I’m Not Dead Yet

The past week has been far busier than this site would suggest. I’ve been enjoying our unseasonably delightful weather, running every day, and hatching hair-brained schemes for the future.

Joe and I plan to summit Mount Hood this weekend, and such endeavors require precise planning done out on graph paper at a table at your favorite coffee shop, which is your favorite only because an incredibly beautiful gal works there. But of course, you have your iPod Shuffle now and have already begun your inevitable withdrawal and subsequent atomization from society, and any conversation about music would have shared no common ground. So all you said was yes to the Rwanda blend and requested room for extra genocide.

You know that useless tiny pocket inside the right pocket of your jeans? The Shuffle fits in there perfectly. It also fits in your mouth, but I doubt people are buying Shuffles in droves because they double as choking hazards. Nope. The appeal must be elsewhere.

I met my friend Will in Portland the other day. I also went to the Bossa Nova and saw a band named marchfourth. marchfourth is what happens when you mix high school marching band, George Clinton and Carnivale. They’re a huge always-on pep band with percussion and a killer horn section, and hula-hoopers and stilts-walkers and fire-eaters.

I was over-stimulated and my head almost exploded. At setbreak I overheard one guy in the audience talk excitedly to his friend about an interpretive-dance version of Dungeons & Dragons. There is so much to this world that I will never fully comprehend. Good thing I’m just along for the ride, having burdened the rest of society with explaining itself.

What else? My “The floor is made of lava!” shirt showed up, and so did the new Winter Songs EP from matt pond PA. My friend Anton introduced me to matt pond PA a number of years ago and they are still one of my favorite bands. Beyond Anton and a couple of my friends, I have yet to meet anyone else who has even heard of matt pond PA.

Apparently one of their songs was played on Orange County. Who knew? I gave away my television. Maybe if I had a television I would know more people who know Matt Pond. Or perhaps I would know Matt Pond himself. He’s probably one of those tiny actors they cram inside the cathode ray tube.

You know what other bands rock? Nada Surf, Juliana Theory and Love Cars. Check ’em out if you haven’t.

I ordered a new digital camera just in time for our trip up Mount Hood. I got the Canon Powershot S500, which is like my old S400 only not wet and not brutalized and not in a hundred tiny pieces. I also picked up an ice axe and some crampons and a climbing helmet. I finally got a kiteboarding helmet too, about three weeks too late.

Oh yeah. Four years of web design have turned my wrists into sad little buckets of misery. It was bad enough for them to make my time in front of the computer miserable, but now they hurt all the time, like when I brush my teeth or slam a tall boy or shift into fifth gear. When that started happening I said enough is enough, and I’ll be seeing a doctor about it tomorrow.

If I’m lucky he’ll leave his meat cleaver at home and let me keep my hands. If I’m not, well, I’m gonna be paddling canoes this summer with liquid metal cyborg hands. A friend of mine says he knows a really good ortho in San Fran, who is totally down with the latest advancements in nanotechnology.

Nanotechnology: It’s gonna save the world. I mean really.

Well. This pretty much covers all of it, except for the really important parts like returned packages, Beer Olympics, and credit card companies whose junk mail takes the guesswork out of identity theft.

Oh. And. I have resolved the issue with the orange cream soda. The correct answer is obvious and exciting.