Holy shit.
Breeze
July 14, 2008
More hot. You stand slack-jawed and dumb, staring forward, a gossamer thread of drool swaying delicately from the corner of your mouth. The brain is fevered and broken, it cannot be helped.
A cool breeze allows a fleeting moment of mental clarity, and you realize that the new Coldplay album is awesome. So awesome. You remember those long, hollow nights right after you bought Stadium Arcadium, where you felt as though someone had carved a hole in your chest. The painful longing, the uncontrollable sobbing, wondering how in the hell could it feel this bad? How could it ever feel good again?
You remember the difficulty breathing, the long exhales where you promised yourself you would never breathe in, that you would never again summon the energy to inhale. But somehow, involuntarily, you would always take that next breath, and you would sob and curse yourself for it, for being weak, weak for breathing, but most of all weak for needing, needing in the first place.
Viva La Vida is nothing like that, nothing like Stadium Arcadium. This is actually good, like A Ghost Is Born good or Good News For People Who Like Bad News good. People are hurting no one but themselves if they don’t have it yet. Yes. They should go out and buy the new Coldplay. They should regret nothing. They should fix their shit.
This, this is what you want to tell people, but the breeze stops too soon. Fatigued with thought your head rolls to one side, and the spittle cuts loose.
Baked
July 13, 2008
SCHLLLLP.
It’s hot. So hot. 99 degrees outside, 99 degrees in here. It’s so hot that even the mountains are spontaneously combusting.
Clothes are too burdensome, so I lounge around in my underpants. I sit here sweating away in my own home office, sticking to and peeling off my fake leather chair as I shift around, trying to eek some comfort out of this day.
SCHLLLLP.
Meanwhile, my neighbors continue their weekly three-day drinking binge in the backyard, which they host with such regularity that they have already worn away most of the grass. They don’t seem to mind so much. A cube of Icehouse is cheaper than a tank of gas, now more than ever. Beer is the new Disneyland.
This morning I went mountain biking at Knebal Springs up near Mount Hood, hitting the trail early to avoid the midday heat. It was a killer ride that I’ve done a number of times before, a nine mile singletrack loop with a thousand feet of elevation. The lupine is in full bloom, and the trail cuts right through some huge fields of the stuff.
It was a hot and dusty ride, and the straps on my backpack are now crusted with salt, where my sweat soaked them completely through. After getting back into town I left my bike in my Subaru for half an hour, and when I went to pull it out I nearly burned my hands on the frame. It was six hours ago that I took my hydration pack out of my car, and the water in it is still hot enough to steep tea.
Unsteadier Footing
July 4, 2008
They say you should shuffle your feet when walking through a shallow sea, to avoid accidentally stepping on a stingray. The same technique could save your life when traveling across my living room.
Someone should really clean up this mess.
Fine Dining in Bingen
June 30, 2008
Question: Which of the following dinners would win in a fight?
A. Ranch Corn Nuts and a hot and spicy beef stick.
B. Dasani raspberry-flavored bottled water and Chex Mix.
C. Spicy chicken burrito, a forty of Pabst Blue Ribbon, and a Swisher Sweet.
The answer is C. The answer is always the forty.
Social Hygiene
June 29, 2008
The other day, Kate and I were discussing the difference between a “tool” and a “douche bag”. It is a subtle but important differentiation, and we came up with the following guide. We hope you find it helpful, and failing that, offensive.
Tool: Drives a champagne Lexus LX with gold trim.
Douche Bag: Drives a black Cadillac Escalade with gold trim.
Tool: Wears one polo shirt with one popped collar.
Douche Bag: Wears two or more polo shirts with one or more popped collars.
Tool: Tries to network with you at a party.
Douche Bag: Tries to network with you at a funeral.
Tool: Working on a Web 2.0 social networking application.
Douche Bag: Working on a Web 2.0 social networking application that will be the next Facebook/MySpace/YouTube.
Trigonometry
June 18, 2008
So. My kiteboarding photography is going to be featured in the next issue of Sports Northwest magazine, perhaps even on the cover. I must say, however, that the current cover will be a tough act to follow:
Maybe I can convince Mike to get a bikini wax and pose with his new kites.
Deterrent
June 7, 2008
Buried deep in our chests, each Hood River citizen is now required to wear an economic growth inhibitor at all times. The weather-changing device atop City Hall is now operating at full power, effectively deflecting all tourists and their valuable Canadian dollars away from our town.
We’ve started referring to this month as June-uary, and at this point we’re beginning to lose all hope for the summer. It’s 50 degrees and cloudy here, and if this miserable weather pattern keeps up much longer there’s risk that we’ll all go back into our off-season hibernation. Frigid conditions aside, I’ve still gotten in a ton of kiteboarding this season, and last week I rode my custom 5’3″ North Pacific in some of the biggest, glassiest swell I have ever seen at the White Salmon Bridge.
Meanwhile, I’ve been reading the new Aaron Hillegass book and trying to teach myself Objective-C and Cocoa. The book is wonderful, but every time I try to improve my programming skills I feel like a dog trying to walk on its hind legs. My knowledge of Ruby and other object-oriented languages definitely helps with the learning curve for Objective-C, and my familiarity with a few different MVC frameworks, including Rails and CodeIgniter, helps with the underlying concepts of Cocoa. I recently spent an inordinate amount of time researching event listeners and how they’re manifested in JavaScript, and as a result my crude understanding of event-driven programming is nonetheless sophisticated enough that I can recognize it in unfamiliar territory.
This ability to abstract knowledge from the specific to the general is what separates man from the lichens and mosses of the world, and I take pride in that fact. Even so, I always feel clumsy and awkward as I stumble blindly through a new language or a new programming concept. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m making this harder than it is, that these are ideas I would have learned the first semester of my freshman year, in an Intro to Computer Science course.
That said, my education wasn’t in computer science. It wasn’t then, it isn’t now, and it won’t be in September. My areas of study included music, jazz, writing, English, philosophy and journalism. And yet I keep inexplicably gravitating towards programming, perhaps because I enjoy learning, perhaps because I’m a glutton for punishment, and perhaps because I have this awful habit of seeking out and doing the things that I find most frightening and difficult.
Ergo Oregon, ergo kiteboarding, ergo interaction design.
Sol 0
June 2, 2008
My neighbors celebrated June by drinking beer from 10:00 in the morning until 3:00 the following morning. Outwardly I pretend to be impressed, but inwardly I’m annoyed and disappointed that they didn’t make a day of it.
