A Post Coming

Hey, I have a short story for you! I wrote up a draft in my journal and will soon put it to blog. I would do it right now, but I am bit nervous today. Just job stuff. I am waiting to hear back from a few interviews and applications. Pretty nerve racking stuff considering that Amanda and her family have been completely supportive and my sainted mother has been...well...my mother.

But, I try to avoid from a rants, even though I do not always keep that promise. An old boss in college used to describe his life as "Still swimming upstream." I think we can all relate to that.

So the story will come up, but until then...enjoy this picture of Carson eating pizza!

I know he isn't wearing a funny hat, but, look at that! Both out animals love junk food, which means they hang around us way too much.

I think I hear Animal Control coming.

Peace!

One Year To Go!

What an exciting time late June 2009 will be! By this point in 2009, Amanda and I will be married and, on this very date (June 26, 2009*) the sequel to the Transformers live action movie will premiere!

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Previous posts should tell you how much Amanda and I adored Transformers! We saw the movie four times in the theater and once at Cornell Cinema. Funny that the one and only time I ever went to Cornell Cinema was to see a huge Hollywood blockbuster (as opposed to an art house film), but how can you deny another opportunity to watch this movie! Forget about the intelligentsia and pray, please pray, that the sequel will meet expectations.

Of course, the Internet teems with rumors. I tend to steer clear of these and I seriously do not want any spoilers...except for what robots we can expect to see!

So it looks like much of the original cast will return and that Rainn Wilson of The Office will also star in a minor role! I can't wait for the reciprocality between the film and the The Office series. I can imagine Dwight touching on the film...

"I love Japan, but I would never visit. They have several armored transforming robots and girls in mini skirts protecting their islands. Yeah, islands. It is made up of several. Blew your mind, uh? Just like Japan."

I do hope that the robot Jazz returns. Even though it is a movie about giant robots and has a girl dodging debris in pumps and a belly shirt, I can appreciate that the writers killed off a (somewhat) likeable character. But I want him back! He is so slick and did you see his car!? I want that super modified Pontiac Solstice. It would be like driving the Millenium Falcon!


Michael Bay is back creating his unique brand of "bay-hem**" and that is great! I can't believe I just said that, but you have to stick true to the original. If I read a book written by a trained chimp and really enjoyed it, then I would only want the trained chimp to write the second novel. Of course, Michael Bay is not a chimp and he made the incredibly exciting first Transformers film, so he gets some serious credit on this blog. I am a fanboy, but not a mean fanboy. I don't care if Bay and the writers color Starscream entirely cool grey or Arcee (a new Autobot that also doubles as a token female character) something not pink.

"But Statrscream was red, blue, yellow, and grey in the G1 cartoon! And Arcee was pink! " say the fanboys. "You will pay Bay!"

Yes, and a tri-colored jet fighter painted by what seems to be Mrs. Luofer's pre-school art class seems realistic. And a female character colored entirely in hot pink? What a great message to young girls. You can be anything you want to be ladies, but only wear these colors.
While fanboys dominate the Internet buzz and will debate the movies endlessly, I think we geeks sometimes forget that these movies make there money because the non-geeky watch them as well. The writers already need to get around the fact that giant, sentient, robotic organisms, from space, somehow come to Earth and decide to change into cars. And planes. And stereos. Oh, and we also want to writers to color them hot pink.

Sure, you need to stick to the originals, but I would not mind if that chimp write his second novel on a computer instead of a typewriter.

Oh, I can't wait! PEACE!

*This could change, which means I would have to keep living for even longer. So far, so good!
**Seriously, this is what Bay's crew call his distinct style of movie making.

¡Ay Perdon!

Hey, a little slice of piece for you. In memory of George Carlin and in the spirit of many stand up comedians that can laugh at themselves, here is an awkward anecdote that happened to me yesterday...

How I do love Mexican food! Well, Tex-Mex food since I have never had the luxury of eating in Southern California, Texas, or Mexico proper. One day I will, but, again, how I do love Mexican food.

But we are in Ohio*, whose main culinary export seems to be chili. Chili from Cincinnati, which is pretty much Kentucky. But chili originates in the Southwest, so there is hope for jammin' Mexican food in Ohio.

I usually make an ass out of myself at Mexican restaurants. Not in the "We are taking Grandma Esther to have her first ever taco!" awkward or "This isn't as good as Taco Bell" horrible, mind you. My horror comes from something that you would imagine actually makes the process smoother.

I am a native Spanish speaker. Puerto Rican Spanish, of course, but Spanish nonetheless. I can say jalapeño with the necessary nasal uptick of the ñ character. I don't pronounce it to rhyme with "we know" or "hero." And I can salsa with the emphasis on the first syllable, almost coming out to sound like salt and not like some big Italian guy.

I don't look like I speak Spanish. I look like I am actually from Ohio. Somewhere in the middle of the state like Wooster, OH. Sometimes I notice that the waiters are caught off guard by this. My sister, who name drops her Puerto Ricaness like a job reference. will then bust into full Spanish. This somehow makes the entire experience more authentic.

I never bust into Spanish. There is no guarantee that that waiter or waitress speaks Spanish. They could be the Mexican-American equivalent of me!

"Well, I was raised in Mexico City**, but I do sound like am from Minong, Wisconsion, don't I!? Now, do you want those margaritas on the rocks?"

Or we could begin to switch a round of "que?" since the server would speak Mexican Spanish and I have my own Spanish. I say habichuelas, he says frijoles, and everyone else says beans.

The Spanish does break out and here is where I look stupid. Like the rolling "r's" you practice in Spanish clash, the languages sometimes rolls off my tongue and into pretentious prick land.

So when Amanda and I ordered some desert and I said, Can I have some sopapillas, por favor," my immediate reaction was to crawl under the brightly colored table in the shape of a sun.

The waiter must have thought I was saying that to be smart. How many times must the servers of Mexican resturants have an "hola," or "si," or "por favor," thrown at them by people whose limits of Spanish end at those words? I was just trying to say sopapillas right, becuase, you know, that is how it is actually said! I wasn't trying to be cute or coy.

When we got out deserts, the waiter handed me the fried dough drenched in honey and chocolate with a quick "Here is your desert, señor."

Ack! A señor!? Did he play along to placate me? Like I somehow did well in my Intro to Spanish class and required gratification. Plunge a knife into my heart because I hate looking stupid in front of my favorite ethnic food.

I need to up the Wooster, OH act.

Peace!






*Of course, I am new to the state. Maybe lovely readers will educate me with famous Ohio eats.

A Message from the National Apple Council...

Kind of creepy to know that one way to get me blogging is to have somebody die. I should work on that...

Unfortunately, George Carlin passed away last night in a Santa Monica, CA hospital of heart failure. A testament to his work ethic and comedic spirit, he had performed as recently as last weekend.

Of course, I am a fan. Even though I am too young to have ever seen the impact of his early days and the famous "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television," he was legend and marked an important moment in my personal development.

In high school, my school participated in a public speaking tournament knows as forensics. Not CSI stuff, but competitive public speaking. The word "forensics" comes from the Latin root of "forum." It still confuses people to this day; they believe I spent high school chopping up bodies.

My school was never big into sports. No high school in PR is and my few bits of culture shock when coming to college included seeing local high school sport coverage in The Ithaca Journal.
But, the forensics team, that was another story. People were exited for this, especially because the team usually spent two days in the late spring semester running around the middle/high school and practicing their speeches in front of class rooms. Hey, we miss class, you miss class. Hooray!

I signed up late for forensics in the 10th grade. For a very shy and very fat Garik, public speaking proved a complete 180. My first speech was an oratory speech that won some prize in a 1957 Mississippi State Fair or something. Oratory was the driest category, akin to competitive final trial arguments. But you learned in that category and moved up to the comedy and drama speeches each class wanted you to give. In the 11th grade, the new forensics coach let me try my hand at comedy and assigned me a Carlin speech. I had never heard of the guy, but even without the swears (The competitions were judged mostly by nuns. I don't think you could have even gotten away with a "gosh darn!"), "Airport Security" proved a wonderful bit.

Of course, these were not my words, but when you take genius Carlin, even a 16 year-old's performance will knock them out. Well, not quite. I was an alternate that year. Kind of like special teams! Or a bench warmer. My first try at anything competitive and I got the most fitting position. Cosmic justice.

These speeches could change your identity for those five to seven minutes. One girl on our team had this drama piece about a mother watching her children starve. There was one line where she could not produce milk for her newborn because she was also hungry. Dark stuff and powerful delivery. I couldn't masturbate to that girl for weeks, always imagining her suffer over her fake children. And the other team mate with a Carlin piece? Well he just ramped up the energy and delivery. He ran for about every student council position (and still does today) and the exposure and practice of forensics made him all the better. And me? Well I never talked in high school and there I was saying how, "No, I did not pack my bags. Last night Carrot Top, Martha Stewart, and Florence Henderson made me a lovely Lobster Newburg and then packed my bags. They then each performed a deep tissue body massage on my back." In the actual bit, the threesome has a four way around the world fuck fest, but, remember those nuns.

That was the importance of Carlin to me. Imagine having an actual soundtrack to an important moment in you life like landing a dream job or winning the all state basketball tournament? All these moments for me had the Carlin soundtrack and I sought out his albums and books.

His acerbic pieces on the stupidity of humanity and organize religion will prove infinite because we will always look to those leaders and see there foibles, whether innocent or malicious. George Carlin angered many a square, prude, and busy-body. Of course, I don't agree with everything he sees ("I don't vote on election day. Never. I stay at home and jerk off because when I am done masturbating, I at least have something to show for it!") but comedians are comedians, not philosophers. While their bits can be scintillating and thought-provoking, they are still just jokes, and only being able to laugh at others always ruins a comedian's routine.

I had the pleasure of seeing Carlin live in Ithaca. In fact, Carlin always provided a respite to the near infinite stream of zydeco, blue grass, and drum bands that cycled through Ithaca. I learned about his gig when a discarded newspaper flew across the sidewalk and wrapped itself around my leg. I was standing in a bus shelter, trying to avoid the January cold and here was manna from heaven. Carlin!? Ithaca!? TOGETHER!? The routine consisted of older stuff, but my future roommate and I laughed it up, enjoying the fact that we related to what he was saying along with all the older fans. His final piece was a practice run for a bit for his (then) upcoming HBO special. I have to admit I did not like it. It concerned the end of the world and had Carlin focusing on a great universal whirlpool just swallowing up everything. At one point, he mentioned how he enjoyed watching large groups of people die and, while not true, it took me out of the moment.

Don't get me wrong, I like cranky Carlin. ("Lead, follow, or get out of the way! What is this Marine Corps bullshit? You know what I do? I obstruct!"), but goofy Carlin is the best. Sometimes I dream of being a comedian and I would be in the vein of Carlin-esque observation (with touches of MST3k, of course).

"How can you be, 'more than happy?' To me this sounds like a dangerous medical condition."

"What exactly is a deadly weapon? I mean, you could kill a man with the Sunday New York Times!"

"You ever notice how other people's stuff is shit and you shit is stuff? 'Hey! Get this shit out of the way so I can put down my stuff!'"

The goofier stuff is older Carlin. One particular favorite of mine is "The Interview with Jesus," where Carlin, playing Jesus, admits that not all the miracles were miracles.

"Some where optical illusions, tricks of light, and sleight of hand."

And what about Lazarus?

"Well I never said he was dead. I get misquoted alot on that one. I said, 'Man, he looks dead!' You see we had gone to a wedding feast the night before and Lazarus had too much to drink."

And Jesus' advice to humanity?

"Don't give your money to the church."

And my favorite Carlin joke of all time? Well, it is the title to this post.

"The following is a message from the National Apple Council...FUCK PEARS!"

Goodbye, Mr. Carlin. Thank you for giving us the 23 comedy albums, the four Grammys, three books, 14 HBO specials, and glee-inducing cameos (Dogma, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, The Price of Tides, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Cars, etc.). Holy shit, will you be missed!

Peace!

Talking About the Heat, Part 2

Here is the second half on heat. This half focuses on air conditioning, fans, and what we do to try and beat the heat.

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On Air Conditioning

I can hear the echoes in my own words. I realize that saying something along the lines of , "I will never have or want any children," sounds a bit hollow in your early 20's. Who knows what might happen? But, right now, I don't want kids and that is a good thing since mine would probably tie me up on hot July and take advantage of my indisposition by buying an air conditioning. I would hope they would buy a wall unit somewhere locally, but the kids, angry at having their fish tank boil over, would probably buy it at a Wal-Mart, just to piss me off.

However hollow whatever edicts about children I say about children sound, I am solid about one thing.

No air conditioners!

This is not as crazy as it sounds. I do not take a hammer to central cooling units. Neither am I the Wicked Witch of Chill, melting whenever we get below 68 degrees. I just have an uneasiness to air conditioning. Whenever I sit in air conditioning (That I can control, mind you. I don't tell the bus driver to turn down the ac or scream at the movie theater manager), I feel as if I am getting away with something. An oscillating fan only takes the air around you and fires it onto your skin. While it is icky to think about it, fans help you sweat faster, making your natural evaporative cooling feel all that more satisfying. Air conditioners, on the other hand, have this Faustian ring to them. You don't need to sweat with ac as it brings the cool to you.

Hey, I like my body and marvel at its ability for homeostasis. When I cool off, I like to know that I aided natural processes like evaporative cooling and simple hydration. Air conditioning makes me feel lazy. And when you(like myself) spend summer already sitting around reading and re-playing every Grand Theft Auto game, you do not need to feel any lazier. If a fan is a nice walk down to the corner store, then air conditioning is hopping in your car to go down the driveway for the mail.

Please don't take this as some sort of insult to anyone that does use air conditioning. Hell, it is nice! And I realize that heat stroke is deadly serious. If you have a/c, then go nuts!* But, leave me to my little overheated zen.

Growing up in PR, everyone had a/c window units. If your house was newer or recently remodeled then you had central a/c or at least those slim Japaneses units that clung to the high walls like huge flies. Our house only had window a/c's and one for every room. The spaces in the walls featured black metal shelters for the outside half of the a/c. They were made of black bars and the air conditioner looked like it was in jail. I used to pretend these were escape pods, to be used if an hurricane with wind speeds greater than 145 mph** ever hit us!

And my mother let me turn on the air conditioner whenever I wanted! Woo hoo! I had a friend in school whose parents only let him turn on the air conditioner after 10:30 pm. Poor sucker, I thought. My mom was nice!

This was before I ever saw an electric meter or an electric bill. Our actual meter was outside the house, on a retaining wall against what used to be an alley. A schefflera*** tree blocked the meter, meaning you had to push the two story plant aside to read the meter. I once took a look at it when all the window a/c's hummed away and the disc looked ready for orbit. It was a "Holy Crap" moment, only intensified by the fact that it never got that hot where we lived. My first ever 100 degree weather was in Ithaca, NY! I spent my final two years in PR, sleeping only under the wobble of my ceiling fan.

When my father battled cancer, we ran the air conditioning in that room non-stop. There was a year where that a/c never turned off. Instead of getting such breaks, it would seem to let out a deep sigh, lag for a minute, and then hum back to life. I used to turn it off during those rare occasions he left the room, most often to enjoy some sun on the terrace. To little environmentalist Garik, the ancient a/c must have been spewing out CFC's! My parents lied to me in that way that only parents do. The kind of lies that take advantage of their parental status and make you believe that they can actually speak to a little bird of Santa Claus. They said there were no CFC's in the a/c, but I never believed them.

"You are killing the ozone layer, dad," I said to him!

He never replied, except with the lie, and it must have taken much will power to not respond, "And I am dying of cancer, kid!"

A/C units, particularly wall units, remind me off him. Of him with cancer. The room where he died always felt sickly with the huge sliding door glass windows perpetually boarded up. We put them up one summer for hurricane season and my mother, without the help of my father and with her back problems, never bothered to take them down. Because of this, the room felt cavernous. They had no house plants in the room (Not that any could of survived) and since the wall were a dulled peach color, nothing seemed lively. My father spent hours in a reclining chair by the corner and my mother would sit at the opposite end, at the foot of the bed, watching TV. And it was always cold.

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This version had a bit more stream of consciousness to it. I hope that everyone also realizes that there is no snobby hippie to my anti air conditioning diatribe. I have ranted about mean hippies before and the idea to where environmental actions on ones sleeve. I just can't bring myself to fire up the a/c, unless something else (like a guest sweating to death) makes me realize that no one else has this idiosyncrasy. Peace!


*Well, within reason. They are energy hogs and screw with your car's gas mileage!
**Another parental lie, except this one came from my mom's most serious boyfriend. He said no house in PR could resist such winds. And while these kinds of winds could only be described as "the hand of god," there are no such things as specific building strengths.
*** Yes, that schefflera that you often see in mall planters. Originally from Australia, it grows to the size of a house in tropical climates!

Talking About the Heat, Part 1

This little piece came to me a week ago when Cleveland baked through a four day long, early June heat wave. Outside, now, the clouds block the sun's rays and everything feels cooler. Like many of these asides, this will be stream of consciousness style.
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Heat Rises

All my apartments come in this ebb and flow of temperature. In college, I lived for two years in a brick apartment cut into the side of a low hill. They were officially known by the Soviet-esque name, Garden 29, but we all called them "The Bunkers." That certainly warmed them up! They proved cool enough that walking into them (or down into them) felt like walking into air conditioning. Sixty years ago, someone must have strolled down the stairs to their basement apartment and felt the gradual layered cooling of the air. "Hey," thought this individual, 'Wouldn't it be great if we could somehow bottle this!?" The Bunkers were pleasant, reaffirming that if cliff structures worked for the Anasazi then they would certainly work for the class of 2006 coeds.

When already graduated and gone, I took an apartment on the main street of a village in Central New York. The apartment had the perk of being right next to the office where I worked. A three minute commute! And it came with the miscellaneous bric-a-brac that can only come from a previous tenant that did not care and a landlord that cared even less. Silverware, an electric blenders, carpet samples, and a plastic ship model that hung flush to the wall. I named it the USS Ezekiel Benjamin. The entire apartment felt ship-like, but this would have never made it out of the shipyard. The cherry wood floorboards sagged in the middle of the living room floor and lifted up all four corners. My apartment had a topography! The fall of the first step through the front door and the depression in the middle room before the kitchen linoleum plateau. The heating unit was an electric range sized brown gas boiler that dominated an entire corner of the living room. The front had a little grill in front of it where you could watch the flames. The edges of the heater were swooped in that future-retro way where the Jetsons watch the news on a triangle shaped TV. It added to the ship analogy as I imagined myself shoveling coal into it to meet the captain's order for "Full Speed Ahead!"

My landlord turned off the heater's pilot light during the summer. But the heat still rose to the top of this split A-frame house. Heat came to the apartment like an universal black body. It had an inherent mugginess independent of the dew index outside. A friend once described such heat, the heat unique to old houses in the Northeast, houses built before we had the luxury to worry about summer more than winter, as "Satan's Asshole Hot." The thermometer on my fish tank shot up to the maximum range, but when I first noticed my Mollys and Platys swimming in circle's belly-up, I realized it was hotter than the 86 on the thermometer. I have never noticed an aquarium thermometer that goes beyond 86 degrees Fahrenheit. The entire industry could have not imagined an actual situation where a tank would boil to a point beyond that. "Inconceivable!" they must have said. "No, Apartment 5," I would retort! I dropped in a bag of peas to cool the water, but the Great Boil only broke when October first chilled the air.

I then moved into a true basement apartment, where the footfalls of the upstairs tenant reminded us that this was an apartment building. But, it looked like a real house, in the city limits and with a backyard where we set up a pen for our pet rabbits and guinea pig. Pity the poor animals in the heat. IF anything could actually melt than it would be the rabbit. Unable to sweat and with a toothy slit of mouth, their heat regulation looks almost reptilian. Of course, imagine anything horrible and it has to have been done to some bunny at some point. But, the heat looks and feels particularly horrible.

But that was all in the old apartment. This basement apartment physically reminded us of why creatures took the ground. The houseplants were not happy, routinely turning angry yellows and dropping leaves in a false internal Autumn.

In my current apartment, we live on the third floor of a brick-shit building. The ground floor is dominated by two bakeries and the smells of sourdough and crisp pie crust little make up for the heat. Oh, the plants are happy, for the sun pours in through the windows, but the animals have taken to spaces behind the bathtub and the aquarium thermometer creeps up to the far limits.

Maybe one day we will have a house with enough rooms to seek solace from the climate and to make all the living things; furry, fishy, leafy, and human, pleasant.
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So, why Part 1? Well there will be a Part 2, of course. I am not getting all post-modern on you readers! I decided to cut back on the stream of consciousness and focus this entry on the apartments. Tomorrow (Yes, tomorrow) I will have a little aside about air-conditioning and cooling.

Peace!

Books I Should Have Alread Read, #3

The return! Of posts and and a previous column!

Books I Should Have Already Read #3


A Walk in the Woods
By Bill Bryson

Well, it is not a classic, but Bryson is a popular author with books about subjects ranging from hiking, popular science, etymology, and the UK. He is an honorary Officer of the British Empire and an university chancellor. Also, Robert Redford already secured the rights for the book and will make it into a movie sometime soon. Some serious credentials.

This book escaped me all throughout college where many fellow environmental studies students praised its narrative of the Appalachian Trail. I have discovered that those that love hiking only like one thing second to that and that is reading about it. OK, well, they are individuals so one hiker might really like pistachio flavored ice cream as his second choice and another always gives Maine Coon cats her second place medal. I have never really sensed a real desire to talk about hikes from the hikers. While you are on a trail, the fact that the only controlled variables in the whole hike are that strip of earth and whatever you have strapped to your back make for some serious, "Well, you just had to be there" moments. Except for really wacky moments like losing your pants while trying to ford a creek or being chased by bees in the shape of a fist! Or, just regular bees. Equally terrifying. They always want to take you there, however. Then you won't need to listen or read! Hikers are a friendly lot and, in my experience, always want to bring more appreciation to their trails.

And by hikers, I mean hikers. The kind of people that have actually taken their Nalgene bottles outside of the office. Or, a person who doesn't even own a Nalgene since the clunky plastic seems to pedestrian. Maybe that bright purple bottle will attract a bear, rookie! You ever thought of that!? These folks sleep in their sleeping bags for fun, laying them over an old comforter situated on the porch. Their boots are lost to the reverse gravity of their feet pounding the earth and not eaten away by the whorls of winter salt.These folks have wardrobes full of natural hues. Hunter greens, tans, granite, sage, and mahogany brown. But these colors, on these folks, are not drab. The energy of their stride and the adventure make everything come alive until you realize why should you hike in anything else. Certainly not something purple, because it might attract bears! And not in blue jeans, at least according to Bryson's research.

A UK resident in my previous book club tried to get us to read Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island once and I wonder if A Walk in the Woods would have shown up here any earlier if we had chosen his suggestion. Better late then never because I appreciate Bryson's honest voice and snarky wit. I have no idea if any of the cartoony events he mentions actually happened in the exact circumstances in the book, but I came to trust Bryson in the early chapters. He does an immense amount of research on the (roughly 2,100) mile long trail, but never feels overbearing or depressingly authoritative. If you read these posts and realize that my voice switches from observation to exposition (see above) then you probably realize that I am a big fan of "wonder." Bryson never loses that wonder, framing the trail and the journey, in the path's scale. Until I read the book, I never understood exactly what the trail was. I had ex-girlfriends, classmates, co-workers, and colleagues tell me about the desire to walk it from Maine to Georgia (or vice versa), but what the hell was it. I was always trying to impress these people (or at least get along with them) so I never really asked. But, Bryson, paints a trail that is meticulously maintained and well traveled, albeit rarely completed. When your local municipality has a 500 foot road with potholes able to disable a tank (I am looking at you Ithaca!), an unbroken trail of 2,100 miles maintained by an alliance of the unlikely (volunteers, state officials, entrepreneurs, federal officials, etc.) can restore your faith in humanity. Bryson and all his fellow trail writer/advocates portray a national treasure, the kind of narrative that has saved the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil development. I will probably never hike the trail, but I ma glad to know that it is there and that others can enjoy it.

The book features a particularly fresh point of view. Bryson likes to hike, but he also loves cheeseburgers and can't help but feel laughed at while purchasing his supplies at the outdoor store. His hiking partner (Stephen Katz) wheezes and whines throughout the climb and tosses supplies because they were too heavy on his back. While trail veterans might roll their eyes at such unfit people hiking the trail, Bryson and Katz democratize the trail for all of us whose hardest hike ever was the steepest incline possible on the gym's elliptical machines. Before reading the book, I knew it was humorous, but I still expected a serious anti-establishment tone to it. Something along the lines Edward Abbey or Bill McKibben, where hikers can find themselves in wilderness and lose all the absurdities of "modern living." Such works spoke to the people I mentioned before and I imagined Bryson doing the same, except with some MST3k wit and not Abbey's crabbiness.

Instead, Bryson makes the trail a physical and metaphorical through line for the eastern seaboard. The segment in Northern Georgia brings up the necessary Deliverance reference and how such stereotypes have harmed the region's image. A side trip through Pennsylvania mentions Centralia, PA; an abandoned town siting on top of a continuous old mine fire.


Of course, it is odd to find a hotel on top of Mount Washington and that you can drive your car all the way up one of the highest peaks in the continental US. My limited experience with hiking is in the El Yunque rain forest back home where you can walk up to the highest (publicly accessible) point on a 3,526 feet tall. It is an easy hike, with the only hazards being the poorly marked signs dating back from the 70's and slightly washed out ridges near the top forcing you to hop the length of a little bit less than a yardstick. But even here there are roads, where, if you made it pass the rangers, drive up to a concrete shack built for some communication towers. It feels phony there and more so on the Appalachian Trail. There is a sobering statistic where Brysion says, "Ever twnty minutes on the Appalachian Trail. Katz and I walked farther than the average American walks in a week." Maybe that has changed since the book came out in 1998 ( most of the trip happened in 1996), but it reamins powerful. There are asides on the death of the small trails towns to multinational chains and the commercialization of the trail. All these asides come across as mournful and not vindictive, something I have seen in such hiking literature. Shouldn't we be blowing up the bridges, Mr. Bryson?

Bryson portrays fellow travelers in cartoony tones. Selfish day hikers that actually dress like they are out for a safari and an irritating latch-on that had the annoying tendency to pinch her nose and blow, in an effort to clear her head. Apparently she honked all the way along the trail and when the guys ditched her, later feeling bad, are able to identify her by asking fellow passerbys if they had heard the honking girl. And they meet those people that your parents warned you about when telling you never to accept rides from strangers along with enough local color to make ten PBS specials!

Bryson appreciates the trail and venerates it, but never takes it beyond what it actually is. The trail is nature, not magical, and packs dangers for those ill prepared. He reflects on the fears created by the nine murders in the trails and how these are isolated cases, ill compared to the potential for twisting your ankle or dying of hypothermia. Bryson and Katz only walk abot 870 miles of the trail by the time they quit. The took a cab along part of the Virginia section, following a road that runs parallel to the trail. In Pennsylvania, Bryson goes it alone and has to rely on his chair, hiking to the next checkpoint and then hiking back to previous one where his car was parked. He then drives up to the new start, doubling back on himself in a snail's paced hike through the Keystone State.

When Bryson and Katz quit, I found their epilogues wholesome. While a "crunchy" hiker might sneer at their lack of devotion (Katz is excited to watch X-Files that first night after calling it quits. My hero!), Bryson mentions how 870 miles is still a whole hell of a lot. From New York to Chicago he says and that few people ever complete a true, non-stop, one season hike. He ends with more respect for the trail and the "cubic" woods that surround it. More respects for the comforts he has at home and the love of his family. "Yes and no," is how the boys described their feelings at the end and if that means finding the middle ground, then more people should read this book.

Peace!

Vision Complete

As a quick follow-up to the post of "Like an Open Book," I realize that the two other complete stories for that book proposal were already up on the blog! Here are the direct links to "Smells Like Almonds" and "Cuernos".

The cafe where Emily from "Like and Open Book" is the same one where the protagonist of "Smells Like Almonds" speaks to the ghost. Nothing in "Cuernos" relates to the others, but I had this idea where a customer buying some magical tea (For lack of a better phrase) overhears the conversation about the unicorn horn.

See!? It all makes sense! Well, sort of. Makes sense in the way Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace makes sense. I mean, I am telling you they are interconnected!

Peace!

Ball Game

This post has been a few weeks coming, but, you know, I suck.

Over the Memorial Day weekend (Yeesh! It is already June!), Amanda and I partook in an American summer tradition by going to a Cleveland Indians baseball game at Jaco...err....I mean Progressive Field!

It was fun! My first ever major league sporting event and the Indians broke a seven game losing streak! Of course, then they slipped into another losing streak, but they won yesterday! Against the same team they beat at this very first of my major league ballgames*.

We had horrible seats. Section 514, Row K, Seat 18. After the gates opened, we fumbled around the ground floor trying to find the section. All the other people (i.e. real fans) knew where they were going and my hope was to find some other poor saps stuck at the roof of the world. We did reach the stairs to our section and after about three flights I noticed another sign for Section 514 and I said to Amanda, "Keep going up."

Hey, but that is part of the fun! We paid 16 dollars combined for those seats! And, let me tell you, we certainly knew that the white ants were our guys and the blue ants, the other team.

Oh, the sights and sounds! The children's choir signing the National Anthem and the heckling! The announced listed off the Indians starting roster and finished by saying "And they are managed by Eric Wedge." Then someone behind me (Yes there were people even higher than us. It is all relative) screams out, "No! They are mismanaged by Eric Wedge!"

Genius! I don't even know why they hate this Eric Wedge guy, but that is right up there with the heckle I heard at a minor league hockey game in Syracuse, NY.

"Get off your knees, ref! You are blowing the game!"

Amazing!

I hope to go to some more games this summer and into the future. I might not like sports very much, but I sure do like the home team. I still use this tired gag whenever conversation lulls, which is something along the lines of, "Well, how about that local sports team?" My college roommate and I had this mini vaudeville bit around the line:

"Hey, how about that local sports team?"

"Oh, they need to fire the manager."

"And build a new stadium."

"Hi-yo!"

OK, well, by vaudeville, I mean nerdy, and by bit, I mean the reason we had no friends!

But now the bit has it's own new cadence, because there is a real local sports team!

So, more games for sure. If we can afford them. I remember reading about how expensive it is to go to a ball game, but it is different actually feeling it in the flesh and pocket book. At 6.25 a beer, I expected to watch a couple of movie previews on the world's largest baseball scoreboard or hear that my connecting flight to Atlanta was canceled.

The prices put a whole new spin on "Take Me Out To The Ball Game!"

Take me out to the ball game!
Take me out to the crowd!
Pawn off your class ring and golden latch
Don't you worry if you get your investment back!
Because it is...
Root, root, foot for the pawn shops!
If they close down it's a shame
Because it is...
ONE!
TWO!
Three mortgages on your house
To go to the old ball game!

But, again, it was fun. There was an energy to the event. The game was sold out and knowing that about 39,999 other people share a common interest with you always takes the sting out of any bullshit life deals you. So, while we still have to deal with George W. Bush, we beat the team he used to (partially) own! WOO HOO! Makes up for the erosion of civil liberties, delay of global warming response, and water boarding with the crack of Ben Francisco's bat and the leather plunk of Grady Sizemore's glove!

Peace!

*I must have gone to umpteen baseball games in Puerto Rico watching the teams of the Professional Baseball League of Puerto Rico. These had their own fun, but were far beyond major league, even though you could see some stars play there during the off season.

Deeper Archives

One lovely thing about finding a new blog is reading through that blogger's archives. The act helps you familiarize yourself with the blogger and see how he or she got his or her voice. It is akin to tapping into a hot, still aired show into it's third season. You get all the back episodes on DVD box sets or watch them online to understand why everyone is so stoked for a fourth season.
Maybe, someone out there, will stumble upon this blog and say, "I need to read more of Garik! There is still an hour left until quitting time!"

Well, if you like books and the kind of jokes you read in the "Movies I Should Have Already Seen" bits, then you can peruse my Bookcrossing shelf and see the reviews for all those books I contributed to the wonderful experiment of BXing. Like the blog, the earlier posts feature a wide variety of typos and hasty text. The newer ones are sharper and my most recent one was the longest review in my BXing career. So many Bookcrossing reviews are short and lacking. "Hey, I liked it," is not going to get me on a cross-town bus so I can search underneath every desk at a local park for any book.

Enjoy, and another post coming up soon!

Peace!