Brainside Out
We had a great time out at Smith Rock tonight, rockin’ the party on Rope-de-Dope. I led my first 5.9 and top-roped my first 5.10c. Afterwards, we sat in the parking lot drinking PBR and talking about cult flicks until the neighbors complained about us talking at 10:07 at night, so then we just drank PBR. I could elaborate on the evening, but now it’s time for hot tub and beer.
If I have learned one thing in my time on this planet, it is that Greatness flourishes in the tiny cracks of the day. If really you want to do something wonderful, if you want to create something amazing, you don’t want to dedicate your time to it.
I am put off by the direct approach to achieving Greatness, convinced that such a concentrated gaze will inevitably cause it to suffocate. Greatness does not breed under fluorescent light. I’ve realized that most of the neat things that I have done that I am most proud of, (Geek Prom, Wuda Wooch! and this website, to name a few) were never full-time positions. They required no resume, no job application. They didn’t ask forty hours a week. Heck, they didn’t even ask four hours a week. At the time, all these little tidbits of pride demanded from me were a few hours crammed into an already packed schedule, and a couple pounds of raw passion wrapped up in the folds of my brain.
Updating this site has never been a particularly painful ordeal, but over the past few years it has taken on many shapes. It has been a piece of self-actualization, a personal burden, a civic duty, a luxury, an escape valve, and a guilt trip. Despite the emotional roller coaster inevitable in such a messy relationship, I have typically erred in the direction of feeding, grooming and caring for my site, even when it seemed that adding one more activity to a day would make it explode with the fury of a thousand suns. At times I would need to squander an entire weekend, consuming nothing but Dr Pepper and Cheez-Its, just to update and release the next iteration of Cromlech, or Dane’s Bored, or Brainside Out, or whatever it was.
Usually it didn’t take that sort of time. For the most part, day-to-day posts and updates would run somewhere between two minutes and two hours. Sometimes the task was immensely cathartic, other times it felt kind of itchy, and a few times it felt like my brain was a grapefruit held in giant crushing robotic claws. Looking back, however, most of the work has been worth it.
There’s still a lot that needs to be done (large swaths of this site have been hidden away until I can somehow get them updated, or automate the update process so they update themselves) but what we already have is quite spectacular. Here I am able to browse and search through the last 3 1/2 years of my life. Whenever I have the date, month or even the year of an event screwed up (say, When was it that I met the host of Animal Planet while biking to Lake Minnetonka?) I inevitably check this site. Certainly, the weblog is incapable of capturing everything in my life, but even if only five percent of good stuff is accounted for in here, that’s still a significant chunk of information.
When it was created, this website was never intended to be a resource of any consequence. Perhaps it still isn’t for other people, but for me, it is invaluable when sifting through history. It helps clear my head of wandering thoughts, stray words and rejoinders, which increases the chances that something profound may bubble forth. We’re still waiting for that to happen, but I’m confident that it will be any day now.
It is important to keep in mind that the things you see here (in addition to all my other passions) have been realized in the off-hours of the day. Remember that those scraggly, ragged edges of time that most people toss aside are actually where the magic happens. It is hanging on for dear life at the edge of existence, with your knuckles white and your teeth bared, that you find yourself. With that, go forth and achieve Greatness. Join the cult of human power, and prepare yourself to do the impossible.
I left Bend. And now I’m back in Bend. And now I’m fairly drunk and it’s 2:50 in the morning and I just got back from a Studio 54 theme party thrown by some friends from the Mountain. And while this is indeed in Oregon, it is pleasantly similiar to the activities taken while back in Minnesota.
Thursday morning I crashed at 2:30 am, after chilling on the porch (and watching Invader Zim) with Chris and Nicole and Luke and Kelly at my parents’ place in Minnetonka. Wednesday morning I crashed at 2:30 am in Duluth, after hitting up Fitger’s Brewhouse with Laura and Sandy and Beth and Eric and a number of other people I had never met before, who had been spun into my web of familiarity regardless.
Given enough time and space, all things seem to circle back upon themselves.
(in no particular order, beyond how they got thrown into my CD case)
If anything, it’s been crazy. My roommate and I just got done watching a few episodes from the new Invader Zim DVD, which arrived today along with the new matt pond PA album. Earlier in the evening we were chilling on the front deck, drinking beers and watching everyone in the world try to weasel their cars along the packed streets of Lava Road, in their tiny personal attempts to escape the Cascade Festival of Bikes and Closed Downtown Streets Festival. We saw a Model A, the Pizza Mondo Delivery Geo, and the same purple Oldsmobile twice. Earlier in the evening I spent a few hours in Drake Park, listening to matt pond PA, soaking up the remaining sun, and trying to finish The Open Society and Its Enemies. If I can complete this book it will be the first that I have finished in half a year. Well, here’s hoping.
Yesterday evening I hit up Smith Rock with Jody and Travis. Joel showed up about an hour late, and we climbed at the Christian Brothers until dark. I flew up a top rope on a 5.10b, and even beasted through the crux that momentarily flummoxed everyone else. I’m a better climber than I was when my leg was broken, that’s for sure.
Monday I didn’t have to work, and Mark was down in Bend so again we went out to Smith to do some climbing. We picked up a few extra quick draws on the way out, and I ended up leading my first 5.8 climb, Five Gallon Buckets, which was actually my second lead climb ever. Hardly anyone was out climbing that day,and it was a scorcher by our standards. My car said it was 93 degrees in the shade, and we most definitely were not climbing in the shade. Near the end of the day I started to lose my mind. That’s a lot of heat for a couple of cold-blooded Minnesotans.
Mark and I staged our own Sunday morning worship by packing into the Subaru, driving up to Swampy Lakes and mountain biking for fifteen miles. I fell once coming around a dusty curve too fast, scraping up my left side and laughing about it too much. We took a hot downhill run all the way to the Tumalo Falls area, swung over near Skyliner Trailhead, climbed for hours to get up along Swede Ridge, and eventually found our way back to the car for a lunch of bagels, hummus and fresh cherries. After lunch we drove up around the Cascade Lakes area, and stopped at the Sparks Lake meadow to play frisbee. After our bike ride neither of us had any energy left to play frisbee, so we ended up jumping from post to post in the parking lot until some leather-clad bikers showed up and started wrestling snakes.
Sunday evening we watched the fireworks from the Phoenix Inn parking lot, and while the show was spectacular you could tell everyone was disappointed that Pilot Butte didn’t catch on fire this year. We also got to enjoy the recurring counterpoint of car stereos not synced up to the same station.
Saturday morning we tromped around downtown Bend, grabbed some bluegrass music from Ranch Records, and picked up half a kilo of Yerba Mate from the Saturday Market. Later on we headed out into the wild wild desert to explore some lava tubes, and Mark bouldered some hot roof problems near the mouth of the cave. I didn’t climb, as my thumb was still narfed up. Driving back from the caves we took the Toyota off-road and scaled the highest butte we could find, while listening to James Brown. We ran crazy around the car whooping and hollering at the landscape. Unstoppable were we.
Friday evening I got out of work a little bit early, caught up with Shane, and we headed out to Shevlin Park for a quick (and rather technical) biking session. I got eaten by bushes once and spilled over the handle bars, and again got kicked way wrong off a two foot jump, ate it on my front wheel and bent my left thumb all wonky. Mark pulled into Bend around 10:30, so we stumbled around downtown before ending up on the sidewalk in front of the Barcelona, sipping (choking) on martinis and catching up on life.
After getting rained out on Tuesday and ending up at the gym, Jody and I regrouped at Smith Rock on Thursday to take another shot at Cinnamon Slab. Jody did the trad lead and we knocked off both 5.6 pitches, and thus I broke the cherry on my first multi-pitch climb.
Next Thursday I’m flying back to Minnesota for a week, and there’s a lot of ya’ll out there I want to catch up with. My proposed tour involves Minneapolis, Minnetonka, Loretto, Elkader (Iowa), Prairie du Chien (Wisconsin), Madison, Shell Lake and Duluth. If you’re near any of those venues we should party, but always with the understanding that these things are typically thrown together at such a horribly improvised level that it is impossible to plan for any of it.
Well, here’s for trying!
Well. The boy ain’t perfect. But after being clubbed in the face a number of times he’s now a helluva lot closer. Kindly refresh, rinse, repeat.
And there goes June. It’s been a splendid month, and though poorly documented, it hasn’t been the worst in history.
One nice thing about school was the cyclic nature of life, in that every couple months there was a built-in milestone that forced self-reflection. A new school year. Winter vacation. Second semester. Summer vacation. The calendar of the outside world has a tendancy to swirl together in an orgy of mingled chaos and order, and it comes as a shock when you look back and realize how you miss those benchmarks. I believe strongly in the infinite malleability of the human spirit, one’s ability to adapt to just about any situation, but it definitely takes time to recover from sixteen years of cyclic conditioning.
Anyways. June has been great. It was the end of May when I remunched my leg, so June has embodied my full recovery. About four weeks ago I started climbing regularly at the Gym, and yesterday Jody and I finally went up to Smith with the intent of shooting up Super Slab. We got rained and thundered out and ended up at the Gym anyway, but at least the intent was there and I spent fifty dollars on anchoring gear. June has played host to a number of great bike rides, including the Deschutes River area and Post Canyon. This past weekend I climbed up from the Skyliner trailhead and dropped in on lower Whoops Trail, which is a two mile downhill crank with tons of bump-and-jump riding. I only crashed once off a whoop, ending in a mess of dust, sweat and a smattering of blood.
The String Cheese festival at Horning’s Hideout also took place in June, and the bliss of that weekend continues to echo throughout my entire life. Mark set up a slack line in our camp, and after two minutes of trying that thing out I knew I was hooked; not just on the balancing and concentration facets of slack lining, but on the social scene of it as well. Just over a week later I found myself setting up my own slack line in Drake Park, and four hours later packing it up in the dark, after having helped more than fifty strangers try it out.
More than anything, my June absence represents a renewed worship and presence in life; from the mind, to the body, to the spirit. July will inevitably have its own personality as well, colored by a Bendian Fourth of July Celebration, a mid-month trip back to Minnesota, and an aching desire to go upstairs and killboard the River again. July will definitely offer more climbing, more biking, more killboarding, and more slack lining.
The greatest hope of all, however, is that July will host even more fleshy contact with lovely people. With that, I’ll be seeing a lot of ya’ll soon.
Cleaning your room is a lost cause when you go to pick up a piece of filth, and it comes to life and crawls away.
I’m still prancing about like a trippy hippie in my personal Anti-Telecommunications Revolution, so the most sincere apologies to anyone trying to contact me via electronic means. I give myself approximately fifteen minutes a day in front of my home computer, which isn’t nearly enough time to cut down on the stack of correspondence that a more motivated person would lovingly address. Why, I believe there are now upwards of five emails I need to reply to. FIVE. WOW.
Contacting me via phone is no better, really, because I’m still not answering it regularly, and if you’ve left a voicemail I probably haven’t checked it. Or if I have checked it, I’ve nodded and said something like, “ooh ($yourname)!” and left it at that. Again, I feel the love, and I send the love back, but currently I’m massaging my sunburn and tying a rope around my ears and grooving out to a Blackalicious disc I stole from the gym, and I’m sure you understand.
Honestly, I’ve been running so hard the last few weeks that I just don’t feel like carving out the time to play with the age’s latest tools of communication. Summer is definitely here, and my leg is more or less healed, and there’s a great grand world out there that needs to roll around in the grass and share some lovin’.
If ya really wanna get ahold of the ol’ Daner, you’ll have the best luck if you just stand in front of me and start talking. I climb every Tuesday and Thursday night at the Gym, or at Smith Rock if we’ve got a gang goin’ out, or at Meadowcamp if we’re strapped for time. I’ve also got everything I need for my slack line, so you can find me strapped between two trees in Drake Park every Monday and Wednesday (unless I’m out bowling for bloggers).
My GPS coordinates get thrown all wonky on the weekends, depending on whether we’re whoopin’ it up in Portland, jammin’ at music festivals in the hills, losing control in Hood River, or chillin’ out in Bend. Now that I’m walking again I need to tune up my camping gear and start hittin’ the trails in this area, hook up with some rugged folk, and eventually climb some fucking mountains. I also picked up a great mountain biking trail map from Webcyclery, and there’s all sorts of tasty singletrack out there that I wanna go chew on.
So that’s that. Things have been super mega frickin’ ultra cool lately, and it’s shaping up to be a glorious colorful summer. This weekend I’m grounded in Bend cleaning up a few things (and setting up slack lines and reading books in the park and visiting the bike shop and getting sunburned), but next weekend I’ll probably run up to Hood River to get the ol’ killboard out and hit the River for the first time this season.
It’s been a long time in coming, but there’s no doubt in my mind that the whole big thing is finally beginning to coalesce in its own crazy way. There’s so much to do, so much to see, and so many people to meet. All of a sudden I feel like I’ve finally escaped the Earth’s gravitational pull, and from here on out my trajectory can do nothing but accelerate. There is no clear map for the journey ahead, but there are core passions and beliefs that will be indespensible in finding the path. So long as I’m tuned in to the right internal murmurs, we’ll all pull out of this thing just fine.
I am recovering from what has been the best weekend of my life. On Thursday I met up with my friend Mark in Hood River, and after sleeping in our cars at Post Canyon and cooking our breakfast at The Hook, we drove to Horning’s Hideout to hang out in the woods with String Cheese Incident. Nothing cleanses the soul like three solid days of music, love and mossy forests. The entire experience was absolutely surreal, but the cultural shock slowly evaporated over the course of the weekend, such that when we left at 11:30 on Sunday night after SCI’s last set, the outside world had become the surreal one.
Words can hardly describe the euphoria I felt over the course of this festival. Through my years I’ve done a number of music festivals, including a few micro Phish tours and Big Wu Family Reunions, but nothing would have prepared me for the atmosphere at Horning’s. The space alone is enough to make it a magical place, with streams gurgling through fern-covered valleys, campsites scattered through mossy forests, and peacocks meowing at all hours of the day. To this you add the kindest, happiest people you’ll ever meet in your life, who range from young to grey, and who are all hanging in the woods for a common purpose: to kick back and chill with their fellow man, spread some mind, and dig on excellent music.
It is one of those experiences that you can hardly relate to people unless they themselves have personally experienced it. When I hit up the climbing shop today after work to pick up some components for building a slack line, I struck up a conversation with a few people who were hanging around. As it turns out, Eva and Cody were up from California and had been at Horning’s Hideout as well. They were still wearing their sparkling red bracelets. Just like me it had been their first time at Horning’s with String Cheese, but we instantly connected on the absolute beauty of our weekends and babbled like drunken fools. Our words were clumsy and awkward, riddled with smiles, laughs and sighs, but the three of us understood each other completely. We all knew that we had been personal witnesses to something magical.
A music festival has a different vibe than a concert. When compared to a festival, even a wonderful concert comes off as hollow and vapid. It feels like an abstraction, a departure from your typical reality, a glaze you coat yourself in for a scant three hours of a particular day. In comparison, a festival gives you the necessary time to arrive, grab your bearings, and fully settle in to the groove. While the music on Friday night was excellent, and Michael Franti was a master of channeling the crowd’s energy, I didn’t really feel it. The music was great and I loved every second of it, but I was still on edge for various reasons, whether it was stress, shock, exhaustion or boredom. As hard as the bands try, too, you can tell that the first day is just a test-run for what is to come. They may hit the ground running and tear up a wonderful concert on Friday night, but for every person at the festival it is a necessary run-up for what is to come.
Friday night was good, but it was Saturday night when I finally arrived, and I got completely out of control. We broke out the 70’s suit, the kimono, the pink sunglasses. We broke out the rubber chicken and stuffed him full of glow sticks. I danced, we all danced, and we danced hard. We threw our arms into the starry sky and cried in elation. With time the sights, sounds and smells of the festival had soaked through my skin into my bones, and they were beginning to tinge my marrow. With the sudden hot embrace of life, all the little anecdotes of the weekend came flooding into my head.
At one point I was standing with Mark at the top of the vendor hill, listening to Sound Tribe Sector 9, both of us eating sushi for the first time ever. I remember tasting little bits from a pile of uncomfortably pink flesh, and trying to figure out what spice it was flavored with. After realizing it was ginger, definitely ginger, we began pondering what the raw meat actually was, and why they found it necessary to flavor it so strongly with ginger. Playing fast and loose with my desire to live as vividly as possible, I took it upon myself to eat the entire wriggling pile of flesh, and after I did it may as well have been my greatest accomplishment ever.
I don’t know what that means, but at the time the scene felt so significant that it must have been influencing my life up and down the fabric of time. And even the hugeness and joy I felt on Saturday night cannot begin to compare to what I felt Sunday during String Cheese’s last show for the weekend. Mark and I raced down the hill to participate in the World’s Biggest Group Hug (about 3,000 people strong, with a giant puppet, too!) which gave way to the best String Cheese Incident show I’ve ever seen. I flailed hard with some of the most energetic dancing I’ve ever done, even though I needed to strongly favor my unmunched left leg on all those bluegrass grooves. By the end of the night my eyes were ready to pop out of my head, and my face ached from smiling for three days straight. On the walk out I couldn’t help but dart in and out of the crowd, smiling and yawping as my kimono fluttered behind my energies.
Perhaps the most important thing, though, were the people we met. We had incredibly kind neighbors, and when Mark set up his slack line we met all sorts of exciting people. Two Japanese fellows who had flown over here just to attend Horning’s Hideout. Ben, who works for a climbing gym up in Olympia and is a formidable entrepreneur. April. Jason. Rachel. Dave. Tim. Fox. People who were high. People who were drunk. People who came bearing watermelons. We loved them all the same, because they were all interested in testing the stabilizing powers of their inner ear under formidable conditions.
And with the help of Mike, our neighbor who in his other life directs a homeless shelter in North Carolina, we finally named the rubber chicken. In honor of the peacocks at Horning’s Hideout and the ubiquity of the sound they make, the chicken will henceforth be known as “Meow.”