Sorry M but I had to put these up.

1984:


2004:

this blog entry is a harrowing adventure about man against nature in the wilds of the PNW. . .brought to you by David B, the only person I've met whose capacity for email supercedes mine.

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have you ever seen a wild huckleberry? no? there's a reason for that. let me
begin at the start of this story...

first, karen (my wife) had a plan to gather huckleberries at a spot east of the mountain pass...this from a web site she found that was over four years old. i duly printed out all the driving and hiking instructions, only to have her tell me that she had found even a better spot! it appears that there is a day use park called olallie*, which they claim is the chinook indian word for "huckleberry"...(i will tell you what i believe it really means shortly.) as the park was just a stone's throw from i-90, she thought this would be a slam-dunk (i think she's been reading the 9-11 commission report...or maybe dick cheney's web site?)

well, it was a lovely drive up there, starting out cloudy and moving to a sunny sky (this would soon become a curse...) when we got to the park, which looked a bit more like a store parking lot with some grass and a few picnic tables, we parked. eager to gather the bounty that nature had to offer us, i gladly deposited the $5 day use/parking fee, grabbed the backpack containing dozens of plastic bags, reference books about plants, animal tracks and mollusks. as we set out, we were as lewis and clark...for as neither of us had ever hunted the elusive huckleberry before, we were as bereft of knowledge as were those explorers.

we trundled down the beautiful path, nervously shouting out when we thought we'd spotted a berry bush, only to note it was a simple bramble with bits of dried toilet paper stuck to it. not giving up, however, we forged on...for nearly 1/4 of a mile, when we came to a rickety gate, a vault toilet and a small water generated power plant...and no berries.

we regrouped at the car, and while karen refreshed herself with a pasta salad, and the dogs supped on cold pork and water, i gathered my printed directions and plotted the next course, as she was determined to plow ahead.

we headed off in the jeep, bound for a place called windy ridge and what has been described as huckleberry valhala. we stopped at the summit, paying an astronomical $2.50 a gallon for gas, which smelled more like water than actual petroleum distillate. setting off, we followed the directions to the letter. nearly an hour later we were still attempting to follow the directions...at this point you might remember that the web posting was over four years old. accepting defeat, we slunk to the ranger station, where karen, claiming the dogs shouldn't be left alone in the car as it might traumatize them, made me go ask. i should have suspected, when the "ranger" put down her clearasil and asked if i need help that all was not well with the world. but ask away i did...and she proceeded to present me directions using a forest service road map that an airline pilot might use...and upside down, to boot. i listened for ten minutes, assured her i was "in the loop and on the same page" and headed to the car. upon closing the door, i told karen we were sunk. she would not be put off, however...so we set out with what i can only tell you was a map of buried treasure instructions done by a three year old with little actual english skills and one hand in a cast.

after driving to the same boat launch three times, we managed to stumble on the turn off to windy ridge...it seemed to me that it was a drive way behind someone's house to their garage, but at the last moment there appeared the gravel road we were promised. hope sprung it's lovely head again, and we set off down the hard won road to berries and certain glory.

after a little over a mile of what passed for a road, but was in fact just what one needed to make a kidney milkshake, we began to despair again. it was lovely, but nary a sign of nature's own sweetness...and the road started to climb at an alarming rate...and that is when it happened...we turned the corner to what surely must have appeared to the earliest visitors as the very gates of hell (i certainly know i thought that...) the road became narrower, the gravel far to much looser and the wonderous trees on either side, both beautiful and comforting in their ability to stop a car from rolling off the mountain, to be tossed against rocks and boulders like a cheap tonka toy until finally bursting into flames, consuming all and starting a forest fire unlike any known since the earliest days of recorded history...i say this road narrowed and the sides opened up to a sheer drop straight down thousands of feet to the mouth of beelzabub himself.

as i clutched the door handle until the plastic cracked, my eyes slammed shut harder then a bank vault door and the sweat running from my face turned to blood, i could dimly hear from a great distance karen singing "this land is your land," and i was made aware of the dogs snoring in the back of the jeep...trying to convince myself perhaps this is a momentary dream, that i had drifted off and surely if all the rest were so peacefully engaged than all must be well, i forced myself to open my eyes...

dear lord above if i never experience it again i shall devote my life to making canapes for those afflicted with leprosy...for there, not four feet in front of us was a semi truck loaded with tree trunks the size of a large yacht barrelling down at a speed surely caused by brakes that had given way when the driver suffered a massive heart attack and became unable to control this ship of death.

as karen continued to hum the latter verses of "this land" and the dogs softly snored, i lost all consciousness. indeed, when i came to we were at a way station, and karen handed me our metal bucket and offered me a huckleberry..."try one."

i swear i heard an evil, rumbling chuckle from down that rocky valley.

---
delivered from the gates of hell, in a handbasket!

must work now.

I marched in the United for Peace rally against the Bush Agenda yesterday. Word on the street was that there were approximately 500,000 marchers. Word on the news was that there were tens of thousands of marchers. here's a picture. You decide.



Two things happened that stood out. As I was walking down 6th Avenue toward the entry point to the march, I noticed a man walking toward me, wearing a green striped polo shirt, sunglasses, baseball cap, khaki shorts, sport socks that were falling down, etc. . . .anyway he was kind of generic. As he walked past me and was just beyond my peripheral vision he hissed the word "Dyke" in my ear. I was fairly stunned. My first thought was "What the. . ?" Second thought was "No." Third thought was "I can't believe that hateful little man didn't even have the balls to say that shit to my face. What the fuck does he know about me anyway? That guy is a perfect representation for every small minded, backward-thinking, anti-choice, homophobic, neo-conservative FUCK. He's hateful and a coward."

The second thing. . .oh wait there were three things. Here's the second.

We had just marched past the GOP convention headquarters at Madison Square Garden and were almost up on Macy's and 34th street. On the side of Macy's there is this gimongous jumbo-tron TV. They were broadcasting Fox News and the funny thing was that I'm out on that block with thousands of people and on Fox they are interviewing some woman about the GOP convention. The caption underneath said "No surprises at the GOP convention." I guess she was talking about what a small footprint the convention was having on the city. A guy about 3 people over from me says, "No surprises? What the fuck is this? What are we?" and then I wished I had a camera because it was a beautiful illustration of how the media will continue to down play dissent in favor of supporting this shitty administration. The crowd just started chanting "FOX NEWS SUCKS!" I will be watching Outfoxed later this week.

And another thing. . .I have a friend who is working catering events all week at the GOP con. He was in a room last night where the Speaker of the House was giving a speech. The speaker called all the protesters anarchists who don't understand what freedom means.

The third thing was a little bit scary. . .at one point in the march, some protesters lit this paper dragon on fire. The police swooped in in their helmets and riot gear and stopped the march at Hearld Square. They blocked the entire square and made some arrests but the scary part was the interim before they allowed the march to continue. I was ahead of the lock down but when I found out that they had blocked the square I turned around and went back (like an ass.) People were going toe to toe with the cops in their riot gear and had they not allowed the march to resume, I believe that riots would most definitely have broken out. As soon as the cops cleared Herald Square, people ran back and pushed back at them from all four sides, myself included. They were chanting "Whose city? Our City!" and "Whose streets? Our streets!" I put myself on the sidewalk side of the barricade so that I wouldn't get crushed by the mob if the tear gas cannisters started to fly. It didn't get that crazy but there was a definite vibe that it could have. People were pissed.

Anyways, that was day zero of the con. Only four more to go.

Oh and by the way, I saw more than a few bloated men in their navy suits and red ties. . . they were just missing their hookers and bibles.

the voice mail stalker is at it again. . .left two messages while I was in Seattle, one voice mail and another text.

Hmmm. I'm very glad this person doesn't know where I live. I went on one less than mediocre date with this person and had a few phone conversations with him. I feel like just changing my number. Which sucks. Why should I have to change my number? He's the one with the problem. Michelle said I should record each conversation and write a piece for This American Life. Then I could publicly humiliate him. Well if he keeps calling the way he has I'll certainly have enough material.

This guy must be really lonely and messed up. Which makes it even less appealing to call him and rip him a new asshole and tell him to not call me again. As I've said before, I fear that he will take even the tiniest bit of acknowledgement and misconstrue it as a favorable response. Even if I block the number. . .will it be like spammers? When you click on their phony unsubscribe links they register you as a LIVE ONE. That means your email address is double plus good. The best response is no response. That's the path I've been taking but it seems to be backfiring. If I block his number that will mean I'm still at the other end of the line. Will he re-double his efforts? I'm not sure what to do.

Oh yeah and by the way, if your name is Christy Cream you can stop emailing me too, okay?

G.D. stalkers.

The flight back was a real humdinger.

There was this fussy, and by fussy I mean a real brat, toddler who was whining and screaming from Seattle to Chicago at 8 in the morning.

Guess who was sitting in front of me from Chicago to Newark. Yay. Anywho, fussy had an older sister who according to her mother "had texture issues". Sis had a sensitive gag reflex. About an hour into the flight, fussy induced vomiting from crying so much and then gaggy saw her puke and launched into her own vomitous spasms. It was like the daycare vomitorium. And then the kid who puked started crying and then the kids in front of them started crying and so on and so on.

ugh. Besides the kids being intolerable, the mother was one of those organic activist types who was hellbent on political correctness. I was surprised when she referred to herself as Jewish instead of something like "Jewish American persuasion" or some shit like that. Anyway, everything with this lady was an "issue". And she spoke using the royal "WE". "We have texture issues. We have a sensitive gag reflex. We have a stick crammed up our collective ass. It's causing us to have
anal resource issues."

I think I was pissed from the onset because there was another family hogging up both sides of the aisle one row in front of the organic super mom. They paid for four seats but somehow got six because they played the kid card. It was the aisle I was supposed to be sitting in. When I got on the plane, there was this smukey toddler who had pretty much licked my seat in anticipation of my arrival. Her dad looks at me and says, "You might want to sit somewhere else" and I'm sure he was trying to be nice but I felt like snapping back, "You might want to control that child." Don't get me wrong. . .for the most part I'm okay with kids but my sympathy meter was definitely running low and I was also tired from the airport and I didn't appreciate having to be the one to concede to the breeders. AND get the death look like I'M the intolerant asshole because I made a CHOICE NOT TO HAVE kids.

But on the bright side. . . at least I didn't end up with barfa-chunka-liscious in my hair. I'll remember that this thanksgiving.

I guess I had the epiphany that I was looking for.

I am still trying to process all of this. At one point an alum came up to me and said "Weren't those the best years of your life? Those were the best years of MY life." To which I thought, "Sorry to hear about the last twenty then. Bummer." Couldn't say it. I'm in Seattle. We don't say it here.

There were a lot of poisoned people. And some pleasant surprises. I heard a lot of people going on and on talking about what they've done, trying to make managing the Red Robin sound sexy and cutting edge. And trying to convince themselves that they were happy. Now, I could just be projecting this but to me, it didn't seem like they were very happy.

I felt like Michelle and Shawn and I (my two closest friends from grade school on up) danced through their worlds like bright shining lights, like lighting bugs, flickering and glimmering, and then dancing out of reach, disappearing into the night. That's what I felt like while I was around them.

The Pacific Northwest to me is a toxic place. Some people, like my freind Michelle, have been able to wrestle this place to the ground and make it their own. They embrace the beautiful things about this place but I'm telling you, as I drove through the rain, I felt smothered and claustrophobic, and lacking in energy and I felt like I had never left and for a brief moment, I was okay with that. I felt like I could move into the back of my grandma's house and give up any aspirations that I had ever had and get a car and go back to working at Starbucks and go back on my zoloft/Wellbutrin cocktail and stop feeling and just exist, miserably. . .like the first 32 years of my life. And then I saw a plane, leaving the airport, cutting through the clouds and I would've given my fucking arms to be on that thing getting the fuck out.

But that happens Wednesday.

I realized there is no reason to second guess any of my decisions ever again.

this sounds corny. but I speak the truth through cliche and platitudes.

I could tell you about the freaks that showed up and the ex-cheerleader that has now become a psychotic housewive who got busy with a former classmate in the parking lot after night #1, and the other ex-cheerleader that was trying to look all "sex-in-the-city" but ended up looking like a Hollywood hooker. Or the class valedictorian that finally came out of the closet and who works on capitol hill as a legislative assistant to a California senator but was prospecting one of his classmate's 17 year-old sons as a potential date. Or the group of jocks that have had some kind of co-joined surgery and have never left each other's side SINCE high school and for whom the reunion was not a reunion but only a change of venue. And how on the night that their wives weren't present, they gave a lot of gropey hugs ("Oh It's SO GREAT TO SEE YOU! Give me a hug. No not like that, that's not a hug. I mean a real hug. Like this." -- oof, shudder.) And I could tell you about the high percentage of people that have succumbed to addiction, some of whom were present and some who weren't, either because they've dropped out or overdosed.

But all of that was really the circus sideshow backdrop to my wrestling match with internal ghosts that no longer exist. I went back and assesed the damage. I won whatever battle I was fighting so luckily no one will have to hear about this particular neurosis ever again.

Thanks for listening.

michelle is coming to get me in 90 minutes. I still don't know what I will wear. My grandmother took me school shopping wednesday so I have new clothes. that's all I can think about as I am trying to make my mind blank and ignote the excrutiating pain that has manifested itself in my back and shoulder. I have only had this pain three times, once in Pheonix, once after my mom and grandma came to visit and now. All three times were stress induced. I think that my subconscious got sprained. I think it's an injury of memory. I am having so many weird flashbacks both mentally and physically it's hard to explain.

Shopping with my mother and grandmother has been hard. My grandmother is still bringing me clothes out of her closet, saying, "Wouldn't you rather wear this?" and it's some old lady shirt of hers that I wouldn't be caught dead in. You think she'd know better by now. "It's classic!" she exclaims. Sure it's classic; if you're over 65. Jesus. The whole point is to not have aged, to only have become wiser.

Last night Shawn T. said, "If I could only take the knowledge that I have now and go backwards, back to high school, I would have done everything so differently." To which I replied, "You know, I've often thought that myself but really, even if you had the same body of knowledge that you have now and reverted back to being a teenager, you still figure out a way to fuck things up. With all the hindsight in the world, you still don't know everything." To which he replied, "Well, I guess you're right since hindsight is seeing out of your ass."

I'm in Seattle. My grandmother's house is a cave. I got an email from a friend that said Welcome to Black Hole Sun. Hilarious.

Am I looking forward to this? I told someone in Jersey that our school mascot was a camaro up on blocks. My grandmother took me to Southcenter mall to shop when I got off the plane. . .I just got done laying out on a blanket in my grandmother's back yard. It's like I'm sixteen all over again and it's toward the end of summer and my grandmother is taking me school shopping at the Nordstrom half yearly sale. good god. My grandmother thinks it's funny that I acquiesced to shop. She said she got me when my resistance was down. . .too tired from the flight. I slept 12 hours yesterday. Just like high school.

gotta go meet up with people.

I leave the day after tomorrow. I have a pimple on my ass that feels like a bee stung me everytime I sit down. I not only did NOT lose weight before this fucking thing but I probably gained 10 lbs in the last week alone. I am still going swimming tonight though, BECAUSE I AM AN OPTIMIST DAMMIT! Not looking forward to this thing. If you want to see who will be attending the reunion, CLICK HERE.

For your entertainment, the next portion of the blog is brought to you by Brian, whose job prospecting letter is so brilliant I had to save it. He wrote this in deep 2002 while desperately unemployed.
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From : Brian
Sent : Tuesday, June 18, 2002 5:09 AM
To : jobs@******.com
Subject : Technical Instructor - Course Developer

Hi - I'm crazy enough to believe that I could teach this shit to people "sane" enough to desire today's job market. Crazy enough to teach them that Dreamweaver, two turntables, and a microphone can set them free for just a few thousand in tuition.

What can I do? I can make large groups of people feel like they're having a good time learning the nuisances of bleeding-edge ackronyms. I can make clever little displays do neat things that ultimately do little more than piss-off a bunch of dial-up users somewhere between the boondocks and nowhere. Most of all, I can sit in long meetings and say profoundly neutral things, even while being grossly hungover from my attempt to drink away last nights compatibility issues.

Teaching experience? Like most anyone else, I've sat in florescent lit rooms listening to multimedia sensations tell me about dynamic-synergy and digital revolution in the new millennium. Sat there absorbing it all like some little sponge-like-organism, hell bent on soaking up a wide-world worth of web shit.

... oh god, it's really hopeless. There aren't any jobs and the competition is mountainous, and come to think of it, I really hate computers. They suck. Who really in their heart-of-hearts wants to sit in front of glass box sucking down caffeine, sugar and some of the most boring manuals ever known. Yeah fuggettaboutit, I'm looking into bartending, or maybe going to work for www.ouchytheclown.com - something's just gotta give.

Regards,

Brian

---

all I can say is that I am happy to have been surrounded by brilliant people during my lifetime.

I'm standing on the sidewalk smoking and this rasta guy comes up and starts talking to me and at one point in the conversation he says, "Man. You know who you remind me of?" And I know this is going to turn out horribly but I say "Who?" anyway. And he says, "Oh man, you gotta know." And I say "No, not really" and the dread is creeping into the pit of my stomach and then he lays down the final blow, "You must get this all the time. I can't believe you don't know." And now I am caught in the bear trap and the only way to extricate myself from this situation is to chew off my own leg so I do. "NO" I say. "I really don't have a fucking clue who I remind you of."

"Rosie O'Donnell. You look just like her."

My leg is now chewed off. I am free to go, bleeding profusely.

You better not pout
you'd better not cry

I just see this picture in my head of a bloated republican in a blue suit with a red tie with a hooker on one arm and a bible in the other, flanked by a soldier with a semi-automatic weapon with a $2 I Heart NY t-shirt stretched over his bulletproof vest.

Here we go.

the stupid reunion is less than two weeks away and I think I gained ten pounds in the last weekend. I'm really tired and burned out AGAIN and I'm looking forward to the week long break. My stomach hurts and part of it is from stress and part of it is from hard living and part of it is from money. I'll be really UNSTRESSED when tuition is paid (tomorrow) and my hair is cut and I'm on the plane to Seattle. I bought a ridiculously overpriced shirt to wear to this damn thing and now I don't like it. Well, I kind of like it but I may need to get something else. Good god I don't know and I don't want to think about it. For the last eight weeks I've been living paycheck to paycheck and I can't take the strain.

I looked on classmates.com and they had pictures of the ten year reunion and the weird thing was that I barely recognized people. They still had big eighties hair and they looked like they had just rocked the bong. OOf. I will have nothing in common with any of them. What a waste of money. At least the reunion check cleared.

must get back to work.

So my roommate and I were talking about working out and all of that and I'm trying to create the habit of going to the gym. Right now, I have to tell myself that my biggest job at the gym is just to get there. . .to create the habit of going (special thanks to Katherine for giving me this way to wrap my brain around this task.) So anyway, my roommate got started on the excercise thing a little while back, around the time I bought the exerbycle. I have to give her credit, she's stuck with it and she looks great.

But here's the deal. We were talking about working out and losing weight and I said, "I just don't feel that big. I think I'm about the same size as so and so." ANd my roommate says, "Actually I think so and so is thinner."

There. Just like that. I'm fucking fat. I feel like shit. Now I want to starve myself and not eat for a month but then what do I do. I fucking go get a sausage, egg and cheese because HEY, I'M FAT ANYWAY WHAT'S THE FUCKING DIFFERENCE.

This is not where I need to be in my head with this fucking reunion 2 weeks away. FUCK.

Another orange alert 20 minutes of tv coverage with terror experts and barricaded buildings and sub-machine guns on my way to work. Now the Bush administration has learned a little something from Michael Moore and has laid out specific buildings that are targets for bombs, complete with the Hercules response team and fireman rushing the building. They've managed to widen the threat to Northern NJ and listed a bldg in Newark. (Please.) I'm sure al-quaeda is sitting back laughing as this country eats itself out of fear manufactured by this administration. They don't have to do anything at all.

It's such a fucking joke. The real fucking terrorist is Bush.

On a lighter note, for some reason, boredom most likely, I ended up at this bar in the meat-packing district called Red Rock West. OUT OF CONTROL (not me. . .the bar.) If you ever seen the movie Coyote Ugly, which I'm not proud to say that I have, this bar is basically the NC-17 version of that. For example, the bartender was this chick who was a size 2 with at least DD fake tits, wearing a bikini top and killing all the guys. She would get on the microphone and yell "Who wants to buy me a shot?" and some lucky guy gets up there and buys his over-priced shot and she stands up on the bar and guzzles the whisky or whatever out of the bottle and then drops to her knees, takes a leather belt, wraps it around the guys neck and yanks him toward her on the bar, then passes the whisky into his mouth, then she yanks him around some more, pulls his shirt up and whips him on the back a couple of times with the leather belt. She hit the guy hard too. . .I know because I got nailed in the head with the damn thing trying to get a beer. Then at one point she was crawling along the bar on her hands and knees toward some other drooling horny frat boy from jersey. . .she looked she should have been in the Hungry Like The Wolf video, minus the jungle paint. Anyway, I wasn't there very long, just long enough to be amazed at the spectacle and to see why videos like girls gone wild ever happen in the first place. And how sad it is for women to view themselves as objects, even if it does make them a good living. I mean, you have to internalize some of that shit on some level after doing it night after night. I use my body too to get ahead. . .I use the brain part of my body.