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volahre · 4 years ago

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babe for the weekend - chapter 2

When an old friend from high school invites her to her wedding and she brings Mulder along as her plus one, Scully reflects on her life, her place in the world, how much she has changed and what she really wants.

I originally started this to explore the topic of growing up, aging and feeling like you are missing out within the character of Dana Scully, but it has become so much more than that - but read for yourself!

chapter two

She insisted on two bedrooms when booking the motel (“So he is just a friend, I see?” Dorothy had said, and Scully chose to ignore the snide undertone to her voice), but when they arrived, she felt oddly happy about the door separating their rooms. They could do something together this evening, she thought. She didn’t want to abandon Mulder in a place where he didn’t know anyone to talk to or anything to do, after all.

Mulder insisted on going for a run after they’d finished unpacking. She couldn’t blame him - the plane seat had been rather uncomfortable for standard class and hadn’t helped her office-related pains. She declined to join him, but suggested that he looked for places to eat while running. As far as she knew, nothing had been planned for a pre-wedding celebration, even though she felt something would be happening between the closer circles of Dorothy’s friends. Last time she’d been part of any circle was at her own brother’s wedding, which served as an embarrassing reminder of how isolated she was now. If someone asked her how many friends she had, she wouldn’t have known what to say. Was there even a difference anymore between people she befriended and people she worked with? She’d even stopped celebrating her birthday, not seeing the point in it anymore. Thirty-five had announced its arrival a few weeks ago with cards in the mail filled with ten and twenty dollar bills. Aside from a long phone call with her mother and Bill, she’d treated herself to a new silk pyjama set and an evening bath before watching a chick flick on TV. Hardly a grand social event.

“You know, Mulder,” she said an hour later across from him at the diner table, “you barely ever remember my birthday.”

Mulder was freshly showered, the wind blowing the scent of his shampoo over to her. Northern California was a swamp compared to DC at this time of the year, and despite being so close to the coast, they could sit outside without jackets. She mentally thanked the weather as her eyes glided over his strong biceps, hugged tightly by the sleeves of his t-shirt.

“Scully, can I ask you a question?” he said, completely ignoring her remark.

“Sure,” she replied flippantly, snapping her gaze back to his face, straightening her back on the simple chair.

“It’s so warm here already, and forgive me if this sounds rude… but it’s honestly making me wonder how you survived California summers throughout your childhood and teen years…you know, with you being so pale and all.” He smiled, but was that a hint of shyness she could detect on his face?

“It’s not rude,” she assured him. “Although I’m not sure if you should be the one making remarks about my whiteness, Mr. Massachusetts Old Money Mulder.”

He laughed. There were those dimples. “Yeah, you’re right. But really, I’ve never seen you with a sunburn, and we’ve known each other for over six years now. How do you do it, Dana Scully?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I spend a lot of money on sunscreen, I guess. And hey.” She bent forward conspiratorially, leaning her elbows against the table, looking him directly in the eyes. “Maybe I’m also blessed by nature.”

She suddenly grabbed one of the fries from his plate and shoved it into her mouth before he could react. Across the table from her, he laughed, but she could detect something in his eyes, something she could not quite place. They shone in the glow of the evening, their gorgeous colour remaining another mystery she hadn’t yet solved. They’d followed the stolen French fry and were now resting on her full lips. It made her feel warm, but she didn’t allow herself to focus on it.

“Why did you bring me here?” Mulder asked suddenly, breaking their companionable silence.

“What do you mean?” she replied, swallowing the fry.

“You brought me along to an event unrelated to work in a strange place with strange people. Surely there’s a reason? Has a werewolf been hunting the people of this town and you just didn’t say, or…?” His voice trailed off.

She blinked, wording her reply carefully. “Are you upset about it?”

“No, should I be?” He looked at her again.

She took a sip from her bottle of beer and looked up at the colourful lights strung up above the tables.

“I don’t know, really,” she finally let out with a sigh. “I guess I’ve started to feel bad about turning up to all these weddings alone. And I haven’t spoken to... let alone seen these people in years. I guess I was scared that I wouldn’t have anyone to talk to.” Her eyes wandered back down, wandering to the sidewalk instead of him. “Don’t you ever feel weird about going to weddings alone in your thirties?”

This wasn’t something they’d ever spoke about before, and the unfamiliarity suddenly hit her. They’d gotten so used to flying across the country, sleeping in crappy motels, and eating in random diners that doing this in a personal setting didn’t feel unusual. She was half expecting in the back of her mind to get an alert from the local Sheriff's office telling them that a murder had took place, or a suspect had broken free, or something plain odd had happened. But there was nothing here other than the two of them and about a hundred people she’d gone to high school with. The strange feeling would probably settle in more tomorrow, like a hangover.

“I mostly don’t go to weddings full stop,” Mulder replied, crossing his arms in front of his chest. “Not the high school ones, anyway.” She finally looked back at him and their eyes met straight-on. She hadn’t taken him as the type to turn down a wedding - she assumed his natural curiosity would get the better of him. But… it made sense, in a weird way. In a very special, unique, unapologetic Fox Mulder way.She took a breath. “Have you ever thought about getting married?”

“Don’t know,” he said, and she felt those goosebumps again. “Have I found the right person yet?”

#my fics #my writing #my prose #msr #mulder and scully #msr fanfic #the x files #the x files fanfic #x files fanfic #dana scully #fox mulder #gillian anderson #david duchovny

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entitycradle · 3 years ago

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A Tree Without Wind

Content warnings: mention of, discussion of, threats of, and plans to commit suicide. Panic attacks, disassociation, and paranoia are described, sometimes in detail. An eating disorder is alluded to. Characters are horny for each other but there’s nothing sexually explicit.

I promise the ending is hopeful. I genuinely am not trying to trick you, I know what this sort of thing is like, I want to respect your capacity while still being truthful to the experience and allowing tension in the story. If you’re in the right place for it, click that button.

A TREE WITHOUT WIND

I was nine years old the first time Phoenix told me he was going to kill himself. Is that too brutal? Sorry. It's where this starts. We were outside, in the morning before it got too hot, kicking around a ball in the scrubby grass. We used the long shadow of the I34Q tower to make the rules--you can't use your hands if you're in the sun, that sorta thing. It was fun because the boundaries of the shadow were always moving with the shape of the tower, and because the tower was a little scary. Phoenix lost a game and just said it, frustrated, "I'm gonna kill myself." I laughed.

When I was that age I loved looking at the shadow of the tower, because it made so much more sense than the real thing. You'd look at the dark, fuzzy stain on the ground and you could imagine it was some sort of antenna, or house, or marker. But then you'd look at the structure itself and your eyes would glaze over trying to figure it out. Unevenly rotating, stacked polyhedral structures, dark gray but covered with a rainbow film like an oil slick. Irregular pieces would be transferred between different sections with no apparent pattern. It smelled like someone you'd never met. The tower was doing something but no one was ever clear on what. That's how it is with I34Q stuff, I think.

I'm stalling. It was some stupid shit, he must've picked it up from some awful caster or something. As a kid Phoenix liked that sorta thing. He'd watch videos of mean people cursing and laughing and he'd laugh with them. I preferred my cartoons, or the I34Q casts, as weird as they were. Later I repeated what he said when I found out my dad was making squash for dinner, "I'm gonna kill myself," and my mom told me off pretty hard. Kept me from saying it again, at least in school and at home. Phoenix kept at it though.

- = -

Phoenix and I got put in the same dormitory when we went to T-school. Do they call it T-school in other places? It's the thing where 4Q tanks (as in I34Q) come and take a bunch of eleven-year-old kids to stay at "training" facilities. No one I've asked knows what T-school is actually for, same as the towers, same as all the 4Q stuff like I said before. An organic shape attached to the ground heads a classroom, gibbering except for the occasional english sentence (Phoenix said he also recognized some Cantonese). Mrs. Lough, who apparently also lives in the facility, tries to teach "formalist english," which is like english but the rules contradict themselves. You take notes on the behavior of a tank filled with inky fluid for four hours a week. One day a three-legged machine packs up your stuff and shepherds you to the gate.

I was ejected a year and a half after Phoenix. I went home on the bus and met him at burger king that afternoon. I caught a glimpse of him from outside. His hair was in long, tight braids. I felt self-conscious about the uncontrollable smile growing on my face. "Aco!" he said through a grin as I opened the glass door. A green poster advertised a meal made from "water beads," an I34Q plant thing.

"Dang," I said, grinning as I sat down. "Dang."

"You make it out? Fuck you to 4Q?" He'd stopped eating to greet me. His grin looked as uncontrollable as mine. Phoenix's nose was wide and flat, also like mine.

"Fork you, 4Q." I still felt nervous about cursing. I was fourteen. "How ya doing, Phoenix?"

"I'm good, I'm good. High school is interesting."

"Oh, man..."

"It's actually like, fucking nice to understand what's happening. But now there are actual smart kids and you actually get punished when you, y'know, mouth off. I'm like, I gotta get around to--" He swiped with his hand, bent his neck, and made a cracking sound with his mouth. I laughed. "Don't worry, I'll show you around. Maybe we'll have a class together."

- = -

We did have a class together. High school with Phoenix was fun, because I got to have a proper crush on him. Pining, sexuality, youthful obsession, yards and yards of it. It was weird, we kinda drifted--Phoenix hung out with kids that I was afraid of, I hung out with kids who played too many videogames. As our familiarity waned, I started seeing him differently. A foreign, adult desire began to penetrate me, replacing childish affection. It took me a while to realize that's what was happening.

It was a shame our familiarity waned, though, because Phoenix was really struggling, and I didn't see it. His friends were mean, when they weren't outright abusive. Not a lot of people liked him. I learned later that he started hurting himself when he was sixteen. Little cigarette burns, and then cuts. He got put on meds at seventeen--the wrong meds, for a year. He went to a psych ward when he was nineteen. His family did not have the money to pay for an extended stay. I still don't know exactly how that worked out. I do know he went into debt after his second stay two years later.

I wasn't doing too well myself, after I hit twenty-two. Something in me broke I guess. So when Phoenix told me he was going to travel to the Santitos digger and throw himself off a cliff, it didn't take me very long to ask if I could go with him.

- = -

"I... I didn't..." He paused for a long time. Ten seconds of silence feels unbearably long in a conversation, and I was quiet for fifteen. My teeth held each other tightly as his thoughts whirled. "I didn't..." He looked me in the eyes. There was an intensity to both our gazes. He'd stuck his jaw out, just a little. "I guess I did. I was, kinda, hoping you'd say that."

"Fuck," I said, looking away and down. "Fuck." I put a hand over my eyes, gripping my face as tears came.

"I'm gonna die," he said, beginning to smile and looking up. I felt the discomfort I'd felt since we were nine.

"Yeah, I wanna go, I wanna go," I said, pulling my hand away midway through and looking back at him with a force I didn't recognize.

He looked back at me and said, "I'm gonna die, and you're gonna die with me."

- = -

The Santitos digger is in northern California, in the Redwood national park. People have figured out the basic idea of what the digger is doing, unlike the towers or the T-schools: the digger is making a big hole. I'd heard that in some places it had dug more than a mile, almost straight down. Don't ask me how the digger would've done that. Don't ask me why it's called Santitos, either, since it's pretty big and not very saintly. Maybe it was the name of a town. Getting to the digger from Prince George County was about fifty hours.

"I figure we could do it in three days if we really fuck-you-pushed-it. But I'm planning on five." I craned my neck to look at Phoenix's cracked phone screen, where he'd pulled up the route.

Gas is expensive because 4Q takes most of it. Basically no one flies. Even in Phoenix's hybrid, it would be a thousand dollars to get to the west coast. But it's not like we'd need the money afterwards.

"We'll eat along the way," he continued. I bit my thumbnail. "I'm not picky, we'll just stop at wherever they won't run us out of town."

We'd sleep in the car. It was April, so temperature wouldn't be a concern. I packed a change of clothes, a water bottle, my meds, and a box cutter I'd stolen from my last job.

The next morning, he pulled his blue, dented '38 prius in front of my apartment building. I saw the car arrive out the window. There was an anxious pit in my stomach that deepened when I opened my front door. I didn't want anyone to see me. This is it, I thought, this is it, this is it. I repeated that phrase down the stairs. My landlord could fucking charge rent to my corpse, I could give a shit. This is it, I thought. That final T stretched to enrobe me. The sky was gray and wet. The sensation wasn't enough to rip me from my inwards reverie. I was about to get in the back of the car when Phoenix spoke. "That ain't it."

He was leaning out the window, regarding me coolly. "Morning. Shall we go?" I walked around the car and got in the front seat.

- = -

Virginia is beautiful once you get into the mountains, forested and rolling. I told Phoenix, "Once I read the Appalachians are millions of years old, and used to be taller than the Himalayas."

"No shit. Was there like an Everest? Where's the old Everest?"

"I don't know, I never heard anything about that. But yeah the continental plates looked totally different. And then things changed and the rain and wind and plants broke them down."

"Hah. Fucking awful. Just being broken down like that. I mean, it's better than what 4Q did to Everest."

I was quiet for a moment. "That's... the worst thing they did, right?"

"I dunno, dude, I think taking kids from their families is worse."

"No, right, right. But like... Everest was like... like everyone knew about Everest. When I was really little I had this big book about mountains and I read the bit on Everest so many times. And now it's like... they made it about them. And people lived in the Himalayas before 4Q came! It forced everyone out and carved a bunch of nonsense into it. A forever reminder that we're below them."

"Hah, literally. Hmmm. I still wouldn't say worst, but, I get what you mean. I'm so numb to it. It's good some people still care." Phoenix shrugged. "I mean I dunno. It doesn't matter much to me, at this point. But from an outside perspective it's good."

That first evening was alright. I drove Phoenix into a beautiful sunset. You hear the phrase "rode off into the sunset" and you think, what a nice ending, but it's not really an ending. If you're the cowboy you keep riding, and eventually the sky darkens and you have to set up camp and eat and sleep and wake up the next morning and eat and go riding again. A feeling of dread and desperation fills me when I think of surviving alone like that. Maybe I'd get used to it. The trip to Santitos was an attempt to write a story with a proper ending.

We didn't stop until we crossed into Illinois. We parked on the shoulder of a country road. I used the light in the car to look at the atlas we'd bought for when we didn't have cell service, and laughed. "We've been in five states today. Pretty good. Keep it up and we'll have visited every state by June."

"What the--?" Phoenix snorted, laughing. "You mean if we visit five states a day. Asshole."

I always giggled when he snorted and called me an asshole. "Hey, I'm just saying."

"Fucking dumb. Doesn't even work. You'd have to wake up in a different state than you fell asleep in." He caught my eye. The smile felt intimate, mutual. Born of sleepy exhaustion from a shared journey. I looked at the divot between his nose and upper lip.

I realized something. "Shit, I forgot to bring a blanket."

"Poor baby. You cold?"

"Hmm. I guess not really."

"Oh, you know what I do have..." He leaned towards me and reached toward the back seat. I watched his shirt stretch over his chest. Phoenix retrieved a big gray sweater. "Feel free to stretch it out."

My fingertips touched the back of his hands as I took the bundle. I did that on purpose. His skin was warmer than I expected, as skin always is. We tipped our seats back. Not the most comfortable, though the sweater would help, hopefully. I checked out Phoenix to see him on his side, looking at me and smiling. I let my own smile relax into me as I watched his eyes. His irises were a rich, beautiful brown. His skin was the color of cardboard in your childhood memories. I loved the way his smile wasn't symmetrical, wider on one side than the other. I carefully resisted scanning my gaze down his body. I actually saw his eyes flick down my form, instantaneously. His eyelids half-lowered, and then, horribly, what seemed to be a great tide of sadness overtook him. I watched him hold it back. I watched his smile mix with growing grief and fear, then bow to neutrality. He covered his gaze with his eyelids, breathed in, breathed out. "All right," he whispered, then opened his eyes. The gaze was gone. "Time to sleep." He sat up and turned off the light.

The sweater had a very particular, subtle smell to it. I guess it was his smell. I was desperately horny, yet blasted to pieces. A heady mix.

"I think I could fall in love with you, if things were a little different." He broke the silence, fifteen minutes later. "I probably would. But I'd cling to you like a fucking baby. And you're here, right?" He paused. For a response? I didn't give him one in time. "That's what I mean, codependent hell. I'd only be alive for you, and you'd only be alive for me, and then the second anything goes wrong we'd be right back here except I'd, fucking, direct all my shittiness at you... and you'd blame yourself."

I was quiet. "Ain't... ain't being codependent better than dying?"

"Hah! But that's what I'm saying, it doesn't change anything, it just leads us back here."

I fumbled for something. "Yeah but if it could... like stave it off..."

"Why is that good? The world is fucked, Acoatl, totally and truly fucked. Things don't get better from here, for me, for people. Should I beg? Stay here in misery out of some misplaced sense of morality? We're doing the only thing that makes sense."

I stayed quiet, not unconvinced. Sleep came, eventually, uncomfortably, anxiously.

- = -

The International Astronomical Union provisionally called it 8I/2034 Q1. I had to look that up. The eighth interstellar comet discovered, identified in 2034. I don't know what Q1 means. The name was briefly changed to 8I/Pasarati, for the research group that had discovered it, but by that time I34Q was clearly accelerating non-gravitationally and on an Earthbound trajectory. 8I/Pasarati is still in orbit, technically. You can see it through a telescope, it's like five miles across. But I34Q is the name for all of it, the craft that came to the surface, the life it brought with it, the structures it built, the war, all the consequences. No one can make any sense of it, except the one thing everyone knows: something else controls the world now.

- = -

I just barely remember waking up to switch seats in the morning, and then desiring nothing more than to return to sleep. Eventually Phoenix nudged me awake. "Hey." We were parked somewhere in Missouri. I'd slept all the way through the night and Phoenix's turn to drive. At least twelve hours, depending on when I actually fell asleep last night. I'd missed the big arch in St. Louis.

Phoenix was curt and reserved as I drove. I thought he was still thinking about last night, or angry at me for leaving him alone on his drive. Then he tilted his head back and began to gag. "My... heart..." Tears streamed down him face.

"Phoenix." I glanced back and forth between him and the road. There were abandoned cars on the shoulder; I couldn't pull over. "Phoenix, Phoenix, um."

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, stop." He bent, heaved, and emitted a yowling, harsh retch. Nothing else left his mouth. "My heart..." He was breathing hard. A panic attack, I realized, stupidly too late.

"Do we have..." Panic attacks can be interrupted with certain intense sensations. The general goal is to increase awareness of the environment, focus the mind on the current moment rather than the future or past. Holding an ice cube can help. There were no ice cubes. I reached into the back seat for my water bottle, which would at least be cool. A truck behind us laid on the horn. I swerved back into my lane. "Sorry." Phoenix dry heaved again. It was a uniquely distressing sound.

I searched for the hazards, feeling useless. Far too much time passed before I found them and started slowing down. A different truck laid on a different horn. I was able to slip in a gap on the shoulder between an abandoned pickup and a rusting minivan.

I led Phoenix onto the tall grass beyond the asphalt, where he collapsed onto all fours. His torso flexed as he heaved. I put a hand on his back. "Phoenix, look at the trees." There were bushy, broken trees lining the sides of the highway, a vibrant green against the blue and white sky. "The, listen to the road." No, the road was stressing me the fuck out. "Listen to the grass waving, feel it." Stalks crumpled in his fists. I twisted my head and saw the tip of an I34Q tower peeking up over the treeline. "Look, a tower, just like when we were kids." Over the next few minutes, his breathing slowed, his heaving stopped. But the tears stayed. He sobbed away the panic. I read somewhere that tears actually contain different chemicals depending on the emotion causing them. Something to do with hormones I think.

He apologized to me. I would've done the same thing. I've done the same thing. So I got it, but felt indignant at having understood--he didn't need to apologize!

We got back on the road and listened to static on the radio. Sometimes the edge of a station would pass by, and we'd get fuzzy country, or christian rock. I changed it whenever there was a sermon. Sermons always come back to 4Q and they're always awful. The 4Q broadcasts are actually better than sermons about 4Q. They're kind of like static, anyway, totally unintelligible. We encountered more of them than I expected. Maybe static itself is a 4Q broadcast. I don't think that's right, I think static is like cosmic background radiation. But maybe 4Q has changed it somehow, like it used to be white noise and now it's blue noise, a different random distribution but still random.

"I'm off my meds," he said, as we rolled into darkness. The moon was a crescent, low on the western horizon. He spoke flatly and calmly. "I didn't even bring them with me. I thought you should know."

I hesitated. I wanted to voice this diplomatically. But then, we'd be dead in four days, anyway. "Is that why you had the attack?"

"No. I panic even on meds." That made sense. I remembered a few times in the past year when he'd canceled an event with little notice, or left early. "But I'm not a person right now, and that's definitely because I'm off my meds."

"You're not a person right now?"

"Yeah. It's called depersonalization. Also derealization, which is when nothing is real. Or that's how it feels, as I'm told. It's pretty freaky if I'm honest. You don't get the same emotional reaction from stuff. It feels like you're watching from somewhere else." He wasn't looking at me. He was looking down. "You're not you. You're not even real." He whispered. "Pretty freaky."

"Can I--do you--"

"Ahh, I'm coming out of it. Some of it is just recognizing that you're in it." He drew a knee up to his chest and shook his head. "Uhh, could you. Could you hold my hand. Touch helps."

I gripped the wheel with my left hand and held his palm with my right. It was warm and sweaty. I wish I could say that was okay. I felt miserable. I wanted to feel happy, holding his hand, comforting him. I didn't.

Sleep came quicker that night, though still uncomfortable, still anxious.

- = -

I slept late, again. I hadn't touched the chicken sandwich I'd gotten from a drive-thru last night. It had awful 4Q stuff on it anyway. I hadn't eaten in twenty-four hours, so I was pretty hungry, but I had no actual desire to eat. I'd deal with it later.

My own panic attack must've seemed similarly unbidden to Phoenix, though I felt it coming about an hour beforehand, and tried to stave it off. We were on I-80, driving through the hypnotizing flatness of Nebraska. Every ten or fifteen minutes I kept seeing this scarlet structure. It was like a giant, bloody caricature of a water tower, a skinny, triangular column maybe ten feet across and at least two hundred feet tall, supporting an enormous squashed sphere more than twice as wide as the column was tall. I'd watch it rise from the horizon, far too big. I'd never seen them before but guessed they must be 4Q. I started thinking we were somehow traveling in a loop, that my sense of direction was faulty and we were passing the same structure in the same field over and over again. Then I started thinking about how crazy that sounded. But I couldn't stop the thought.

I wanted to pull over but I couldn't stop anywhere in view of the structure, because it was watching me. Of course it wasn't, but I couldn't stop the thought that it was. Hell, maybe it was. Maybe only the mad can decode the purpose of I34Q stuff. I felt how hard I was breathing and glanced over at Phoenix, wondering why he hadn't said anything. He was staring down. He was probably disassociating again, I realized later, but at the time all I knew was that I was alone.

I get angry at myself after my attacks. I feel so stupid. Phoenix apologized to me that night, which made me feel even stupider. I couldn't wait to get to the Santitos digger.

- = -

The next day was bad. Quiet, lonely, and frustrated. A further reminder of the reasons. I saw patches of 4Q purple grass climbing up the Rockies. We both took long shifts and entered Redwood park just after midnight.

- = -

I read a story once about a man that was falling in the dark. He was falling so far that he would die instantly when he hit the ground. He realized that his brain wouldn't have time to process the impact, or even the few moments before. And he couldn't see the ground. He couldn't see anything. All that was left in the world was him and his death. I wondered if Phoenix had read the same story, and was hoping for a similar effect, coming here at night. Of course, we got it wrong. There were clouds, burgundy with light pollution, and every few minutes a star would gaze through; an unearthly glow was cast up from distant pieces of the digger.

Some parts of the digger looked like the towers, spinning and shifting. Some parts looked like exposed microelectronics, cables sutured to shiny terminals of minute complexity. Some parts were just made of asphalt blocks, cream-, gray-, and lime-colored pebbles tightly embedded in dark tar. Distant redwoods, many damaged by fire, ringed the horizon. The Santitos digger was less an object and more a place.

I felt wordlessly close to Phoenix as we scrambled over asphalt, looking for a pit. We touched each other frequently in our effort, to assist, to communicate. We'd have to give each other boosts, lift each other up, look for alternate routes. This place was not made for people.

Finally we came upon a deep canyon. I had half a mind to walk off the edge immediately. But both Phoenix and I stopped to regard it.

I couldn't tell if the rumors were true. You could only see maybe a hundred yards down before the walls of the abyss disappeared into ink. Or, not ink--not blackness, either. People are black. This was something else. The most prominent features were the semi-perceivable red blotches left on my optic nerve after gazing at one of the digger's glowing sectors. The unknowable told me nothing. It just revealed the flaws of my being. Maybe we would achieve our effect after all.

"This is it," I said, elliptically. The beginning is the end. If you take out the 'h' that phrase is a palindrome. "That was the first thing I said out of the door before I got into your car on Saturday. If you take out the 'h' the phrase is a palindrome. The beginning is the end. This is elliptical. This is it."

"That ain't it." He was regarding me coolly.

I laughed.

He was angry. "Are you fucking kidding me? The point of this thing, the whole fucking point is you do it in your right mind. You're letting your madness make the decision for you. You have to make the decision!"

I found that extremely funny. I laughed harder.

"Shut up! Fuck!"

"What's a right mind?" I asked, still grinning. "There's no such thing anymore. Even when it was a thing, all it meant was the most socially-acceptable, capital-promoting mind. Now? The world doesn't fit us anymore. The human condition is inconvenient to its purpose. 4Q can't even train us. The right mind is a dead one. You want a right mind, go ahead." I gestured at the abyss. That's what I did.

He stepped forward. He stepped forward. A foot hung above the end.

I don't know what I would've done if he had lowered that foot, changing his balance, tipping him forward. Jumping in after him wouldn't have felt right. Maybe I'd have gone back to those red eyes in Nebraska and begged for them to torture me. Maybe his idiosyncrasies would have been repelled by the unknowable, flowing away from his body and into me, and I'd be lost forever in a derealized paranoia. Maybe I'd have gotten in the car and driven back home.

His foot remained, hanging, the edge a gallows. "Suicide is about pain. It's the ultimate response to ongoing distress. I never wanted you to be normal. I just didn't want you to be in pain. In a twisted way, I guess I thought, if this was your way of dealing with pain, I wasn't going to stop you. That is your right. I feel like that has to be your right." His balance was incredible. He remained still, a tree without wind. "But you can be abnormal, you can be a bad fit for the world, you can be utterly broken, and you can still live without pain." We're both crying. Tears descend into the pit.

| ' , |

I do think madness is the right way to understand I34Q. I feel this mysteriously. I wonder what it would be like if I tried going to T-school while embracing my altered states, living in them. I suspect Phoenix would have more success, being more comfortable with unreality. Not that either of us would participate in whatever hegemony 4Q perpetuates. More that we'd figure out what it wanted, and how to resist. I've been thinking about this a lot. Maybe other people are, too. We need to find each other.

Phoenix and I wandered north. We found this incredible queer community in Oregon, with actual traditions and mechanisms to deal with communal trauma. I can't say anything about the world, the world is unknowable. But I think there's hope for us.

Phoenix and I are together, now, in a way I can't quite name. We did finally make love. That was beautiful. But we don't live together. I make love to other people, sometimes, and he does the same. Sometimes I'll go a week or two without seeing him, without notice. Sometimes I'll go a few days without even thinking about him. I love him, and I tell him that, and he says the same to me, though both of us have admitted that we don't know what that means.

We still panic. I still get paranoid. Phoenix disassociates. He's been using the state to make art. I think about I34Q and write down what I think. I'm pretty good at eating regularly, even if I don't feel like it. I don't know if we're living without pain. I think maybe that's a pretty tall order. But I don't want to kill myself anymore. So I think that's pretty good.

[Ed.: have this little treat. It takes me about the length of this playlist to read the story.]

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5VD5lJJqNUJsITPj3Rg8Sn?si=d262096479104d4f

#fiction #short fiction #science fiction #aliens #madness #suicide #panic attack #disassociation #paranoia #eating disorder #hopeful ending

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studioahead · 4 years ago

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Artist Spotlight: Ido Yoshimoto

Ido Yoshimoto is an artist and former arborist reimagining the forest around him. His woodworks encourage us at Studio AHEAD to take a second look at our natural surroundings and the possibilities that lie within. We discussed with him the various types of wood found in Northern California, how hard work leads to creativity, and nature's endless inspiration.

Studio AHEAD: Where did you grow up?

Ido Yoshimoto: I was born and raised here in Inverness amongst a community of artists and people living closely to the land. My father was a builder and artist (still is) and worked with other artists in varying mediums. It was a pretty simple childhood, a lot of outdoor time exploring, swimming, fishing—all the things that I still love to do now. I did leave for a few years as I got older but came back as I truly felt connected to Inverness. My daughter was also born here when I was 25, which I can never say if that has also kept me here or if I would have stayed until now otherwise. The town is changing a lot, in many ways not for the best. I feel committed to the community, my work is here, my family is here, it's a beautiful place, but I do hope it can be preserved.

SA: What do you feel to be inherently Northern Californian and how has it affected your lifestyle?

IY: Northern California is still very much the wild west in terms of opportunity and also, literally, in its wildness. The coast is largely undeveloped and the diversity of the landscape and flora/fauna all make it really interesting to be around. The abundance of resources here is really exciting, each season (though mild) offers different growing climates and wild foraging opportunities. We are surrounded by great organic farms and ranches... oysters, etc.

My parents' generation of moving from NYC and Hawaii to Inverness in the 70s with the idea of living more closely to the land and moving away from conventional living still feels really present here.

SA: Tell us a bit about your work, your method, and the path that led you there?

IY: My work is an exploration of material, form, scale, and function. I try and let these influences converse with each other and help facilitate a balance. I work mainly with wood, sculpting single pieces into sculptural and functional objects. I'm working as large as possible, limited by the material I can find and what I can move around, as I mostly work alone. I also do wall treatments and architectural features. I try not to limit myself right now.

SA: How did you begin this exploration of woodwork?

IY: I worked in tree work for a long time and that gave me an in-depth knowledge of varying types of wood in the area. I see it as the beginning of woodwork, understanding the source and life of the material. Most all of the material I work with is native to Northern California. The coast redwood is very specific to this area and is a really special type of material. I am very interested in exploring other materials for my work, such as clay and stone. I haven't had much time to deal with the learning curve these days but I hope to in the future. That being said I am not at all tired of working with wood!

SA: When do you feel most inspired?

IY: After a few days of continuously working on a certain piece. Sometimes it’s when I am the most tired or hungry and stretched thin that I feel the most in the flow. Time disappears, the muscles stop aching, and the work gets really good.

SA: How do you recharge after these strenuous creative stretches?

IY: Days off are usually determined by the weather. If mushrooms are popping up, I will go for a walk. Or if the ocean is calm and fishing is good, that determines my day off. My partner and I go swimming regularly at the end of the day also to reset before dinner.

SA: Do you collaborate often with other vendors, architects, interior designers?

IY: I work often with a few designers and architects and other makers. Currently I have two pieces for design firms—I am collaborating with cabinet makers, which is a fun and interesting experience for me. I once worked on a hotel in Japan for a design firm and it was an amazing experience to do something so large scale. I have not been there yet but the photos are really beautiful.

SA: We always ask artists their favorite local nature spots and their favorite local vendors. Tell us some.

IY: I think that anywhere is a favorite place to be in nature—nature is all around us and I have had magical experiences in deep Oakland or in the middle of San Francisco. It's more about stopping and paying attention to what's around you (the light, the birds, the season) than a specific place. Obviously where I live is a really special place but I guess what I am saying is that my favorite spots change all the time, and perhaps what draws me to them is hard to relay in a general way.

Since COVID we haven't been going to many shops or restaurants and sadly many good ones have closed. But we always try to support the local businesses here in Inverness by getting take-out or random supplies, such as the hardware store in Point Reyes. We enjoy going up to Marshall for lunch at the Marshall Store on a weekday when it's less crowded, or driving up to Mendocino and hitting all the little spots along the way (not during COVID). Point Reyes Books is our local bookshop and it is a great one to support here in town. I will say we really miss the Alameda flea market and can't wait for that to continue.

Photos by Ekaterina Izmestieva

#idoyoshimoto #woodworking #sculpture #studioahead #inverness #northerncalifornia #californiaartists #california #interiordesign #sanfrancisco #woodcraft

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doraspenlow · 5 years ago

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ok it’s clown movie fanfic time

We Go On

(you can read on ao3 here)

It’s been three years now and Derry, Maine is a nice town, anybody will tell you that. There’s been a little boom of people moving in, who knows why– getting away from the city, enjoy the suburbs, commuting in to work. It’s a nice town. The people are nice too. There were some… incidents, quite recently actually, but who wants to talk about that. So some madman who once killed his father busted out and killed some kids. Well, he died. (The cops never found out what happened to Henry Bowers, his skull split open, but they weren’t investigating too hard). So that one poor man got thrown off a bridge. The town had a nice little candlelight vigil. It made the local news, and those boys all went to juvie. Nobody talks about these things anymore. Sometimes it’s as if they’ve forgotten entirely. It’s a nice town. Sure thing.

(The five of them will never, ever go back.)

Bill’s new book is coming out, finally, and the preorder numbers are higher than they’ve ever been. The New York Times gave the ARC the best review they’ve ever bestowed upon him. Something about “fundamental humanity in the face of terror”. Something about “the agonies and joys of growing up and facing your childhood”. They still think the ending is shit. That’s alright. Can’t win ‘em all. Anyways, he doesn’t love the ending either.

He and Audra got divorced– a month after the movie project he’d split from came out. The critics loved the movie. (Loved the ending especially, though it’s not his ending, it’s the work of some guy they yanked out of nowhere to ‘fix things up’). Everybody said the director’s an auteur, Audra’s a genius, that if the academy didn’t hate horror it’d get nominations for sure. All the buzz drove him crazy while he meddled around in his office. He screamed once too often. She left him. It’s probably a good thing– he didn’t know how to cut the chain. Three years later and she’s doing prestige stuff now, she’s engaged to that pretty boy actor boyfriend of hers. He’s happy for her. He really is.

He’s left California for Oregon. It’s cool, northern, but with a touch of that west coast freshness. Everything back east is so old. He doesn’t date, he’s taking time to “work on Bill” as he tells any interviewer who asks. One day he might try again– find some nice woman. A blonde or a brunette. Somebody who doesn’t remind him of anybody.

Richie’s still in LA, and he’s started dating, really dating, for the first time in his life. There were some half hearted attempts at having girlfriends in college, and a few hookups with men here and there, but he’s never done the whole romance thing. He feels awful pathetic, dating for the first time in his life at over forty, but it’s alright. The men he’s gone out with have been very understanding. This latest one’s real nice– a clever, tidy sort of guy, doesn’t care for stand up and had never heard of him before a mutual friend introduced them. They’ve been going for a month maybe. He doesn’t think the guy’ll last, but he’s hopeful someday someone will.

He took a long break, after Derry. An unexpected and abrupt hiatus. There were a few months were he wanted to die, a few months after that where he went to a lot of parties and snorted a lot of coke. That ended, and he started visiting this therapist– some beaky little woman his manager recommended. He still wanted to die a little bit, but he decided it was probably better to live. The tour after that crisis was the “Come Out Comeback Tour”– he wrote some of his own jokes for the first time in a long time. He told funny stories from when he was a kid. It was strange, he reflected, that he had funny stories to tell. Rooting around through his memory was like running his tongue along a line of rotten teeth. It ached, almost unbearably. But there were pleasant moments, and he was glad he hadn’t forgotten them.

“I guess my first real crush was this kid in middle school– he’d been one of my best friends forever, but about seventh grade I started having all of these feelings– and I decided to do something nice for him, something discreet– I was going to give him a popsicle. Like a literal popsicle, you perverts! C’mon! Anyways, at lunch one day I bought a bomb pop, I went to our lunch table and… I chickened out. I stuck the popsicle in my pants pocket, because I was 12 and a fucking idiot, and I went on my merry way. It was only after my next class was over that I realized the popsicle had melted through my jeans. It looked like I pissed my pants. But I pissed my pants for love, and how many seventh graders can say that?”

The divorce was a mess– Bev had expected it to be, but it still made her panicky. She didn’t so much as want to see Tom again, much less have a legal battle. For months, she’d wake up crying, miserable dreams dripping out of her mind like water. She won, in court, testified and showed pictures of bruises and witness reports and described how it was all her work, and wound up getting a restraining order against Tom and full ownership over Rogan and Marsh fashion– now just Beverly Marsh fashion. She thinks about changing the name to something modern, anonymous– but she doesn’t. It’s nice to know she has something hers. That she can be just her, and be alright. “You’ll be nothing without me––” well haha, she is something. She’s Beverly fucking Marsh, and that’s something.

It’s nice to be loved, though. Divorce is as sweet as a summer's day, and remarriage is as sweet as honey. She and Ben got married less than a week after it’s all finalized, in a courthouse, in their everyday clothes, a couple of her friends as witnesses. They bought rings on the way home, simple little bands. They split their time between Chicago and Nebraska– Ben’s used to working remotely, and she doesn’t mind it. He’s started talking about maybe building them a house of their own– she says maybe New Mexico? It’s so warm and dry and safe in New Mexico– and all the artists love Santa Fe.

So maybe they’ll move to New Mexico, or maybe they’ll stay here. It doesn’t really matter where they go. They’ll be together. It feels so good to be loved like a person. It feels so good to know she’s a person. She still has bad dreams, but she has nice ones too. Lovely ones– a boat on the ocean with the sky clear and blue. A litter of puppies she can hold. Her husband kissing her. A group of children, laughing children, playing little kid games. There’s seven of them, the children, all splashing each other in a lake, like they’ve never suffered and they never will. She wants to have children, though she’s getting older now. She wants two or three of them. She likes to think she’d be a good mother.

Ben thinks she’d be a good one too. He adds plans for children’s bedrooms to his favorite piece of mental drawing paper– a building titled “the dream home”. He’s been working on it for a decade– the dream home had a double bedroom before he had anybody to share it with. He was so used to loneliness it took him a while to get used to another person’s rhythms– how she’ll get into bed and just then remember to brush her teeth, hopping back out again, how she sings in the shower and refuses to acknowledge it.

He’d once thought he’d be lonely forever. Now, at 43, he’s trying once more to make friends. He goes to dinner parties and makes meaningful conversation, he takes up fishing with a man from work. You might never love your friends as brilliantly, as totally as you do at 11, but there's a comfort in the easy, mild talks about the weather, about work. He lets himself eat ice cream, now and then, and a social life means less time for working out. Nobody really notices– Bev says he’s still hot. But of course she’d say that, she loves him– And oh, it rushes over him sometimes, she loves him, she loves him, she loves him.

He used to write poems, but he hasn’t since college. He feels like he’s getting rusty with words somehow, and he’s always been better with his hands. He’s fixing to unveil this stunner of a municipal building in Chicago– it’s maybe the best thing he’s ever designed. He takes Beverly on a private tour a few days before the ribbon cutting– there’s some last minute things being put together, furniture and lighting, but she still tears up when she looks around. “It’s so lovely,” she says, “this is the most wonderful–” and cuts off, moved. He thinks, looking at the light caught in her hair ‘I’ll build you something even better, darling. I’ll build you a future.”

Mike heads down to Florida, like he used to dream about. On the way there he made a stop in Atlanta to see Patty Uris. She was very polite, pleased to meet one of her dead husband’s old friends– hungry for stories of a childhood he never spoke of. The mirrors were still covered, and she tangled her hands in and out of knots. Mike still felt guilty. He’s been trying to not feel guilty. He told her anecdotes about Stan as a child– he didn’t know him as long as some of the others, but he knew him enough. He knew him when it was important. “Your husband was a brave man.” He told Patty, who closed her eyes. “He was, he really was.”

He contemplated, for a moment, staying in Atlanta– befriending Patty, telling more stories. But he’s a little sick of playing historian, of being a keeper of ghosts. He heads down to Florida. He gets a job in a small town library, makes acquaintances, meets a woman. If he wants, he can go anywhere in the world. The freedom shocks him, the lightness. Anywhere in the world– Rome, Tokyo, Sydney, Helsinki, Cairo. Places where it never rains, places where it rains all the time. He keeps a framed photo of his parents on the counter– his parents as he never knew them– young and just married and laughing to each other. He likes to think they’d be proud of him for leaving. For having the world at his feet.

He has two dogs and a cat, eats vegan, takes up biking. The children at the library call him ‘Mr Mike’ and climb over his arms like a jungle gym. Eventually, his neighbors start calling him Mr Mike too, which is funny. Most people don’t look at him like an intruder, and when they do it’s easier to shake off their stares. His hair starts greying at the temples and he relishes it. He’s made it this far. He hopes to keep making it.

It’s almost always Mike who send the emails, a tradition at this point– “Hey everybody!! Want to meet up? Where, this time? Kansas? Colorado?” And the others will reply– yes-yes-of course-yes-let’s go to Denver-lets get Greek food-I know this really great spot-how about Mexican-July-maybe August?– And he amalgamates their suggestions into plans, sends off the group message, mark his calendar. He sits back and smile, types out “I can’t wait to see you all again”. Presses send.

So it’s been three years now. And here they are, in a Mexican restaurant in Denver (they never get Chinese). They’re chattering about their lives, the five of them– Mike’s girlfriend, Richie’s boyfriend, Bev and Ben’s fertility treatments. Bill’s a little quiet. They look at him. He pulls the new book out of his bag– four copies. They coo dutifully over the cover, flip through the pages. Get to the dedication. Stop. To six that made my lucky seven– Stan, Eddie, Richie, Beverly, Ben, Mike. All my love. The loser’s club rides forever.

“The ending’s still awful.” Bill says, to stop their tears with laughter. They shake their heads and say they’re sure they’ll love it. He thinks they probably won’t– even he thinks the ending isn’t great. He’s bad with endings, he’ll admit that now.

The friends in the book, they all go off. They kill the bad guy, get their tidy endings, resolve their trauma, end up with their sweethearts or happily alone. He wrote it, and yet it still rings half hollow to him. No one can walk off the page happily ever after. They’ll still have nightmares. They’ll ruin relationships, try to pick up the pieces. Things are always going to be difficult. But they’ll keep going. And that’s the other thing he’s always hated about endings– the finality, the never-see-you-again. That’s the worst thing of all. He’s lucky, he thinks as he looks at his laughing friends, his best friends, the loves of his life, he’s lucky that life isn’t a story. That it goes on. That they’ll keep going on.

The loser’s club rides forever.

#it chapter 2 #richie tozier #bill denbrough #reddie #benverly #ben hanscom #beverly marsh #mike hanlon #mine #it fanfiction #my writing #speech #sk tag #it

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sickenoughsteve · 5 years ago

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An Official Takedown of the ‘I Don’t Like LA, Traffic Sucks and Everyone is Fake’ Myth and An Unbiased Breakdown of LA Bullsh*t Being the Best Brand of Bullsh*t

OK, I’m back and ready to address something that’s been bugging me throughout my life. LA slander.

Not to sound like Trump, but my goal here is to try to convince the haters and losers - of which there are many - that while LA (hometown of Blueface) may have an unshakeable stigma attached to it, it nevertheless remains a world-class city with something for everyone. And I mean everyone. Look at this dude who I’ve literally let cut my hair not once but twice.

(The cuts were FIRE)

The fact that I have to clarify that those are tattoos and not face paint already tells you all you need to know about the fact that he’s fully bought into the LA Bullshit (which I’ll dive into later).

At the risk of sounding like I work for Zagat, let me go ahead and list several pros without addressing a single con about the city. It has, among many other things, a diverse population, way more thriving industries than just entertainment, the best weed, the most seamless integration of skater bros into the mainstream, the cutest dogs, fucking space, smarter people than you’d think, and proximity to other dope places, making it a generally fine place to live.

I guess that’s the tl;dr here: I’m not here to say LA is the best city. I’m here to defend LA from the unjust slander it so often receives.

As a native Angeleno from Brentwood who went to high school in North Hollywood, it was in Northern California for college where for the first time I was often told I wasn’t *actually* from LA by people who’d never stepped foot in the sprawling city. They were coming at me vicious with little to no context besides maybe a map that said Downtown Los Angeles is Los Angeles.

Also, without diving into it as it probably needs a separate article, I finally got a glimpse into the big brother, little brother “holier than thou” LA/SF relationship.

Since then, I’ve been (in my opinion) justifiably defensive about the city and its many surrounding neighborhoods. I mean, sure, my experience was one that took place in a sheltered bubble and I’m a bit of a bougie narcissist. But isn’t that as LA as it gets?

Haters not only don’t understand the city, but they come with preconceived judgy notions of how they’ll like it before even giving it a chance. That or their hopes, ambitions, and impatience are so substantial that they’re inevitably let down by a place that still.. in the end... is just a place. Living in LA won’t make you cooler. If you just want to spend money and seem cool, go to Vegas.

I mean, let’s get one thing straight. Everybody here is awful. Literally everyone. Are you reading this, live in LA and don’t think you’re awful? Then you’re the worst.

We’re bad people. But that’s what makes this place tick. We all know it.

We all understand the struggle and share a commonality that no matter how much money we make, how good our bodies start to look, and how fucking cool we are, there will always be someone richer, sexier, better dressed and more effortlessly dope than you. You’ll be reminded of that every day walking down the dang street. And that can make you feel pretty insecure and judgy for sure.

It can even make you feel truly alone and borderline psychotic.

But the people who start to lean into LA, lean into the LA Bullshit. So go ahead and do it with me. Indulge me and let me explain the best I can why this city is popping.

Stephen, what the hell is LA Bullshit?

Glad you asked, reader.

LA Bullshit is eating only items from the above photo but also smoking opium.

LA Bullshit is an expensive birthday party for someone’s dog.

LA Bullshit is running into Lil Nas X on Abbot Kinney.

LA Bullshit is dressing like a bum and still having money.

LA Bullshit is being 2 degrees of separation from almost any famous person.

LA Bullshit is having 500k Instagram followers but consistent overdraft charges on your debit card.

LA Bullshit is the fact that every single person of importance is forced to begrudgingly show face here for some reason or another at some point in their life. Usually on several occasions.

LA Bullshit is the admissions scandal.

LA Bullshit is our crushingly real homelessness problem.

LA Bullshit is not always something to be proud of, but it’s rare that there isn’t at least a tiny element of love somewhere beneath it all.

But yeah, traffic or whatever.

Traffic is bad, I know, but that’s lowkey YOUR fault

Thanks for moving to LA asshole. You and your 8 improv partners just put 9 more cars on the road.

People come here in droves every year trying to make it. This city chews people up and spits them out, but there is beauty in trusting the process and maybe that’s why the traffic in some ways can be enlightening.

We’re all in this together. We’re gridlocked on the 405, debating whether our decision to try our luck here was even worth it. Or if it ever will be. But more people come than go, every single day. And while that might mean our commute is a tad bit more stressful, I choose to believe that’s a good thing.

Much like traffic, like clockwork, if we stick with it, we’ll end up getting where we need to go.

Speaking of people, yes we are fake.

Newsflash: There are fake people in LA

Duh.

I already made this point earlier, but we are bad, bad people. Obsessed with image and maybe we’re not as deep as you and your family. Own that, feel better about yourself because of it. You are better than us. You won.

And for the record, wherever you are from has bullshit too. We just have better less-concealed bullshit than you.

Now pass the Kale chips.

And don’t look me in the eye.

Everyone is welcome here

Whether your view of LA is La La Land or Straight Outta Compton or Pulp Fiction or Training Day or The Big Lebowski or Beverly Hills Cop or Pretty Woman or almost any other kind of film you could imagine that was set here... you can experience this city and grow with it any way you see fit.

LA is not easy to put into a box. It’s everything and nothing all at once. It’s likely that if you stay here long enough, you’ll figure out and be able to appreciate this unexplainable attraction you might learn to have for the City of Angels. And I hope you do.

I really do.

I’ll leave you with this

"Look, from fucking hood rats to fucking stars/Spending all cash, to sliding cards/It's the definition of living large/Smoking top flight in the biggest cars/Told you '08 this shit was ours/Getting this cake, yeah nigga then getting more/Look at this world young nigga, this really yours/Nigga this really mine, my niggas is really for it, them buildings is really high/them cars is really foreign" —Nipsey Hussle ‘Ocean Views’

I would be remiss to write an LA-focused post without at least mentioning Nipsey who was truly the epitome of LA, especially black LA. At 33 years old, he was taken away from us way too soon.

One of my biggest regrets was believing since he had focused so much attention on his neighborhood and LA, owning the rights to his music, not kowtowing to a record label, and supporting black-owned businesses he maybe had “missed his window” as an artist. I thought he could’ve been as big as another one of his great contemporary west coast artists, YG. More pop. But the outpouring of love and support after his passing proved to me I was dead wrong.

He was a walking talking advocate for the city and did it his way. He was truly good in every hood and he’s a legend that will be remembered from Crenshaw/Slauson and beyond.

#los angeles #nipsey hussle #nipsey #city

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currentclimate · 6 years ago

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Did You Hear About the Mars-Bound Raptor Engine

My colleague asked me, over tea and italian soda, at a local coffee shop: “What do you want to do about climate change?”

It’s a good question.

There’s nothing to be done about it, but at least doing something about it, like protesting or a lifestyle change, disarms the helplessness a bit.

We are helpless, you and I. There is nothing that you and I can do individually that will matter. You can sell your car and bike to work. You can disconnect the power to your house and install solar panels. You can eat only organic and locally-sourced food. You can grow your own food. You can do it all.

It still doesn’t matter.

Our species, homo sapiens, our entire civilization is built upon carbon. Even long before, when humans were still situated around campfires, that heat and light source based on carbon, released carbon, as did the whale oil we progressed to after that.

Carbon is tied to humanity like a double helix.

No exaggeration. We are a carbon-based life form.

And now there’s too much of it. Way too much of it. Hundreds of billions of tons too much of it. It covers our earth like a blanket, like a baby swaddled in wool.

In a moment of clarity and complete honesty, I replied to my colleague: “I want to crawl into a hole . . . until it’s all over.” That my response to any difficulty: disappear, only there’s no disappearing from climate change, and there is no waiting it out, unless you’re eternal, or undead.

It’s only going to get worse. These are the better days, the best days; right now. The days of the future will only be worse, and, get this, even if -- even if -- we somehow miraculously sucked all the human-produced carbon from the atmosphere in an instant . . . even if we did that, things still get worse.

We are experiencing the impacts of our carbon emissions from a decade ago, right now. Today is a result of yesterday’s emissions. 10 years from now, the globe will fully realize the warming effects of the carbon we release today. 2018 saw an increase in carbon emissions overall. 2019 is predicted to also be an increase overall.

And, we’re just talking about human sources of carbon.

If the earth takes over, through a mechanism called positive feedback loops (only these feedbacks are definitely not “positive,” in any imaginable way, for humanity at least). There is many times the amount of carbon that is in the atmosphere today, locked away in permafrost across the northern hemisphere. If this carbon is released, slowly over time, or quickly in a burst, it will not matter what humans do with their own carbon emissions, even if we zero them immediately and send the entire world back to the Stone Age; it will not matter. The earth will release its carbon and continue to warm the planet.

It’s happening. It’s been widely reported, even in the mass media. Check out the Vice news episode where the journalist starts the methane seeping from arctic ponds on fire. She singes her eyebrows in the process. Anything for a story, I guess.

The permafrost in Siberia is melting. Giant sinkholes dot the landscape, some of them a decade old. This is from melting permafrost. Methane is already being released.

It means we’re probably already screwed, even if we were able to engineer a way, or many different ways, to capture carbon from the air and sequester it somewhere underground -- we are talking about billions and billions of tons of carbon. Humans have never, ever completed a project on this scale. The mass mobilization of the West during WWII is nothing, absolutely peanuts, compared to the scale of what sucking all of this carbon out of the air would require.

Do NOT imagine that technology will save us. This is not Star Trek.

The only mediocre hope we have, and this “hope” is quite frail, and very dangerous, only slightly less dangerous than extinction itself, is geo-engineering. We will get here, out of desperation, maybe this decade, maybe the next. We could put trillions of tiny mirrors in space, to reflect incoming solar radiation, and thus manage the global average temperature. That’s the idea, at least, with geo-engineering.

The world is already dimmed by all the pollution, the particulate matter that humans are constantly pumping into the atmosphere. After 9/11, nearly all air traffic in this country was grounded. There was a noticeable uptick in the brightness in the sky, of the sun. This uptick did not need to be measured scientifically. A layman could see it. You may very well have seen it. No jets in the sky means no contrails.

It’s not just jets though -- it’s also particulate matter, like the smoke from coal-fired power plants. This particulate matter -- pollution -- swaddles the earth as well and provides a measurable cooling. We stop all carbon emissions today, or tomorrow, and that means, at least, a .5 degree increase in global average temperatures, from the loss of the dimming effect.

We are already doing geo-engineering, just not from space.

It’s here. It’s happening. The bad stuff is all around us, and we are not recognizing it. We are not connecting the dots. Come on, folks, half the Great Barrier Reef is already dead. It’s not coming back. The oceans have absorbed 90% of the additional heating the earth has experienced. The oceans are already in crisis, and not just because of plastic pollution.

Fish stocks are crashing. Whales are beaching themselves. There are no starfish left on the West coast of the United States.

California was on fire. It will be on fire again, after this latest freak storm rolls through with 10 feet of snow, causing power outages and mudslides. Or, maybe, another tornado in Michigan in December?

Sandy. Harvey. Irma. Maria.

Bats falling dead out of trees in Australia.

I can go on and on. Check out the evangelicals! They think it’s the End Times. Check-them-out! They do not say it’s climate change: they say it’s the Rapture. They are seeing something, seeing the same things as you and I, and nobody is talking about it.

We cannot keep living in this untruth. It is making us all sick, society sick, good people going bad, because it’s stressful -- damn stressful -- to feel this dread inside, to know in your bones that things around you are changing rapidly and that the environment, for which we all depend for our habitat, is under duress, and, this is the kicker -- nobody’s talking about it.

Nobody’s. Talking. About. It!

There is this enormous, galaxy-sized white elephant, perched upon every single person’s chest, and nobody is talking about it. They just continue to gasp for breath, and hope this enormous metaphorical pachyderm will get off their chest, but it doesn’t, because it can’t, and it won’t -- the elephant is here to stay because the elephant is climate change(d).

The climate is changed and bad things are happening, people are suffering and dying, all over the world, stressed and poor and do not know where they will live or where their next meal will come from, so they set out, in rickety boats across an unforgiving sea, and they know -- absolutely know -- the odds that they might perish are high. They know the stories, of all the boats that don’t make it, and all the bodies that wash up on the beach, yet, they still do it, they get into those boats, knowing it might be their last day, because they do NOT have another option. There is nowhere else to go.

This is climate change.

It’s not that way for you and I, not yet, but it’s coming, and look at how we are treating these people, suffering through no fault of their own.

Did you know, if you cut out the emissions of the top-20% of earners in the world, you cut half the world’s emissions. These people who set out in caravans, they did not cause the problem.

I did. You did.

I have travelled across the sea, more than once. I use my A/C. I use way more than the people who are in boats or caravans. They do not know that it was my emissions that killed their coffee plants and forced them to flee north.

What do we do?

We could choose to just burn the whole damn thing down -- the hothouse earth. We could do that. We might do that. Lots more people will suffer if we do that.

I don’t suggest we do that.

There is still a fight against carbon.

I do suggest some honesty. We may need some civil disobedience as well. Things are not normal. The climate is in duress. People are already suffering and dying. The climate is already out of control. We need to grow up and look at this demon in the face. As a species, we need to grow up and face the physics and facts.

Some people will always be blind, imprisoned by belief, not facts, and unimpressed with experience, the first-hand experience of a climate gone awry.

Don’t be one of them.

That’s all I can say. There is no hole to crawl into deep enough to escape this terrible thing. There is no escaping at all. There is denial, of course, even as you watch your fancy condo wash away, but there is no escaping.

It doesn’t end here.

#mars-bound #raptor engine #2019 #climate change

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wineanddinosaur · 4 years ago

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Wine 101: The U.S. Regions Outside of California You Need To Know

Inspired by one of VinePair’s most popular site sections, the Wine 101 Podcast takes an educational, easy-to-digest look into the world of wine. This episode of Wine 101 is sponsored by Columbia Winery. As Washington’s original premium winery, Columbia Winery proudly carries a long legacy of discovering and celebrating exceptional Washington wine. Our rich history, as well as the distinct terroir of the great Columbia Valley, allows us to craft wines that embody Washington’s unique spirit and curious nature. Columbia Winery offers a collection of rich and deliciously enjoyable wines inspired by the diversity of Washington’s best growing regions. Created through visionary wine-making, and unrelenting curiosity: Columbia Winery.

In this episode of Wine 101, VinePair Tastings Director Keith Beavers steps outside of California to talk about what winemaking looks like around the country. He traces back to early vine planting, and the factors that led Americans to eventually move away from European grapes to their own hybrids and native species. One such factor was a pesky louse called phylloxera, which wiped out 85 percent of European species, but was eventually resolved by a team of French and American scientists.

Unfortunately, shortly after finding a way to deter the louse, Prohibition came into effect. It was difficult for Americans to regain momentum after the ban was lifted, but winemakers and wine lovers alike reemerged with a new palette for sweet, high-alcohol wines. This shaped winemaking for decades to come, until The 1976 Judgement of Paris crowned a California wine and reinstalled American fine wine values.

This excited American vintners around the country, and after the creation of American Viticultural Areas in the 1980s, U.S. winemaking began to look different. Today, the country’s producers are celebrated for the attention they pay to climate, soil, and a diversity of niche and native grapes. Consequently, there are new and exciting wines popping up everywhere from Long Island to Texas.

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My name is Keith Beavers. And just thinking like, wow, Disney bought Star Wars. And I get to watch Star Wars…

What’s going on wine lovers? Welcome to Episode 27 Of VinePair’s Wine 101 Podcast. My name is Keith Beavers. I am the tastings director of VinePair. Hello, how are you? I’m fine. I mean, we’re not going to talk about all of the wine stuff happening in all the places outside of California, but there’s some places you have to understand that are really cool you probably already know about. But also let’s have a discussion about what’s going on in the future of American wine. Why not?

This title is a little insane, right? Outside of California, what do you need to know about wine in the United States? And we still haven’t talked about all of California, but this is going to lead into a very interesting conversation I want to have with you wine lovers out there. We’ve talked about Sonoma. We’ve talked about Napa. We’ve talked about the Central Coast. We did not talk about the Southern part of California. We did not talk about the Northern part of California. There are other wine growing and producing regions in California that are stunning. Stunning wine like the North coast, Mendocino, Clarksburg. And in the South, there’s Temecula, which is an emerging wine growing region.

But in this episode I think we should talk about what’s going on outside of California because the United States is a wine drinking, wine growing, wine producing, vine growing, viticultural, vinicultural country. The thing that Thomas Jefferson aspired to back in the day with a bunch of hit or miss, because of the lack of knowledge with plant morphology and science and botany and all the stuff that we have now that we didn’t have then. I mean, really it all began because we had people coming from Europe to this country, and it was just part of their lifestyle to have wine. It was part of their food, was part of their dinner, it was part of their meals. So planting vines and making wine from those grapes was a natural thing to do.

And the fact was that in the colonies and the Eastern Coast, there were a lot of problems with climate and pests and all this stuff. It didn’t really work that well, but while that was happening, we were still forcing it to happen, if you will. Before the Civil War, we had vines growing in the Ohio Valley. We had vines growing in Erie, on Lake Erie, which we still do now today. We had vines growing in Missouri, we had vines growing in Texas. We absolutely had vines growing in Southern California. That’s where California wine kind of began with the missions of the Franciscan monks over there in the West Coast.

And what we were doing on the East Coast, back in the day, we had no idea what the West Coast was doing. It was just kind of all over the place. I mean, I’m sure people knew what other people were doing, but there wasn’t email. It was hard to get information from one coast to the next coast and from one part of the country. From the Midwest even to the East Coast.

And it was a rough go for a while there. I mean, we were Europeans planting European vines in this new soil and this new land with tons of climatic and natural challenges, and it didn’t really work that well. But then we found, “Hey, there’s actually these native grapes here in the United States or the colonies or whatever. Let’s plant these.” And the result was wine, but not the kind of wine that we were used to in Europe. So we were like, nah, let’s try and make this vitis vinifera thing works. So we keep on trying to make that work and in doing so, it just so happens that every once in a while, a natural crossing of a European variety and an American variety would come about. It’s called a hybrid.

And this hybrid would have some aspects of the European variety, but it would have the hardiness and ability to survive in the climates in this new land. The only problem was: Wines made from American vitis labrusca or whatever they’re called now, and these hybrids, would often have this really odd distinct, musky, animal smell to them that they called “Foxy”. I mean, we knew now that it’s a compound called methyl anthranilate, and it’s very unique to these American varieties and hybrids. And we also know now the best way to get rid of these is to pick early, harvest early, or age for a long time in cask, or just rack the hell out of it until it’s gone.

And there were a lot of them that had this sort of unfortunate aroma to them, but there were also some that didn’t, there were some successes. And to this day they’re still being used. Hybrids with names like Catawba, Delaware, Isabella, and the really most famous one was Norton. There’s also ones called Seyval, Seyval Blanc, Vidal all these different names. A lot of them are white. Not all of them are red. Norton is one of the most successful red ones. We have another one called Baco Noir. And if we weren’t forcing Merlot and Cab and Chardonnay into these soils, we were just using these hybrids and we were trying to develop our wine culture through these hybrids.

That’s why California is so important. Because in California, these European varieties tended to do well. The mission grape, which is the grape that kind of started the wine thing in California, was brought to California by Franciscan monks. That grape is actually a native Spanish grape, and it traveled all the way around the world, and it finally made it to California. They call it the mission grape because it was planted in the missions going all the way up from San Diego to Sonoma. So that’s a vitis vinifera variety, and it did just fine. So when Cabernet Sauvignon, Zinfandel, Chardonnay, Merlot, Cab Franc all these varieties start doing well, then we start focusing on them.

Of course, the mission grape is always around, but it’s a vitis vinifera, so this is how it starts working in California. It’s why all eyes were on California, but of course so was the Gold Rush. The Gold Rush happened in California. So there’s all this attention on this state. And it just so happens it was a great place to grow certain vines. But while all that was happening, wine was being grown in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, the Ohio Valley, Lake Erie, Missouri. Even though it wasn’t really working that well, we were doing it. We had these hybrids. And then what happened is this louse called phylloxera starts attacking all the vines in Europe and in the United States, kills 85 percent of European vines. It goes crazy in the United States as well, starts depleting our vines all over the place. It took us a while, I think it was four or five years to figure it out. We figured out through a collaboration between the Americans and the French. We figured it out. We never killed phylloxera. It’s still around, but we figured out how to combat it by using American rootstock, because phylloxera is an American louse, and putting American rootstock on European vines.

Therefore, the phylloxera is like, “Oh I don’t know what that is, I don’t want to. I guess I’m not hungry. I thought I was hungry, but I’m not hungry.” And this whole thing led to us actually making hybrid vines proactively, instead of like, “Oh look, a new grape popped up because of nature.” No, we actually started making them, thousands and thousands of different hybrids to put out there. Not all of them made good wine or made wine at all, or could make anything that was remotely like wine. But a lot of them did. Hundreds of them did. We made thousands of them, and hundreds of them could make wine. And a lot of places in the United States held onto this for a while, because it was the one way the wine could be made. And we got out of this whole phylloxera thing. California had the eyes of the world on it after the Gold Rush. Things were happening, which we’ve talked about in previous episodes.

And then in 1919, we decided to make it illegal to drink alcohol. And that basically ruined all the progress we had made up until that point. And then in 1933, it decimated pretty much the entire alcohol industry. We emerged out of that, but we emerged out of that with a sweet tooth. The wine we were drinking in Prohibition wasn’t dry red wine or complex white wine. It was really sweet, high-alcohol hooch. That’s what it was. And that’s what we were used to. So coming out of Prohibition, it was very hard for us to figure out what fine wine or what good, fine dry red or white wine was. And it wasn’t until the 1960s that we kind of figured it out. People like Robert Mondavi were inspired by the winemakers that kept the thing going in Napa after Prohibition. And it was in California that we started seeing really nice, fine red wines and that kind of inspired other wine makers.

And there’s a lot of activity going on in California. Then in 1976, The Judgment of Paris showed that the wine from California was winning awards that would beat out French wine. And that was our watershed moment. And we became the winemaking country that Thomas Jefferson had always wanted. But before that, things were even happening North of California in Oregon in the 1960s. There were winemakers up there that had left California to go make wine there because they wanted to make Pinot Noir. They wanted to plant it and vitis vinifera wines in the Hills of the Dundee Hills, around Portland. And people were like, “Nah, that’s not going to work.” So they went and did it because someone told them they couldn’t do it. And in doing so, created what is now the Willamette Valley and one of the most sought after places for Pinot Noir in the country, and in the world. And that was all happening before we had these things called AVAs and North of Oregon, you have Washington state, which just even a little bit later than that started saying, you know what? We can do wine as well, and that’s where the Columbia Valley started coming into play.

While all that was happening, wine was still being made in New York. Actually the Finger Lakes had a huge industry of wine being made. It was still kind of hybrid-y, and there was a Concord grape, and they were trying Riesling at this point, and all the different kinds of cold, like winter-hardy vines. And then in 1976, The Farmer’s Winery Act was passed in New York. And then you have these winemakers out in Long Island buying up potato fields and turning them into wineries. And then from 1978 to 1980, we created what’s called the American Viticultural Area, which is our way of having an Appalachian system in the United States. It is nothing like the Old World in Europe. It is a very loose, very lenient system. It’s basically used to demarcate an area if you can prove it has a certain kind of unique soil type and unique climate, but it can also be political — it’s America. It’s just what we do. But when we created that, the first one was awarded to Augusta, Missouri, which is old school, they’re still making wine there. Even after Prohibition and through all this time with The Judgment of Paris, Missouri was still making wine, and they were the first ones to apply, they got an AVA. Then after that, the second one was Napa Valley. And then from the 1980s, until literally last week, we have been adding AVAs to our land. A lot of the AVAs we had rushed in between the eighties and the nineties. But I was told by one of the hosts of the VinePair Podcast last week that there was an AVA that was being awarded to Hawaii.

I was talking to a winemaker in Washington state that said about two weeks ago, since the recording of this podcast, there’s two new AVAs in Washington state. And I guess you could say for a long time, we didn’t think about any of this stuff, right? I mean so what? It’s California! That’s what’s important.

It’s New York. It’s Washington. It’s Oregon. Those are important places because of the track record. But there’s other places that work in the United States that make great wine. The thing is, we’re a big country. And it’s not going to work in every place, but if we’re smart — we’re getting smarter and smarter, the people making wine in this country, the things that they’re coming up with is incredible. They’re thinking about the soil, not the vine, they’re thinking about the climate, not the vine. And then once they get the climate and they get the soil, then they find the vine that works in that soil. We’re finally at a place in our history in America where we’re willing to try whatever does well in whatever soil.

There’s an Austrian grape called Grüner Veltliner. It is awesome from Long Island. It is delicious, but the thing is no one knows what Grüner Veltliner is, so it doesn’t do as well, but in the future, it could. ‘Cause once it catches on, people will know that variety as well there.

And maybe Long Island Grüner Veltliner will be a thing. And it could be. We’re only 240 something years old. We had 10 years of Prohibition, and we had to come back as a country from that. Our drinking culture is still kind of young. We actually had a stunted growth, if you will. So the thing is, what you should know is that yeah, Oregon makes amazing Pinot Noir in the Willamette Valley and all of its sub regions, but Oregon also makes amazing Cab Franc, amazing Pinot Gris, amazing Riesling, amazing Müller-Thurgau. And there are other wine regions in Oregon in the South like Rogue Valley that are doing great things.

You should know that in Washington state, they were once really well-known for the Riesling, but now they’re really more known for their Merlot. And now they’re also really known for their Cab, but they really should be known for their Syrah, but not enough people are making Syrah in Washington state because it seems like it’s just Cab and Merlot and Riesling are more popular, but if you’ve ever had a Syrah from Washington state — Columbia Valley, Rattlesnake Hills — they’re beautiful. They’re peppery and dark and wonderful. You should know that in New York state, they make absolutely stunning, amazing Riesling, and now they’re known for it. But there’s also a great Cab Franc coming out of the Finger Lakes.

There’s also a great Merlot coming out of Long Island. The Grüner Veltliners coming out of Long Island. There’s a lot happening. In that area now it’s getting more and more popular and more people are understanding the soils. You should also know that Virginia is making absolutely stunning wines right now that sets it apart from every other wine region in the country. They’re making amazing wine from a grape called Petit Manseng, which is a blending variety from Bordeaux. They’re making amazing Viognier, Pinot Noir, Cab Franc, Merlot, Chardonnay. And the beauty of Virginia is all these wines are elegant. There’s more acidity in the wines in Virginia than anywhere else in any other region in the country.

You should also know that there’s wine being made in Arizona. Actually I had some great red wine in Arizona. I had one of my favorite white wines ever. A white wine from the grape Malvasia from Arizona that was absolutely delicious. You should also know that there is wine being made in New Mexico. Some of the best sparkling wine in America is being made in New Mexico. You should also know that Texas is doing something really special. The thing about Texas, fun fact is that’s the home of T.V. Munson. That’s the guy who worked with the French to figure out that American rootstock on European vines helped stem the tide of phylloxera. So that’s pretty cool. So he was also a hybrid guy, so he created hundreds and hundreds of hybrids. So Texas has always been kind of a hybrid winemaking place. And the few AVAs that are emerging out of Texas, like the Texas High Plains up in the Northwestern part of the state or the Texas Hill Country, which is right smack dab in the middle of the state. There are things happening here, where vitis vinifera vines are being grown and they’re successfully being grown. Like Merlot, Tempranillo, Syrah, and some of them are being blended with hybrid grapes. And the success rate is stupendous. I recently had a Texas red: It was Merlot, Tempranillo, and a hybrid called Ruby Cabernet. The wine was awesome. And for me, it was like, this is an American wine. It is absolutely an American wine because of the blend.

And they’re still making wine in Augusta, Missouri. It’s the first AVA in America. I recently had a red wine from the Norton variety from Missouri, and it was awesome. It was meaty, juicy, and soft, and great. But when it comes to vitis vinifera, the thing is, we are still working on it in the United States. We still have a long way to go. And the best way that we can help this along, is we have to understand that we’re not always going to be a place that makes a lot of wine to get all over the place. We also have really weird laws. Post-Prohibition laws gave every state its own, “Go ahead and create your own law.” So every state is its own country of wine and liquor laws.

But the way we can do this is we have to visit these places. We have to go to Virginia, go to Texas, go to New Mexico, go to Arizona. Go to New York, go to Oregon, go to Washington. Of course, go to California. I mean, the places that you can get wine all over the place is one thing. But go to places that don’t do the production to get across the country. And it’s not because they don’t make good wine, it’s because they’re making good wine, but in smaller amounts, because they’re concentrating on quality not quantity. And that’s where America’s going. And I think that’s what’s exciting about American wine.

I want to thank Sean Hails, winemaker at Columbia winery in Washington for some great info on this episode.

If you’re digging what I’m doing, picking up what I’m putting down, go ahead and give me a rating on iTunes or tell your friends to subscribe. You can subscribe. If you like to type, go ahead and send a review or something like that, but let’s get this wine podcast out so that everybody can learn about wine.

Check me out on Instagram. It’s @vinepairkeith. I do all my stuff in stories. And also, you got to follow VinePair on Instagram, which is @vinepair. And don’t forget to listen to the VinePair Podcast, which is hosted by Adam and Zach. It’s a great deep dive into drinks culture every week.

Now, for some credits. How about that? Wine 101 is recorded and produced by yours truly, Keith Beavers, at the VinePair headquarters in New York City. I want to give a big shout-out to co-founders Adam Teeter and Josh Malin. I also want to thank Danielle Grinberg for making the most legit Wine 101 logo. And I got to thank Darby Cicci for making this amazing song: Listen to this epic stuff. And finally, I want to thank the VinePair staff for helping me learn more every day. Thanks for listening. I’ll see you next week.

Ed. note: This episode has been edited for length and clarity.

The article Wine 101: The U.S. Regions Outside of California You Need To Know appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/wine-101-regions-outside-california/

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johnboothus · 4 years ago

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Wine 101: The U.S. Regions Outside of California You Need To Know

Listen Online

Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify

Or Check Out the Conversation Here

My name is Keith Beavers. And just thinking like, wow, Disney bought Star Wars. And I get to watch Star Wars…

I want to thank Sean Hails, winemaker at Columbia winery in Washington for some great info on this episode.

Ed. note: This episode has been edited for length and clarity.

The article Wine 101: The U.S. Regions Outside of California You Need To Know appeared first on VinePair.

Via https://vinepair.com/articles/wine-101-regions-outside-california/

source https://vinology1.weebly.com/blog/wine-101-the-us-regions-outside-of-california-you-need-to-know

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365-of-2019 · 4 years ago

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Today is August 7, 2020. I am currently on a flight home to Atlanta after spending more than two weeks out West in Colorado and Utah. Though I am coming off a desert adventure, I am sitting on this plane feeling intensely anxious. The last time I remember feeling this way was during my sophomore and junior years of college—the years in which I couldn’t see straight and didn’t sleep properly for weeks at a time. So, I am scared. I would very much prefer not to spiral in the way that I did 3 years ago. I would prefer to prove to myself that I have grown since then, and that I have ways of dealing with my anxiety other than just pretending it doesn’t exist. If it turns out that I am unable to handle my anxiety, then I will need to follow up on my years-long intention of getting professional help. Anyway. I wanted to open up a blank page and write a little bit about the past two weeks, rather than writing about my job and my stress levels.

For context: the world is still in the middle of a pandemic. In the US, COVID-19 cases continue to rise every day as public officials make laws, take back laws, and take back their take backs. In general, flying is frowned upon. When I drove up to the Atlanta airport two weeks ago, I felt enormous tidal waves of guilt. I felt selfish, ignorant, and borderline idiotic. But I still went through with it. So I guess none of those feelings really matter.

This summer, Maddie worked for Jefferson County in Golden, Colorado. She was a trail specialist and spent three days a week performing maintenance on trails all around Jefferson County. At the same time, Nevada was driving around the West Coast, spending time in California, Nevada, Arizona, and Colorado. For the past two weeks, both Maddie and Nevada have been living in the suburbs of Denver.

With both of my sisters in a city that I have always wanted to visit, and with the opportunity to work remotely from any location I choose, I felt like I could not pass up such a special moment in time. Special feels like the wrong word to use. I may look back on this decision and think, “IDIOT!” But, for now, I feel grateful for concentrated time with Maddie, who is growing and evolving so quickly and confidently.

I arrived in Colorado on July 23. That weekend, Maddie and I, along with her roommate Emma, made a drive out to Great Sand Dunes National Park. It was wild. There was sand everywhere. The hills were steep and tough to trek, due to our feet sliding backwards four inches with every step we took. But, we eventually found our own little peak to claim. And then we claimed it by eating peanuts and dancing to Harry Styles and throwing our cowboy hats into the wind. We finished the day by ordering six burritos in the drive thru of La Casita, and eating them in the Colorado wilderness. A hard Saturday to beat.

The next day, we met up with Nev to check out UC Boulder’s campus. We grabbed coffee at a Boulder café, walked around the Quad, found Varsity Bridge, and talked smack about our family members. I am so thankful for those moments—no matter how nasty or silly or irritating we may be when we are all together, we are all together.

Unfortunately (the word “unfortunately” is comical in this context), I was not permitted to take more than two days of PTO while in Colorado. For the last week of July, I worked a four-day week before we set off on our four-day weekend in the desert.

We left Thursday night and drove to an Air BnB in Grand Junction, Colorado. We woke up the next morning and drove straight to Arches National Park—the park I have been dreaming of ever since I went to Zion with Zander last year! It was 105 degrees. The air was dry. There were no trees. It was amazing.

Because I am obnoxious and feel the need to prove points that don’t need to be proven, I suggested that we attempt the longest hike in the park—an 8-mile loop through the most northern tip of Arches. To my surprise, Maddie and Emma agreed. Maybe they shouldn’t have. But they did! So we set off! We made it about halfway through the trail—seeing some beautiful arches along the way—and then spent about 90 minutes trying to locate the correct path to take to lead up through the second half of the loop. It was a little bit fun and a little bit concerning.

I love National Parks and I love the West because they make you feel small. You can look at a canyon or a mountain or the clear night sky and feel like a speck. Which then means that all of your problems and worries are smaller than specks. And that’s nice. However, when you are lost in the middle of a canyon, feeling small is not so reassuring. As we drank the last sips of our water, we decided to turn around and cut our losses. So, we did not complete the 8-mile loop, but we did complete an 8-mile hike. I was so thankful to be with my sister in nature. Not even a powerfully persistent dry mouth could ruin the day.

That night, we camped at a private campsite in Moab. We grabbed fresh corn, broccoli, and vegan sausages from the grocery store and grilled them over charcoal. We slept in Emma’s tent, sleeping on the camping pads that I purchased last November when Kristy and I spent the night on Maddie’s dorm floor. I had not been camping since I was little, and I had not felt so disconnected from technology since my time in Uganda. It was a welcome change.

We woke up to the blazing sun burning through the side of our tent, and set off for another stint at Arches. The second time around, we waltzed around the more touristy parts of the Park, taking ~4 minute walks to reach beautiful viewpoints. It was relaxing. And beautiful. And I think we were all happy to have the car within a half mile.

Arches was everything I thought it would be. I wish I could explore the that place for weeks, rather than days.

The second night in Moab, we drove to a Utah state park called Dead Horse Point. It sits at the northern end of Canyonlands National Park. It was insane. I saw the Grand Canyon last year, so I know what big canyons look like, but this one still took my breath away and had me repeatedly saying, “Wow,” like an idiot. I hope that that feeling never goes away no matter how many feats of nature I come across.

We asked the park ranger if we could stay past closing hours, and he suggested that the answer was yes. We laid on the rocks of the canyon wall for hours, watching the sky turn from neon orange to dark blue. It was the night before a Full Moon, and the light of the moon lit up the canyon walls so brightly that we ran and danced and played music until nearly 11PM. The tiny desert mice made a couple of appearances. We said thank you.

Day three in the desert: we drove to the center of Utah. Along our drive, we saw signs that said, “No Services for 100 Miles.” We thought we were in the desert in Moab. But when we drove farther West, we started to realize that Moab is a bustling city in comparison to the center of the state.

We spent the afternoon at Little Wild Horse Canyon, a slot canyon near Goblin Valley State Park. We had a photoshoot between the canyon walls and soaked up the shade that the narrow slots created. It was a beautiful, totally unique ~4 mile hike that left us in high spirits.

That night, we stayed at a campsite in Goblin Valley. Emma got us some firewood and we roasted corn over a fire. Maddie made me tiki masala with chickpeas. There were signs at the campsite that advised boiling water before consuming. We tried. It was very bad.

After dinner, we drove to the valley of the park to soak up the stars. Goblin Valley is home to one of the darkest night skies in the US, and we could tell how special that darkness was, even in the blinding moonlight. Maddie and Emma stripped and ran around the valley naked. I curled up in the crevice of a boulder and stared up for an hour. Sometimes, I wish I would not be such a square. Sometimes, I appreciate my ability to choose the things that bring me most satisfaction, even when others are telling me that I am choosing incorrectly. But that’s for another time.

We drove home to Golden the night after our rendezvous with the goblins, and we all took showers and curled up on the couch after nearly four full days in the desert heat.

I have already written this so many times, which I hope suggests that it is authentic: I am so thankful for experiences like the one I had last weekend. Particularly in the midst of a world that is stressful for me as an individual, but also stressful for global society, I feel so lucky to have the relationships and resources at my fingertips to experience truly special pieces of life. Never have I ever wanted to buy a van and live off of rice and beans so badly. There is so much that I haven’t seen and so much that I want to see again. I often feel as though I approach life like a race—trying to squeeze in experiences even when doing so is inconvenient or difficult or exhausting. I hope this is a good thing. I am not sure yet.

I spent the last four days working from Maddie’s home in Golden. She finished up her summer job this week, and is driving back to North Carolina this weekend. I am landing in Atlanta tonight and moving into my new apartment tomorrow. Jake and Dad are driving down from Raleigh to help me with the insane one-day moving process. They are kind.

I am stressed about work, stressed about moving, stressed about money, stressed about COVID-19, stressed about the social and political atmosphere of the country. Sometimes, it is so much that I break into tears without any specific triggers. But at the same time, I am feeling such immense gratitude. I have siblings who are so smart and thoughtful and unique. I have spent more time with Mom and Dad in 2020 than I did in the four years previous. Zander is loving and kind and gives me advice when I feel helpless. I have a job that is challenging, but full of some of the brightest people I have ever met. I am moving in with one of my best friends from college tomorrow, making a beautiful apartment on 14th Street into our home. I got to see the desert and soak up the dirt. So, really, life is very very good.

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brittanyinterviews · 5 years ago

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Yohta Namba, Sous Chef at Marlow & Sons

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This interview was conducted via email in April 2020.

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Brittany: Can you tell me a bit about yourself?

Yohta: I was born in Japan. My mother is American, from SF, and met my dad when she was teaching English in Japan in the ‘80s. I grew up in northern New Mexico with my brothers, mom and her partner, Summer, where I lived until I was 17. I moved to Oakland to go to school at the California College of the Arts, and started cooking around the time I was finishing school. I’m currently a sous chef at Marlow & Sons in Brooklyn—well, not currently, as it’s closed right now due to COVID-19.

Brittany: Have you always been interested in food?

Yohta: My first real job was working as a dishwasher in a small cafe in Taos. Growing up, especially out in the country, there wasn’t a huge restaurant food scene—of course there was rich culture, with tons of ranching and farming around, but there weren’t a ton of chefs on TV or anything. I guess I sort of just started working, to make a paycheck, and kept growing.

I’m lucky to have great cooks in my family, and being part of a huge family, food was always part of it. I have issues with the industry at large, but yes, food is an extremely important piece of connection for us.

Brittany: Can you describe your first food memory?

Yohta: My brothers and I ate a ton growing up, so dinners were always a huge pot of curry, beef stew, or something hearty to keep us full. My mother has this amazing corn soup recipe that was one of my favorites growing up.

Brittany: When we met, you were working as a line cook at Ramen Shop, a hip ramen restaurant in Oakland's Rockridge neighborhood that's known for its dynamic varieties of ramen and a stellar brunch selection. Before that, you worked at other Oakland favorites like Camino and Penrose. What was it like working at such notable restaurants when the Oakland food scene was really getting attention? What did you learn working at these restaurants?

Yohta: It’s funny, I worked the least amount of time at Camino but I think it’s the job that I learned most from. Russ [Chef Russell Moore] is very particular, and kept me on my toes, and rarely let things slide.

I was able to build really strong friendships and working relationships through these restaurants. Because it’s such a small world, you’re bound to end up working with familiar faces and menus. I worked with the same folks from Penrose that I worked with at Starline or Ramen Shop. Before Penrose I had last been working in catering in New York—totally different world. It’s cliché, but it truly is a community.

Brittany: You're now a sous chef at Marlow & Sons in Brooklyn. Can you describe the type of food a customer will encounter at Marlow & Sons? Is "Japanese-American farm food" still an accurate description?

Yohta: Right now, being in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, the restaurant is closed. The only business in the Marlow Collective that’s open is the butcher shop, Marlow & Daughters—it’s such a strange, surreal time to be in New York. The hardest part is not knowing, but Andrew [Tarlow] and everyone in charge are great about keeping us all in the loop and staying positive about what the future holds.

Patch [Troffer] is also half-Japanese, is interested in exploring the food of his life and family, which feels comforting and familiar. He, we, are so committed to quality ingredients, quality cookery. I feel so happy about the food we are able to put out. Also a really sweet dude, so easy to work with.

Brittany: Are you involved in coming up with new dishes? If so, can you describe the process of creating a new dish?

Yohta: I’ve put a few on—More often, the head chef Patch and I work on ideas together. He’s a super supportive chef, and is always open to ideas and feedback. Between Patch, the other sous Greg [Wright], and I, there is a lot of collaboration. Patch and Greg are also Bay Area guys, so we all sort of “get” each other. Really great dudes.

Brittany: Before you began your career in the world of food, you studied illustration at the California College of the Arts. Can you describe your current relationship with art?

Yohta: I’m happy I went to art school. I met some of my best friends and learned to look at things critically. I don’t make work as much as I used to, or would like to, but it’s always there.

Brittany: What do you eat when you're off the clock?

Yohta: I try to eat light, I feel like working in kitchens really loads your system with salt and fat. I have a sweet tooth, I love fruit.

Brittany: How has living in New York, the Bay Area, and elsewhere influenced your work as a chef?

Yohta: Hard to say, I think it’s more about the way we work—I feel like you can tell a Bay Area cook from a mile away. I’m lucky to have worked for so many great chefs, on both coasts.

Brittany: What are some of your favorite places to eat in New York? How about in the Bay Area?

Yohta: I miss Mexican food so much—my fave places are Tamales Mi Lupita and El Paisa in Fruitvale. I love Best Pizza in Williamsburg.

Brittany: When you're not working, how do you spend your time?

Yohta: Cycling, running, and skateboarding. I got engaged last year, so we’ve been busy planning our wedding and future.

Brittany: What can we look forward to seeing from you in the future?

Yohta: I’m curious to see what will become of the food industry post-Corona. With a ton of places closing for good, I imagine there’s going to be a huge shift in how we get our meals, and how we all work. No plans yet, just open to the future and what comes next.

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Photo by Javier Valencia

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Special thanks to Yohta for discussing his work with us. You can follow him on Instagram.

#Interview #Chef #Food #Yohta Namba #Marlow & Sons #Ramen Shop #Penrose #Camino #Starline Social Club #NYC #New York #Brooklyn #Bay Area #Oakland

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marjaystuff · 5 years ago

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Elise Cooper interviews Christina Dodd

Strangers She Knows by Christina Dodd creates an atmosphere of suspense and tension, that will keep readers on the edge of their seats. This story never lets up from beginning to end.

A psychopath, Mara Phillips, has a vendetta against the main character, Kellen Rae. She has escaped a maximum-security facility for the criminally insane. This psychopath targeted Kellen, her husband Max, and their daughter Rae who still has a maturity level beyond her years. Hoping that authorities will re-capture her, the family decides to stay on an island off the Northern California coast. There is no cell phone service, WiFi, internet, and TV, basically having the family totally cut off except for the radio in the helicopter. To pass the time Kellen and Rae explore the many hidden rooms and tunnels throughout the house. One of the main discoveries is a diary from the WWII years of a young girl whose father was the original owner of the Hearst-like home. As they read it, Kellen, Rae, and Max find out that the father was abusive, and that the writer’s lover died in the war. They also are kept busy by repairing and restoring a 1955 Ford-100 pickup truck.

But, since seeing Mara at her wedding, Kellen knows she and her family are in danger. She is also recovering from brain surgery that removed a bullet from her brain, and now is trying to regain the use of her atrophied hand. Unfortunately, Kellen will also have to battle Mara in a fight to see who will live and who will die.

This book is a fast-paced and a riveting read. Readers are kept guessing about the outcome. People will be sad knowing that the story of this family has come to an end.

Elise Cooper: Had did you come up with the last book in the series?

Christina Dodd: It is the logical progression of the first two books. For me, it is the only story that can follow the previous two. This will be the last book in the series, because I told my editor I would only write three stories.

EC: Did you know anyone that had brain surgery?

CD: My brother-in-law had a non-malignant tumor on his brain. The part affected was how he controlled his foot. Everything I wrote about was similar to his experience. He did not quite get his foot working, while I wrote Kellen having problems with her hand. I wanted to give her another level of difficulty and something she needs to overcome.

EC: The dog Luna was based on your dog?

CD: Luna was based on my daughter’s dog who recently died at the age of sixteen. We are dog people. My own dog died last year and we do not plan on getting another dog. He was originally saved as a service dog and flunked out because he was too social.

EC: Rae is growing into adolescence with some attitude?

CD: I did it and so did my children. It is terrible for everyone around them, but then they become lovely human beings. This is why I put the book quote, “A lovely child one moment, the next a temperamental, shrieking virago.”

EC: Did you get the island from someplace?

CD: The island, Isla Paraiso, was completely made up. I like geology/geography, and read about what happened in California so I decided to invent an island. I put in this sail boat for them to get off the island. I do not sail but both my children learned to sail in the girl scout camp. I had fun in making it real and not able to use technology.

EC: How did you come up with the book quote?

CD: You are referring to “If a book isn’t read, it cries in its soul.” Once a book is read there is more to it than just a cover with a story inside. After reading it people’s imagination can go wild and they can put their own imprint on it. What means the most to me is when readers find something that affects them personally. For example, I was told how my stories kept them company as their mom was in hospice, or how they were touched by the story. I also had in the story another type of book, a diary. Unfortunately, they are something of the past. But readers hopefully saw how books can be a form of entertainment when there is no technology.

EC: There are a lot of tidbits about the army?

CD: Like the motto, “Always prepare for the worst,” or how “the children in Afghanistan held rifles, fighting in wars so old their distant great-grandparents had started.” Most of the information came from my father-in-law who fought in WWII. A lot of what he went through in his service applies today.

EC: There is a reference to “Beauty and The Beast” and “Alice in Wonderland?”

CD: I think the story of “Beauty and The Beast” is enduring to children, especially that scene when Belle enters the library. It was such a beautiful scene. I think the storytellers nailed that one. The quote about Alice In Wonderland refers to the serial killer as the Queen of Hearts that says “off with her head.” This was one of my favorite books.

EC: How would you describe Mara?

CD: Bad and crazy. I wanted to explore how her father drove her to these extremes. Yet, she always had a choice not to go off the rails. Overall, she is competitive, mad, delusional, and a psychopath.

EC: Why the Ford-100 pickup truck?

CD: My husband had this type. I relied heavily on him since I know nothing about cars. After finishing the book, I handed it over to him to make sure I had all those scenes correct. After he read it he was sad since I blew it up. I knew I had to do something with cars because the family needed a distraction and Kellen’s background in the service was repairing autos.

EC: What about your next book?

CD: It will be a stand-alone based on the “Fugitive” TV show, but with a female on the run, who is innocent. It comes out next year.

THANK YOU!!

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travelinglifeshighways · 6 years ago

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Pebble Beach, 17 mile drive, Bixby Bridge, and McWay Falls Big Sur, California

Pebble Beach, 17 mile drive, Bixby Bridge, and McWay Falls

Big Sur, California

Wednesday, June 27, 2018

Clear, 80°

“Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.” ~Andre Gide

** Note – I have had a pretty good sinus infection for the last several weeks. It has kicked me to the ground so between that and limited or no internet I am, once again, several weeks behind in my writing. I will catch up when I can but the journey continues, just at a slightly slower pace until I am feeling better.

The fog was still lingering around the coast in the early morning hours as the wisps of low lying clouds floated through the campground. It would be a shame not to enjoy this beautiful setting, even in the fog, so we took a walk along the sand dunes and then the beach before heading out and up the coast. There were a few people out walking their dogs and others just walking looking for shells and sand dollars that had washed up along the shore. The waves, lightly crashing onto the beachfront, uncovered the fragments of shells, sand dollars and long pieces of kelp that had been deposited on the beach.

There was a group of school kids who was being taught how to paddle board at the base of Morro Rock. They appeared restless, moving around while the instructor was trying to tell them how to paddle out and then stand on the board. Rather than sitting there being lectured about how to do it, almost all of them seemed anxious to get in the water.

The walk was nice. There were several types of seabirds in the shallow pools left by the receding tide. Several groups of pelicans, formation flying back and forth along the beach would get close to the rocks then turn to fly back out along the waters’ edge. Some would head to deeper water where they would fly several feet above the water until they spotted a fish then climb rapidly to about thirty feet off the water and dive straight down to catch their prey. It was enjoyable to watch nature take its course. I guess that might not be how the little fish saw it but from shore it was pretty interesting to see how the pelicans worked for their food.

When we got on the road later that morning, it started out foggy with low hanging clouds still covering Morro Rock. However, the fog quickly dissipated as we drove inland to Highway 101. We had to detour off the Pacific Coastal Highway (Hwy 1) due to a massive mudslide, back in May 2017, which took out a bridge. Those living along Big Sur were cut off from civilization after more than 1 million tons of rock and dirt cascaded down a slope in a landslide the likes of which local officials said they had never seen before. The slide buried about a quarter mile of the highway in dirt up to 40 feet deep. The road, also known as State Route 1, is about 70 miles south of Monterey. It has had about a 12 mile section from Ragged Point to Gorda closed since last year. The California DOT has been constructing a new bridge that is expected to open later this summer.

Yesterday, we took a drive to just below the south closure point to see the elephant seals. Today, we are making our way to the northern side of the closure and will drive back south to see the sights along the Big Sur section of Hwy 1.

Driving up Highway 101 was an agricultural delight finding many fields growing grapes, fruit trees, and berries. There were fields of vegetables: lettuce, cabbage, artichokes, and others that we could not identify. It was a busy area with some fields being harvested, others being planted, and ongoing work to maintain other fields not quite ready for harvest. It appeared that more labor was needed to harvest crops but those who were working were doing a great job.

The detour brought us to Monterey by the Laguna Seca Racetrack (Indy car racetrack) where we continued the drive out to Pebble Beach for the 17 mile drive along the beach, golf courses, and the scenic viewpoints along the way. The cost was $10.25 to drive the rocky shores around the golf courses. The crashing waves made a spectacular backdrop along the Pacific Ocean for those playing golf or walking along the beach.

Golf Course View

It is a beautiful scenic drive for ten dollars and worth every penny to see the incredible homes, vistas, and viewpoints along the way.

One of the most scenic drives on the Monterey Peninsula, and quite possibly the world, is found behind the prestigious gates of Pebble Beach. The famous 17-Mile Drive is a visually stunning stretch of roadway which hugs the pacific coastline from Pacific Grove to Pebble Beach and features awe-inspiring sights along the way. The drive allows you plenty of time to cover the entire stretch of road to fully immerse yourself in the wonders of this seaside gem.

Pebble Beach

There are many pull offs and parking areas to enjoy these iconic landmarks (and photo opportunities) which include The Lone Cypress, Spanish Bay, Stillwater Cove, the Del Monte Forest, and the world-renowned Pebble Beach Golf Links. You are likely to see a variety of wildlife ranging from grazing deer on the golf course to barking sea lions near Bird Rock.

After entering the gates of Pebble Beach, the drive takes you by Spanish Bay golf course and to the parking areas along Pebble Beach. The beach is aptly named as the white sandy beach is covered in fist sized pebbles with larger stones closer to the walkways and roads that wind along the shore.

Across from the Spy Glass Golf Course, where we parked, you could see deer coming out of the tall grass onto the fairway. The beautiful setting is both calm, with the lush vegetation along the course, and invigorating as the Pacific Ocean’s waves crash onto the many rocks along the water’s edge.

Rocky Coast Line

With all the rocks along the beach it was easy for Cairn Stones to be stacked and balanced.

Pebble Beach Cairn Stones

There were several stacks along the beachfront, some close to the road while others were closer to the beach area.

Cairn Stones

A bus filled with Japanese people offloaded next to the motorhome and began taking pictures of anything and everything imaginable along the beach. They took photos of each other, the greens on the golf course, and the rocks just off the beach in the ocean. They were amazed that some rocks were covered “white” in bird poop. They scurried back on the bus and we saw them stop after stop; it was sort of a comical leap frog from viewpoint to viewpoint watching them with their cameras.

The road winds its way around the golf courses and past the very expensive houses dotting the hillsides. There was a mixture homes. The older homes, which were simplistic but elegant, were mixed in with the extravagant mansions and it appeared that some of the owners had more money than brains with what they had built or were building. The styles of architecture varied from the simple Mediterranean styles and Spanish fortresses to ultra-modern homes. There was a lot of construction going on and several houses were still under construction since my last drive through two years ago.

As you climb in elevation along the cliff, winding around the jagged shoreline, you come into an area where there are older houses - both Cliff side and on the interior side of the road. These houses were probably built, between the 50s and 70s, during a time when things were not as extravagant. Construction was completed so the main house, guest houses, and parking areas or pools blended in with the beautiful twisted cypress trees. It was not long before you came across the famous Lone Cypress Tree, clinging to the solitary rock where it rests.

The Lone Cypress Tree

This tree has endured all types of weather; wind-blown monsoons, driving rain & fog, and other natural events yet still remains perched on the tiny rock outcropping.

The rest of the drive takes you around the golf clubhouse, spa area, places to eat and shop as you enjoy this beautiful setting. The road continues around past more houses and condo complexes before leading you to another entrance gate close to the west side of the compound out to Hwy 1.

Leaving Pebble Beach, it was an easy connection to drive south on Hwy 1 to Big Sur where we saw many dramatic cliffs along the highway. We made stops at Bixby Bridge and further down the road at McWay Falls, both great places for beautiful photos. The road construction and bridge work was just past the falls so it was necessary to turn around and drive back north along the coastal highway.

As you drive south on US1, past Carmel by the Sea, the road starts its climb and winds through the curves gaining elevation over the ocean. The jagged rocks along the coast and the waves crashing into them are reminiscent of those “Kodak�� moments from long ago.

Rocky Coast

Once you are about two thousand feet above the ocean, you can see the Bixby Bridge in the distance. Its curved arch underneath is part of its superstructure and clings to each side of the mountain’s walls as the river flows into the ocean far below. Parking is very limited along the crest and even less if you turn off the little side road so it was lucky that there was room for the motorhome. I pulled into a regular parking spot with the front wheels as far forward as I could go without going over the cliff and hoped the back end of the RV would be off the highway. There was about a foot between me and the white line on the road so it was safe to make this stop for photos.

Bixby Bridge from Cliff

I took the normal pictures from the cliff overlooking the bridge and ocean but also wanted to hike up the small road across the street to get photos of the bridge with the ocean behind it. It did not disappoint as the angle and the composition in the photos are different from the ones on the cliff.

Bixby Bridge toward Pacific Ocean

Continuing the drive south in Big Sur, curve after curve, beautiful vista after vista, you arrive at my favorite place along the coastal drive, McWay Falls. It is located in the Julia Pfeiffer State Park and is such a pleasure to see. There are trails leading from the park through a tunnel under the highway to the trail alongside the highway where a short walk brings you to the vantage point to see the beautiful waterfall cascading into the Pacific Ocean.

McWay Falls

The beach along this cove is protected by large rocks that the surf pounds against, creating spectacular splashes of water in the air. It has a very calm atmosphere as everyone talks in hushed tones with the occasional “beautiful” or “oh, my” heard among those gathered to see this beautiful place.

McWay Falls Panorama

By then, the sun was setting as we drove into Monterey Pines RV Park which is located on a naval military installation. It had a beautiful golf course, little bar and breakfast facility. It was a nice place to stop along the way before arriving at my youngest daughter’s house.

#Pebble Beach #McWay Falls #17 Mile Drive #California #Interesting places #Interesting things #Beautiful Places #Beauty #RV'ing #Road Trip #Travel #Traveling Life's Highways #Big Sur

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jafreitag · 7 years ago

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The Liner Notes Felsen Interview

Back in November 2017, Liner Notes featured “Vultures on Your Bones,” the new single by Bay-area ensemble Felsen. That track kicks off their new album, Blood Orange Moon, which was released last month. It’s great. (And that’s not damned faint-praise. I enjoyed TF outta this record. And everybody, especially my best friend, knows that I’m a music snob.) Listen for yourself. You’ll dig.

Felsen honcho Andrew Griffin and I grew up together in Valparaiso, Indiana. We’re old friends. We recently had a chance to Q&A via email about the new record. Here’s the result – the first-ever LN rock star interview. If you’re expecting Lester Bangs chatting with Joe Strummer, you will not be disappointed

JF: Describe your life path from Valpo to Oakland. How did a Midwestern kid end up on the left coast leading a rock band?

AG: I moved from Valparaiso to Chicago in 1991 with my Loudflower bandmates after I graduated from VU. I worked shitty restaurant jobs, and we were really going for it for about another year until the band imploded. I started taking drum lessons soon thereafter, and that teacher encouraged me to further my education and go to Berklee College of Music. I moved to Boston in the fall of 1993 with my girlfriend, Norene. I started school in January 1994. Norene and I got married in ‘96 and then we moved to the SF East Bay in 1998. I started working playing drums and teaching lessons. I worked my way up the food chain of bay area drummers, toured the US with a few different bands, went to Europe a few times. Always working. I started teaching in schools, different music programs, daycare music, you name it, I did it. Plus…thousands of gigs…you’ve got to if you wanna eek out an income. I played lots of rock, singer songwriter stuff, cover bands, wedding bands, jazz, country, Zydeco, Blues, Salsa, Cumbia, musical theater gigs, Big Band…everything. I learned much along the way. I had a band when I first arrived in the bay area, where I was the songwriting drummer – that being my 3rd valiant attempt with this concept, the first being in Valparaiso with the aforementioned Loudflower. It never really seemed to work out though. Odd concept I guess – songwriting drummer with someone else singing and fronting the band. I set that notion aside around 2000 and just focused on drumming. I started to produce other people’s music. I was also a busy co-writer with a handful of really talented Bay Aarea songwriters. Mmost notably, I worked closely with Rich McCulley in the early 2000’s. I was Rich’s drummer, and we wrote a bunch of tunes together, played about 180 gigs from coast to coast putting 70,000 miles on his van (seriously). The drumming life was good to me.

JF: When did you form Felsen?

AG: I started to record what would become Felsen’s first album, Accidental Drowning, in the fall of 2007. I had no real plan at the time. I was in the middle of a long cancer ordeal, and I guess I was killing time, as I wasn’t working much due to my sickness. There was also some desire to commit to tape my songs as my health situation was rather grave and perhaps my time was short. I had a newborn son at home at the time, and I wanted to leave something behind just in case. I thought I would have other friends sing the tunes as I’d done in the past, but when I started to write about what I’d recently been dealing with (life and death and being a dad), I realized I had to sing. I’m still learning. I’m a work-in-progress. That album took about a year to record, and then a few months of mixing. I got a small record deal with an East Bay label, 9th Street Opus, and they encouraged me to put a band together and make a go of it. I was now the frontman, singer in a band–didn’t see that one coming. That was in the summer of 2009. I’ve been doing Felsen ever since.

JF: There have been various lineup changes. I think the last time that I saw the band at Valpo’s legendary Club Coolwood, you were a quartet. How has the band evolved since then?

AG: It’s really hard to keep a band together. I’ve done my best. People come and go over the years. Mainly, they run out of time (or money) or have moved from the area. I will say, though, that every time someone new comes into the band, the bar always gets raised higher. The level of musicianship is ever increasing as I’m able to attract better and better players as the band’s notoriety grows, we get better gigs, better money etc. I’m very, very grateful to all the folks who’ve helped me along the way. In my current lineup I’ve got two people who’ve been with me about four years each. I haven’t been touring as much, mainly playing around the bay area and Northern California, and have had the luxury of playing with a slightly larger ensemble – sometimes up to 7 musicians. When we tour again, it’ll most likely be a more compact unit, most likely a quartet. Touring is dreadfully expensive. Hey…can we sleep on your floor? Can you make us a vegan meal? Can I get your credit card number?

JF: You played drums in high school, right? And you were in bands back then. I can’t remember the names.

AG: You are correct, sir. I’m a proud alum of the very fertile Valpo music scene. My first band was with Chad Clifford, who’s still going strong in Valpo. Here’s a few band names: Merge, The Happy Bunch, Blue Elvis, Astral Zombies, Buddha’s Belly, Loudflower. Anybody remember these bands?

JF: I remember the Happy Bunch, and maybe Astral Zombies, haha. When did you start playing guitar? When did you start writing songs?

AG: My parents were kind enough/wise enough to allow my bands to practice in their house when I was in junior high and high school. The guitars and amps, etc., lived in the house, and I guess I got curious about guitar around 9th grade and started fooling around then. Maybe around 11th grade I could play a little bit. My freshman roomie at Valparaiso University had a guitar and an amp that I was constantly playing. By my sophomore year, I had acquired a guitar (the borrow-to-own program thankyouverymuch) and basically started writing tunes the same way I continue to. I was writing lyrics in highschool for my bandmates to sing and started writing poetry and short stories in college. I guess that all melded together. I’ve always mainly enjoyed creating original music. I’ve never been a very good or dedicated cover band guy.

JF: Do you still play drums? With Felsen? I know you’ve gigged with other bands, too. Camper Van Beethoven? Cake?

AG: Yup, still quite busy playing a lot of drums and teaching tons of lessons. If you know of anyone who needs a drummer…let ‘em know…I’ll do my homework…but I’m very, very expensive. OK JK. I’m really fortunate to have lots of opportunities to play great original music here in the bay area (and beyond). I love it very much. The new Felsen album is all me on the drums. We were going through some personnel changes at the time. Super fun experience for me. And, yes, a few big name gigs along the way.

JF: Describe your process with respect to songwriting. Are you a notebook guy, scribbling lyrics in coffee shops when inspiration hits? Or a device guy, recording snippets on your phone? Or are you more structured? Which comes first, chords or words?

AG: I’m pretty disciplined about recording new song snippets on my phone or computer. Also, I keep folders in my google drive. There’s a random lyric folder where I dump words, phrases, stuff I hear in passing, or on TV, or Netflix or read on the internet or in a copy of the New Yorker (my doctor’s office magazine of choice) or just bizarre stuff my kid says. I then begin to sort through that stuff, sifting it out into more specific files – like a file all about technology or Trump or nature or death or love or sadness. I play guitar and stare at the screen, and, eventually, the words start to coalesce around the music (or vice versa). I also keep a file of good opening lines and a file of song titles. Metallica starts with titles, and I wouldn’t argue with those dudes. That’s an interesting way of going about business, IMHO. Too many songs have shitty boring titles. I like song titles that could be movies, or novels. Good movies and interesting novels. “The Telepathic Kind.” That’s a good title. Or “The Secret Life of Guns.” “Blood Orange Moon.” “White Denim Jeans.” Yummy titles. I’d read those books.

JF: I’m a New Yorker fan, too. I regularly snag passages and dump them into a notebook app. Such good writing, particularly about music. (Amanda Petrusich is a god among manboys.) Speaking of words, is there an aerial theme? Airplane, Airline, Moon?

AG: I just saw Up In the Air again the other day. Amazing movie. I guess that one really hit me years ago. It takes years for me to wrap my brain around something. Re: air travel, etc. It’s a lonely world of airports and shitty motels. I’ve spent a lot of time on the road. i guess I really saved up some of that sadness. I move at a glacial pace processing life events and churning them into songs.

JF: Are the songs on the new record all new? Have you played any of them live before going into the studio?

AG: There was really only one tune that Felsen had been playing on stage before recording the new album: “Poor in a Wealthy City.” I wrote much of that tune in a motel room in the Midwest when Felsen was on tour in the fall of 2013. I wrote very deliberately for this new album. I did perform a handful of the tunes, as I was writing them. I wrote for two years, and then spent two years recording.

JF: Describe your process with respect to recording/production. Were you involved on the production end of BOM? If so, what were your goals? Do you have an idea of what you want a song or an album to sound like when you press record? I’m thinking of something like Ansel Adams’ concept of previsualization. Maybe preaudialization?

AG: On Blood Orange Moon, I had a pretty clear idea of what I was going for. I started a branch of the Felsen family tree, playing with a few new faces and a few old ones, referring to that unit as the Felsen Symphonette. Incorporating cello, glockenspiel, synth, acoustic guitars and hand percussion – a bit of a departure from the electric guitar-heavy music of previous of Felsen albums. The Symphonette started to perform house concerts and backyards – low volume, lo-fi, and low tech. Why not write an album of that lower volume stuff? I was inspired by a Rolling Stone review of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass that described that album as “music for mountaintops.” I liked that idea alot. I was also greatly under the musical narcosis of Beck’s twin albums Sea Change and Morning Phase, as well as Songs for a Blue Guitar by Red House Painters. I also heard Serge Gainsbourg’s tune, “Bonnie & Clyde” in an episode of Mad Men and eventually found Serge’s Historie de Melody Nelson. I recruited Allen Clapp of the Orange Peels to mix the album. This album needed tons of reverb, and Allen has a special understanding of reverb. He and his studio live on a mountain – music for mountaintops, indeed. Blood Orange Moon’s tempos are slower, volumes often quieter, and I’m often singing in a lower register. The tunes kinda sprawl out more and take more time to unfold. They’re kinda cinematic in scope. The overall pace of the album is much slower. That’s a good reminder for all of us to just slow down. Life is way too chaotic and insane right now. Chill out America.

JF: The production on “The Telepathic Kind” is lush in a ’70s way. (Not a criticism. I love ’70s music.) Intentional?

AG: Yes and no. It kinda seeps out of me. I love the early 70’s Pink Floyd – Meddle and Dark Side of the Moon era. I wanted that tune to be really dreamy and kinda narcotic sounding. That one also owes much to Sun Kil Moon’s “Ghost of the Great Highway” as well. Mark Kozelek really knows how to take his time and let a tune slowly unfold. I love that. It takes courage to do that, too. On previous Felsen albums, I guess I was holding onto the idea that we would someday, somehow, get a song on the radio, and I had been making what I believed were radio-friendly albums (to the best of my ability). I guess I’ve officially abandoned that idea entirely this time around and just made an album that I enjoy listening to. So…lots of 6 minute tunes this time ‘round.

JF: Guitar solos are pretty prominent on the new record. Was that intentional? Did you do those?

AG: There’s a few. I’m OK with it – I’m old fashioned. Seems like they’re being abandoned, but I’m all for it. The guitar solos were all done by Dylan Brock. I love Dylan’s playing. He toured and recorded with Felsen for about four years. He’s got a real unique sound. I hear Johnny Greenwood and Johnny Maar in his playing. Also a hint of George Harrison. There’s some pedal steel, and that was done by Gawain Matthews, who also engineered a goodly bit of the album.

JF: Talk about the instrumental interludes. I think of you as a wordy guy, and it was fun to hear a few purely musical tracks.

AG: They’re like incidental music in a movie. Again, going for kind of a cinematic thing. I put a lot of thought into the sequencing of the album – I always do, but this one feels really special in that regard. The album flows from start to finish, and it’s meant to be listened to as an LP, as well. I know that’s a tall order for our overly-stressed-out and frantically-paced society, BUT if you can just slow down and listen to this, you’ll really see it as an album. I think it holds up. The three, short instrumental interludes really help tie it all together and make it feel more album-like.

JF: “Spanish Jam Sandwich” is like psych-rock Felsen.

AG: Yup. Felsen is a cult. That’s our theme song.

JF: What has been the local response to BOM? I know you played a record release show recently.

AG: Excellent response locally. We got lots of great press nationwide, and then we had a team of local friends write their own reviews. My fav review so far has been from one of the bay area’s finest songwriters, Mr. Maurice Tani. My new, all time fav quote re: Blood Orange Moon: “It sounds expensive – back in the day of album rock, an album like this would have cost a mountain of corporate cash and a cigarette boat full of drugs.” Nailed it.

JF: Any plans to make it back to the Midwest?

AG: We hope to be back in 2018. Maybe play the Popcorn Festival? Contact your local congressman and demand Felsen. Also, contact Von Tobels and see if they’ll underwrite our tour. You never know.

Fwiw, Von Tobels is a local hardware store. For years, the business called itself the “Do-It Center.” I’m sure no teenagers ever had sex in their parking lot just because. Anyway, thanks, AG. I’ll have an influences playlist from him in the next week or so.

More soon.

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racingtoaredlight · 7 years ago

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The degenerate’s guide to 2017 college football TV watch ‘em ups: week 2

My heart’s not really in the football like it normally is. I’m just impotently worrying about hurricanes so the capsules might be bad. Like worse than usual level of bad.

This is basically a week without Florida which is effectively my nightmare version of football. Times are all Eastern. Schedules are stolen from FBSchedules.

Saturday, Sept. 9, 2017

Matchup Time (ET) TV

(21) USF at UConn —Canceled

The first of several scheduled games that won’t be played today. As of now Irma is expected to make landfall in the keys as a Category 5 storm and then basically work it’s way up the entire length of the state of Florida.

Buffalo at Army Noon CBSSN

This is a bad game. Army might make it through with zero passes thrown.

Charlotte at (19) Kansas State Noon FSN

I was on the Collin Klein hype train early and here I am holding the banner for Jesse Ertz.

Cincinnati at (8) Michigan Noon ABC

On the one hand this looks bad but on the other hand I can totally see Harbaugh trying to run this one up as much as possible just for the hell of it.

East Carolina at West Virginia Noon FS2

West Virginia’s QB made some disastrously bad decisions last week and I didn’t really see him get called out for them.

Eastern Kentucky at Kentucky Noon SECN

Man, this is not the easiest early slate to care about.

Florida Atlantic at (9) Wisconsin Noon BTN

Of course it’s the Florida team coached by Lane Kiffin that’s going ahead and actually playing their game. Will Boca Raton still exist when the game is over? Will FAU football?

Iowa at Iowa State Noon ESPN2

I don’t know who Iowa State’s QB is but he’ll give Iowa’s defense a tougher challenge than the stiff they faced last week.

(17) Louisville at North Carolina Noon ESPN

SB Nation has this listed as a “maybe watch” and I feel like that’s disrespectful to Lamar Jackson.

Northern Colorado at (22) Florida —Canceled

Sucks that Florida had to cancel the one game this season where they could pretend to have a decent offense.

Northwestern at Duke Noon ESPNU

This is actually my least favorite game of the day.

Towson at Maryland Noon BTN

This is some sort of rivalry I guess. These campuses are about 50 miles apart.

ULM at (10) Florida State —Canceled

There’s a pretty good chance next week’s Florida State-Miami game is going to be called off, too.

UT Martin at University of Mississippi, Oxford Noon SECN Alt.

The Mississippi QB is pretty good. I think the state of Mississippi has the two best QBs in the SEC. Times are strange.

Jacksonville State at Georgia Tech 12:30 pm RSN/ESPNCE

My favorite thing about these posts is discovering new stupid skins that show up in the Watch ESPN app.

Wake Forest at Boston College 1:00 pm ACCNExtra

For instance, ACC NExtra is just an ESPN channel.

Texas State at Colorado 2:00 pm Pac-12N

I feel like Colorado should get into the habit of hosting night games.

UAB at Ball State 3:00 pm ESPN3

Now THIS! This is just about gambling!

Abilene Christian at Colorado State 3:30 pm MWN

As much as I disliked the tranisiton from Jim McElwain to Mike Bobo it appears that Mike Bobo, of all people, is the better offensive mind. Odds are you don’t have access to this network but if you do the new on campus stadium for CSU is pretty nice.

Austin Peay at Miami, OH 3:30 pm ESPN3

Is Austin Peay trying to make the move to D1-A?

Delaware at (18) Virginia Tech 3:30 pm ACCNExtra

The Hokies vs. the Flacco Wolverines. Depending on how VPISU dresses this could actually be fairly pleasing aesthetically.

Eastern Illinois at NIU 3:30 pm ESPN3

Woo. MAC football.

Eastern Michigan at Rutgers 3:30 pm BTN

Rutgers could surprise you all by winning this one.

Fresno State at (1) Alabama 3:30 pm ESPN2

Holy crap. Fresno State is going to get slaughtered.

Howard at Kent State 3:30 pm ESPN3

Important note about this game: Heisman Trophy votes are not limited to FBS players. I, for one, welcome Cam Newton’s little brother as a candidate that keeps my interest. If Howard can pull off another upset of a 1-A program this week maybe I will not be the only idiot claiming he’s a candidate.

Indiana at Virginia 3:30 pm ACCNExtra

No matter who wins we all ignore them.

(16) Miami, FL at Arkansas State —Canceled

I’ll forever remember the school president of Arkansas State basically calling Miami cowards for cancelling this game. Very classy move.

Middle Tennessee at Syracuse 3:30 pm ACCNExtra

Both of these teams confounded my expectations last week so I’m not going to pretend to have expectations for either of them this week.

Old Dominion at UMass 3:30 pm 11 Sports/NESN

Fuck yeah, this is... (/checks sheet) football!

Pittsburgh at (4) Penn State 3:30 pm ABC

Last year Pitt saved the whole college football season by giving Penn State the loss that ultimately kept them out of the playoffs. This year Qadree Ollison is the best running back in the game. I don’t say this often but Go Pitt.

San Jose State at Texas 3:30 pm LHN

This is the kind of matchup that makes the Longhorn Network a winning money proposition. Who doesn’t want to see the scrappy undermanned upstarts from Texas playing against a West Coast power in a seemingly unwinnable game?

Savannah State at Appalachian State 3:30 pm ESPN3

I always pull for the HBCUs in these games.

(23) TCU at Arkansas 3:30 pm CBS

This looks like a total trap for TCU.

Tulane at Navy 3:30 pm CBSSN

There will be a lot of rushing yards in this game. I’m interested to see where Tulane is at this year after they gave Navy more of a game than I expected last year.

Villanova at Temple 3:30 pm ESPN3

RIVALRY WEEK!

Western Michigan at Michigan State 3:30 pm BTN

How odd is it that this doesn’t seem like an easy game for Michigan State?

Alabama A&M at Vanderbilt 4:00 pm SECN Alt.

Maybe I had Derrick Mason all wrong and he really has turned Vandy into an average-to-above average program.

Central Michigan at Kansas 4:00 pm FSN

I’m considering checking in on this one to see what’s the hype with Dorance Armstrong. Pray for me.

Gardner-Webb at Wyoming 4:00 pm ATTSNRM

My favorite thing about Josh Allen is that he probably won’t even look good in these kinds of games and he’s still going to get 1st round hype.

Indiana State at (25) Tennessee 4:00 pm SECN

If Tennessee were to somehow lose this game it would make up for that shitty Georgia Tech game 100%.

New Hampshire at Georgia Southern (in Birmingham) 4:00 pm ESPN3

Hurricane Irma has done something really weird with this game by moving it to Birmingham. Is it at least a fundraiser of some sort? What interest do people in Birmingham have in this game? Are GSU fans making the 350 mile trek for this? Bless their hearts.

UL Lafayette at Tulsa 4:00 pm ESPN3

It seems truly unfair that so many good teams had their games cancelled but this game will be played.

Nebraska at Oregon 4:30 pm FOX

Nebraska is just finally getting ready for their first good signing class of this century in 2018 and it feels like they’re being reborn but Oregon, who fell off a cliff just over the last two years, is going to run train on Nebraska.

Hawaii at UCLA 5:00 pm Pac-12N

Josh Rosen can throw any stupid pass he feels like and Hawaii is even less likely to catch it than Texas A&M was.

Weber State at California 5:00 pm Pac-12Bay

I didn’t know Pac-12 Net was split into geographical areas. Nobody even gets one Pac-12N and they split it up into directional bullshit? Yet more great media strategy from the conference that decided it should grow its national brand by having games on Friday nights and making sure at least one game is going until midnight West Coast time every week.

Alabama State at Troy 6:00 pm ESPN3

Another HBCU to root for. You’re probably better off watching the first half of this than the second half of Nebraska getting trucked.

Marshall at NC State 6:00 pm ACCNExtra

If you find yourself watching this game please stop.

South Dakota at Bowling Green 6:00 pm ESPN3

I couldn’t tell you one thing to watch for in this one.

Arkansas-Pine Bluff at Akron 6:30 pm ESPN3

This one either.

(13) Auburn at (3) Clemson 7:00 pm ESPN

GAMBLING ADVICE! Clemson will win by more than 6.5 points.

Nicholls State at Texas A&M 7:00 pm ESPNU

Nicholls State catches aTm at their lowest point in a history full of low points.

North Texas at SMU 7:00 pm ESPN3

SMU has a chance to win a second game way earlier than most experts would have ever guessed.

South Carolina at Missouri 7:00 pm ESPN2

The worst thing about SEC! SEC! SEC! stuff is that these two teams are in the SEC. I miss the Metro Conference.

Southern at Southern Miss 7:00 pm Stadium

If somebody wins this game on a field goal it will be a Southern Make.

Toledo at Nevada 7:00 pm ESPN3

This is great counter-programming but I really wish it was starting 3 hours later.

UNLV at Idaho 7:00 pm ESPN3

Really, though, why would a state school in Nevada take a confederate mascot?

Chattanooga at (12) LSU 7:30 pm SECN

Under the lights in Baton Rouge is the best in stadium atmosphere in sports, I am told, and here is Chatanooga soaking it up. I just want Derrius Guice to get off a few clean runs and then hit the bench as the Tigers pile up the points.

(15) Georgia at (24) Notre Dame 7:30 pm NBC

I really hate myself for expecting this to be a blowout win for Notre Dame.

Mississippi State at Louisiana Tech 7:30 pm CBSSN

This is a low key fantastic matchup that will probably end up being pretty one-sided for Miss State but Louisiana Tech has been an off the radar offensive powerhouse for years now.

(5) Oklahoma at (2) Ohio State 7:30 pm ABC

I’ve got this image of Oklahoma getting plastered like that National Championship game against USC and it’s giving me a boner.

Montana at (7) Washington 8:00 pm Pac-12N

Washington has a fairly loaded roster but people have decided they hate Jake Browning. I don’t love him like I used to, either, but I think he’s gotten an unfair rap.

New Mexico State at New Mexico 8:00 pm Stadium

I hope they have a rivalry trophy that’s a statue of a hatch chile or just a pile of sand with a little cactus in it. This is available via an app so get your Bob Davie fix while you’re mostly paying attention to the 7:30pm games. If you’re betting on this New Mexico is the good one.

Rice at UTEP 8:00 pm CUSA.TV

There is nobody on this planet, no matter how much you love your alma mater or the state of Texas or the team that you are currently playing for, that cares about this game. Be kind to this game if you come across it. It did not ask to be born into this world.

UTSA at Baylor 8:00 pm FSN

It would be nice if Baylor could lose to a team that isn’t even more hateful than they are.

WKU at Illinois 8:00 pm BTN

Off the top of my head I’d say this is a pretty even matchup. Go Hilltoppers.

(14) Stanford at (6) USC 8:30 pm FOX

Stanford is totally gonna win this on a Sam Darnold meltdown.

Minnesota at Oregon State 10:00 pm FS1

This is some kind of metaphor about poor choices turned into a real life football game.

Utah at BYU 10:15 pm ESPN2

I remember learning while I was in Utah last year that these two schools particularly dislike each other. I am firmly on the Utah side of this divide.

Boise State at (20) Washington State 10:30 pm ESPN

I think the line is too high on this one. This is totally gonna be the game of Brett Rypien’s life, playing against his dad’s alma mater.

Houston at Arizona 10:30 pm ESPNU

This end of day slate is pretty awesome. Ed Oliver versus Rich Rodriguez’s offensive schemes? That seems like a decent preview of the future. This could totally vault Oliver up to the top of the RTARLsman rankings.

San Diego State at Arizona State 11:00 pm Pac-12N

Here’s another super late night game. I love it. In my stupid mind I’ve got this framed as good, Rashaad Penny, versus evil, Kalen Ballage. Twitter has broken my mind in so many ways.

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