted in Hood River, Kiteboarding | Comments Off on Chill