APOKALIPSIS

I don’t care if it’s where I grew up — I still say that the Mid-Willamette Valley has some of loveliest landscapes I know of. There are more staggering and breathtaking vistas all across the world, but there’s a lush comfort here that can’t be beat. Even the car-window view driving along one of the two-lane highways that leads out of Dallas is so pleasantly scenic that it frequently strikes me as over-generous.

My dad and I took a trip to Baskett Slough National Wildlife Refuge this afternoon. It’s a beautiful, serene place that I have many fond memories of and only a short drive from my parents’ house. Lots of migrating birds use it as a bed and breakfast, so no dogs are allowed, much to the sorrow of our lab Lucy.

The morning’s fog had mostly burned off, leaving us with a crisp January afternoon. Baskett Slough is mostly oak groves and savannas, lacking the evergreens the Northwest is famous for, which are indigenous only at higher altitudes. It’s more colorful and shady when the trees still have their leaves, but despite the sparser landscape, in winter the land holds a mossy, earthen beauty. Wet leaves ground underfoot will become nourishing soil for tomorrow’s trees, but meanwhile the land lays quiet, seeming to hover in this moment like the clouds our breath makes in the air.

The forest was battered by recent storms, littering the ground with many mossy boughs. My dad said it must have sounded like quite the racket when all the branches were crashing to the ground, and I refrained from making the obvious joke about whether anyone was around to hear them falling. Surely the sounds must have echoed through the valley, where families would have been huddled by candlelight in Christmas sweaters, waiting for the roads to unfreeze so that someone could turn their power back on. They could have not gone unheard.

I stopped to snap a lot of pictures, and often found myself lagging behind my dad. Once, as I was hustling to catch up, gravel crunching under my feet, he suddenly stopped and held up a hand signally me to stop. He stood still and quiet, and I slowly crept forward. I knew he had found something special and easily spooked. Rounding the bend, I saw it — a doe!

There were three deer there, munching on whatever it is that deer eat. We watched them for a while and they sort of watched us, nonplussed. These were the first deer I’d seen since returning from Australia, and it was hard not to be reminded of kangaroos. If we had startled them, they’d be gone just as quickly, bounding through the underbrush. As it was, we went slowly on our way, and they went right on eating whatever it is that deer eat.

We finished our walk before I was quite ready for it to be over, and then drove up to Van Duzer Vineyards, which has a beautiful view of the valley. Despite growing up here, I had never really been to a Willamette Valley winery, but my dad is apparently quite the expert. We chatted a bit with the winemaker, then got a bottle of chilled Pinot Gris.

Even in the recession, it seems there is a time to act like a yuppie. It was nice to chat with my dad — I think the last time just he and I had a drink together was my first beer, which I was unable to choke down. I had no problem with the wine, which was crisp and refreshing. Just like the day (awww).

Hope you all enjoyed the pictures!

My younger (no longer “little”) brother Nathan is big into freeride mountain biking, which is something I’ve never done, but it seems to involve biking through trails in the forest and across elevated wooded platforms that look like they came straight from the Ewok treehouses in Return of the Jedi. So it seems pretty fun.
Along with surfing, skating, snowboarding, parkour and any other sports that involve kinetically weaving your way through natural and man-made obstacle courses, the a huge part of the culture of freeriding is videos and DVDs that show people tackling the trails. Every time I’ve been home to Oregon over the past year or so, I’ve seen Nate watching these DVDs over and over again. There’s something inherently dramatic about see dudes speed through the trees on their bikes, riding along tiny tracks made of logs, soaring off of dirt ramps, and crashing head-first into mossy rocks. It turns was is a solitary effort into something more like an art, halfway between a sport, a dance and a documentary. Plus, it allows for enthusiasts to share trails and techniques with each other, since the hardcore trailriders are spread out around the world and can’t all make it to Peru or Andalucia.
Nathan rides at a place called Black Rock which is not too far from our hometown and basically right next door to where he works at a summer camp, and for those of you who can’t make it out to Black Rock (like me at the moment), you can check it out in this video, where Nate charts out a “sick” route.

He described the movie to me thusly: “I ride some trails and then meet this random old guy there and we talk. Then it’s like he gives me wisdom and we ride off.” He said the filmmakers did some “artsy-fartsy” shots that he wasn’t completely keen on, but that he felt pretty good about how the whole thing turned out. I think it looks pretty cool, and I am proud to see Nathan in one of those videos he spent all winter watching.

Sorry I have been lax about posting the last couple of days — I’ve been working on a few other projects and haven’t had time to blog properly! Woe woe woe. However, my mother has started blogging! Now we know that the 21st Century is truly here.
I suggested to my mom that she start a blog just the other day, so I feel like I played some small part in this development. She is also embarking on a trip to Korea to visit my sister, which I think was probably the REAL reason.
I also suggested to my dad that HE start a blog, but he said that it was “just a big waste of time.”
I suppose that we will see who is right in the end!

More Borneo stuff tomorrow. If you care. xoxox

When I started college in 2001, I had never heard of blogging. I just knew that I wanted to start some sort of web page to document my new life and when I stumbled upon blogger.com, that seemed like the easiest way to do it. I’m trying desperately to hold onto any illusion of youth, so I don’t want to sound like an old-timer, but things were a lot different then. There weren’t any commenting systems back then, let alone tags, rss feeds or trackback. Things are a lot more standardized now, a lot easier to customize, and for the most part, a lot easier.

I haven’t exactly stayed abreast of the technology tide, but since combining all my old blogs at this domain, I’ve been slowly getting back up to speed. Last night I went through the last two years of posts and added tags to them, which categorizes them so that you can view the archives not just by date, but by subject. For example, you can see all the posts that deal with bachelor life, my time working at the sushi bar, POGs or *shudder* romance.

As I was going through the old posts, I found myself using a lot of the same tags. Slightly pointless came up a lot (apparently I didn’t know what to write about for a good portion of 2007), as did angst (apparently 2005-06 were not easy times). The one that I seemed to be using most often, though, was wanderlust. The desire to move seemed to be the most consistent theme of my life over these past three years.

For a long time I guess I’ve felt that sticking around one place for very long was the sign of some sort of failure on my part. Most of my highschool classmates just wanted to stick around our podunk hometown, or maybe move to a neighboring city. The overarching message of life in Dallas, Oregon seemed to be “Things are always the same here. You can’t ever escape.” Whole families were born, lived and died there, and it seemed that they did it without ever crossing the county line.

Now that I’ve moved away, I can see that there’s a certain kind of noble charm that accompanies the desire to live in the same place for generations, but in high school I only saw it as creepy, hopeless and drenched in ennui, and it’s a feeling that I haven’t fully shaken. Back then when people would tell me, “You’ll always end up back in Dallas,” I would remind myself that I wasn’t even born in Oregon. I had lived in three different states before I was five, so I figured I had traveling in my blood. It didn’t hurt that my parents were always taking us on trips around the Northwest and occasionally across the country. I figured it was simply my destiny to be nomadic.

Now I’ve lived in Orange County for six years, with breaks in between to make a zombie movie in Oregon, work food service at Mount Rushmore, court a lady in the Midwest, and study history and graffiti in Spain. I’m starting to plan whatever comes next, and I feel fairly certain that come 2008 I will be on the road again. Just knowing that feels great.

My dad, who shares my inability to sit still and has scaled serious peaks all up and down the Americas, wrote to me the other day. He has taken up sailing and mentioned his upcoming 850 mile trip from Annapolis to Bermuda on a 50-foot catamaran. Then he added:
“I will probably find out that the key to contentment is not climbing another peak or sailing away but learning to be at peace with where I am now.”

“Hmm,” I thought. “I guess the same is true for me. But not now — later. Later, later, later!! Travel comes first, and peace can wait.”

I got a regular 8 a.m. – 5 p.m. job before most of my friends did (actually, many of them still don’t have a comparable “daily grind”), and t’s taken them a while to learn that for a good chunk of the day I am not really free to chat on my cell phone. I can get pretty terse and focused when I’m at work, and I tend to assume that if someone is calling me, it must be really really important.
This makes it really awkward whenever I get a call about anything less than a life and death situation. Here is a sample conversation:

“Hey man!! How’s going?”
“Fine. I’m at work.”
“Workin’ for the man! Dude, we have to get you a job working as like a suberban ninja guerrilla or something, you know? Hey, is it snowing where you are?!”
“No. I’m in California.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s right. Cali! Well you should be in Oregon because it’s snowing RIGHT THIS SECOND and we are having a snow day and it’s soooo awesome!”
“You know, that is fantastic. I am glad we are friends, but I am hanging up right this second.”

It’s not that I don’t want to talk to my friends about hypothetical fantasy careers and the amazing qualities of weather, it’s just that I tend to feel like everyone in the entire office is listening to my conversation, and the less they know about me, the less they will be able to destroy my life if I format a spreadsheet incorrectly or something.

Every time I take a personal call, I feel like I am putting my career in grave danger. Since I’ve made this clear to my family and friends, I don’t get as many calls like this one:

“Hi Aro! I didn’t think you were going to answer the phone!”
“Why did you call me?”
“I wanted to leave you a long, happy message! You weren’t supposed to answer the phone, stupid!”
“It was ringing!”

So when my mom called me the other day from beautiful Port Angeles, Washington apparently they were actually in Fairhaven, which is nowhere near Port Angeles. But anyway, I was sure that something important was going on. In fact, she was just calling to say that she and my aunt were in a moped shop and they thought that I should get an electric scooter, and that it would be so so cool. I was too taken aback to be stoic or annoyed. This seemed like the funniest thing she could be calling about.

I had considered getting a Vespa before, but I was deterred by two major points:
1). They don’t make diesel scooters, which means I wouldn’t be able to brew my own bio-fuel, which would make me dependent on dirty, foreign oil.
2). Even if you aren’t running on bio-fuel, riding a motor scooter around is pretty much the dorkiest thing. Unless you live in Europe or are a girl, then it is awesome. Actually, if you live in Europe or are a girl, you are probably awesome to begin with.

The fact that my mother was telling me that it would be cool to get a Vespa pretty much erased all doubts I had about point 2. As far as point 1 is concerned, an electric scooter would hypothetically pollute less than a gasoline scooter, but electricity is only clean power if it comes from a clean source, and in California (and in most of the world) it doesn’t.

But when I related this story to my friends, no one thought that having an electric moped would be a terrible idea. Some people even explicitly said that it would be cool! Then I realized that people think a lot of awful things are cool. And then, finally, I realized: Who cares what other people think?

So when I saw a little electric moped attached to a weathered, hand-written “For Sale” sign on my way home from work, I decided to inquire about it. Here is what I learned: the scooter needs a battery and has a top speed of 24 mph if you are lucky. It is a dull shade of pink and looks about 15 years old. It is also really really cheap. I’m going back to meet with the owner tomorrow.

I contemplated trying to cross the United States on a tiny, beatdown pink moped, cruising the continent at 18 miles an hour. There is a lot of desert in between towns in the American Southwest, and the desert is not known for having a lot of electrical outlets, which would be a problem. Also, I’m not sure that the moped’s six-inch wheels and battery-run motor would make it very far up the rocky mountains.

So the idea is probably a bad one.

But I still want to cross the United States. It’s an idea that’s been formenting (sic) in my head for a while now. In a few months I think it would be financially possible. I’m not sure if it would be particularly practical. But I’m starting to believe that there’s power in being outrageously impractical.

Developing….

…

BONUS FEATURE!
Christina dug up this old survey she made back in 2002 to determine which of her friends you are. Guess who I turned out to be!

 

I’m looking for a new place to stay. I’ve been in this little room in this little house for just over a year now. Never signed a lease because I wasn’t sure how long I was going to stick around. At the time I was considering leaving for Turkey to teach English for a year, but I decided to spent my time sticking around here and learning to be somewhat respectable.
After about a year of leaselessness, my landlord finally asked me to sign a six month lease or vacate in 30 days. Six months is not that long, really. But I took the 30 days instead, refusing once again to make any long-term plans in Orange County again. This time it’s because I may or may not take a volunteer position in Nicaragua which may or may not be offered to me.
So once again I’m looking for a room in someone else’s house that I can move into for an undetermined amount of time. It’s almost enough to make me just pack up and leave for good. Honestly the only thing keeping me at my job is free graduate tuition, but I can’t imagine sticking around long enough to finish the entire program and actually get my degree. So I don’t know exactly why I’m here. And I have even less of an idea of where I’m going.
It’s just getting a little bit old. For some reason I seem determined to be a vagabond.
Although I should mention that I got a sappy inspirational card from my mom in the mail today, which actually managed to give me some hope.
… which means you know it’s bad, because, well … it’s a sappy inspirational card!
Oh well. I’ll do my best to take it to heart.

xxoo

This is just a post to publicly declare that I am a fan of the B-52s.
I know this will come as a disappointment to some members of my family, but please understand that it is just very hard for me to not like a band that yells out strings things that don’t make sense in strange voices in complete (if synthetic) sincerity, and furthermore, this does not mean that I like Neil Young any less. He is awesome, too. Just look at him!

ROCK OUT, NEIL YOUNG!

I wonder who would win a fight.

It’s been a kind of crazy couple of weeks, and I realized while standing in the lobby of Salem Hospital, surrounded by my relatives who had come to see my great-great-aunt before she died, that I had not gotten a really good night’s sleep since sometime before May began. This has generally been for the best possible reasons, but I’m holding off a cold, and the body does have physical needs.
So now I’ve got an evening to myself and I really think I needed it. I’ve got a cold glass of Oregon water and Paul Simon’s Graceland for the moment, and things will be crazy and busy again soon, and that is OK, that is great even, but for now this feels really good.

xxoo

My mom and sis came to visit this past weekend from Oregon and I tried to show them a good time. It ended up being pretty easy to do, since mostly they just wanted to go to Disneyland. Living down here means Disney theme parks aren’t quite as exotic for me as they used to be — I’m ashamed to admit my first piece of travel writing was a breathless blow-for-blow account of my family’s trip to Disney World that was spread across two full pages of the middle school newspaper in seventh grade (to my credit, it was a homework assignment and I wrote most of it on the plane ride home) — but they are still pretty fascinating, and I always end up doing a lot of pondering while there. I’ve written before about Disneyland’s manufactured nostalgia for turn-of-the-century colonialism, as well as the strange way many of the rides are backed by a self-referential warning against greed, indulgence and thrill-seeking, but this time my post-Disneyland polemic is nothing so collegiate .
Perhaps this is because I am going soft. Or perhaps I needed to be in a less critical frame of mind in order to convince my kin that, despite my previous ranting, I really do ENJOY Disneyland.
Anyway.
I don’t appreciate roller coasters for the sake of being spun around and flung against the forces of gravity and inertia. I can understand the appeal of that sort of thing, but the fact is, it’s not for me. I do like Disney rides, though, because most of them have some sort of theme or story to them. If I had to give that sort of experience a name, I’d call it “immersive fiction,” because the goal of many of the rides is to immerse you in fantasy, to literally transport you through another world. It’s not quite interactive — you are on a fixed track, afterall, but like any fiction, how much you get out of the whole experience depends on how much you are willing to be immersed and suspend your disbelief — especially if you’re a repeat rider. I tend to talk out loud when I’m on a ride (I tend to do this during movies as well, but that’s another blog), commenting on the action as if it were actually happening. I suspect this is relatively common. When you know that the rabbits and princesses and yetis are really just robots going through the motions, you’ve got to do something to validate them and support the illusion.
It’s kind of like kids playing pretend, like saying “this See & Say is a time machine!” or “this is a boat, not a bunkbed!” but hyper-realized, dressed up, set to music, put on wheels and contained in 1500 feet and 2/12 minutes. As such, it doesn’t required much imagination to see what this world looks like or who its characters are. It does, however, required quite a few narrative leaps to piece together a story from many of the rides. If you’ve seen the movies, it’s not that hard to do, but I’d like to know what it’s like to ride many of those rides with no prior knowledge of the story they are supposed to tell.
Some of them, like Snow White’s Scary Adventure (which scared the crap out of me as a child) move with a breakneck pace, equivalent to “ok, and then this happened and then this and WHOA! then this happened and YOW! and then this and this and WHAM! and then this and ok it’s over now” — a bunch of story fragments crammed into a run-on sentence, some of them, like “The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh” have a strange dream-like logic where one minute it’s a blustery day, then all of a sudden the room is flooded with honey, and then you wake up because guess what, it’s your birthday!, and some, like “Pirates of the Caribbean” are organized more like an immersive essay than an actual story (ok, perhaps “Pirates” is the only one that works like this, even and it’s been more of a narrative thrust now that elements from the movie have been worked in).
With their emphasis more on evoking a mood rather than telling a true story, their frequent use of recurring motifs, and way you are brought through the piece at its pace rather than your own, and even their average length, it strikes me that the art form Disney rides most resemble is that of a pop song. A pop song with robots that look like animals, jerky half-turns and safety bars that you have to wait half an hour in line to experience, but a pop song none the less. Instead of singing along, you just talk back to the ride.

(for the record, if I had to classify the rides mentioned here into pop genres:
Snow White = garage punk. perhaps The White Stripes
Winnie the Pooh = upbeat, dreamy psychedelia/shoegazer.
Pirates = Rhapsody in Blue
anyone else care to make comparisons?)

So far, I have been sick for all of 2007. It’s only been a week, so there is plenty of time for wellness to descend upon me, but it is getting a little annoying at this point. My dad is a doctor and my mom is a medical technologist and either of them could probably tell you what is going on inside my body in clear and accurate scientific terms. As an errant son who refused to take up the mantle of the stethoscope, I can only make wild guesses.

Inside by body, valves and joints and canals buzz and churn and pump in a continual harmony that I contain but cannot feel. When I try to picture my own interior, it is like looking into a night sky and trying to understand the light-years between stars. It seems unfathomable. And yet, somehow I am sustained by tiny electrical sparks, by unseen chemical reactions, by red and white cells in my blood stream, and by trillions of microorganisms living inside of me.
No wonder they made that movie about sending a spaceship inside the body — there is practically a whole universe spinning and pulsing within each of us. And on days when I am being particularly lazy and uninspired, the only thing I really work toward is making sure the Aaronvese is maintaining a decent amount of fluids.
It’s not a great feeling to realize how much time I spend doing nothing but making sure the right things come into and go out of my body, but I do marvel at the mysterious mechanics inside me. All I really have to do is make sure I get enough water, eat occasionally and stretch once in a while. And somehow, that is enough. It seems indeed to be a miracle.
But now something foreign, some strange strain of invisible microbe has begun reproducing itself deep in the interior of my body. This cannot be allowed. My body, quite without any conscious command on my part, is fighting back. Perhaps it is encasing the intruders in mucus, which is being forced out of me through my ears, my throat, my mouth. During the worst of it I wake up in the morning and spend a full half-hour clearing all the mucus from the hollow places in my head, blowing, coughing, sneezing it out, like a vacuum cleaner in reverse, shoving out instead of pulling in. It will continue all day long, at work, during meals, on the phone, in the shower. It does not look, sound or feel pleasant in anyway.
But this is not a very bad illness. The worst it does is make me annoyed and tired and always grabbing for tissues. The human body can endure far worse.
It is fascinating — my body is healing itself, cleaning out this disease, although I never even asked it to. It is as if my body made a New Year’s Resolution, the same one it makes every moment: to survive a little longer. All these things inside of myself have a powerful will to keep going, to clean up the trash in me. It’s not really fun, or always pleasant. Sometimes it makes my nose bleed.
But I find it incredible how hard my body will work to keep going. It’s almost enough to inspire me to clean up my bedroom.

…

Wow, inspirational sickness. Now I know I’m off my rocker.