June 25, 2003

don’t ask her what it was

So. I’ve been here over a month, already. The skunk that usually goes off right outside my window at this time of night has become old-hat. I’ve grown accustomed to Hood River; to Oregon; to the Wild Wild West; to being away from home and family and friends.

And now that I’m getting used to my surroundings I have to make sure I don’t become jaded to the things around me. I think newness is a beautiful thing. It inspires us, keeps us fresh, and brings about that unsettling experience that keeps us honest human beings. But at the same time, familiarity has its own perks as well. When the novelty of living away from home, of living with a Japanese roommate, of windsurfing every day, etc… when that all wears off, it leaves room for substance and content.

I can smell the nuance in daily life. That’s something I feel I learned from summer camp; discovering ways to keep myself fresh and inspired in a stressful environment, where developing a routine could easily come as a mere survival method.

So that’s where I am now; boosting familiarity while maintaining that early excitement. I still stare down the Gorge in awe, looking west into the crowns of angry dark clouds boiling through the hills; clouds that never seem to make it into town. All I can think is an articulate, “Wow.” I am still floored that I’ve got the opportunity to live here, to work here, to play here. A soul can grow in the fertile volcanic soils beneathe Mount Hood. I feel I can breathe, here.

But then, that’s not to curse home, to cast Minnesota to the dirt. I love Minnesota, and I suppose I loved it enough to realize I needed to leave. I needed to cast aside that filter to see how much of what I see is myself, is my environment, is my reality. I approach this all as an experiment. I’m testing things out, seeing what holds substance and what does not.

I love home, I miss home and my friends. I find myself missing silly familiar things that I didn’t really appreciate at the time. My roommate Hal making up stupid songs on his guitar, Doug inviting his freshman harem over to the apartment, or Ryan offering me bottles of his expensive-yet-nasty beer. These are all things that irked me at the time, or just fell neutral across my brain, that now summon up strong feelings that say, “This is how it was.”

And that was how it was, and I can never go back there again. That is the scariest and most exciting thing I’ve realized on this adventure. Before I left I was talking to my mother about it, how it might be nice to swing back up into Duluth and shoot the shit around the yellow Wooch! table, again.

Even that will never be exactly the same. Me and my fellow Woochers can trade jokes, both old and new, and recount current and past adventures, but never again will we be able to share undergraduate gripes. I’m outside out that, now, and I can’t turn around and put myself back in.

I can’t become the person I was, but I can become the person I will be. Same goes for reality. It’ll never again be the way it was, but it will inevitably be the way it is.

Don’t ask her what it was. Tell her what it is.

June 24, 2003

you’ve been warned

www.danesbored.com is officially gone. I unparked and deleted the domain about ten minutes ago. Long live www.brainsideout.com.

As I’ve been saying for months, “Update your links, foo.”

We’re still chugging through our HTML, making it all nice and pretty for your fancy pants. The new stylesheet will roll out later this week. In the meanwhile, enjoy the 90’s while you got ’em. Dial up some Crash Test Dummies and pretend you’re in high school again.

sesh-wan sauce

I had a killer windsurfing sesh off the Event Site, tonight. Got totally dialed into my waterstarts and didn’t even touch my uphaul once. The Mistral Classic 295 (cm) is going into the garage, to be replaced by the Mistral Edge 168. A 140 liter board, down to a 91 liter board. Barely enough float to uphaul in a pinch, but a small enough board to not be a pain in the ass.

Sparky rode the Edge back in its hey-day. His verdict? Killer board, very difficult to jibe because of its 90 degree rails, freakin’ fast as hell thanks to a flat plane surface.

This puppy got sauce. Team Mistral lives on.

June 22, 2003

strap on your power suit

Welcome to Brainside Out – Transitional Edition. The 90’s never looked this good.

A few notes for nerds: We are now using PHP for navigational server-side includes. Our index pages all validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional code. Our CSS? It validates as well, but we’re keeping it behind the curtain until all our HTML is clean-dandy and ready to serve.

put on your prayer shoes

Observations from the Jesus Presley concert last night at Hood River’s River City Saloon:

People in Hood River know how to drink.

People in Hood River know how to party.

People in Hood River do not know how to dance.

When 38-year-old women want to dance they claw at your arm with long, laquered nails.

June 20, 2003

opt-in, opt-out

Work is crazy. Flat out, hands down, rockin’ and knockin’ crazy. We’re trying to set up our online shop with a leading e-commerce site, and just about nothing is going right. The products won’t upload. Now the products will upload but their images and descriptions won’t display. Now the product images have slid their thin little bodies into every crevice on the page. Now the duplicate products won’t delete. Now the products won’t upload again.

It is absolute mayhem, and so far all we have in their database is fourteen watches. In the next month we’re going to have thousands of windsurfing products. I keep myself sane through the whole thing by talking to myself, which drives my co-workers crazy.

In a noble attempt to stem the tide of error messages received from the leading e-commerce site, our programmer gave me a large red button on our back-end maintenance page. Pressing this button purges the system of all products. Because of a confused assigning of numbers to the options available on the page, there were three number 6’s. The large red button was the third 6.

I call it Option 666.

Our programmer has since fixed the numbering system, but I still call the big red button by name. I think Option 666 would be a great name for a band. I think I’ll start it. I think I’ll make t-shirts.

I think I’ll go windsurfing.

June 19, 2003

cacti genocide

I think we’re gonna gut this baby and start from scratch. Don’t panic; all content will remain, and all cowboy-esque entries will continue to be written, but pretty soon we’re gonna look like the Internet circa 1995.

And when we come back? Internet circa 2003 with Style circa 1895. XHTML, CSS and PHP with lassos, cacti and shiny six-shooters.

June 17, 2003

five times before you hit the ground

Out here there are landscapes that can swallow a man, whole. If I drive a mere twenty minutes out of Hood River I can be on deserted logging trails; single lane paved (or gravel) roads that coil through the mountains. If something bad happens when I’m out there, say I hit a deer (which I’ve seen), get a wheel stuck in a washout (which I’ve driven through) or run out of gas (which I almost did on the drive out here), I’m walking home. I don’t carry a phone, and even so there’s no cellular service in a cathedral of granite.

Usually when I run off on my adventures I forget to grab a map, which historically has been my favorite book, the Rand McNally 2003 U.S. Road Atlas. It would be wise for me to grab more detailed maps of Oregon and Washington, and perhaps the Mount Hood National Forest, and put them in the Dragon’s glove compartment. It would be wise to leave a note to my roommates detailing my travels. “Went to Lost Lake: If I don’t return, avenge death.”

These are all good ideas, but I find through the years I have grown complacent with my physical surroundings. When I lived in Duluth I never thought twice about running up the Shore for a little jaunt, as no matter where I ended up I was never more than two miles away from something. No ill can befall the soul in the cradle of the Midwest, and I have transplanted this attitude upon my Pacific Northwest existence.

But there are dangers out here. Mount Hood kills people. Mount Adams kills people. Rainier kills people. I spent some time hanging out with Dedrich and his family last night (I was walking from my house to Little Florida and when I rounded the corner of 22nd Street, someone kept calling my name. Turns out these guys live right around the corner from my house, and had grilled food and salad and ice cream that needed to be eaten) and they had all lost friends to the mountains. It is rare you find someone who has lost loved ones to the BWCA.

Today as I was practicing my waterstarts I watched some barges chug along the Washington side of the River. One kiter got particularly close to a barge, which sent the operator into a fit of honking. Since the operators don’t have ten-foot megaphones for broadcasting obscenities they need to make do with other forms of forceful communication. I also noticed that they paint smiley faces on the sides of barges, too. I think they’re all masochists.

Trains run on both sides of the Gorge, and trains run often on both sides

of the Gorge. Kyle told a story about a friend of his who got caught between two trains cooking in opposite directions. While the draft kicked up from all that motion has to be scary enough, this poor guy got stuck in there while holding his kite.

While derigging today I watched a snake slither under my car. My first reaction was to try to catch it, but then I remembered some blurbs I read for a few popular launch sites in the Gorge: “Dangers: Strong current, strong winds, train tracks, rattlesnakes.” I’m used to garter snakes and other animals that don’t want to kill me. This particular brand of snake was brown and didn’t have a rattle, but I wouldn’t put it past these guys to have their rattles surgically removed just so they can hang out with the in-crowd of non-lethal snakes. They’re called snakes for a reason.

And summer has just begun. Be careful out there, kiddos.

June 16, 2003

recompile your kernel

Been working hard. Real hard. I turned in my timecard yesterday, and was chatting with Coach about the sheer amount of work being spilled into the website. He asked if they could start calling me Da Man around the shop if I finally got this puppy whooped into shape. I said I would prefer Da Geek or something, even though most people at the shop call me Da Burglar.

Liz came up and slapped down her timecard right next to mine.

“Dane, you see this. 82 hours of work in two weeks! What are you complaining about, with your 76? That’s nothing. That’s nothing!”

I flipped my card over, revealing 26 additional hours spent working at the Hook.

“Oh.”

Even with that, I’ve still managed to get out and have some adventures. Two days ago after work I went out on the far-side of the Hook and practiced waterstarting for an hour or so. Yesterday the wind in the River was fairly light so I finally got a chance to sail out of the Event Site, which is the biggo hangy-hangout on the Hood River part of the Columbia. I didn’t have enough wind (or enough sail or really enough skill) to waterstart, so I just uphauled and got out into the River. I went out and back three times (which, for a river that’s a mile wide, adds up to a decent session), got into the harness a couple times, and had a good time just lazin’ about in some light wind conditions.

What’s more? I actually ended up DOWNWIND, which is the opposite direction of DOWNRIVER, which is the opposite direction that Rowena wants me to go.

Progress? You bet your ill-fitting Speedo with your hands held behind your back and your unit thrust forward.

Let’s see, what else, over the last couple days?

I started figuring out the steamy underbelly that is Hood River’s covert technological society. There’s a lot of brainpower in this town, a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of computer programmers/designers/coders, that hide in their home offices or above Andrew’s Pizza or beneathe the sidewalks. Something can happen, here. My spider-sense is tingling.

Met Bruce Peterson, the man whose name is all over my Sailworks 4.4 Revolution sail of ill-fame. There are pictures of this man at The Hatchery, thirty feet in the air. These pictures are typically found in Windsurfing Magazine, shot by Eric Sanford. Eric Sanford is an assistant editor of Windsurfing Magazine. The head editor of Windsurfing Magazine spends his summers in White Salmon, right across the River from ol’ Hoody town.

It was never a really big part of my life (for some reason I never caught the aviation bug), but I keep finding myself talking airplanes with customers down at the Hook. One guy studied at University of North Dakota – Grand Forks. Another guy is building a RV-8 in a hangar at The Dalles (my uncle is building an RV-6A in Minnetonka), and is sticking a 300 horse engine in it. One family flies from Idaho to The Dalles every couple weeks, picks up their van that they store in the airport parking lot, and drives down to Hood River to windsurf for the weekend.

“Our daughter has been travelling a lot for the last couple years. Right now she’s in Hawaii, and before that she was all over the East Coast for a year. She’s taken to a gypsy lifestyle.”

“You mean she steals children and plays the accordion?”

“… Dane, you’re a weird one.”

June 14, 2003

bi-lingual uppity mixxity

My new roommate’s name is Motoshi. He’s from Japan, and has taken the next couple months off from his job at Toyota to travel the world and kiteboard. He came to Hood River through Maui, and once he’s served his tour-of-duty here he’s off to New Zealand. He bought a bicycle, and every day he slings up all his kiting gear and heads down to Kite Beach to rip it up.

Motoshi doesn’t speak very much English, but he speaks infinitely more English than I do Japanese so that’s just fine. We get by very well through mimicry, imitation, signs and basic words. Some things in the house we have remembered to explain to Motoshi, such as the dishwasher, the grill, cheese and Zip Loc bags. Other things we have neglected.

On a top shelf in our pantry we keep various household cleaners and cooking sprays. The can of Pam and the can of Pledge are right next to each other. Aside from the names slapped on the side, the cans are nearly indistinguishable. What’s more, neither brand name is revealing in what the product’s purpose is, even for a veteran Englishatarian.

Today I made grilled cheese, and Motoshi watched as I grabbed a can from the top shelf and sprayed the skillet. “Oh, OK,” he said. I put the Pam back where I got it, but then hesitated as I considered moving it to a move intuitive place; a place that didn’t house poisonous cleansers in similar packaging.

“M’eh,” I decided.

I left the arrangement the way I found it, figuring it would be really funny one day. And tragic. But funny.