If you drink three Red Bulls in the same day you will not sleep that night. At all. Your brain will reel and you will be haunted by uncomfortable visions and non-dreams, stitched together in a horrible and disjunct fashion.

The last few days have been wild. Friday afternoon I went to the local sporting goods store to rent a pair of snowshoes for our backcountry skiing expedition on Saturday, and by Friday evening I found myself driving to Government Camp, spinning a recently acquired Johnny Cash show, headed for the Mount Hood Brew Pub to meet a group for a full moon snowshoeing hike.

We hiked a few miles up around Bennett Pass, and afterwards a small group of us pulled up to Charlie’s in Government Pass for beers. We were treated to live music, a solo guitarist who played a fifteen minute rendition of The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald with more flange than you can imagine.

It was late and I had an hour’s drive back to Hood River, but I was armed with Red Bull. So much Red Bull. And Johnny Cash. And Red Bull. I fell into bed around 1:00 in the morning, and proceeded to toss and turn for more than four hours. I was meeting Joe at a quarter to seven that morning to hike Hood and go snowboarding, and with my alarm set for 5:45 I really wanted to get some sleep.

But sleep I did not. Instead, my brain was haunted with awful disjointed images, juxtapositions that unsettled the mind. It resembled the slapdashed style of snowboard magazine ads, where underpaid and overtalented graphic artists are turned loose on an indifferent audience. Instead of mishmashed photographs of professional snowboarders, the source images were of my own life, past and recent experiences, slapped together with wickedly worn edges, distressed Photoshop techniques and high-tech interfaces.

It wore on for hours, until finally I decided it was late enough to get up and shower. It was 5:30 in the morning. I ran the water for more than five minutes but it never got warm. The furnace had finally choked and needed to be repressurized (or filled with bodies), and I didn’t know how to do this without blowing the house up. Plus, the furance is in the basement, and we can only access the basement by going outside, pulling aside a heavy (and sodden) plywood cover, and descending a step ladder into the foundation.

Plus, it was raining. Whatever. I ate toast, the cat yowled constantly, I drove to Joe’s, we picked up Phillip, and the three of us headed for the mountain. It was snowing big heavy flakes at base when we started slogging, and it was blowing and snowing like all fury at the top of the timberline where we stopped. The snow was great in the higher elevations and we made some sweet turns, but down low everything turned to crud. It was raining hard and the snow rode like Elmer’s, so we called it a day and drove back to Hood River to eat burgers and drink beer.

At the pub we got a table near the window, and watching traffic on State Street provided limitless entertainment. The city had been doing some road construction, and the rain had carved out a huge pothole in the oncoming lane. The pothole looked deceptively tame, so cars would approach it with way too much speed and find themselves kicked into the air and bucked all over the street. The whole thing was so hilarious that we shot video. If anyone can recommend a good way to compress AVIs shot from a digital camera, I’ll smaller them up and post them online for ya’ll.

My friend Brian from Wooch! is in town. He was supposed to be framing houses down in Tucson, but road construction had foiled his grand scheme of living in the woods and commuting to subdivisions, so he headed for the coast. He met up with a French-Canadian gal and they’ve been working their way up the Pacific coast, occasionally stopping at organic farms to lend a hand and make a couple bucks. He called me Saturday afternoon when they were in Tillamook, and they arrived in Hood River that evening.

We hung out and waxed poetic late into the evening, and I learned that even though Quebéçois mainly speak French they also speak Canadian, and Canadians always say “eh” no matter the language. I was also told that most of the Frech I speak “doesn’t mean anything.” Seeing as how the French I remember involves such phrases as “Do not tease the pig,” and “The gas station attendant is in my trunk,” I wasn’t surprised.

Oh. Also on Saturday, thousands of ants invaded the house and carried off the cat. And this morning, the neighbor’s dog was curled up with the chickens inside their coop.

Today one of the chickens started barking, and it hasn’t stopped for the entire evening. I have no idea what this means. The two of ’em have also taken to flipping over their food dish every afternoon and pitchin’ a fit ’bout it. They’re starting to become a pain in the neck, and when I say a pain in the neck, I actually mean delicious.

In the last week I’ve probably flip-flopped ten million times about what I plan to do for the future, which is typically an indication that I’m trying to plan too far ahead. I’ve been thinking six months ahead, which experience has shown is a completely useless exercise. It’s an indication that I should probably be planning only a month ahead, and instead trying to figure out how I’m going to pack up this circus and roll it back to Minnesota for the summer.

Minnesota. It seems my stomping grounds only make the news when people are shooting at each other. That’s not how I remember it at all, but maybe in 22 years of living there I missed something.

The distant future (distant being anything more than three months out) looks rather interesting. I have no shortage of exciting opportunities, some of which allow me to live and work anywhere I please. However, these require that I figure out a way to work without being in constant pain. Despite intuition otherwise, chronic pain associated with work is usually detrimental to productivity. I do plan on living for at least another 75 years, and I assume a functional pointer finger will come in handy wherever I choose to go. It’s not as interdisciplinary as the middle finger, of course, but I need to find a way to protect it nevertheless.

Hopefully, three months of paddling canoes will give my body enough time to knit back together its damaged goods, while destroying parts that are currently intact. My body will break in places it never knew it had, but that will take the mind off existing ailments long enough for them to disappear. This process is cyclic, and cycles are the way of life. If you can look back while looking forward, nothing will take you by surprise.

Unless you like surprises, that is.

I’ve tried to mask it. I’ve told people that I have a soft spot for rockabilly, that I have a lot of respect for Johnny Cash, that when I’m in a particular mood I’ll dial up Boot Liquor Radio. When karaoke night rolls around I do Garth Brooks covers. I’m familiar with terms like shitkicker and I’ve been known to use phrases like “somethin’, somethin’.” Sometimes I speak with a Texas drawl, whose inspiration and origin is impossible to pinpoint.

Nay, there’s no point in denying it any longer. I have finally bled my last drop of sophistication, and I totally dig country music. Tonight I checked out The James Sasser Band at River City Saloon and had a boot-stompin’ good time.

I’m a fair-weather pseudo-member of the local band Topsoil, and James Sasser opened for us when we played a gig a number of weeks ago at River City. My friend Brian, who often sits in with Topsoil and can play the shit of the harmonica, is the drummer for James Sasser. Brian’s originally from Iowa, and I was happy to see that he was sportin’ a Leinenkugel’s shirt for the evening.

There was also a fellow in the audience wearing an awesome “I <3 Beer” shirt, not to mention the guy in a Vise Grip hat, whose horn-rimmed glasses were two inches thick. I talked (shouted) to him for a bit, and learned that he and his friends had driven all the way from Boise that day to visit their friend in Hood River.

I don’t know what it is about country music, but it really seems to be doin’ it for me lately. I am so totally down with the whole folk thing. Over winter break I caught up with an old friend who talked excitedly about all the members of the English aristocracy that she had schmoozed with during her time in England. Maybe I should have been impressed, but honestly that sort of thing doesn’t do it for me. I have more respect for the guy who runs his own shop repairing snowmobile engines than I do for the entire English aristocracy.

One of the most poignant anecdotes I’ve ever heard involves a man from the city who ventures out West. He runs across a cowboy out tending his fence, and asks to speak to his master. The cowboy looks at him funny and asks what he means. The man clears his throats and clarifies.

“You know, your master,” he says. “The man who owns this land. The man you work for, who provides you with food and shelter. The man who tells you what to do. Your master. Who is your master?”

“My master?” The cowboy spits on the ground. “The sumbitch ain’t been born yet.”

Anyway, I spent the entire evening throwing back tallboys of Rainier, stomping my feet to some killer country music, wishing I owned a pair of cowboy boots. I also wish I could play the slide guitar, but it’s probably just as well I can’t. If I could play the slide guitar, and if I owned a slide guitar, I’d probably never leave the house again and spend all my days playing and listening to it.

What an amazing sound. It’s like the soul of every cowboy who lived and died has been absorbed in that instrument, and they can only be freed one note at a time.

I live for good stories. I enjoy telling them, I get a kick out of hearing them, but above all I love living them. So long as it makes a good story, I regret nothing. Sometimes I feel it’s a cruel limitation of biology that the stories of our ancestors don’t get passed down through blood.

I’d love to know what my grandfather did when he was 24 years old, what inspired him to become a man of the woods. I’d love to hear more stories about Old Uncle Vermond, the family wanderer. I’d like to see my great-grandparents board the ship to America, to feel their excitement and apprehension about starting a new life in a new land. I’d like to see their parents, and their parents parents, earning a living in the rolling hills of Denmark.

I’d like to reach even further back. Am I descended from any line of Danish royalty? …well, given the size of Denmark, it turns out that just about anyone Danish is probably descended from royalty. More importantly, what kind of royalty were they? Did we have gilded thrones? Did we fling wine glasses at servants? Did we gamble and lose it all in a single night at the local tavern?

What about Vikings? Did anyone in my lineage do any pillaging or plundering? Did a Petersen ancestor sack England, or explore Greenland with Erik the Red? I mean, this is looking so far back that there’s no guarantee my ancestors were even Danish at the time. Or maybe they were. Could I be descended from Gorm den Gamle or Harald Bluetooth? Hah. Bluetooth. I wonder if he knew that his name would be used for a short-range wireless connectivity protocol?

And even before that, what drove the Petersens to Scandanavia in the first place? I’m fascinated by stories and I would love to hear the tales of my ancestors, the wild experiences and journeys that coalesced into the family we have today. In looking back, what more could we learn about ourselves today?

Anyways. I talked Ryan today, and he was trying to figure out what he wanted to do in life. Ryan’s a good friend from college, and the two of us did some incredibly stupid stuff together. He graduated the same year I did, and has been doing some heavy-duty computer stuff over the last two years that has proved lucrative.

And yet, he misses the hijinx. I don’t blame him. The two of us were really good at hijinx, so good in fact that we started an official club at UMD to give us more room to play. At first we were going to name it The Dane and Ryan Fan Club, but we couldn’t find anyone else willing to fill the officer positions. We had a president and vice-president (obviously), but we still needed a secretary and treasurer. When we suggested naming the club The Coolest Club Ever we had no shortage of applicants for officers.

Ryan and I were so good at hijinx, there’s no doubt in my mind that we could pursue it professionally. We’ve blown stuff up with dry ice, raced shopping carts, caught air in sleds, discovered stuffed animal burial grounds, and explored tunnels and caves beneath Minneapolis. One time Ryan helped drop a tree on my head in the Porcupine Mountains, giving me a concussion and a trip to the emergency room.

If Ryan can’t figure out what he wants to do, and I can’t figure out what I want to do, I’d say we need to get our own TV show. Above anything else, I believe that would make my ancestors proud.