Weblog

There’s no other way I can explain it. The cat sounds like it’s popping. In any other case this would be cause for celebration, but this week my landlady threw down all my rent money and bought herself a ticket on a cruise ship, and I’m in charge of watching the cat. And the chickens. And the furnace. One of these takes absolute priority even if all the others should fail.

I actually kinda sorta like this cat, which for me is saying a lot. Cats and I don’t get along. Well, I shouldn’t say that. We actually get along just fine. I despise them, they hate me, and we live our lives in a symbiosis of mutual derision.

However, I would dare say that this cat is different. I feed it. It likes that. It rubs against my legs after I feed it, or before I feed it, or while I’m feeding it. It claws at my chair when I’m sitting at the dining room table. When I scratch at its belly I can make it collapse in a fat heap of cat. It’s never hissed at me, it’s never tried to bite me, and beyond the dining room chairs it’s never clawed at me. And this thing has claws, believe me. I’m totally jealous of them.

This cat and I, we have conversations. When I’m eating (and after I’ve shooed it down from the chair) it’ll go to the door and meow. And meow a lot. Like, totally insistent “if you don’t get up right now I’m going to explode and make a mess of everything” meowing. See this, this is a game we play.

“Meow.”

“You don’t need to go outside.”

“Meow.”

“You are so bothering me.”

“Meow.”

“And you so don’t care.”

“Meow.”

“Watch. I’m going to get up and walk towards the door, and you’re just going to walk away.”

“Meow.”

“But not until I finish my toast.”

Usually the cat doesn’t want to go outside, and just wants to be a pain in the ass and make noise for no reason. In this way the cat has figured out the nature of human relationships. Sometimes (rarely, but it’s been known to happen) the cat really does want to go outside. Sometimes, I’m not eating and I’m in a bit better humor. This results in an altogether different conversation.

“Do you want to go outside?”

“Meow.”

Wanna go outside and eat birds?”

“Meow.”

Okay. Go outside eat birds!”

I’m almost embarrassed by how much I talk to this cat, but the nice thing is it doesn’t talk back. Much.

Cold, spitting rain. Forty degrees. Wind that knocks fist-sized pinecones on me as I drive up the hill. It reminded me that I haven’t seen rain since my first days in Baja.

Despite the weather, today was the best I’ve felt in a good two weeks. I went to the doctor a few days ago and learned that I have an upper-respiratory infection, so now I’m on a delicious cocktail of antibiotics to shoo that puppy aside. I seem to be seeing a lot of doctors, lately… leg wounds, head wounds, repetitive stress wounds, chest wounds… I wish my body would just chill out for five seconds.

I always know when I’m starting to feel better, because I start muttering to myself more often. I make up word games and giggle at jokes only I understand. I repeatedly say words like sashay. I dance up the stairs. I grab my belt and hold spontaneous ho-downs. I make fun of the avacadoes at the grocer.

Really, nothing else significant to report. And I’m okay with that, for once. We’ve pushed our summit attempt for Hood out to next weekend, so hopefully the weather will clear up by then. I have my new camera and it’s lovely.

Jennifer is going to start writing more for the rest of us. I am excited. We should make a drinking game out of it. It will go like this:

1. Every time she cries, you take a shot.

2. Every time she hyperventilates, you finish your drink.

Remember Peter? Of course ya’ll remember Peter. Well, Peter is getting married in May. His fianceé is fluent in l33t, and that is enough to sell me on the deal. Even though they are both hardcore libertarians, they still argue all the time. This is for the best. I couldn’t imagine Peter without battleships.

Have a lovely, er, Thursday.

Well, we postponed our trip up Mount Hood. I’ve been hacking and weezing all weekend, fighting off the Hood River Plague, which has since reached legendary status. I’m still waiting for them to send in the CDC and quarantine the town, close down I-84, and pitch a couple napalm missions just for good measure.

We’ve always been told that the Air Force tests bombing runs against the Hood River Toll-Bridge because it’s been outfitted with sensors and makes a great practice target. Now we know that they run these missions just in case an outbreak like this happens, and they need to seal off the town in a smoking crater.

I say if they’re gonna do it, they’d better hurry up. Do it before I file my taxes. Hell if I’m gonna take the time to give the government money if I’m gonna be vaporized in the next week.

The doctor said I have a broken funny bone. Seriously. After two years of building websites, and four years of college, and umpteen years of playing video games, I’ve toasted my ulnar nerve. The nerve runs close to the surface at your elbow, fits in a little groove right there, so when you bump it you get a particularly exhilarating feeling in your arm.

Well, even if you try to do everything right, and you take frequent breaks and you stretch your joints and flex your muscles and don’t rest your wrists on the desk and avoid carpel tunnel, you can still suffer from an irritated ulnar nerve. It’s your typical repetitive stress injury, which turns the means of production for the 21st century into your personal gambit of pain. Such joy.

That being said, we still pretend to be surprised when we hear that the human body wasn’t built to hold the same position for eight or nine or twelve hours a day. And if you’re the poor guy who works at Sprint, which sometimes enacts mandatory twelve-hour work days, your body goes to hell in a hurry.

And sometimes, even though the company makes a suspiciously huge effort to improve the ergonomics of your workspace and allow you to work twelve-hour days, your body still can’t handle it. You are still in pain and visit the doctor again and again. Meanwhile, the company keeps fixing your workspace, as though they have something great and horrible to prove, until all alternatives are exhausted. Finally, the company agrees to cut back your work hours, and you never need to visit the doctor again.

To be sure, that’s not me. I am willing and able to cut back my hours, and I’ve already felt an improvement in my condition after doing so. And really, that’s about all I can do. Surgery is rarely considered for ulnar nerve complications. You can’t immobilize a nerve with a wristguard, and you can’t stretch it with exercise. What’s more, anything I do to my ulnar nerve will do nothing to improve the tendonitis I’m developing in my double-clicking finger. You see, this thing just keeps getting better and better.

When it comes down to it, the only solutions are moderation and lifestyle change. Fortunately for us, these are the two solutions that I am most willing to embrace. I would be overjoyed if I could find a profession that minimizes my time in front of the computer. I prefer tactile work. I prefer contact with people over contact with microchips. I’d rather read a book than read a website. I’d rather climb a mountain than play Warcraft.

Irregardless, my lifestyle will be kicked off its heals in two months. I’m trying to figure out what I’ll be doing in six, but it’s difficult to plan anything with such a huge gap of experience between now and then. Perhaps after a summer in the woods I’ll be more than happy to curl up with Grand Theft Auto after a long day of staring at screens and writing code.

Maybe the geek inside needs the meathead, just as much as the meathead needs the geek. Maybe. I wouldn’t bet on it. But maybe.

For the last few weeks our furnace has never been starved for fuel. Hood River has been enjoying its own personal plague, hanging around town like an invisible fog. Its presence makes your skin tingle, like a demon visiting from another astral plane.

And now I am fighting off my own personal case of the Hood River Plague. I caught it a few weeks ago right before my trip to Baja, got over it in Mexico, and returned to town just in time to catch the latest mutation. This thing is wonderful. My brain is slow-roasting in fever while my body is wracked with chills. I took a hot shower the other night, an extremely hot shower, and yet I couldn’t stop shivering.

Nothing ruins your enjoyment of the company of your fellow man quite like being sick in a small town. You know that one of these miscreants got you sick. You know that it’s probably someone you see every day, whether it was someone at work, or the girl at the pizza parlor, or the FexEx guy. Maybe the UPS guy gave it to the FedEx guy as an act of spite, and the FedEx guy gave it to you when he dropped off your new camera. Or maybe he gave it to you at work. Or at the pizza parlor.

Hmm. You seem to see a lot of the FedEx guy. What are you up to? You need to start hanging out at the coffee shop more often.

Whoever it was that got you sick, you probably know them, they probably know you, and you feel affronted that they had the nerve to pass on the misery to you. Share and share alike, certainly, but this is ridiculous.

What’s more, the world becomes instantly unbearable. The floor is too hard. Footsteps are too loud. The air makes your skin itch. Everything is irritating, but nothing is more irritating than the people who aren’t sick. I made a foray out to the grocery store to buy a fifty gallon drum of orange juice and was disgusted by what people were doing. A couple in front of me was walking too slow. A guy was buying 36 eggs. Another couple was making out in the ketchup aisle.

For whatever reason, I found these acts inexcusable in my fever-addled state. It makes no sense rationally, but illness and rationality are mutually exclusive. All I want is a clear line from wherever I happen to be standing to wherever the orange juice is. If there are things in my way, whether they be people or aisles or locked doors, they will pay the price of my fury.

The fever gives me powers like you wouldn’t imagine. Have you ever heard of balefire? Do you know how balefire works? Get between me and my orange juice, and you will know it firsthand.

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.

Geez the house is making an awful racket. My roommate snores. No, I take that back. My roommate doesn’t snore, so much as his throat simulates earthquakes. Tonight the windows are shuddering. The cat is pitching a fit over something or another, annoyed that he’s inside or outside or fat or not fat enough or something. To me, cats have two moods: living and other. Our furnace is moaning and groaning, demanding that we shovel more plague-ridden bodies into it.

I had a point but I lost it. Hey, it’s a new month! My search referrer strings for the day include such gems as “getting stitches taken out”, “grad school sucks”, “make your own nes cartridge”, “llama omni parts”, “kiteboarding in eden prairie”, and “take this job and shove it literally”. It’s amazing how closely those reflect real life. With the exception of llama omni parts. My iPod Shuffle shipped today, but the llama omni parts are back-ordered until April.

I like to think of search referrers as the magic eight-ball of the oughts. Sometime I may set aside a week and live in whatever direction the search referrers push me. Actually, that may not be far from what actually happens, now, what with quantum entanglement and everything.

I think I need to go lie down.

Somewhere along the line, something in our trans-dimensional high-efficiency washing machine went horribly awry and ruined two of my favorite shirts. Though they were in the washer, I’ve Been to Duluth and Eden Prairie were gladly spared, but two other shirts emerged with horrible brown stains.

One was a cream-colored polyester shirt that I picked up at Ragstock many years ago, that went wonderfully with my Lucky Red Pants (note: pants have yet to be proven lucky). I remember that I wore ’em when a bunch of us camp counselors swarmed Valleyfair in ’02. The other shirt was a Hawaiian number featuring some cool Tiki gods, that I picked up at Pacific Sunwear during my Pamplemousse days back in ’98.

I suppose seven years out of one shirt isn’t a bad run, all things considered, but I’m still not happy. I’m a small guy. It’s tough finding clothes that fit. I get lost in the cushions.

I don’t know what’s up. I still haven’t gotten back in the groove since returning from Baja, and I’m still feeling pretty spaced out and miserable. I have no excuse for this. The place where I live is beautiful. I enjoy my job and love my co-workers, and I am in constant proximity with some of the coolest gear on the planet. I finished reading Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, and am close to finishing Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos. To read again is nice. I should consider doing it again.

I am able to pay the bills without needing to eat Cup o’ Noodles and Spam. I’ve gone for a two-mile run every day for the past week, and even today’s rain failed to curb my enthusiasm. The airline found my case of CDs that I left on the airplane in Las Vegas and mailed them back, reuniting me with such favorites as Primus, Love Cars, My Morning Jacket, Guster, Modest Mouse and Weezer. My iPod Shuffle is supposed to ship within the week. Apple lowered the price on the iPod Mini. My parents mailed me a copy of Napoleon Dynamite for Valentine’s Day, and it’s every bit as genius as I remember it.

I am in the market for a new digital camera. I got around to disemboweling my old camera, and by the looks of things I am certain that it will not be going back together again. For those who have never seen the insides of a digital camera, there’s only one thing you need to know: there’s a lot of it.

I really don’t know what my deal is. I’m in a funk for no good reason. I feel that the walls in my 9′ by 11′ bedroom are closing in; that I’m being chewed away on all sides. On Saturday I crossed over into Washington and drove to the general store in Trout Lake to buy a Henry Weinhard’s Orange Cream Soda. It’s a wonderful drink that one can purchase in any gas station in Hood River, but I needed the excuse to get out and think.

And think I did. I’ll be in Hood River for two more months, and in May I pack it all up to move back to Minnesota. I’ll spend a week in Minneapolis for a wilderness lifeguarding class, and then it’s north to the BWCA for a week of wilderness first responder training, followed by a week of camp orientation mixed with a canoe expedition into the wilds. And then I begin my summer guiding canoe trips, followed by an autumn of ambiguity.

And it was on that ambiguity I pondered, while basking in the weak afternoon sun on the front porch of the Trout Lake general store. I would swirl my orange cream soda in its bottle while listening to a group of boys build a wooden bench, and think of the path ahead. There’s a decision I need to make, and it’s not an easy one. It carries with it many facets, decisions within decisions, each one harboring its own risks and concessions.

Whatever choice I make, it will be insane to most and sensible to few. Then again, that’s nothing new. Nothing new at all.