Weblog

Not dead, not yet. I spent the weekend down in Bend shreddin’ the mountain, drinking cheap beer and catching up with old friends. It was my first time visiting Bend since moving to Hood River in January, and I was surprised by how much of my heart and soul are intertwined in that town.

On my way down from Redmond, as Awbrey Butte loomed into view, my chest got all tight and I was flooded with a confusing torrent of emotions and memories, encapsulating the wide open spaces of 2004, the entire span of which I spent living in Bend. Duluth is the only other town on the planet that does this to me, only with Duluth the experience is magnified a hundred times. When I pull over that last hill and finally see Lake Superior and the entire town unfolding before me, I just about lose control. The emotional rush is so potent that if you could extract it, a single drop would burn clear through to the center of the earth.

Arriving in Bend wasn’t that strong, but I was completely unprepared for how strong it was. I could totally see myself living there in the future, if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s so damn expensive. It’s really frustrating, because it seems like every decent place to live in this country costs a right nut (and half of the left) to live there. I mean, most stuff isn’t too expensive. Your water bill is kinda high, but other utilities are fairly priced, groceries are okay, and dining out is reasonable.

But damn, anything real estate out here is outta sight. I don’t care if you’re looking at houses in Bend or Hood River or Portland or Seattle or San Francisco, there is nothing available that you could consider to be fairly priced. Even in the short time I’ve been out here, I’ve seen average rental costs in Hood River increase by about $100 a month.

There is a house for sale on 12th Street in Hood River, a 1,500 square-foot bungalow with hardwood floors, a tiny yard and no garage. The house is really close to downtown, and across the street from a playground, but 12th Street isn’t an ideal street, being a busy throughfare for people on their way to the Heights area.

For this particular house, this tiny two-story deal with no garage and hardly a yard, they are asking a mere $320,000. At that price, if they were to cover every inch of the floorplan with $20 bills, they would still have money left over.

Anyways. That being said, I could totally dig living in Bend, if that dusty dirt wasn’t so damned expensive. The town has everything I could possibly need within twenty minutes, from mountain biking to climbing to canoeing to snowboarding. Bend does lack windsurfing and kiteboarding, however, and that’s definitely a score against it.

But the snowboarding, man, the snowboarding on Friday was absolutely epic. It had snowed all that night, and it was actually snowing in Bend when we hit the road that morning. There was 8 – 12 inches of the fresh stuff, and it kept storming until the afternoon. The mountain was nearly deserted so Shane, Adam and I shot line after line of fresh stuff. We traversed off Northwest way over into the western bowls, and blasted some huge, wide-open terrain in the trees.

Closer to home I was popping 180’s off everything I could find, and launched a beautiful backside off Triple Nipple, with slow rotation and everything. I also stomped the entire flat-down-flat rail, and pulled some fast and reckless lines through the trees, with some close calls that almost had me pickin’ splinters out of my teeth. Our bodies were thoroughly chewed up when we finally decided to call it a day, and we jammed back into town to grab some grub at Super Burrito.

All in all that town has some amazing things going for it, the best being all the people and friends I’ve met down there. Though I spent only a short day in Bend, I managed to catch up with my old roommates Shane and Erin, my friends Erik and Fish from the Lava House Alliance, and all the folks from Alpine. It was late Friday afternoon when I showed up at the office, so we closed down the shop and went for a walk down to the market. Jody grabbed a Redbull, Morgan grabbed a Sparks and Jim grabbed a six-pack of PBR tallboys. At the register, Jim said something that totally renewed his position as my personal hero.

“Could we get some small paper bags, too? The kind you drink out of and walk down the sidewalk with.”

I think it’s no question that we’re the classiest web design agency in existence. That night I met Erik and Fish at the Bend Brewing Company, and as Erik and I waxed poetic about the cowboy mentality, we came up with the slogan for my web design shop, should I decide to jump the wall and create one myself:

“Because we’re the experts. And we’re probably drunk.”

The night wore on and the words became ever more insightful. As Fish tried to figure out how Erik was going to make a tail for his Big Bad Wolf costume, someone mentioned the use of “thin strips of pudding.” Well. Once we plunged into the English accents and uttered that a few times, it was all over. We finished our brews while repeating every line from Invader Zim and Napoleon Dynamite that we could remember.

“I’m dancin’ like a monkey!”

I love Cheezits and Dr Pepper. There were times in college where I would go for weeks subsisting on nothing but Cheezits and Dr Pepper. I think that deep down inside, every man has a suppressed diet left over from young-manhood that consists of two pseudo-food elements. For my father it is Hydrox and Squirt. For me, it is Cheezits and Dr Pepper.

Tonight I anticipated a marathon session of web design, so I went to Safeway to grab some soda. Dr Pepper was on sale (24 cans for seven dollars! that’s a dollar a cavity!) so I grabbed some, went to checkout and prepared my dollar bills for the discounted transaction.

“$8.20.”

“What the-?”

“Eight twenty, sir.”

“How the hell did seven become eight… oh, right. Bottle deposit.”

For a second there I forgot what state I live in, and I had forgotten the lovely bottle deposit program of Oregon. You see, everything that comes in a bottle here is subject to a five-cent bottle deposit. Well, they used to call it a bottle deposit, but then they shortened it to “deposit” after people started arguing that cans aren’t bottles, and plastic bottles aren’t bottles, and glass bottles aren’t bottles, and this beer really sucks anyway so why should I have to pay an extra five cents, etc.

I hate the deposit. Every time I see DEPOSIT 60 CENTS come across the screen at the checkout, I want to hop over the conveyor belt and strangle the clerk with his apron. The logic of my emotions on the matter are not nuanced. The bottle deposit gives the government money. I hate giving the government money. Ergo, I hate the bottle deposit. I also hate social engineering, but that’s an unprovoked rant for another day.

I’ve neglected to mention the other important half of the deposit. You see, a deposit implies that I’m putting money aside to be retrieved later. It’s not a bottle tax, per se, as there is a way I can get my money back. The way is through machines. Have you seen these machines? They are remarkable pieces of work, as large as refrigerators stacked on top of washing machines stacked on top of trash compactors, with the greatest redeeming qualities of each.

These Great Machines are the only devices on Earth with the sheer mass, noise and stickiness required to convert hornets into nickles. In the dead of August people approach these machines with garbage bags full of hundreds of syrup-filled pop cans, and with yellow jackets buzzing all around, proceed to stuff these cans (nay, bottles) in these Great Machines.

Under ideal conditions, the machine will accept a can, shudder violently, and turn a hornet into a bright and shiny nickel. More often, however, the machine will curse and spit out the can and make the hornet good and angry. You see, the machine is full of lasers and mirrors that tell it to only accept cans and bottles that were purchased at this particular grocery store. Even then, lasers and mirrors aren’t all that bright, and will often reject cans who’ve suffered abuse and neglect. Also, perfecly valid specimens (like Squirt) that aren’t popular enough to cause any huge amount of public outcry, will also be rejected.

Long story short, wrestling nickels out of these machines is a hot, sticky, smelly, frustrating experience. What we have here is an ingenius infrastructure for involuntary taxation. The method for taking your money for the deposit is devilishly efficient, well-developed and foolproof. You go to the grocery store, you buy some Dr Pepper, the clerk scans the Dr Pepper, the scanner adds the deposit amount to your bill, and unless you want a free ride in a cop car, you don’t choke the clerk to death and you pay the damn deposit.

However, the method for returning your deposit is a horrid experience, lousy at best, wrought with hornets and sticky floors and a strange-smelling mix of stale beer, Coke residue and B.O. It’s like going to the state fair, only without mini donuts and farm machinery, or like going to the movies, only more expensive. All it takes is one double-thick leaf bag to spring a leak in your car and cover everything in sludge, to convince you this is no way to earn a buck.

Now, I like recycling. I love recycling. I grew up doing it curbside, and it makes me feel really good in that social justice kinda way. What I don’t like is being fined for not recycling in the sticky, miserable, financially mandated way. I’ve often pondered the alternatives, such as cupping my hands underneath the fountain drink station, or bringing in my own cloth grocery bag and filling it up just the same.

I’m all about closing the loop on recycling. Unfortunately, in this instance my capacity for rage is a fusion reaction that needs to find an outlet, lest it spiral out of control and destroy the entire closed system along with it. Nay, I’ve found that the best emotional outlet here is to participate in an unthinkable method, an approach that Erik and I formulated during our time at Lava House:

I take the can. This precious, five-cent can.

I crush the can.

I take a deep breath.

I throw the can in the trash. Do you hear me? The trash.

I exhale. And I feel so much better.

Augh. This is gonna be quick and barely proofed. Tomorrow I’ve got an über early wake-up call for snowboarding, and today I spent the entire day building birthday presents. Since everything in this damn world is now computer-centric, from making presents to doing taxes to paying bills to getting a bag of chips, my wrists are killing me. My lower right arm is deliciously numb and tingly.

It’s going to be a long and miserable life of pain and poverty if I can’t find a way to get this fixed. What’s more, I’m totally over this dorm-room lifestyle. In explaining what I mean I think I’ll go ahead and invent a new phrase, which is “That’s so dorm room.” We’ll file it right under David’s “Those things look so price point.”

“Dorm Room” is the lifestyle in which you have one room for everything. “Studio” is a more respectful way to say the same thing, but I’m so far beyond respect at this point. I’m sick and tired of having one room that serves as bedroom, office, den, entertainment center, walk-in closet, gear closet and basement. Just yesterday this room was fairly clean, but after a day’s worth of arts and crafts it’s now completely trashed. I could clean up, but the same thing will happen again when I get back from snowboarding. Or running. Or hiking or kiting or biking or camping.

I’m far too O.C. to be constantly confronted by this mess, and it’s not like I can just leave, shut the door and go do something else. Do something else, eh? Like what? Taxes? I do that here. Write? I do that here. Read? Work? Listen to music? Balance my checkbook? Chat with friends? All here. Go to bed? I spin around 180 degrees and move six inches.

None of the things I need to do get me out of this one freakin’ room, and sometimes it’s enough to make me want to open my veins to the heavens. What’s more, unless someone wants to rent me a four bedroom house for $500 a month, or offer me a drastically increased paycheck (doing work that I can do without further ruining my hands, of course), I won’t be moving out of the dorms any time soon.

Pretty soon it’ll all get flipped topsy-turvey, and I’m sure I can bear with it a month longer. Still, it’s one of the things that, at my darkest moments, makes me pray for wildfires. It would suck if I suddenly lost everything in this dorm room to an uncontrollable blaze. The path would certainly be one of hardship as I struggled to piece back together the life I had lived. In that scenario, I would pray for a shred of the order that I am enjoying now.

Yeah. A wildfire would suck. But it would be a different kind of suck.

I now have in my hands a 24oz can of Rockstar. Have you seen these things? They’re obscenely huge. Ginormous. Rockstar size? These cans are pornstar size. They look like they eat Red Bulls for breakfast. Chicken-fried Red Bull. A co-worker of mine has a serious Rockstar habit, and he’ll go through at least one 24oz can a day.

“Geez, an entire can before going to bed? Isn’t that a bit much?”

“Nah. It’s just sugar and caffeine. It’s not like it’s gonna give me a hangover or anything.”

“Right. The Rockstar hangover? It’s called type 2 diabetes.”

I’m starting to get excited for the summer, what with Bro Forms and other mad gear hook-ups comin’ through the pipeline. I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to rig up my canoe with a 12 meter kite, so on windy days I don’t need to work at all. I take off for Minnesota in little over a month, but before I leave I’m going to retrofit both my kite bars with a fifth line system.

The fifth line will go a long ways in preventing death and dismemberment, and to those who are not familiar with kiteboarding, nothing sounds more pathetic than split skulls and broken ribs and dislocated shoulders at the hands of a kite. Beyond kiteboarders, I think Pakistanis are the only people who can identify with the serious dangers associated with kite flying.

But yeah. Summer is coming, and it’s time again to roll this mess 1,600 miles across the country. A week ago I was stressing out that I have no plan, concrete or vaporous, for what I’m doing beyond August. I’m totally over that now, though. There is so much to see and experience between now and then, that there really isn’t any sense in trying to figure out what to do with that time. Might as well make the best of the time I have. Live in the now. Which is not to suggest it’s time that we smear ourselves down with blood and bay at the moon, but it’s high-time to do away with this awful fretting thing.

You live, you fret, you die. You very well might die before a lot of the stuff you’re fretting about even happens. Sometimes I feel like I’m expected, right now, right now at this point and time in my life, to Finally and Ultimately come up with whatever it is I plan on doing for the Rest Of My Life™. I feel like others are waiting anxiously for that shoe to drop, and for me to pull myself together and settle.

But settling is just that. Settling. It’s resolve and commitment, commitment to circumstances that you are finally satisfied with, circumstances that you are willing to commit to with all of your remaining breath.

I feel like I’m still growing out of control, that I have yet to meet my match, that I’m intended for great and amazing things that remain hidden, but are close enough to make my skin tingle. Right now I honestly don’t know what these things are, which is why I’m still firing on all cylinders in so many different directions. At some point these things will coalesce out of the fog and I will see them, plain as day. Maybe it’s something huge, like competing with Luke for world domination and such, but maybe it’s small, like running a summer camp.

I’m open to either possibility, as well as thousands of others, but that’s as strong as the pressure gets at this point. Open. Three months out, I don’t feel anything tugging me in a particular direction. I can’t explain it any other way than that. It’s clearly intuitive. That far out, the tracks disappear into darkness. I extend logic and rationality into the void in an attempt to give it more definition, but the tools feel clumsy and inept, altogether useless for gaining insight.

And so, I’m done. I’m packing for Minnesota, I’m scheduling my wilderness training courses and preparing my gear lists, but I’m done thinking about September. Instead, I’m going to dig my heels into April and go snowboarding this weekend. September will arrive in its own time, and when it gets here it will know what to do.

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.