run on sentence

...and you know i just spent the last hour looking through your photographs, right, and the thing that i saw that for whatever reason immediately struck me was that we both have photographs of jeff and betsy making out which is creepy, like for some reason watching that couple kiss makes us both want to grab our cameras...

beer tube

i don't think this is an isolated incident. in central pennsylvania, at a certain bowling alley, which shall not be named (mostly because i do not remember the name and also because dan will tell me in the comments section), they sell beer in a tube. draft beer in a clear plastic tube with a little spigot on the bottom. it makes me so happy to know that there is someone out there who heeded america's call for taller, narrower beer dispensers. 

now i'm reading this book called deep economy about how maybe we shouldn't measure the success of our societies by their economic growth, because this focus on growth results in the overproduction of goods that a) use resources that can be better applied and b) don't make our lives any better. bill mckibben is the author and i agree with him in theory, right, but something tells me that he would not support the production of beer tubes and i am not sure i could bear to return to a world where beer in bowling alleys is served only in pitchers. 

(but wait, oh, i just had a revelation! isn't a pitcher just stouter kind of tube? and a cup too? oh jason and dave at beertubes.com, what do you take me for?)

the tomatoes are green

do you know when you have a garden and then all of a sudden it is like winter out and you realize that your tomatoes will never ripen and you get kinda sad about it and wonder whether there is something that you can do with them besides fry them? well, i know about that feeling, so i brainstormed and researched and came up with this recipe that i enjoy:

nate's dan quayle green tomatoe sauce:

5-6 lbs. green tomatoes

1 cup white wine

1/4 cup olive oil

3-4 tbsp. (non-iodized) salt

1 tbsp. cane sugar (to cut the tartness)

5 large cloves garlic

handful fresh oregano and thyme

3-4 tbsp. whole green peppercorns

5 bay leaves

core the tomatoes and slice them into quarters, put them in a large pot with the wine and oil and salt and set to simmer for 30 minutes. 

dice the garlic and fresh herbs and add them along with the remaining ingredients to the pot and allow to simmer for 1-2 hours.

after simmering the sauce, i mashed the tomato chunks with a large wire whisk. it was tedious and resulted in a chunkier sauce (which i like anyway), but a food processor would be a better option for a smoother sauce.

serve or freeze! (i plan on serving the sauce on squid ink pasta with romano cheese and garnished abundantly with fresh minced parsley. black and green sounds like an intriguing combination.)

have tres leches - will travel

despite a crippling inability to absorb other languages, i was fortunately able to piece together that tres leches means three milks. and milks is what i want to talk to you about today.

now i like desserts probably more than you do, and my philosophy with regard to them tends toward moderation on the consumption side and not on the preparation side. (consumption-side dessertonomics?)(and i am sorry to joke about consumption, tuberculosis is no laughing matter. it is a coughing matter.) 

anyway, i decided to make tres leches for gallagher's taco party. here are things you might want to take into consideration if you find yourself in a similar situation:

1) if you ever think you'll want to eat tres leches in the future, don't prepare it. don't even look at a recipe. that is too much milks.

2) if you are planning on riding your bicycle to the party, ha. you didn't think that through very well, did you?

3) oh yeah? you have a car? you gonna swallow your environmentalist pride and drive it to the party? cool. now your cake has turned into a milk wave pool. 

next time i'm bringing some fucking flan.

for your listening pleasure

i made this song about working on a tv show.

i can't make music and it is a whole bunch of nonsense. enjoy!

choose my career!

so look, i'm a 27 year old unmarried white male with a b.a. from an elite liberal arts college that nobody has heard of. i live in portland, oregon. i am interested in processes.

in december i will turn 28 and i think i should have a career. my friends seem to be heading towards careers. like benny will be a professor and arijit will be, um, a professor too. or work in a non-profit. or maybe for a government agency. dan will be the host of a japanese game show. elspeth will be a production designer. i feel like other people are focusing their interests and mine just keep expanding. for instance: yeah, so i want to fix that moped up and oh, i wonder if my landlord will let me have chickens. where can i take a bicycle frame building class? 

so i am going to put this to a vote, here are my options as i see them:

1) lawyer (look dad, i put this one first.)

2) artist (look dad, i put this one second.)

3) elected official

4) guy who calls you periodically and asks for work

5) restauranteur (like i know anything about that)

6) ___________

post your compelling arguments in the comments section.

(extra credit: which of those options am i at the moment?)

(double extra credit: if you choose artist, what kind of artist should i be?)

(did you ever read those choose your own adventure books? this is more like a choose that guy's adventure book. that guy being me. the book being a blog. adventure being the most mundane bullshit ever. look, i tried to make this interesting. i do this all for you, all of this! what more do you want from me? oh quit my excruciatingly self-aware sniveling? never!)

i love gravy

i just invented this vegetarian gravy, or anyway, i made it.

1/2 lb. chantrelle mushrooms

2 tbsp. butter

saute the mushrooms in the butter. dice two of the cooked mushrooms and put them back in the pan with the leftover butter.  (set the rest aside. yum, chantrelles). 

with the heat on medium, add to the pan:

1 oz. bragg's liquid aminos

7 oz. water

1 tbsp. maple syrup

1 tbsp. cider vinegar

1 bay leaf

sprinkle in slowly (mixing vigorously to avoid clumping):

2 tbsp. flour

season with:

dash oregano

dash thyme

dash rosemary

oh man!

i poured it on garlic mashed potatoes served on steamed brussel sprout greens. garnished with arugula flowers.

running in nyc

when i run in new york city, i can't run as far as when i run elsewhere and i've come to realize that it maybe has nothing to do with the distance i'm going, right, but more to do with the amount of humanity that i absorb in that distance. once i hit my limit i just have to stop.

scattershot

sometimes i wonder what the last item i cut or copied was so i press "open-apple v" to find out. lots of times it is just an address or an incomplete thought. tonight it was this image, which i like.

also, you might be interested to know that i write all my blog posts in the body of an email. if i don't finish them i send them to myself. i am not sure why i started doing it that way, but now that you know that, can you tell?

why does the english language have such a specific term for lighting oneself on fire that is not "lighting oneself on fire"?

francis

(boy, it's been a while, readership, so much has happened since last we met.)

(so i guess i am a little late in writing this and i'm not sure how crisply the details of the following events will be remembered, partly as a result of the nature of the events themselves and partly because there have been too many stimuli in my life recently and my detail-remembering dial is set on "economy". in the case of details which are not crisply remembered, they will be completely fabricated.)

dan poppy got married and so did angie salisbury. on the same day no less! thankfully they spared all of their friends the agony of choosing whose wedding to attend by marrying each other. me and nick and seth were the groomsmen, which is the only word i can think of that has the consonants "msm" in a row. so we arranged the bachelor party. 

it was a secret and obviously the first thing to take into consideration when you're arranging a secret bachelor party is to try to make the groom think you are going to make him do something like go to the penn national horse track and al's diamond cabaret in reading, pa. it was not hard to convince dan that we were going to do something super lazy and ironic to honor him. well within the realm of possibility.

the second thing to do is to pick the activities for the weekend. to do this, we had to ask ourselves what does dan love? if you said whiskey, you're right. also long walks on majestic white sand beaches? wild ponies? yep, again. um, 11 dudes in a van with two gallons of chili? well, he likes 6 of the dudes, but he definitely loves both gallons of chili. 

number three is invite people that you think the groom would invite. this is hard, because a) you kind of have to hierarchically rank your friend's friends and also it is easy to project your own thoughts about your mutual friends onto that hierarchy. and b) you will forget people and there will be people on the bubble and some people who can't come. 

the fourth order of business is to contact the friend's boss and arrange to kidnap them from work. dan's boss is josh and he was an excellent accomplice.

lastly, most of the details should be nebulous until the very last minute, because things are way more interesting when they are frantically thrown together at the last minute. bring a whiffle ball and bat, though. 

so we decided on assateague island (off the coast of maryland) as our destination. it is this long amazing barrier island of sand beaches with wild ponies. we were hoping to get 6-8 people, so we invited twelve. eleven accepted. we rented a 12-person van and we bought two gallons of chili from ben's chili bowl for $80. extra for the onions. we got food that would satisfy all of the dietary requirements of the group, because we were a very cosmopolitan lot. 6 liters of whiskey seemed adequate. 

there were some near disasters. marson was going to drive back to new york after delivering water and s'mores materials to the camp. apparently our site was full, and the rangers told a mightily disgruntled marson that he couldn't stay with us. now walking along the beach to meet him after playing some whiskey whiffle ball, i had stumbled upon a fairly large and brightly colored toy boat. it was probably 2 feet long. so it was while holding this treasure that i was told that "this was not one of nate's best ideas", before he turned on his heels and trudged off along the beach. we had given marson vague words of encouragement about coming back out to the site. we promised to at least find him a ride back to the parking lot. no one thought we were going to see him later.

so it was with heavy hearts and a toy boat that we were making our way along the beach back to our site, me and dan and jesse. we played rock paper scissors to decide who was going to talk to the first car to come our way. dan lost. we made him do it even though it was his party; fair is fair. so dan convinced this carload of two couples, either drunk with the satisfaction of a relaxing and fruitful day fishing, or more likely keystone light, to pick brian up where he was walking, 300 yards down the beach. he said something like "our friend really needs a ride up to the ranger station, you guys look pretty full, but is there any chance you could pick him up?" 

"yeah, we're good people"

"oh thanks, i really appre..."

 then the driver's eyes got real wide, like cartoon wide. "TUGGY! HE FOUND TUGGY!" this seemed about right, like it was about time in the bachelor party for the carload of intoxicated marylanders who were about to pick up our sullen friend (so that he could drive four hours home) to grow startlingly excited over a molded plastic tugboat that they had apparently lost and had sailed a few hundred yards down the beach to the point where i had found it washed up next to some horseshoe crabs of almost equal size. one question about the situation and our arrangements comes immediately to mind, and it has to do with age and childrens' toys and mental states and good ideas, but i don't know the answer either, so i won't even ask it. so marson would at least get a ride to the ranger's station.

but he came back. and we had a fire on the beach. and macaroni and cheese (and gluten-free macaroni and cheese) and hot dogs (and not-dogs) and whiskey (and scotch and rye and bourbon). 

(so now for the moral right, 'cause you knew i was gonna do it.) as men we aren't all that accustomed to expressing our love for one another. the fact that 11 people each took the time to travel many hours (from dc and new york, pittsburgh and harrisburg, north carolina and oregon) speaks volumes about how much dan's friends care about him. the fact that everything that almost went wrong didn't and that everything that seemed like a good idea was goes to show that some deity up there knows he deserves it. and i for one am starting to think that it is tuggy...

david brooks

dear david brooks,

your recent article "high-five nation" was just the worst. let me explain why.

you say that "[on v-j day] the allies had...completed one of the noblest military victories in the history of humanity. and yet there was no chest-beating." maybe there was no exuberance on v-j day because we exploded and incinerated hundreds of thousands of civilians in japan. maybe people recognized the frightening future implications of our use of nuclear weapons. maybe it wasn't because those were more modest times.

you call "individual expressionism" a capitalistic routine. you are wrong. sure, aspects of it are frequently co-opted by corporate interests, but there are vital movements (do-it-yourselfers, backyard farmers, much of the bicycle culture, to name a few that come immediately to mind) whose individually expressive members are driven not by money, but by intellectual curiosity and desire for self-sufficiency and sustainability. 

you use michael jordan's basketball hall of fame induction speech as an example of immodesty. can't m.j. allow himself a little self congratulation for the simple reason that he is the greatest basketball player to have ever lived? and because he was being inducted into the basketball hall of fame? there is nothing wrong with him reflecting publicly a little bit on his success in front of people who appreciate his accomplishments. he is frequently quoted as saying that his predecessors made his success possible. is the forced aw-shucksism prevalent among athletes today better than a little honest discussion? do you really think michael jordan is trying to bolster his resume at this stage in the game? shit.

later, you essentially compare the actions of contemporary professional athletes and entertainers, people who are paid to get attention, to those of soldiers and average americans at the end of a brutal two-front war; a war in which we unleashed the most fearsome human-made device ever devised on a civilian population. do you really think that our soldiers today would unabashedly celebrate the use of nuclear weapons on our enemies? do you even think that terrell owens would pretend to pull down his pants and moon afganistan or that dikembe mutombo would wag his finger at iraq if we obliterated their major metropolitan areas? 

you might remember babe ruth's called shot in 1932, which is possibly one of the cockiest gestures of all time. not just calling the shot, but the mocking and grandstanding the accompanied his trot around the bases. if there wasn't a precedent for public celebrations of personal accomplishments before, that certainly set it. 

an opinion column at the new york times? you can say anything you want to hundreds of thousands of intelligent people. don't fucking call me and my contemporaries immodest and self-indulgent and then back it up with illogical nonsense.

hood to coast

one time i asked my friend how you stop on a fixed gear bicycle without brakes in an emergency, right, because it seemed like the track skid took a second to initiate and he said "you just do". now that is an imperfect explanation and i ride with brakes because my gear ratio is, as rachel's friend pointed out, pretty stout. but i would like to borrow that explanation if i may to describe a recent experience i had that has nothing to do with bicycles.

so i ran in the hood to coast relay, which is a 197 mile road race on the back roads of oregon; teams have 12 people and each team member is responsible for running 3 legs, one every 8 hours or so. it is an intense experience for a number of reasons, 1) you don't have much of an opportunity to sleep, 2) you can't eat normally, because you're always about to run, and 3) unless you are a distance runner and 15+ miles don't bother you, running 5-7 miles every 8 hours is exhausting. 

now i was not out of shape, but it is true that i took a couple of weeks off from running before frantically trying to get some training in during the week leading up to the race. nevertheless, i ran my first leg, 6.4 miles, and felt pretty good. my second leg was 4.9 miles around 5am and i overexerted myself, running faster than i planned to (the result of some poor calculations of my proximity to the checkpoint.) 

by the last leg i was spent, my quads and calves were frozen solid and i had slept two hours in the rain and eaten only peanuts and raisins and bananas for the last 18 hours. my teammate flurry had given me some energy cubes, little caffeinated gelatinous bundles of carbohydrates (yeah, that's a natural product), of which i ate five to wash down my five ibuprofen. i was at the handoff point, waiting for my teammate to come in and i was thinking "my god, i don't know how i'm going to do this". 

and if this seems too self congratulatory or you think i am about to make myself out to be some sort of hero like robert redford in the natural (triumph in the face of adversity!), well then let me disabuse you of that idea. and if you don't want to read what amounts to a story about an overprivileged white kid going for a 5-mile jog, well then i don't blame you. i bet there is some show on mtv right now that will at least make a similar story entertaining with melodramatic dialogue, a lively soundtrack and fast cuts. 

well lindsey ran in to the checkpoint and sort of surprised me, i was so checked out. i went from daydreaming to running. the first few minutes i was so uncoordinated i felt like i had hooves (or maybe high-heels on, or maybe both like if the greek god pan were a cross dresser). whenever i passed anybody or someone passed me i thought "oh man, they feel like i feel; this is hard and they are doing this too." and eventually the physical exertion and discomfort were pressed backward in my mind, like they became more than i could focus on and i was just going. 

and so if someone asks me how you run a race like hood to coast, the only answer i would be comfortable giving them is "you just do". (and if you want to extrapolate my sentiment to mean "even when you think you can't, you can", then be my guest, just don't hold me responsible if things don't work out.)

the heat and dreams

so it turns out that my car doesn't have any air conditioning, but i already knew that. you didn't, because that is not generally a piece of information that present to people unprovoked. anyway, me and kathleen took a road trip of sorts down to san francisco and camped along the way in national park/forest/recreation area campgrounds, which are the best kind of campgrounds and i had this amazing vivid dream in our tent one night and i am going to tell you about it, but after i tell you about the heat.

red bluff, california is the fucking hottest place i have ever been. you see, we were visiting lassen volcano (which erupted may 19th and may 22nd, 1915) and we were at an elevation of over 8000' and it was hot up there (but not because it is a volcano, though that's awfully clever) and if i keep adding parenthetical asides to my sentences, i'll never get through this thought. ahem. as we drove west down toward red bluff (at 348' in elevation) the temperature, which is generally one of many components that make up what we call our experiences, began to rise. at about 97 i started to monitor the situation, because at 97 temperature became the only component of living that i was capable of paying attention to and here's one reason why: it became gradually apparent to me that my eyeballs were baking in their sockets. 

now i can tolerate physical discomfort generally well, but heat will be the death of me. so with that in mind, and the fact that there was no air conditioning, so our windows were open, picture this scene: one large bearded man of northern european ancestry and a fair freckled lady of irish descent were barreling down a northern california highway at 75 miles an hour with the windows wide open, unable to talk or listen to music for all the buffeting wind noise pulsing in our heads. the bearded man at the wheel was monitoring the thermometer with a sense of foreboding as it the numbers rose and rose. the only communication in the car was every couple of minutes when the man would yell "99...100...101..." over the constant throbbing of the wind. (oh, i think i should mention that the bearded man was me, because i don't want to talk in the third person anymore.) at 105, i started to notice that i didn't seem to be sweating. then i realized that that wasn't true at all, my backside was drenched and i seemed to be stuck to the leather car seat, but everywhere the hot wind hit me was bone dry. my sweat was evaporating before i could feel it. my eyes dried out if i kept them open for more than a second. at 107 we decided to take a picture of the dashboard, where the temperature readout was. if you're all like "that doesn't sound hot", then try sitting in a sauna for two hours. 

whenever one part of my body touched another part, there was an instant wetness. (and to steer this story toward the inappropriate, there are instances where that is desirable, but alas this wasn't one. and for the most part though, this drive wasn't hot and wet, just hot and dry.) when the thermometer topped out at 112, sitting in traffic in red bluff (and know that we were the only car with its windows open), i couldn't even bear the electrical attraction between my subatomic particles. i so desperately wanted a dark matter breeze to blow through my being (haha! what a convenient and ill-defined explanation for the real mass of the universe being so much greater than the observable mass. and also, if there was a dark matter breeze blowing through my body, and there might have been, it sure didn't help.) think of this too, we had been driving in that temperature for long enough that all of our water was 107.

but if you don't feel sympathetic to our plight, well then you're right. there was so much good on the trip, that having to reconstitute our eyeballs was just an unpleasant aside. and anyway, san francisco was in the low-60s when we got there later that night.

now to shift gears completely to a dream i had while camping (and the dream i had last night that reminded me that i had the dream that i had while camping)...

look, i have this friend greg and we all lived on this farm, all of my friends and me. so greg fell for this chicken that lived on the farm, like followed it around all day. he named it grubwalker. and you know how chickens move, sometimes running and flapping and jumping all zig-zaggy, well greg would just shuffle along behind the chicken, to the exclusion of everything else. he wasn't even interested in human contact. he just loved grubwalker, he loved that chicken.

now this was a dream, right, so there was no narrative involved. i was just shown briefly this magical relationship between my friend and a chicken. i was sort of sad that greg didn't want to interact with humans anymore, but i was happy that he had found fulfillment (although it was slightly codependent). now i can see three separate aspects of the dream that relate to my life at the moment, the first is this youtube video i saw about a dog and an elephant who are best friends (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBtFTF2ii7U), the second is the fact that i have been entertaining the idea of raising some chickens in my backyard, and third is that my friends are getting married and i am happy for them, but there is also this realization (or maybe a misconception) that marriage will somehow change the dynamic of my relationship with them. 

i have no idea why it was greg who fell for the chicken, that part doesn't make any sense. (i would also say that greg probably eats more chickens than any of my other friends, so that adds another layer of strangeness to this dream. he is at least in the top three...) dreams are so awesome.

and last night i was a speed-skate cross racer, which, as far as i know is a sport that i just made up. it is like motocross or snowboard cross (boardercross, bro!), but on speed skates. bonnie blair eat your heart out (tony blair eat your heart out too). it takes place in an arena on this crazy topographical ice. it is totally nuts. i was decent, but not great. my dream centered on this race where i had my best lifetime finish, so that was encouraging. i think i got second or third, but there were some serious competitors. and anyway, don't let perfect be the enemy of the good.

(and who needs cohesion? who needs narrative or punctuation? this isn't a novel, this is a blog for crying out loud! you want a story, be my editor. sheesh.)

kfc double down sandwich

why do you mention this you ask? because the bread is replaced with fried chicken. then what is inside the sandwich you ask? bacon and cheese and special sauce. where can i get one you ask? only in rhode island and nebraska. have we finally figured out how to create food products with no redeeming nutritional value you ask? we figured that out a while ago. then what does this sandwich represent you ask? taken in conjunction with "my humps", the direction our political discourse has headed in this country, and the fascination with the sordid details of michael jackson's life (including the fact that his death was ruled a homicide), this sandwich represents the downfall of human civilization. it was a pretty good run though, wasn't it?

oh mythology

i don't want to assign any mystical powers to myself, and actually i have none, but there was an instance two weekends ago where i was exposed simultaneously to my past and a (the?) future and i was lucky in that i immediately recognized the difference. and it is a rare occasion to feel so privy, to feel as though you understand the choices you have and to understand why you are making decisions you are making. and if you're yearning for more specifics, well then i can't help you. (but you know it has to do with love, right? only love is capable of seeping into the otherwise neatly compartmentalized aspects of our lives). 

and i bring this up only because it is on my mind right now. there is a costume party tomorrow, the theme of which is gods and goddesses, and in determining which deity i wanted to emulate, i realized that i couldn't be anyone but janus (and oh, i just learned about him today!). the god of new beginnings. he has two faces, one looking to the past and one looking toward the future. 

and my future is this and not forever, but friday, a goddess will fall asleep with me and kiss me on both faces when i am waking up.

pause, sit with your breath or: from russia with love

the term "mouth-breather" is in the collective consciousness these days and the first time i ever heard it was in a woody allen stand-up routine, but it wasn't live. it was recorded and i was in a car with amy and jill and we were driving from garmisch-partenkirchen down to cinque terre, which is a fun thing to do if you ever find yourself in europe with amy and jill and a woody allen cd. and i don't think it is fair to call it a coincidence that the first time i have ever felt comfortable applying the label of mouth-breather to a person was when i was riding on a chinatown bus from new york to boston two fridays ago. it is not fair to call that a coincidence because one incident involved listening to woody allen in a car with two girls i like and the other incident involved sitting next to a loud russian on a chinatown bus and they are such unrelated incidents that they cannot be considered a coincidence.

now i'm sure you've ridden a chinatown bus. i like the lucky star, mostly because of the dragon wearing a backpack that adorns the sides. and also i like stopping at arby's where there always seem to be other lucky star busses parked letting people stretch out and get cheap beef sandwiches and use a bathroom that isn't quaking and braking and accelerating and decelerating and heaving you around. and it takes some figuring to determine which lucky star is the one you just got off of and which one would take you back to where you just came from if you got on it by accident.

so i was heading up to boston for mike's wedding and it was friday afternoon and i think everyone in new york was heading up to boston for mike's wedding, because the bus was full and so was the highway. it took six and a half hours. but i was waiting in line to board the bus behind this pretty girl and maybe she had tattoos somewhere, i don't know, but she was pretty. i thought to myself "this bus is going to be full, look at all these people in line" and also "i should sit next to this pretty girl and wouldn't that make the time on the bus go by faster?" so i didn't. i sat two rows behind her on the other side of the bus because maybe i would get both seats to myself if i looked gruff enough to scare people away. but the bus was full, like i knew it was going to be. so the last person on the bus was this behemoth of a russian man with a blackberry and a tight t-shirt and a baseball cap on and where else was he supposed to sit? 

so he plunked down beside me, all elbows and hanging over the armrest and he immediately launched into a heated discussion with another russian or maybe someone didn't speak russian, but who he wanted to bellow at regardless. he probably didn't need to use the phone, if the person on the other end was anywhere in connecticut i'm sure they could hear him if the wnd was blowing in the right direction and they tilted their head just so. as abruptly as the conversation started, ten minutes later it ended and by the time his hand, still grasping his phone descended to his lap, he was asleep. and he slept like he talked, bellicosely, but instead of some unseen recipient of his energies, the recipient was sitting exactly in my seat and shared all my fears and aspirations. in case that wasn't clear, the snoring mass of russian was piled onto me. his head was on my shoulder, bicep to my bicep, hand on my thigh.

"now this is interesting," i thought and "i can't believe we're only in cos cob."

we rode like that for a while and at least the air conditioning was on this time. then his phone rang and he launched into such another boisterous conversation that i almost forgot he had been asleep seconds before. ten minutes later, conversation over and i had my snoring russian blanket again. once his phone rang again i took the opportunity to get up and spread myself out under the pretenses of heading to the bathroom. not that i didn't have to pee, because i did, but mostly i wanted air around my body and not flesh. so i made it to the bathroom and shut the door and took some deep breaths (unadvisable) and got ready to start peeing and the driver decided to accelerate and switch lanes and brake, all in a span of three or four seconds. so i wedged myself in the tiny bathroom, elbows on walls, feet on the rim the toilet, anything i could do to keep from getting jostled and sending an errant stream trickling down my shorts and out under the door. but i couldn't bring myself to do it. i felt like some drunk in a cartoon, looking down at the bowl meandering it's way through my field of vision. finally, i looked at myself in the scratched up mirror, looked away, sighed and sat down on the toilet seat. i felt so defeated, sitting there peeing while connecticut heaved past me in fits and starts.

and stepped out of the bathroom, four or five minutes later  and made my way down the aisle. when i got to my row, the russian was dead asleep, hanging over the armrest, but i didn't need to wake him up. his phone rang...

me so hornets

oh, my parents like to keep the bushes in order so they periodically traipse about the yard with a hedge trimmer and some felco shears and that is how come magazines sometimes come take pictures of our yard and also politicians film campaign commercials there. i think it is great until i am supposed to take part in the trimming, then i find it unnecessary.

but so, there are casualties in every war, and this is a war story at the heart of it, you see because mom was out pruning the hedges and these crazy little fuckers decided that the pruning shears were too close to their nest. they are called white faced hornets and they don't buzz around so much as fly directly at the point on your body that is most sensitive and sting it over and over. so mom got stung, she threw down her implements and ran inside for the baking soda.

dad was swift in avenging his wife's attack, like a few hours later when i was trying to read some malcolm gladwell by the pool. he came out of the garage with some raid (which is a patented chemical product that kills stinging insects and makes dogs really curious. seriously.) and, never one to tempt fate, a broomstick. get ready to run, he told me as he steadied the broomstick like some don quixote, but with realer, if less intimidating enemies. right-oh, i responded. and "psssssssssssh..." the raid shot out as dad parried at the nest. and "psshhhhhh..." the raid immediately stopped coming out. dad looked at the can, looked up, threw the can down and started running. i leapt up from my lawn chair, threw malcolm to the grass and dove for the pool, fully clothed. i dove right past dad, as he yelled "owwww...shit!" running full tilt. i hid under the water for a few seconds to make sure the hornets passed me by and took the opportunity to scoop up my sunglasses from the bottom of the pool.

dad was inside with the baking soda. it feels like i got hit with a pan he said, looking at his wounded forearm.

i'm going to really let them have it. i'm going to wait until it is dark and they're all in their nest and i'm going to sneak up and let them have it, dad informed me.

hornets 2 - humans 0. 

at dusk, from the kitchen i saw dad in the mudroom putting raincoats on and snowpants on. muck boots. canvas hats. ski gloves. not only was he putting them on, he was trying all the options out to see what materials might be best at thwarting a stinger. finally he approached me like some wacked-out fisherman, covered head-to-toe in the most water-repellent, insulated garb he could muster and asked me to pull his mosquito net over his head. i obliged, making sure the elastic around the neckline had no slack that would allow those crazy insects any point of entry into dad's soft parts. he was ready to fight anything. 

remember that dude in jurassic park who was trying to steal the fucking embryos or dna or whatever and he's all driving in the rain storm and his car slides off the road and he's trying to winch it back up and this dinosaur starts hissing at him and spits in his eyes and then they all eat him (his name was dennis nedry)? wouldn't have happened to dad. he was impervious. 

in fact, the final battle was tame, dad employed the scorched earth policy. he razed that nest. the little fuckers never stood a chance. serves them right for living in our cuboid bushes.

new clothes, no emperor

so i will start first things first and then move to third things second before skipping my way gleefully back to the second thing last. 

just kidding.

god it was hot back a couple of weeks ago and i decided i needed something to wear to mike's wedding, so i was walking purposefully around downtown with my dad during market days in concord. (market days is when all the stores on main street put all their goods on the sidewalk for three or four days and there are bison burgers and real new hampshire maple syrup and dunking booths.) but there is this place on main street called "britches of concord" and they sell sort of middle-aged northeastern men's clothing, which, incidentally, was pretty much exactly what i was looking for. you see... nevermind. i wanted a white blazer. whatever.

so i was in this store and i was smiling at the owner, ray and asking him how to put on an ascot and if he had any white blazers and i don't think he took me very seriously and i was on the way out the door when i was like "that is a white blazer, right there on that mannequin". do you know why i was like that? because it was true. but it was a full suit. and ray told me that if it was my size he would give me 20% off so i went in the dressing room to try on the pants to see how much they needed to be taken in. 

i undid my belt and my pants button and my shorts dropped to the floor, first of all, earlier, my dad and ray had gotten a big chuckle out of my cutoff shorts, but i can't remember why. anyway, my shorts pooled at my ankles and i realized that i was naked as the day i was made. it was hot, you see, so i was underwearless. and about to try on white linen pants. i had to make a snap decision, do i beg off an tell dad and ray i don't have underwear on and that i'll come back, or do i waltz out of the dressing room in a pair of baggy white linen pants barely holding onto my hips and let some poor guy grab at my waistband to figure out the appropriate alterations...?

what do you think.

stones

i have a few stories to relate in the next couple days and we can smile together when we read them, but i have to write them first and so in lieu of writing them and posting them tonight i offer this...

it is a dangerous game and time consuming game to try and determine your five favorite rolling stones songs. first you have to ask yourself if you should take past returns into consideration. i say no. i say five favorite rolling stones songs at this moment. and is it ok to have multiple songs from the same album? sure, but it might offend your sense of symmetry. as of 2:45 am on monday, july 27th, 2009 my selections are: no expectations, shattered, miss you, country honk and monkey man.

and i am not sure if you can see the inner workings of my being based on those selections, but i don't think so. my inner being is mostly made from marshmallows and sun bears.

reflect

(and i heard greg telling matt costa about the reflection of the moon in the water and how the wind and ripples made the points of light rotate like a music box ballerina when you squinted your eyes and also how it moved like people through grand central station. and dylan and greg and i were sitting and watching it earlier and we were mesmerized together and we talked about how if we tried to explain it to the other folks at the campfire, it wouldn't make any sense. but my point is that our feelings are like that reflection in that the way our experiences effect us is unique to ourselves and sometimes our feelings intertwine with other people's feelings and we can communicate them with each other and relate, but without those shared experiences, it is impossible to convey our feelings completely. )

there's no i in spder

usually i can't tell spiders apart, like it is hard to positively identify them as individuals, but one came in my CSA share and i sort of developed a fondness for him because he had only five legs. four on one side and one on the other. so i brought him out to the compost bin because there are all these flies that live in there and spiders like flies as far as i know and i thought maybe i could help him out a little, because he was disadvantaged in the leg department.

but so a couple days later i was in the shower and who should appear on the wall above the tile, but the one spider in the world that i can positively identify. now how or why he made the trek 30 ft. from my compost bin to my bathroom is something that i can't begin to understand, but there he was, in the flesh (wait, do spiders have flesh?). i figured that he must have made that journey for a reason though, so i decided to let him be. but as i was showering he started repelling down a strand of whatever a spider's strand is made of, towards the tub and perilously close to the reflected spray of the shower and the river of water headed for the drain. now i know he didn't want to go down there, because there is no way he knew what terrible fate awaited him in the sewage system so i put my hand in his path and he climbed aboard and i placed him on the windowsill, above the tub. he was a little startled by this turn of events and he just sat there, trying to figure out how his scenery had been so rapidly altered. 

anyway, next morning i got in the shower and there he was, mister five-legs, waiting for me above the tiles. i turned on the water and hopped in the tub and we reenacted the same series of events as the day before. next day, same thing. so i was not surprised by my arachnid-accompaniment on the fourth day when i climbed into the shower and i was equally unsurprised when the steam animated him and he started wandering about.

now it is impossible to say what was driving that creature towards the stream of water tumbling down the drain and, if he wanted to be down there so badly, why he didn't just go investigate some time when i was not in the shower. but on the fourth day he either repelled faster or just leapt without bothering to secure his strand, or maybe i just wasn't really paying attention, but i noticed the blank spot on the wall where he had been hanging out and looked down in time to see him circle the drain once before succumbing to the whirlpool of wastewater.

it was sad to see him go, but his persistence paid off in the end and i'm sorry if that makes you sad. i have a hard time allotting too many emotions for creatures as small and transient as spiders, but i felt a tinge of sadness as i watched him disappear. 

and r.w. emerson said "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" and i'd add that sometimes we don't really want what we think we do.

(and i'm sorry for assigning a gender to the spider, but it made him a more sympathetic character and i don't really know how to ascertain a spider's gender anyway, so lay off. and it is too late now.)

looks can kill, or whatever

look, i understand that some people find me physically attractive and most of those people are my mom's friends who, every christmastime, tell me that i'm such a handsome man, and so i grew a beard and it became you're such a handsome man, why cover it up with a beard?

but my objection is this, and it has nothing to do with my difficulty accepting a compliment, or wait, maybe it does have something to do with that, but look, why praise someone for something they have no control over? i would rather be noticed for something i do rather than for the way i look. and if you can find something redeeming about me when i look like a homeless man, then i know i'm doing something right. 

and there is a precedent for this attitude: nico? sinead o'connor? (man, remember that sinead o'connor reggae album? haha.) and so i feel uncomfortable when people tell me i'm good-looking and i find it difficult to tell other people they are good-looking (and that has gotten me in trouble with girlfriends in the past, that reluctance). it isn't like i don't notice when people are good-looking, more like i would rather focus on other aspects of their personality that they have more control over.

college

so when you get to the point in your life when you start to wonder what about you makes you you (and believe me, you will if you haven't already), you'll try to assess what you connect with in other people and why. and if that makes no sense, let me just talk about my five-year college reunion.

charlie stole this bmx bike from somewhere (he is a doctor or nearly a doctor) and i don't place a lot of value in partying hard (see my story about jcb, re: pleasure and happiness), but i had had all this purple malt-energy beverage called four-max and sometimes it is fun to go a little crazy so i was chasing charlie up and down the parking lot in a dead sprint taking photographs as he rode this bike around and i remember thinking "i feel insane" and "this is unsustainable" (which is funny, because the theme of our reunion was sustainability). and if you were there i probably announced to you that i felt insane and there was good reason for that. energy drinks and alcohol are a bad combination for me and luckily the worst that happened last weekend was i fell off a golf cart that i was dancing on into the corner of a brick wall and got a little cut up, but one time four years ago (the last time i mixed energy drinks and alcohol) i had all this red bull and vodka and i was at a party and i realized that i had to get out of there so i excused myself to the bathroom which was on the second floor. once i got upstairs i started to formulate plans for my escape, which was not actually that difficult, because there was this balcony over the backyard and obviously all i had to do was climb down the balcony and hop the fence into the alley and walk home. but that wasn't how it worked out because i stepped over the guardrail and started to walk my way down the pillar that ran from the second story down to the ground and it detached from the balcony, pulled right out, and i am not sure how long i held on, but it wasn't very long and i found myself on the concrete, 15 ft. below where i thought i should be and goddamnit, my elbow hurt, but goddamnit that was funny. until i woke up the next day and wondered how i didn't hit my head and if anyone would have found me if i had. i don't think so. 

but we were talking about reunion and it was one of the best times i've had in a long time or maybe ever, because after chasing charlie and after the golf cart and the pants-off dance-off and after meeting all these great people, who i didn't really know at school, two of my best friends and two other newer friends who happened to be pretty girls and i went down to the canon river at like 4 in the morning and went for a swim and the sun was starting to come up and rosali didn't go in the water, because she was afraid of drowning and maybe for good reason. and it was the summer solstice and then we went to perkins for breakfast at 5:30 and this waiter named "J" brought us plates of food that we weren't that hungry for and everything was hilarious. after breakfast we drove out to canon falls where there was a lake and on the way there was this grass landing strip with all these people getting ready to take their small planes out for the day and we did yoga on the dock and some of us napped and some fishermen set off from the boat ramp. and i guess there was no real fitting way to end our time together, because we just sort of drifted away once we were back on campus and how do you say goodbye after something like that? it was just so amazing. and i stayed up the rest of the solstice (more or less) and went to a second breakfast with president oden, but i was even less hungry then than i was the first time and then i bade farewell to everyone i saw and to carleton college and went up to st. paul to watch a baseball game. (and that was fun too, but more in the expected fun kind of way). it was the kind of experience that can happen only once in a great while.

now it's not like i wasn't expecting to have fun, because i was, but i was convinced that i was in touch with the majority of people that i wanted to be in touch with and reunion maybe would be an opportunity for us all to be in the same place together, but probably not anything more (and i'm not saying that's not a lot). 

(and a brief aside here, why are there so many double negatives in that last sentence?)

anyway, we had our cliques (or social groups or friends or whatever) in college and i expected the same sort of structure to persist ad infinitum. but the miracle of reunion was that something, maybe distance, separation or real life made us realize that we all actually had a lot more in common with each other than any of us ever suspected, and in realizing this, we were freed of our social constraints. we were suddenly free to engage and connect with people outside our groups of friends. now that doesn't sound miraculous, or even noteworthy necessarily, but what if that lesson could be applied to societies greater than college classes? what if we could suddenly see everything we had in common with everyone; our shared goals, as opposed to our disagreements? 

and no one likes to be told how something is, least of all me (and especially not when it is me doing the telling-how-something-is), and so i'm sorry for that, i just think it is so nice to feel optimistic.

rambling about books

i was going through the list of books i've read on this literary social networking site called goodreads, which is kind of fun and it is kind of fun remembering that you've read some of the books that you've forgotten you've read. and there is a function on the website where you rate the book from 1 to 5 stars and i realized that i almost never rate a book below three stars, which means that i like almost every book i have ever read, at least the ones i remember i have read. but i don't think that is the whole story, see, because i figured out that i wasn't rating the books i started and then put down, and if i like a book, i don't tend to put it down with some exceptions (gravity's rainbow, don quixote, finnegan's wake), so the books i would rate as one or two stars are books that i won't rate because i don't finish them. again though, that is not the whole story, because i don't put too many books down. i guess i like every book i pick up because i think that every book has something to offer if you're willing to pay attention.

story 2

i feel slightly blessed because i crashed my bike a few days ago, and actually, it was my uncle's bike and i don't feel blessed because i didn't get hurt, although that was fortunate, but i feel blessed because my crash was the result of this series of amazing and improbable events. it was like the least possible outcome was the one that happened and it was awesome in the literal sense of the word awesome.

so anyway, i can ride a bike just fine generally and i would go so far as to call it my primary mode of transportation, at least around portland, but i was up in seattle for a few days with my cousin and we wanted to go for a bike ride, but my uncle had a new u-lock that we mounted to the seat tube of his bike frame before we left and that piece of information might seem trivial, but it is essential to the story and file it away as the first factor that made this crash so improbable. there was a cable lock on the frame, but we took it off and mounted this u-lock.

so we rode around seattle and sat in a park for a little while and then went down to this folklife festival with the standard menagerie of craft tents and food vendors and excuse me if i wax a little cynical, but there is something about a subset of festival-goers, the homeless-by-choice kids my age, that puts me off, like i understand the disgust with modern society and all, but isn't there an inherent selfishness in removing yourself from it? like you're part of this society whether you like it or not and if you think it is sick, how are you not going to try to make it well?

phew. but anyway, so we were riding home, me and caley, and we were on this bike trail that was built on an old railroad and i think it was called the burt gilman, or something, but i was following caley along the trail and he passed this guy towing his child by bike in one of those pods and this is where things start to get improbable. because a little earlier i was thinking "i haven't crashed my bike in a while" and also (and don't take this the wrong way, but) "i kind of like crashing my bike and i kind of like being hurt physically, not the act of getting hurt, but being hurt is like 'wow, my body is working to heal itself and what an amazing thing we are as humans that we can put ourselves back together' and also there is an immediacy to being hurt that forces you to be present in the moment and it isn't like i like the pain, i guess it is more that feeling of being where you are and when you are and what you are, right?"

but the u-lock hopped out of it's mount when i hit this potholed section of asphalt and i was right beside the man with the pod-child and i felt it or heard it or saw it dislodge so i braked super hard and locked my wheels, which is usually fine except the lock tumbled its way under my rear tire, so i was skidding along with my front tire on the ground and rear tire on the lock and it didn't take long for the asphalt to scrape through the plastic of the lock and down to the metal and so this scene was accompanied by this hellish screeching sound of metal scraping across asphalt. 

and the only reason i bring up the man with the pod-child is that i think it is a funny image and also because i only rode over the potholes because i had to pass pod-child man (and to his credit, he was very concerned with my well-being when he could have been upset that i had endangered his pod-child.)

now i want to stop and consider, briefly, how unlikely it is that a cartwheeling u-lock, that was at times yards away from me and my bike, could make its way under my rear tire. of all the possible outcomes, how unlikely is the one that happened? 

but the front tire was braking just fine still, the only issue was that now the back tire wasn't slowing down, and it wasn't like i had been riding that fast, maybe 15-20 miles per hour, but i barreled along for a good five seconds, enough time to allow everyone in the vicinity to wonder what horrible banshee was approaching and watch as my rear wheel swung to my right and slowly began to overtake my front wheel and i stayed upright until my bike was just about perpendicular to the direction it was traveling, at which point my bicycle, the object in motion, decided that the friction from traveling sideways, the unbalanced force, was acting on it enough to keep it from tending to stay in motion with the same speed and direction. and that is newton's first law.

so anyway i learned a valuable lesson as i skidded along the pavement and not about elementary physics, but now i forget what it is. maybe there are things that happen that we shouldn't try to assign a reason to.