It’s not going to stop being useful, and I don’t intend to leave it behind during future trips, but I think having access to the Internet pretty much everywhere creates losses elsewhere. Something is lost when I don’t follow up my question to the guy at the bike shop about the best local trails by asking about the best place to get a beer.
(At least I asked about the best local trails. I could have relied on the Internet for that, too.)
A few brief observations.
I got on email once, to look up flight information it turned out I’d already saved. So essentially I went 26 days without checking email, and it was awesome and actually really easy to do. I missed nothing of much importance. The implication for future behavior is substantial.
I checked Facebook exactly zero times, and that was easier still, and I’m sure I missed nothing of any importance except for the messages people sent me on my birthday, the email notifications of which I glanced at in my inbox and which made me smile and which I will answer, each and every one, because getting a “Happy birthday!” from someone, even if it’s someone I never otherwise hear from, always makes me smile. (Gratitude is well worth expressing.)
Not to suggest that I attained some kind of disciplined monk-like purity with respect to the electronic devices that fill my life and slurp up my time. The laptop had to come so I could do my writing, and there’s no problem with that, but I also spent a surprising amount of time playing Game, which yes that addiction has returned, and I even sat outside on a lovely day in Gig Harbor and played a little Hearthstone. Are these the kind of things one does when one is out exploring the world, away from one’s usual patterns, breathing deeply, spending every minute of this so-far glorious summer outdoors, attempting to live in the moment? Apparently it is.
And the smartphone, the goddamn smartphone, how tied to that asshole I was. Look, it’s a profoundly useful device, I can’t deny it. The number of times I used it to get around an unfamiliar city, or to find the best route (not always obvious) between Here and There–super useful. (Yes I had a road atlas, but it doesn’t fit comfortably in my pocket.) And it was nice to be able to send and receive text messages, and it’s good to have a camera in my pocket all the time, and being able to ask about the best local restaurants and stuff was regularly useful. So I’m glad I had it.
But I don’t like being such a slave to it. It’s just…there, constantly demanding attention. “Hey, look over here!” it would say. “Maybe someone texted you!”
“But I’m driving,” I’d tell it.
“I don’t care!” it would say.
And because it was so useful and because modern smartphone battery life is the mayfly of the electronics world, I had to be careful to remember to charge the thing, which isn’t really what I want to be thinking about when I’m watching darkness fall at Delicate Arch or trying to comprehend the height of Mt. Rainier or imagining the great glacier that clearly once filled (not that long ago, geologically speaking) Turnagain Arm. But if I wasn’t careful about putting it in airplane mode in these remote places, it would slurp down charge searching for signal, and if there’s one thing more annoying than carrying a useful smartphone, it’s carrying a useless dead one.
At the very least, next time I will take a watch. I needed to check the time regularly enough, and having the phone as my only timepiece made it puff out its little chest in self-importance. “Just try leaving me in the glove compartment,” it would say. But it got a little too cocky. Next time? “Twenty-five dollars at Target,” I’ll tell it, pointing to my wrist.
Westley: To the pain means the first thing you will lose will be your feet below the ankles. Then your hands at the wrists. Next your nose.
Prince Humperdinck: And then my tongue I suppose. I killed you too quickly the last time, a mistake I don’t mean to duplicate tonight.
Westley: I wasn’t finished. The next thing you will lose will be your left eye followed by your right.
Prince Humperdinck: And then my ears. I understand, let’s get on with it.
Westley: WRONG! Your ears you keep and I’ll tell you why. So that every shriek of every child at seeing your hideousness will be yours to cherish. Every babe that weeps at your approach, every woman who cries out, “Dear God, what is that thing!?” will echo in your perfect ears.
My first night back, I heard our dog Mango (whom I missed terribly) jump down from the couch around 4am. There was something funny about the sound of her movement, which in the middle of the night usually indicates that she’s throwing up.
Came downstairs and sure enough. Partially digested food on the cowhide that I hate but that Debby won’t get rid of and…this…this…well…
I took a photo of it, because it simply defied description. But Free Refills is a classy joint, and I just can’t bring myself to post the picture. You’d never believe it was vomited rather than defecated.
The only thing to call it:
Exactly.
No fucking idea what it was. It was possibly the grossest thing I’ve ever seen, and keep in mind that I just drove across Wyoming’s roadkill-smeared highways.
It’s good to be home.
[Apologies that the video doesn’t stop after “…mass.” I tried and tried and tried to get it to work, but the video embed won’t accept that kind of URL.]
Originally published here on July 5th, 2013. While you’re over there on Jay’s Bon Mots, why not scroll down and read some of my dad’s posts?
It was a Fourth of July tradition in our house for my dad to put on a record of Sousa marches and let the neighborhood know that patriotism was alive and well in the Lanin household, so yesterday we did exactly that.
We listened to the “Washington Post March,” “Hands Across the Sea,” “The Invicible Eagle,” “Semper Fidelis.” We listened to “The Liberty Bell,” and I told him that even if I live to be 106, I will never not cheerfully associate that march with Monty Python.
But of course our favorite is “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” He used to air-piccolo to the feature piccolo. (You know the one I mean.) And over the softer third theme, what’s known as the trio, he taught us to sing a silly song, which I will now teach you:
So be kind to your web-footed friends,
For a duck may be somebody’s mother.
They live in the fields and the swamp [here pronounced like ‘stamp’]
Where it’s very cold and damp.
And you may think that this is the end.
Well it is.
I sang that to him yesterday and he laughed like hell.
If my trip goes more or less as I’ve mapped it out in my head, today I will be driving from somewhere in Idaho, not far from Grand Targhee (which, granted, is actually in Wyoming), back home to Boulder.
I will be taking a specific and not exactly obvious route. At some point I realized that an interesting way to end this trip would be to follow the route I took with Nolus’s then-girlfriend Luna when she and I drove to Colorado at the end of a trip to Jackson/Targhee back in January of 2012. Nolus and I had driven from Colorado to Victor, ID, (just on the Idaho side of Teton Pass) and met Luna and Nolus’s friend Jesse there for a snowboarding trip. (They’d come from Portland, OR.) At the end of the trip, Nolus was going with Jesse to Portland for a party he didn’t want to miss, flying back to Colorado later, and Luna was going to continue on to Colorado–at Nolus’s behest, she was moving there. I would be driving Nolus’s 4Runner, and Luna was in her own car with all her stuff.
Are you catching the part where Nolus was going to Portland for a party rather than to Colorado with his woman? Let’s suffice to say that as an awake and conscious individual during that trip, Nolus was a far, far cry from his best.
The route is/was this: from Victor, rather than Teton Pass (closed that January because of avalanche), I’ll take ID-31 southeast across Pine Creek Pass (where I spun out in Nolus’s bald-tired 4Runner and put it into a snowbank), then US-26 past Palisades Reservoir to Alpine, WY, then continuing east/northeastward to Hoback Junction. There I’ll pick up US-191 (probably not an ice sheet as it was back in ’12) to Rock Springs and I-80. Perhaps I will go to the Walmart where I pushed Luna around in a shopping cart at 2am, exhausted but slightly giddy at having survived (not entirely an exaggeration) day one of what ended up being a two-day drive. Along I-80 I will reflect on the place where a combination of wind and ice caused Luna to spin out her car, narrowly missing a snowplow, a tractor-trailer and a guardrail and somehow ending up no worse than terribly shaken. I don’t suspect I’ll face the whiteout conditions I did on I-80 that day as I make my way to Laramie, where I’ll switch onto US-287 toward Ft. Collins, I-25 between Cheyenne and Ft. Collins having been closed that January day for adverse conditions.
So though it is a slightly less efficient route from the Targhee area than the obvious route over Teton Pass, its greater significance makes the added difficulty worthwhile. I don’t know what, if anything, I’m expecting to find by driving this route, but once the idea arose, it felt appropriate. It felt right.
That 2012 trip was horrible. I expect things will go rather better this time around.
By today I am well on my way back to Colorado. I am returning with a somewhat firmer sense of the route I will take and where my stops will be and what I will do with my days (besides travel) than I did on my drive out. If all goes even close to plan, it’ll be a lot of fun.
Before the trip, several people offered me the blessing, “May you find what you’re looking for out there,” and I did, and so much more. As it should be, I am coming back changed for the experience.
During (and because of) the trip, I’ve gained a clearer sense of my direction–what I’m doing from here, and why. Not that I have vanquished all uncertainty on my path going forward–life doesn’t work that way–but I have come to a different relationship with that uncertainty. I can in part thank my choice to not pull back from my writing while I was away. I haven’t missed a day of publishing, and I’ve finished my 5,000 words every week. I did that despite often not knowing ahead of time what my days would bring. There’s a lot to be said for declaring, “This is my path,” and then walking it, no matter what comes.
That’s a good thing to experience.
The trip has been fun and amazing and wonderful in ways both expected and un-, but it will be good to get home, good to get to work.
I got back from the wedding and went down to the solstice party that the brewery I was staying at was throwing. (Yes, I stayed above the brewery, and it was awesome.) Solstice eve in Alaska: it would never get darker than dusk. If that isn’t a solstice worth celebrating, I don’t know what is.
I went without changing–dress shirt, slacks, tie–though I felt I could only properly express the spirit of the occasion by throwing on my moose hat as well.
Many of the kids there didn’t know quite what to make of me. (Healy, AK, is just outside Denali National Park, and is full of kids in their early 20s there for seasonal work.) “He’s different from us! He’s older, and he’s in a necktie!” was the vibe I was getting.
But eventually the smiles got wider and the conversations sillier. “Love the hat,” they said.
Fun is contagious.
Many times this spring, Jerry said to me, “I turned [insert name] on to your not-a-blog.” Jerry almost certainly has been more active in promoting this thing than I have.
Through his efforts, I now have over six readers per day!
But for serious, I have no idea how many people read this thing. I’ve only occasionally done promotion, and I’ve never checked my pageviews, not once. For all I know, word of mouth has taken off and over 10,000 people read this thing every day. Rumor even has it (it’s a valid rumor even if I’m the one who starts it, right?) that President Obama is a daily reader! Welcome, Mr. President. I hope you continue to enjoy what you’re reading here.
But back to serious: I’m actually pretty proud of what I’m doing here. Thus a goal for the summer season: actually put regular effort into increasing my readership. Time to spread the gospel. (And to Jerry, and anyone else who’s passed the URL on to someone else: thank you.)
This is not a blog, and therefore these can’t be blogposts. Only Dawn has thus far figured out (or at least reflected back to me) what they are: they’re Free Refills.
Good job, Dawn.
Now that I’ve acknowledged it, I’ll have to finally explain what Free Refills really means. It all started many years ago with a really great idea…anyway, watch this space.
In all seriousness, thanks to everyone who’s reading what I’m publishing here.
I’m trying to build something here. Without your eyes, it would be so easy to stop stumbling forward, though stumble forward I must. Every time I receive even the barest hint that these writings mean something to someone, it fills my world with light.
I wasn’t surprised, not really. With public opinion having already shifted and a raft of lower court rulings asserting the right, I figured at least a 5-4 win for the good guys. Kennedy would, as usual, cast the swing vote. I could even imagine Roberts, who seems to have a keen eye for his legacy and a surprising ability to put aside conservative orthodoxy (as he did the day before in the Affordable Care Act case), coming over.
So I wasn’t surprised, and yet when I saw the headline on the NYTimes, I wept.
Though all four justices in the minority wrote dissenting opinions, it’s toward Scalia that I wish to turn my gaze, for it is Scalia who stands as the Court’s conservative-wing intellectual leader. For many years it’s been his voice that speaks loudest.
Scalia’s argument can be summarized by this sentence from his dissent: “Until the courts put a stop to it, public debate over same-sex marriage displayed American democracy at its best.” There was no need and no basis for the court to step in, he argues. Across the country, whatever movement on the issue that was occurring via the democratic process was exactly what should happen. Let the states work it out for themselves; the Constitution is silent on the issue.
I live in Colorado, and through our recent legalization of cannabis, I am privileged to see the state vs. federal debate played out in the most fascinating and useful way. We’re moving the world forward by getting to challenge our country’s insane drug laws via intrastate action.
Thus I am not one to reject the “states are the laboratories of democracy” argument out of hand. But within that space, one must question the consistency of Scalia’s beliefs. Imagine that in the face of the question of same-sex marriage, a state had chosen to argue that marriage, as a religious institution and social convention, fell entirely outside the purview of the government, and that therefore that state would no longer recognize any marriage, gay or straight. Would Scalia have the courage to maintain his intellectual fidelity to the originalist view of the Constitution here, for certainly the Constitution is silent on all matters of marriage? I admit this is speculation on my part, but I strongly doubt it. I suspect Scalia would cringe at the notion that an institution by which we’ve ordered our world for literally millenia cannot be seen as a basic right in our culture, because the Constitution doesn’t speak on the matter. Perhaps I am wrong, and perhaps Scalia is capable of that kind of intellectual consistency. But I doubt it.
But let’s presume for a moment that he is thus capable, that he’d maintain his principles in the face of a legislative or democratic challenge to a social construct that predates our nation by literally thousands of years. Good for him. But for that to be true then he would have to be saying, similarly, that he would have sided against the majority in Loving v. Virginia, the 1969 case that struck down laws against so-called miscegenation. He’d be saying, too, that he would have sided in the minority of Brown v. Board of Education, on the same principles.
And thus we are able to see Scalia for what he truly is. Either he is the worst kind of intellectual coward–the sort of person who begins with his conclusion and essentially argues backward until he reaches his so-called principles, knowing that he can avoid ever facing a real test of those principles–or else he is simply hideous, as anyone who would still argue for any possible legitimacy to miscegenation laws or the doctrine of “Separate but Equal” clearly is.
Whichever it is, it is good to see that his time as leader, both intellectual and legal, is coming to an end. He will not be missed.
“In the folds of the pannus1,2, a french fry was found.”
1In researching the correct spelling of pannus, I discovered that the correct word is actually panniculus–pannus means something else entirely. But as I had recently learned pannus from my friends John and Katie, medical professionals as well, both of whom live in a completely different part of the country from Aaron, I have to conclude that pannus in this context is less malapropism than med-pro vernacular. And I’ve long been a slut for vernacular.
2No, I’m not gonna leave you hanging. Here’s Urban Dictionary’s slightly awkward definition: A large roll of abdominal fat which can extend anywhere from the genitals to, in some cases, all the way past the knees.