It Goes Tie-Dye in the Brain

Despite an apparent lack of activity, things have been pig-bustin’ wild. Yesterday we hit up the Christian Brothers wall at Smith Rock and I top-roped Ring of Fire, my first 5.12a climb. It was quite a jump, seeing as how I had never even climbed a 5.11 before, and though I flailed a considerable amount and found myself hanging on a tight belay, I made it. It was all the grunts and growls near the top that really made it possible.

My friend Dan from back home has been out here this past week, so we’ve been hanging out, checkin’ the sites, and freakin’ out the locals with our inane esoteric banter. Ninety percent of the time no one has any idea what we’re talking about, whether it involves a hair eel or pencils or wolverines or worgeenk or thanks for calling the cheat has cool boots or just a box.

Dan hit the road back to Minnesota early this morning to answer a tech support call on an NT server. Morgan suggested that if he was servicing a Unix box he could remotely administer it and fix it from Oregon, but the problem was likely a hardware failure… which conjured up the idea for the COMPLETE VIRTUAL SYS ADMIN (a.k.a. Virtu-Essé). It would be a clumsy robot with steel claws for hands and tank treads for feet, that you could send to Best Buy in place of your usual sys admin to pick up computer parts.

Of course, if I had any say in the matter the robot would rattle into the store, flail its arms maddeningly, grab an armful of EuroTrash CDs and escape by smashing through a wall in the car stereo department. Then he’d go back to the office where he would mash Cheetos into the carpet and mess up his workstation with stacks of blank CDs, action figures and empty cans of Jolt. The Virtu-Essé would spend most of his time spinning around in his chair, grumbling that he could quit any time and get a job anywhere that paid twice as much and then wouldn’t all you jerky jerks be so totally screwed. The robot would need five fingers, too, so if the boss ever came up and asked him if he was working on rebuilding the server, he could flip him the middle finger just like a real essé!

As I think about it, the robot would only need an odd number of fingers, like 3 or 5 or 7 or one of all those other odd numbers out there. I hear that they’ve recently discovered, like, fifteen or sixteen new odd numbers that they never knew existed before. Maybe the robot could have this many fingers, and he could reach out and yank your eyes out of their sockets and replace them with red robotic eyes that make you bestest friends with the first thing you see. And what if the first thing you saw was an odd number of fingers? What then, I ask you? WHAT THEN?

So really, that’s pretty much how the week has been. I spent last weekend up in Hood River, where I hung out with the Bee Dub crew on Friday night and we went HUGE, with Karaoke and scorpion bowls at Jack’s, and early morning dancing at Savino’s, and trashing the hell out of my friends’ house by staging water fights and riding cardboard boxes down the stairs. I fell asleep in the back of my car around 3:30 in the morning, and woke up around 9:00 to go windsurfing.

That afternoon Mark and I got severely dehydrated, toured the Full Sail Brewery, played with magnetic poetry attached to the side of a van, made some dinner at a park on the river, and slept in our cars out at Post Canyon. The next morning (Jerry Garcia’s birthday!) we tried to go kiting, but the wind was cookin’ 30-35 so instead I went windsurfing and got my first session out in the River this season. I sailed off from the Event Site and was pretty well lit up on my 3.7, and got thrashed and flipped over the handlebars an odd number of times. I called it quits when I put a four inch hole in the nose of my board.

Better than putting a four inch hole in my nose, after all.