I was supposed to work a landscaping job yesterday. There was snow on the ground so it didn’t happen. I was supposed to work a landscaping job today. There was three more inches of snow on the ground so it didn’t happen. Instead, I hopped the 9:15 bus to the Mountain and played in eight inches of fresh powder all freaking day. We made fresh tracks in virgin pow all through the Outback, and occasionally I would find myself sucked into a tree well, buried in snow up to my waist.

There is currently snow on the ground, and if this is still the case tomorrow morning I probably won’t be landscaping again, and will instead catch the 9:15 and do it all over again. I feel that if I’m not going to be making a living wage in town, I might as well be boarding up at the Mountain. In town I’m surrounded by all sorts of tempting things that cost money, like rock climbing shops, useless Downtown trinket shops and prostitutes. At the Mountain I’m surrounded by all sorts of things that are free, like snow, pine trees and unlocked snowboards.

Not-Work (as I’ve started characterizing my current living situation) is really fun, but it’s not as fun as it should be. You find yourself saddled with all sorts of degrees of Not-Fun, which usually take the form of questions. Consider the following questions. If you have found yourself asking ten of them or more, you may be experiencing the lifestyle of Not-Work:

I participate in dangerous activities that threaten to move vital things inside of me (bones, organs, etc.) to a space outside of me. How am I going to pay for someone to put those things back inside of me?

I drive a horseless carriage at dangerous speeds in slick conditions that Bendians characterize as "black ice", even though Bendians have no idea what "black ice" really is. Black ice forms when it’s so freakin’ cold that car exhaust freezes on the road, and since cold is epidemic in the Midwest, so is black ice. However, Bendians conflate the concept of "black ice" with the concept of "ice", and seem to think that black ice forms when ice forms on the road. How am I going to pay for a third party to fix my car when an idiot in a bright yellow Hummer H2 (aka, a Small-Pen1s Mobile – SPM) smacks into me?

I drink water from the tap. I steal sugar packets and salt & pepper shakers from restaurants when the hostess isn’t looking. I rifle through my neighbor’s garbage for expired multi-vitamins. I make homemade oatmeal out of shredded newspapers and paste. Despite my best efforts, my body continues to groan for something of nutritional value. How am I going to pay for Ramen?

Every month at about the same time, I receive large amounts of mail demanding large sums of money. When I ignore this mail strange things start to happen. When they cut out the electricity the house becomes dark, and I can’t read the nasty messages that the electrical company sends me. When they cut off my phone I can’t use the phone to contact the phone company to figure out what needs to be done to reactivate my phone. When they turn off the gas I can’t cook my Ramen, so I become delirious with hunger and can no longer function as a reasonable person and can’t make constructive decisions toward getting the gas turned back on. When they cut off the Internet I can’t find minimum-wage jobs to apply for. When they cut off the water I can’t take a shower, so I can’t give myself a respectable smell for job interviews. And we all know that the only reason you need a job interview is so the employer can have a chance to smell you. How am I going to make the postal worker quit frequenting my house?

So, how did you do? Are you experiencing Not-Work? Not sure? See if any of these questions describe your situation:

Are you living in the state that comes in absolutely dead-last for unemployment?

Are you finding yourself with plenty of time on your hands to distract yourself with books and weblogs?

Are you filling out hour-long applications for jobs that boast generous wages up to $8.00 an hour?

Are you suddenly appalled after discovering that states may have reason to demand a minimum wage from businesses, and that the reason may be because businesses will pay minimum wage if they are able to pay minimum wage? Does this seem like a disgusting perversion of an otherwise excellent free-market, capitalistic system? Despite your best efforts, is your faith in Ayn Rand faltering? Just a bit?

Did you graduate summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts from a Great University on a Great Lake last May?

Do you find yourself tempted to get a job at McDonald’s, just so you can say you graduated from college and got a job at McDonald’s? Do you grin impishly at the prospect of constantly asking people, "Do you want fries with that?" Would you ask people if they wanted fries with their Egg McMuffins?

Do you find yourself tempted to get fired from a job at McDonald’s, just so you can have the bragging rights to such a feat?

Some people seem to be confused about the redesign. This is understandable, as change can be a traumatic experience not unlike winding up a plastic dinosaur that shoots sparks and sticking its mouth in your eye.

First: Yes, there is one entry on this page. Yes, this is intentional. As time has progressed we’ve realized we’re not so much a weblog as we are a collection of memoirs that people can print out, keep in the smallest room of their house and eventually put behind them. To keep things clean and tidy (for the time being) we’ve limited the main page to one entry.

Second: Yes, the words are bigger and the columns are static. This is to benefit our non-sighted customers who read the site by drawing their pudgy fingers across the computer screen.

Third: Yes, you can still access all the recent entries in one digestible space. See the link at the bottom of the page? The one labeled, Recenty…? You get one guess as to where it takes you. It doesn’t take you into the crawl space, behind the washing machine or to the front of the line. Where, then? WHERE?

Fourth: The search function has moved and we have a new listing of archives. They are both harbored in intuitive locations. If you are having difficulty finding them, please drive out to Bend so I can jam a screwdriver into your skull. That way you will always have a handle, so if your thoughts ever get out of hand you can hang on tight until things calm down in there.

Fifth: I don’t really care if you like the new design or not. If you want to comment on cool pictures of typewriters that you have seen recently, feel free.

Yesterday I taught my first beginner snowboarding lesson, and I must say it was wildly exhausting, stressful and successful. My ten kids spent the morning session getting used to the gear and working on their turns, and after lunch I took them up the chairlift. Well, half of them went up the lift by themselves, and I eventually coerced the other half to follow suit. Five kids were convinced they would die if they didn’t ride up the chairlift with me, but since the lift only holds four people at a time and we haven’t figured out how to stack small children on the lift like cans of soup, I had to trick a few of them to head up on their own. My technique was morally dubious, but it worked like crazy and by the time they reached the top of the hill they forgot they hated me.

The three remaining kids were really sketched out. I had one little girl who, just waiting in the lift line, already had huge fat tears running down her cheeks. Seeing that wrenched my heart. She was convinced that everything horrible that could possibly happen would happen, that she would fall off the chair or get minced in the gears or spontaneously combust in fear. I assured her that I would sit right next to her on the lift and so long as I remained alive would never let anything bad happen.

Soon enough we were at the top, and all the fears of riding the chairlift up the mountain were replaced with the fears of snowboarding down the mountain. It took a lot of time, hard work and patience, but we made it down with nary an injury to the body or spirit. All the kids crowded around me at the base of the lift, asking, begging, pleading to go up again. We didn’t have time to make another lift run so we spent a few minutes learning new skills in the flats, and ended the afternoon with a resounding "SNOWBOARDING RULES!" from an eleven-piece choir.

But god, those tears. I’ll never forget those tears.

In other news, I’ve been figuring out what makes the Northwest tick. People here are super laid-back. People here are nice. People here tell you that people here are nice, but you realize it’s a different nice than a Midwest nice. It’s a laid-back nice, a lazy nice, as though Pacific Northwesterners just can’t muster up the energy to be nasty. It’s pretty groovy I suppose, but it’s not what I’m used to.

I mean, let’s say you’ve got twin uncles visiting for Christmas. One loves telling stories with a deep barrel voice and always keeps a stash of sweets in his shirt pocket. The other grumbles slowly around the house, complaining about his back, death and taxes. Now, if each uncle was stinking drunk on eggnog and slouched in front of the television growling at football, you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart. There is no difference between them in action, in personality. There’s just eggnog and football. But you know, you know that as soon as the mental fog clears and they’re back to their usual selves, only one is going to make an effort to be amiable.

I hope you enjoyed that nice little anectdote. It was a nice little anectdote and I don’t think it cleared up a dang thing, but I hope you enjoyed it.

I miss the Midwest. I really do. At the same time, there’s nothing quite like living out here, whether I’m exploring Mount Hood, sailing the Gorge, riding the Cascades, or freezing in the desert. There is so much to do out here, so many outdoor pursuits, it’s like I’m jacking off 24 hours a day. I’ve been rock climbing, camping, windsurfing, kiteboarding, snowboarding and mountaineering, and if I wasn’t stinking poor I could go kayaking, mountain biking, rafting, snowmobiling and snowshoeing.

On clear days in Bend you look to the west and see Mount Bachelor, Broken Top, South Sister, Middle Sister, North Sister, Mount Jefferson and more, all lined up like a dysfunctional family and caked with fresh snow. In every direction, too, mountains dominate the horizon. They command your attention, give you focus. Every time you see them you get that twang of desire, that thirst for adventure, and you start planning. What should I do next? you ask yourself. Mountains encourage you to dream. Their bright white peaks become the focal point of your every desire, and you channel your energies into them. You know what must be done.

Living around mountains, you become intimate with them. You trace their contours, memorize their complexions, share their moods. You recognize the subtle changes they undergo as they carry out the seasons of their lives. They are at once friends, guardians, lovers and prospects. You speak to them and they speak to you, and you share stories. When you feel distant they open a yearning deep within your breast.

And this, this is what the Midwest is lacking. We don’t have mountains. We have horizons of corn. We don’t drive twenty miles to find snow at 6,000 feet, but step out our front doors and curse the heavens. Generally, there is little in the landscape of the Midwest to flatten you with awe and inspiration. There are beautiful places, certainly, lovely places in the Midwest, but nothing on the scale of the Pacific Northwest. The Midwest is small, cozy, sensible. The Pacific Northwest is huge, sprawling, borderline obscene.

Whence comes the strength of the Midwest. Without grandoise inspiration that drags our eyes across the landscape, we need to channel our energy from somewhere else. Where do we get the power to suffer through 20-below cold snaps, hot and humid summers, swarms of mosquitoes and a hopeless flatness?

Within. Stir-crazy with boredom over the cold, dark winters, Midwesterners turn inside and find ways to entertain themselves. Instead of glancing at the mountains for motivation, we look into the limitless ingenuity of the human mind to keep ourselves busy. For chrissakes, we pull fish up from holes in the ice, we carve things out of butter, we build boats out of milk cartons. No one with a mountain fixation would ever be able to come up with this stuff.

When we look at the horizon we don’t see mountains. We spin around and see an entire three hundred and sixty degrees of possibility. There is an intense creativity that is specific to the Midwest, an other-worldly resourcefulness that insists that nothing is made of such sacred stone that it cannot be recast in a million new forms. Our strength flows from our lack of stimulation and our inability to deal with it. In the middle of July, Midwesterners will buy blocks of ice and ride them down the local sledding hill. In the middle of January, Midwesterners will take a tractor to build a 10-foot kicker at the family farm, and hit it all day with a pair of skis, a snowmobile and a tow rope.

Seriously. The World’s Largest Ball of Twine. The Voyager With No Pants. The Sandpaper Museum. More cheese than you can shake a cheese-on-a-stick at. It’s all crazy, it’s all genius, and none of it would work without a penchant for humility and a strong sense of identity. The Midwest loves its kooky damn self, as evidenced by any Vikings/Packers game and as codified by the Minnesota State Fair. No mountains? No problem. We can entertain ourselves pretty darned well.

And lest we forget those hot summer days with the chain link fence.

Time to get crackin’. The Internet and I haven’t been on very good speaking terms as of late. I have no convenient way of hooking up our broadband connection in my bedroom, and I typically browse the web for sites that depict questionable moral practices. These sites are not appropriate splayed across our living room, out our bay windows and into the bustling family-oriented streets of downtown Bend.

Nevertheless, that is where I currently find myself, sitting on our living room floor hunched over the keyboard in a most precarious abuse of ergonomics. And that is where I will stay for the next couple days until my wireless router and PCI card show up and I can broadcast this nonsense into my bedroom, liberated from pithy cords and ruthless dictators.

However, ‘bedroom’ is a bit of a misnomer. I haven’t had an actual bed for the past week, as beyond the smell of cat piss my room came unfurnished. I outfitted it with a night stand and dresser from the Goodwill Superstore, but procrastinated on buying a bed for as long as possible because, really, who with my current relationship status needs a bed, and really, beds are expensive.

The endless nights of weird dreams, however, eventually forced me to cave in and buy a mattress. One night I was playing a game of Whack-A-Mole that instead of moles had me whacking kids from summer camp. We were figuring out whether we should give the kids helmets, and decided against it because they would only get in the way of the pop-up mechanism. Another night I was paddling a canoe through a lake in the BWCA, filled with hundreds of swimming moose. Then I was screaming down a melting luge track in a metal snow saucer while little snowboard punks jeered at me.

These visions I attributed mostly to the fact that I was spending my nights on a hard floor curled up in a sleeping bag, and partially to the fact that my mind was a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives. The bed arrived today, so we’ll see if the brain clears up a bit. I simultaneously hope so and hope not.

What else? It’s becoming increasingly apparent that working as a snowboard instructor this winter will be one of my more financially-ludicrous schemes. I was one of the lucky few who got hired on to work as an instructor at the Mountain, and we’re currently going through all the phases of training that are necessary before we’re competent at teaching our sport to the interested public in a constructive manner. And we don’t get paid for it. This may sound rough, but consider that our training consists of strapping on our boards and riding all day. Sometimes we ride in the fog and the wind and the driving rain. This may sound rough, but consider that we’re employees riding on free season passes that are sold to the public for a thick pile of sawbucks.

For all of the time I have already spent at the Mountain I’ve only gotten paid $13.80 in wages, and I probably won’t be getting more hours for another week or so. And even then, as instructors we only work from 10-3 and our actual hours are extremely dependent on weather and business. All this, coupled with the fact that as an instructor I get any gear remotely associated with snowboarding and skiing for half price, cooks up a recipe that is primed for financial ruin.

I’m finding ways to deal with this situation. I bring a PB&J sammich with me to the Mountain instead of buying half-price chili fries. I drink myself dumb with free hot cider, cocoa, coffee and tea. I outfit my room with the latest cutting-edge furniture from Goodwill. I commute a mile to the Park-n-Ride and ride the convict/employee bus for the twenty mile drive to the Mountain. I skip the glitz and glamour of Safeway and instead buy my food from the warehouse aisles of Food 4 Less, where fat women with goatees go for their prescription Oreos. I’m buying a wireless card for my computer so I can scan the neighborhood and potentially access the Intermooch from an unwittingly generous neighbor.

Still, some costs of living refuse to disappear and they make my joints ache. Monthly rent payment is as monthly rent payment does. My cell phone will continue to drain the beast, as we don’t want any leather-clad crusaders in sunglasses spontaneously apparating in Lava House so we don’t have a landline. We’re splitting utilities evenly, which means I’m paying for cable TV even though I have no use for it. My job will likely be hard on gear, so I’ll probably need to upgrade my hard and soft goods out of necessity. My car insurance is clear for the next six months (or should be, if I played those cards right), and such things I pay in a lump-sum so I can forget about them until June. I have health insurance until mid-January, at which point I’ll need to start paying homage to the Mountain God to ensure the continued immortality of my mortality.

This website continues to jab at my insides monthly, and even though I can’t promise that I will update it regularly through my current phase of Life 1.0, it’s not going anywhere. No matter what happens, no matter where I go, this is my permanent address. I’ll starve before I’ll let this baby disappear, and since I have assurance from people in my life that they won’t let me starve, it will never come to that.

In celebration I’ve added three new photos to the oft-neglected Photolog, that glimpse my recent introduction to Farewell Bend. The snowstorm on my drive down. Shane and his turkey puppet. Smith Rock State Park.

Welcome home, ya’ll. Welcome to December. One month left of the grand and beautiful two-thousand-three and then a new game begins. I have no clue what oh-four has in store, but in the shadows I’m laying the philosophical and psychological groundwork that will make it happen. And it is going to happen on one premise that we hold to be self-evident:

Dane is awesome.