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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Leaves

November 3, 2006

It’s 35 degrees and raining, and that’s down here in town. Today it rained non-stop, all day. You’d think I lived in Oregon or something, what with this rain and all.

Something struck me as strange the first time I came to this state. I kicked up a random conversation with an old lady in a grocery store parking lot in Portland, and she began to ramble, in such a way that only people ’round these parts can ramble. The thing she said that stuck with me the most however, was “It never rains in Portland. Sure, it rains all the time, but it never really rains in Portland.”

Which is true. I guess. What I’ve noticed, as the rainy season really starts getting its sea legs, is a growing indifference to the notion of whether it is or isn’t raining. Typically, if it isn’t raining, it’s probably because you haven’t noticed yet that it is raining.

Anywho, it might be getting chilly but I don’t freakin’ care, because my fresh shipment of tea arrived today. Whereas in historical times we received our teas from the Orient, shipped overseas at terrible risk of kraken-wrought death, these days we have them shipped from the far-flung reaches of St. Paul.

Ever since my friend Mark had us first introduced, I have sworn on holy ground by TeaSource. Their tea is the absolute bomb, they have a massive selection of it, and if you’re able to go to their store they’re great at helping you choose the right one. Now, I’m a huge tea snob (I’m also, among other things, a gin snob, a beer snob and an indie music snob). So long as I have a choice, I will only deal in loose tea. There are two things in life that should come in bags, and tea isn’t one of them.

In my last round of tea I picked up a couple ounces of Ti Kwan Yin, Spring River Green, and Clear Mountain Water. Ti Kwan Yin is an Oolong, which was a bit of a risk for me because I typically prefer the lightness of a good green tea. Nevertheless I enjoyed it enough that I grabbed another Oolong tea in my most recent shipment. Spring River Green was an average green tea, one which I thought had the occasional subtle taste of sushi.

Clear Mountain Water, however, is one of the best green teas I’ve ever had. The leaves are very young and green, and when you brew it up it looks like they were just plucked from the field. It’s a very bright tea, and I believe it tastes like drops of liquid sunshine. Clear Mountain Water doesn’t come cheap (it looks like two ounces will run ya $15), but it was by far the best tea I got in my last round.

Consider this, too. I drink a lot of tea, like 4-6 cups a day. Last January I picked up these three guys for a total of six ounces of tea, and just now am I running out. If you don’t count my summer of tromping through the wilds and being bearded, ornery and tea-less, that still makes out to be six months of tea. Plus, it’s no problem to brew these teas multiple times.

So now, this time around I’ve got a couple ounces of Moroccan Mint, Assam Green Kopili Estate, Green Dragon Oolong, and Jasmine Dragon Phoenix Pearls. I haven’t tried all of them yet, but the Moroccan Mint seems to be a pretty decent green tea… with spearmint. I have had the Jasmine Dragon Phoenix Pearls before, not to mention that I’m drinking it right now, and it’s one of my favorites. The tea looks pretty cool, too, with all these tiny rolled-up balls of green tea leaves that unfurl when they’re steeped.

Just remember. If you’re in a pinch, you can’t go wrong when your tea has a name like Iron Goddess of Mercy.

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Wahtum

October 30, 2006

On Saturday night our endless summer came to a screeching halt, and I happened to be outside to witness the transformation. I’ve been feeling slow and lethargic lately, and needed some change in routine to shake out of my rut, so I decided I’d load up the trusty ol’ backpack and hit the trail for a couple days.

There is this place in the Cascade Range, somewhat close to where I’m currently living, that I have been trying to reach for the last three years. It sits somewhere between Mount Hood and the Columbia River, and it’s called Wahtum Lake. As far as lakes in the Cascades go it’s a bit bigger than most, but it’s pretty wimpy compared to anything I’m used to. Nevertheless, Wahtum Lake is a lake and it’s in the mountains, and I love lakes as much as I love mountains, so right there is a natural attraction. Not to mention Wahtum Lake is within 30 miles from Hood River, making it a worthy destination for a quick weekend in the woods.

As I said, this lake has eluded me for three years. In 2003 my friend Ryan and I flew out to Oregon for spring break, and spent a couple days tromping all over Portland, the Oregon Coast and Hood River. This was the first time I had even seen Oregon, so the entire time my head was crazy with all the green. I thought I was going to suffocate on the thick living air, and I figured that would be a dignified death, all things told.

We decided to hit up Eagle Creek for a few days, intending to hike up the canyon all the way to Wahtum Lake. It’s nothing too difficult as far as distance goes, and we had even brought snowshoes for the higher elevations. However, we hadn’t factored in the rain. Oh the rain. The incessant frigid drizzle, that quickly sapped from us all available energies. Ultimately we hiked in for two days, basecamped 7 1/2 Mile Campground for a few days, and hiked out soaking and cold.

That was the first time we tried to make it to Wahtum Lake. My second attempt was a solo trip executed within the warm cocoon of the Subaru, in the spring of 2005. See, you don’t need to hike to Wahtum Lake from the Eagle Creek Trailhead. There are logging roads galore that will, so long as they aren’t washed out or gated shut or being used for, well, logging, take you straight up to Wahtum Lake.

Once again I began my assault on the summit of Wahtum, this time taking a route far less noble, with a support crew that included rear defrosters, fuel injection and a CD player. Despite being so grandly outfitted I was once again sent down without seeing Wahtum Lake, this time because the road was choked with snow. I did find a really cool rough-skinned newt, however, so the trip wasn’t a total loss. His belly was bright orange and he was pumped full of neurotoxins. How exciting!

So yesterday, it was with no small amount of trepidation that I set out for Wahtum Lake. The weather was clear and warm and beautiful, and despite a few near-collisions with oncoming traffic on the one-lane road, I made it to the trailhead without a hitch. Signs posted at the trailhead requested that I post some sort of “pass” or pay some sort of “fee” to leave my car in my parking lot, but I just told said signs to bugger off. I slouched into my backpack and hit the trail.

And after descending a couple hundred feet, I finally saw Wahtum Lake. It’s a nice blue lake, surrounded by steep hills and thick stands of pine. Splendid.

However, Wahtum Lake wasn’t the goal. I was gunning for Smoky Campground, a five-mile southbound hike from the trailhead. It was a wonderful hike with some spectacular views along a 4,000-foot ridge, and the sky was achingly blue. Mount Hood was looking over my shoulder for most of the ridge, and sometimes Mount Jefferson even poked his head up. At one particularly amazing overlook I could see Mount Adams, Mount St. Helens, Mount Rainier, and parts of the North Cascades all adorning the horizon.

I reached Smoky Campground (they call these campgrounds but really they’re just one-banger backcountry campsites) by late afternoon. I hadn’t seen another soul for hours, and I wouldn’t see anyone until I got back to the trailhead the next day. To save weight I had left my tent back at home, bringing only the poles, rainfly and ground cloth. This is the configuration that they often refer to as “quick pitch”, even though there is little that is “quick” about “pitching” with only these tools.

Since you don’t have the actual tent to keep the form, you’re at the whim of the poles, and in accordance with physics the poles tend to fall to the ground. This makes it difficult to do anything with the rainfly but throw it over your head, or maybe tie it around your neck so it blows in the wind like you’re some kind of superhero. Really, this is how I figure you “quick pitch” a tent:

  1. Stake down the ground cloth.
  2. Put the poles in the ground cloth.
  3. Grab the rainfly and throw it over your head.
  4. Now you’re a ghost! Spooky!
  5. Walk around a bit.
  6. Trip on the poles. There they are!
  7. Finagle the rainfly’s velcro straps around the poles.
  8. Keep doing this until you imagine you resemble a tent, not a ghost.

I made dinner. I got cold. I made a fire (which was, strangely enough, the smokiest fire I have ever made in my life). It got dark really quickly, which is when I started realizing how creepy it is to be on a solo trip. I put out the fire and went to bed. It was 7:00.

Sometime during the night, it got cold. Then it got colder. Before long I was deep in my sleeping bag wearing every single layer I had, including my rain jacket. The wind started picking up, and I started cursing this campsite on the top of a ridgeline. Actually, I had no idea how windy it was until I stepped outside to pee. Wow, it was really rippin’ out there, but you could hardly tell from inside. Such was a testament to the fine construction of my tent, even without the actual “tent” part of it, and my awesome quick-pitch skills. Spooky! I slithered back into my sleeping bag and checked my watch, just to see how many more hours of darkness I had left.

It was 8:00.

Anywho, somehow I managed to sleep through the night, even though it was cold and the wind was howling and demons were tromping around outside. In the morning I awoke to more wind, and rain this time around. I gathered my crap, made a hasty breakfast of Milky Ways, and tried my best to dismantle the tent from the inside-out to avoid getting wet. Loaded up and hunkered down in my rain gear, I began the soaking trod back to Wahtum Lake. Whereas on the hike out I could almost see to Canada, this time around I could hardly see 100 feet in front of me. Clouds and fog boiled up and over the ridge, and a silent, relentless drizzle soaked me to the bone.

I was loving every minute of it. In its own dumb way I knew that this was exactly what I wanted.

By the time I reached Wahtum Lake it was snowing, my gloves were sodden, and my hands were useless. I hiked to my car, tossed down my pack, and began the arduous process of extracting my hands from their gloves, and then pulling my car keys out of my backpack. I started the car and loaded my gear into the back, warming my hands in the exhaust so I could summon enough dexterity to peel off my rain gear. Thus unclothed I tossed my dripping layers in the back, climbed into the driver’s seat, and wiped the layers of slush off the windshield.

The thermometer in my car read 34 degrees.

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Plates

October 24, 2006

I work from home. Sometimes in the middle of the day people swing by to hand me pamphlets decrying false religion and immoral sex and just about everything else in the world that could be considered fun. These pamphlets also predict the end of the world, in some vaguely backwards attempt to motivate me not to participate in false religion or immoral sex or Las Vegas, which isn’t a city so much as a glowing physical manifestation of the first two.

Think of Vegas as a crystalline form, a precipitate of sorts, that coalesced out of the sultry, boiling solution that is modern human life. Ayn Rand may have believed that Hollywood was mankind’s greatest invention, but I think the unabashed purity of Vegas definitely puts it in the running. Vegas exists for one thing, and one thing only. Well okay, maybe two things. But we’ve discussed those already.

So what does this have to do with work? Well, everything. Nothing. Sometimes people ask me how the business is going. It’s been a year, or over a year, or less than a year if you count my sabbatical in the wilderness, since I started Brainside Out.

All in all, things are going really well. I have clients who I really enjoy working with, I’ve designed and built some nice stuff that I’m proud of, and I’ve started collaborating with some people in the industry who do stuff better than I can.

That last one is the kicker for me. I did the one-man army thing for the first year of Brainside Out, which let me throw every lever, flip every switch, and pretty much get dirty in every aspect of building websites, from start to finish. In so doing I got a broad familiarity with my industry, from design to development, project management to information architecture, user experience to usability. That being said, I’ve since realized that I’m not the best person for every job in all matters web design.

In my most recent projects, then, I’ve been zeroing in on what I do exceptionally well, and collaborating with other designers to fill in for my weaknesses. And this, this feels right. If I can be confident of one thing, I’m confident that this shall be the direction of Brainside Out. There are so many opportunities out there for building kick-ass websites, and it would be a shame to keep all the fun to myself. As I’m looking at my workload over the next few months, I’m not sure I could handle all this work on my own, even if I wanted to. This is both frightening and delicious.

As far as everything else, though, I really have no idea. Honestly, I don’t even know what kind of work I’ll continue to do here at Brainside Out. I have a couple ongoing projects that will be, well, ongoing, but as far as what cog I will play in which infernal machine, I don’t know.

Given my strengths I’ve recently been leaning away from design (pixel-pushin’) and more towards development (code-slingin’). Currently my front-end development skills are rock-solid, and I can slice up designs and throw down the XHTML/CSS like nobody’s business. I’ve played with enough javascript that I can get down and dirty with the DOM, and I’ve been experimenting with frameworks in that regard. I know enough about scripting and databases to be dangerous, and in my lifetime I’ve managed to rebuild an e-commerce engine or two (or one).

More recently, I’ve spent a lot of time researching web application frameworks and learning their ins and outs. I’ve built stuff in CakePHP and Django and Ruby on Rails, and I think I’m finally wrapping my head around their shared MVC architectures. That said, I’ve had the most success in figuring out Ruby on Rails, and I think that’s the one I’m going to grab and run with.

I’m not a good programmer, but I have a weird intuition for discerning good code from bad code. Even though I know very little about it, I’m a huge fan of the discipline and organization involved in object-oriented programming. Ruby, which is natively object-oriented, is a surprisingly beautiful and clean language, one that I believe is worth my attention.

I’m all for lazy, no doubt, which is why I’m looking at MVC frameworks rather than trying to build web apps from scratch. However, I’m drawn to the aesthetic of working in a language that requires you to write in OOP (Ruby), versus one that only recently grafted some weak-ass OOP functionality onto itself (PHP). Putting myself in a position where I’m unable to cheat will be better for my education and productivity in the long run.

Anywho, that’s the state of things right now. Talk to me tomorrow and it will all be different. Jake and I have discussed starting a printing company, and recently I decided that I want to start a tiki lounge here in Hood River. Plus, Luke will probably need help starting his own brewery since Mark is busy turning algae into gasoline, and what with Kate’s goals of saving the world and all…

Yup. Full plates all around, here.

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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.
Filed under Civilization, Hood River, Life | Comments Off on Booty

Ullr

October 15, 2006

Last night we ran up into the foothills of Mount Hood and, in an effort to appease the winter gods, burned piles of skis at our Pray for Snow party.

It’s amazing how much of the stuff that goes into making a ski, how much of that toxic garbage just burns like hell when you lay torch to it. We also burned cardboard effigies of John Wayne and Fabio, the significance of which was ambiguous, beyond the fact that they were made out of cardboard and they weren’t nailed down. Which was really the reason we burned most of the shit we burned last night.

Once our plumes of black, acrid smoke are finished enveloping the globe and blocking out the sun, we’re bound to have a killer winter this year. That is, assuming that our attempt to decrease the global albedo wasn’t offset by our contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions. Which is very likely.

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Cryptozoology

October 13, 2006

So.

I had a post here, but as the martini was taking hold I inadvertently closed my browser window. This should be a lesson that the web is not a proper development environment for the discipline of writing, and instead we should write our drafts on something less ephermeral, like composition books or soft clay tablets or coffee mugs.

Thus, this here post is being written in my wholly over-priced and sadly disappointing text editor of choice, which I continue to use because I can’t afford the competition. Or at least that’s what I keep telling myself, given the current weakness of the dollar in the global economy.

What is a euro, anyway? As far as I’m concerned, it’s nothing more than a fancy keystroke, an ASCII-equivalent, an extended character in my font library. Either that, or a brilliant attempt by the mindflayers of the European Union to drag Scandinavia down into the dirt with the rest, to try and force them off their noble crowns and kroners and kronas and the whole lot.

Anyway, BBEdit really isn’t all that bad. It just feels… clunky. I mean, I continue to use it because it has really robust RegEx support, but even its search-and-replace dialogue is disappointing. Seriously, hitting the “return” key doesn’t start a new line, but instantly executes my half-baked script? And yet the paltry three-line textareas aren’t resizable? And your HTML toolbar wastes more of my time than it saves? And your automatic code-coloring, in a word, sucks? BBEdit, you’re fucking lucky the Euro is roaming around these days, because it’s the only reason I’m still with you.

That and inertia. Curse you Newton, for inventing both.

I don’t know why, but my mind keeps drifting to trolls. Not the trolls in World of Warcraft, mind you, but the little ugly ones that roam the northern reaches of Minnesota. As I recall, trolls were introduced to Minnesota by the early Scandinavians who settled the area. They smuggled over from the Old World while hiding in liquor barrels and tiny, tiny thatched houses and rotten moss-covered logs that the Scandinavians brought over to remind themselves of their homeland.

These trolls look like they’re made out of wood and grass and nuts and pine needles, and if you ever caught one and brought it to your nose you would say the same for the smell (though some are thought to bathe infrequently and may smell slightly of duff as a result). However, it is important to remember that trolls are indeed made of meat, just like the rest of us, as it would be silly to think that a living thing could be made of anything besides meat. How absurd!

It is said that every time you say “I don’t believe in trolls!” a troll somewhere dies. I find this to be a ridiculous notion, and I demand those who researched the matter to cite their sources. Even for a humanoid species as closely tied to the environment as trolls are, it’s hard to believe that the mere utterance of a few words would have a direct causal relationship with their untimely deaths.

Now, it’s feasible that when the above statement is said it will set into motion a chain of events that inevitably brings about the death of a troll. If that is the case, however, it becomes a question of whether or not the person who said “I don’t believe in trolls!” is morally responsible for the death. I suppose that depends if the person who made the utterance said it with autonomy (in that he or she was not compelled by another to say it), and if the chain of events involved any other autonomous beings that knowingly could have chosen one way or the other to cause a troll’s death.

Genocide or not, I still haven’t figured out if trolls live in the forests of the Northwest. My friend lives across the river in Snowden, and most of his neighbors claim that they have seen sasquatch and aliens… he also adds that his neighbors are the kind of people that have always seen sasquatch or aliens. A few weeks ago there was a creepy event where a number of goats had their udders surgically removed, which as far as I’m concerned neither proves nor disproves the presence of sasquatch, aliens, neighbors, or even goats for that matter.

Trolls, though? I have no idea on that one. Really, no idea. Maybe I’ll find out while camping under the stars for our Pray for Snow party at the base of Mount Hood tomorrow.

Filed under Outdoors, Philosophy | Comments Off on Cryptozoology

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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Medium

September 27, 2006
  1. A few days ago it hit me for the first time that not only am I moving to Hood River, I am leaving Minneapolis. This makes me sad, as there are people and non-people here that I am really going to miss. Most of all, I’m going to miss Gus. He is my world (aside from another world that I already miss like crazy).
  2. Stadium Arcadium, the new Red Hot Chili Peppers album that spans two discs, never needed to span two discs. I mean, the album is okay, but it isn’t okay enough to take up 2 hours 2 minutes and 22 seconds of my life. NOTE TO RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS: It isn’t done when there is nothing more you can add, but when there is nothing more you can take away. But what the fuck do I know? They’re the millionaires, and I’m… well…
  3. …Jake and I are certain that through future web design collaboration we will be able to take over the world in less than two years.
  4. The new version of iTunes? Thanks for all the useless and functionless gloss. Hopefully version 7.0.1 will address these issues and mop up that fucking wet floor effect. Wet floors are the new glossy button, which was the new drop shadow, which was the new bevel. Honestly though, on my guiltiest days I like it.
  5. The New iPod Shuffle? Whoa, awesome. Now where’s the version that I can inject under my skin?
  6. Downloadable movies? Bring it on. I already feel that CDs and their respective jewel cases are completely superfluous, and I shall bring none of them with me on my trek back to the west. All the music I have is on my computer anyway, so what’s the point of keeping all these the solid-state copies around? Now I’m beginning to feel the same way about DVDs and all the space they take up… how long will it be until each one of us has our own eight-terabyte media server that houses all our music, movies and television shows? Heck, while we’re at it let’s throw all our video games in there… Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Wii… what’s the point of having these disparate systems and all their games taking up space? Consolidate, consolidate, consolidate.
  7. Sprint gives me free long-distance, and doesn’t charge me when I’m roaming off their network on my cell phone. What they don’t tell you is that when you are roaming they will charge you for long distance. When was the last time you had to make a local call when you were roaming? When was the last time you even made a local call? In today’s decentralized, geographic-independent world of cell phones, how do we even define local, anymore?
  8. Sorry if I haven’t called you back yet, but I’m about three weeks behind on returning voicemails.
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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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