A Conversation

“So there’s this blog that I sometimes read.”

“Really? People still write blogs?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh. Imagine that.”

“Anyway, this one is normally updated weekly, but it’s been about two weeks since the last posting.”

“Good heavens! Do you think it’s a government conspiracy?”

“Hilarious, but no. I’m just wondering what happened? It feels like I’ve been sort of abandoned. I mean, this author was like clockwork.”

“You mean always posting, like he was desperately crying out for any attention he could get?”

“You could say that.”

“You sound very attached to this blog. Is it funny?”

"Well, the author thinks he’s funny, and that's sort of amusing.”

“And now your life has been shattered by the lack of updates?”

“Kind of.”

“Well, maybe he has a good excuse for not updating it.”

“Like what?”

“Maybe he realized he wasn’t funny.”

“I don’t think that’ll ever happen.”

“Then maybe he got a cold.”

“A cold?”

“Yeah, a cold. You know how it is: You get a cold but you still go to work because it’s not worth taking any time off. Then you spend several days in your cubicle coughing up a lung all over your keyboard and generally annoying everybody within a fifty foot radius, all while accomplishing very little in terms of actual work. When you get home at night, you basically collapse into a heap without the energy to do anything except watch reruns of Cheers on Netflix.”

“Oh yeah! And then your voice drops several octaves until you can really nail the ‘Giddyup, oom poppa, oom poppa, mow mow’ part of the song Elvira!”

“Yup. That’s what I’m talking about.”

“You’re right! Maybe that’s what happened to that blogger! And maybe now he’s finally starting to feel better and is desperately trying to come up with something to post!”

“Maybe.”

“Wow! I feel much better! I was worried he fell down an open manhole or something.”

“I guess it’s still a possibility.”

“I’d better go check for an update! He said he was going to write about Bear Jams!”

“Bear Jams?”

“Yup.”

“There’s no way that could be any good.”

“Deep down, I think I know that.”

Glacier Highlights

I have returned from Glacier National Park! Rather than bore you with the gritty details, which I’m much too lazy to write about, I’m going to instead compile a short list of the trip’s highlights, which will be determined using the rigorous scientific selection method of writing down whatever pops into my mind over the next few minutes. Sounds good? Then here we go…

The Day of Eighty Wardrobe Changes: The second hike of the trip was during a windy, rainy day. The rain was intermittent, to the point where it was basically toying with us. It would start to rain, and the rain gear would come out. It would stop raining, and the rain gear would be packed away, since it’s so hot and heavy. Repeat several dozen times or so until you’re pretty certain that somewhere along the line you did something to really tick off Mother Nature.

Going to the Sun Road: It was a wonderful drive, assuming you love sitting in construction and you don’t mind the majestic view of thick, impenetrable fog.

The Sunburn: After several cloudy days, the sun finally came out in full force. I neglected to consider this important meteorological change and went into the next hike wearing a bandana and no sunscreen. The result was that at the end of day, my head resembled a mismatched plastic Easter egg; its cover white and the rest deep red. And no, I did not take any pictures of this.

The Jim Leyland Lookalike: We were hiking the Highline Trail, moving along at a pretty good clip, when out of nowhere this old guy caught up to us. He was eerily reminiscent of Jim Leyland, complete with the sunglasses and moustache, except he seemed much less likely to keep putting Ryan Rayburn into the starting lineup, in the hopes that he might “run into one,” and much more likely to hike along the continental divide for several weeks at a time, wrestling mountain goats into submission for the sheer sport of it. Yup, he was a tough old coot, giving hope to anybody over the age of fifty-five who wants to enjoy an active lifestyle. After chatting with us briefly, he sped off and left us behind in a cloud of dust. This is the only picture I got of him. Somehow, it seems appropriate.

Johnson’s of St. Mary: If you’re ever in St. Mary, located on the eastern side of the park, and you need a place to eat, then stop at Johnson’s. They play nothing but old school country music. They have phenomenal homemade bread. They display customer sign in/comment sheets from the 70’s up until the present at the tables. They have excellent soup. They sell something called Ice Cream Pie, which weighs about fifty pounds and is as big as a mature pumpkin. It’s worth going there just to see the eyes of somebody when it’s placed down in front of them at their table. Their expression is basically one of I-think-I'm-in-heaven-even-though-there’s-no-way-I’m-eating-all-of-this-without-getting-a-stomach-ache-that’ll-last-for-roughly-a-week-and-possibly-dying.

Huckleberry Everything: Huckleberries are pushed everywhere in the park: huckleberry soda, huckleberry jelly beans, huckleberry stuffed French toast, huckleberry ice cream, huckleberry t-bone steak, etc.

Bear Jams: More on that later, assuming I remember to write it.

The Polite Bighorn Sheep: It was patiently waiting for a turn at the outhouse:

"Hey, I'm next in line, buddy!"



Learning that bear bells have an approximate operating radius of three feet: This was done through a scientific process consisting of us constantly not hearing other hikers’ bear bells until they were right up in our proverbial grills. So as long as you don’t mind a bear not being able to hear you until you’re basically sitting on its dinner plate, bear bells are a wise purchase. In addition, they are also incredibly annoying, making it sound like Santa Claus is perpetually coming to town. Even if they were effective, I’d rather be eaten by a bear than hike in a group with somebody wearing them.

This sign:

This Realization: No matter how good the trail mix tastes for the first three-quarters of the trip, there still comes a time when you instantly begin to hate it and simply can’t eat another bite.

The official group photo for the trip:

 

Oh right, and some OK scenery:

Minimalist Planning

Preparation for any vacation adventure is key. Too much preparation, however, may be worse than none at all. An adventure where every single minute is planned out and packed for seems to me to be less of an adventure and more of a transfer of life’s daily grind over to one of the few occasions where it isn’t needed.

What you need to do is minimalist planning, which is just enough to get you by, and more than enough to keep things interesting. ("Money! I should have planned to bring money!")

For example, I’m about to head to Glacier National Park for a week or so. I know how and when I’ll get there, and how and when I’ll leave. I’ve even got places to sleep lined up, which might even be going a bit too far on the planning front. Beyond that, however, it’s kind of all up in the air. That’s minimalist planning. Anything less, such as not picking an actual destination, could be a bit of a problem. Any more would be too constricting. (“Yeegads, it’s already 8:47! We’re supposed to be done with breakfast by now! Code Red! Code Red! The day’s in shambles! Our only hope is to bump our average traveling speed up to 62 miles per hour and skip Bathroom Break Number Three! Nobody drink anything! It’s time to exercise contingency plan Bladder Control! Now let’s get moving!! I've got charts and graphs to update!!”)

Additionally, a non-minimalist would have purchased a book on the park and read it cover to cover. I bought a book, but I’ve barely looked at it. It has lots of pages and seems kind of boring, at least more boring that the alternative of reading about Jack Reacher as he dispenses his own brand of vigilante justice on those who deserve it most.

A non-minimalist would also have purchased a detailed map of the park and scoured every detail of it, picking out the best looking hiking trails and planning routes. I bought a map but I haven’t been inspired to study it very much. There’ll be plenty of time for that on the plane, assuming I’m not listening to Gunsmoke on my iPod.

A non-minimalist would have initiated an exercise and nutritional program months ago to get into shape so that the sudden immersion into Hike Uphill All Day Mode won’t destroy them. I found my hiking boots and made sure they still fit.

A non-minimalist would have created various lists to help with packing, and they would have started that task weeks ago, making certain that almost every contingency is planned for. My packing will consist of the Fixed Volume Approach. I have one piece of luggage and a carry on. The day before I leave, I’ll start filling them up with the items I consider to be the most important, based solely on my priorities at that very moment. When I run out of room, I’m done. Will underwear make the cut? Will I bring nothing but peanut butter because I was hungry during packing? We’ll just have to see…

Once I get there, how will I fill my time? Well, that’ll all work itself out soon enough. I assume there will be lots of hiking up to high places, admiring the view for a while, hiking back, and then celebrating with a meal. What more planning could possibly be needed?

Do I have any specific goals for this trip? I dunno…to not get caught in a stampede of mountain goats would be one, assuming that mountain goats actually stampede on occasion. Beyond that, though, not really. A goal seems like a metric, and a metric seems like something you can get evaluated on, and something you can get evaluated on seems like work, and work seems like something I’d rather not do while trying to embark on an adventure.

I could go on, but I think I’ll cut this short, which is to say I never planned on how to end this entry in a smooth fashion.

Washing Machines and Country Music

My favorite line in the girl-leaves-guy-but-then-realizes-the-grass-isn’t-necessarily-greener-on-the-other-side-and-then-comes-back-to-the-guy-who-may-or-may-not-have-noticed-she-was-missing-in-the-first-place song “She Couldn’t Change Me” by Montgomery Gentry is as follows: “She changed her tune to some hip hop mess.”

This is in reference to one of the things the girl does upon leaving the guy, which also includes changing her hair color. Later on in the song, when she sees the error of her ways and returns to the guy, who apparently spent the whole time sitting on his front porch in his overalls, we get the bookend line: “She changed her tune, it’s all Haggard and Jones.”

This allegory to country music being superior to hip hop is not in the least bit subtle, and while to each their own, I tend to agree, to the point where I’m comfortable saying that hip hop sounds like the contents of a toolkit being run through a washing machine, except with less understandable lyrics.

So, it is of great concern to me that the “hip hop mess” now seems to be infiltrating country music, not to mention the fact that it seems to be being embraced by its listeners. The way I see it, for a country song to be a hit these days it must have:

• Loud guitars that drown out all of the traditional country instruments
• (Not that any traditional country instruments are even being played)
• At least 35 percent of the lyrics rapped
• The words or phrases “girl”, “jeans”, “truck”, “out here”, “dirt road”, “backwoods”, “beer”, and “theoretical particle physics” included at least twice. I’m kidding about one of these
• Lyrics with roughly the same emotional depth as the weather report
• An alternate version of the song that features a hip hop artist such as T-Payne-Dizzle-Dawg-Yo*

Here in the Twin Cities, on my way to work each morning I always scan through the country stations, just to cringe and survey the damage. Besides Bob FM – whom I’m giving an enthusiastic shout-out to – these stations all rotate through about ten songs each day, all of which sound exactly the same, since they follow the above-stated parameters. An example playlist is as follows:

• Florida Georgia Line: “Round Here” – This song is pretty much indistinguishable from all of their previous singles, by which I mean it’s a continuous dull roar of noise.
• Luke Bryan: “That’s My Kind Of Night” – This song reminds me of “Another One Bites The Dust” at the beginning. It gets worse from there.
• Florida Georgia Line: “Cruise – (hip hop remix)” – Or maybe it’s “Round Here” again. Or "Get Your Shine On." Who can even tell with these guys?
• Luke Bryan: “Country Girl (Shake It For Me)” – Just as I recover from “That’s My Kind Of Night.”
• Jake Owen: “Days of Gold” – See Florida Georgia Line.
• Jason Aldean: “1994” – Joe Diffie actually tried to capitalize on this by coming out with his own hip hop country song afterwards. Seriously. It’s called “Girl Ridin’ Shotgun.” He sings with somebody by the name of D-Thrash. Honestly. Look it up. You won’t regret it. Although you might.
• Florida Georgia Line: “Round Here” – Better spin it again, since it’s been 20 whole minutes since the last time.
• Blake Shelton: “Boys ‘Round Here” – Blake once lamented in “Same Old Song” that everything sounds the same in country music and there’s no originality in it. Huh. Pot meet kettle. At least he went with the original lyrics “chew tobacco, chew tobacco, chew tobacco spit” in this one.
• Lee Brice: “Parking Lot Party” – See Jake Owen.
• George Strait: “Amarillo By Morning”

I’m kidding about one of these. Unfortunately.

Needless to say, after trying to slog through to a lineup like this, I soon find myself looking forward to listening to the commercials. (“How do you spell Zerorez again? I need to know!”)

I realize that I’m probably sounding like an old-of-touch, stuck-in-the-past, blathering old man here, and I suppose that I sort of am. But it’s a free country, and I’m allowed to whine and complain all I want! So there!

Luckily, music seems to act like a pendulum, swinging from one extreme back to the other, which means that there will inevitably be short periods of actual good contemporary music being made. So with any luck, it’ll swing back to sound like 90’s country sometime before I die. If not, then I guess I can always listen to the washing machine.

* Not an actual hip hop artist. As far as I know.

To Paint, Perchance to Spill

I had a room to paint, and that scared me.

Painting has never been my forte. Instead, it’s my anti-forte. (If that isn’t a word, it should be. Also, for the record, breakfast for dinner is my forte.) Anyway, painting is my anti-forte because I’m a naturally messy person when it comes to accomplishing chores. Spills, drips, crashes, bangs, slips, slops, drops, leaks, and small fires seem to follow me around, and that’s just when I’m trying to make cereal for breakfast. It gets worse during the rest of the day. So, arming me with a brush and a gallon of paint is one of the last things anybody, including myself, would ever want to do.

But I had a room to paint.

And as if my penchant for messiness wasn't enough, I was also out of practice. I hadn’t done any real painting since back in my college days, where over about a three-year stretch I did quite a bit of it. I painted everything from walls to doors to lockers to the backs of unwary co-worker’s shirts. Even back then, my messiness was in full swing, so needless to say, by the end of college every single one of my work shirts looked like a rainbow had melted directly onto it.

My favorite college mishap was when I was painting the metal frame of a hockey net. To do parts of this, I had to squat inside of said net. I’d just finished painting the underside of the crossbar and decided to stand up to stretch. Unfortunately, I forgot a very critical step in this process, which was to make sure I’d gotten myself completely clear of the net before doing so. Because of this slight oversight, I ran into the crossbar on the way up, resulting in a thick bar of bright red paint transferring over to the back of my shirt. Talk about your Red Badge of D’oh!

But, despite my dismal college track record, I still had a room to paint, and there was no getting around it.

So I got to work.

The key to painting is to tape everything off correctly. To do this, you need to get the highest quality tape and spend several presidential administrations wiping down and carefully taping off everything that needs it, including baseboards, windows, outlets, passing household pets, etc. While not exciting, and potentially a cure for insomnia, this job is still well worth it in the end.

Not that it will make the quality of your paint job any better, mind you. No matter how much time you spend taping, paint will still leak underneath. It’s a basic rule of nature, much like geese spending ninety percent of their time wandering through busy intersections looking confused. However, if you can honestly say that you gave a maximum effort during your taping job, then you’re justified in moaning and complaining about how taping never works when painting, despite what the internet tells you. This is a must for anybody who’s just finished painting a room and needs to come up with a good excuse for the numerous drips and runs left behind on the baseboards and windows.

When everything is taped off you next have to "cut in" with a brush in several key areas, including the corners, where the wall meets the ceiling, where the wall meets the baseboards, around the doors and windows, and around any furniture you were too lazy to move because it looked kind of heavy. This is the most mind-numbing job ever, beating out even United States Congressperson, and you will absolutely hate it after roughly thirty seconds. After sixty seconds, you’ll probably wish that you were still taping things off. But persevere through, because soon you’ll get to use a roller!

Rolling the walls is the most fun. It’s a payoff for all of your prior hard work taping and cutting. Now this is where you can really get some color going fast! The key is to apply consistent pressure throughout, in order to apply a uniform coat of paint. If you can’t keep consistent pressure, however, don’t worry. Nobody will notice anyway, because your roller will soon begin to shed little pieces of nap, which will get caught up in the paint and transferred over to your wall, ultimately making it look like you rolled over several cats in your hurry to get the room painted. A non-uniform coat of paint will be the least of your worries.

That's basically how my painting session went. However, I was actually halfway pleased with the result, as it could have gone much worse. For example, I could have stepped directly into the paint bucket, a la just about any Archie Andrews comic, or I could have been painting a hockey net.

In addition, ever since I did the painting and noticed all of the tiny imperfections afterwards, I’ve begun to look at the paint jobs in other houses, and I’ve realized that they all have basically the same problem as mine!

This has led me to a very important conclusion: Painting perfectly is all but impossible and everybody eventually settles, and so should you. This means that you need to subscribe to the “I’m Sick Of This, Let’s Be Done And Get Some Dinner” school of thought. If you don’t, you’ll just drive yourself crazy trying to make everything perfect. Remember, even if one of your visitors were to notice a few drops, runs, or streaks, there's a good chance they wouldn't even care, because their house probably looks exactly the same.

Plus, they're most likely wondering about the massive colony of bacteria growing in your bathroom, taking guesses as to how often it is you actually clean in there, and debating whether or not you'll need a flame flower the next time you get around to it.

The Things I Do For My Craft

Sometimes it seems like I’ve run out of things to write about. This feels especially true if nothing interesting has happened to me lately in the checkout line at the grocery store, where it seems that half of my entries originate. (Not that I’m embarrassed by the amount of time I spend in checkout lines. It’s just an observation.)

So, in order to keep my idea pool from drying up, I took it upon myself to do something drastic, something that would virtually guarantee me a never-ending supply of anecdotes and talking points for this blog.

I bought a house.

Well, a townhome, really, since lawnmowers hate me and always seem to want to attack me, which is why I decided to remove them from the equation completely. And don’t even get me started on hedge clippers. I still have nightmares.

Despite the lack of outdoor responsibilities, a townhome still holds a vast potential for interesting blog fodder, and here I’m thinking of do-it-yourself projects that will inevitably go horribly awry, much like what happens in the storylines of numerous Three Stooges shorts. For example, I plan to do some painting. That in itself should be a gold mine that translates into multiple entries, such as:

• How to chose from a near-infinite number of paint colors with snooty names like Golden Wheatfield Dancing In The Wind or Midnight Mulberry, when choosing a lunchmeat for a sandwich can sometimes take you upwards of a quarter hour.
• How to stock up on equipment at the nearest Home Depot, which costs almost as much as your mortgage but is much harder to haul to your car.
• Why accidentally backing up into a freshly painted wall is both a bad thing and slightly amusing.
• Questioning how paint got in the fridge, even though you were working on a bedroom on an entirely separate level.
• How to position furniture in a room to cover up all of the paint puddles that somehow found their way around and under the drop cloths.
• Determining how you managed to get paint on virtually every square inch of your skin, including your belly button.

And that’s just painting, which is a relatively harmless activity. Just think of when I get into plumbing! It’s going to be great! I’m thinking tidal waves here! I’ll probably have to invest in a pair of hip waders!

So, if you thought this blog was getting boring, you’d better prepare yourself. Things are just getting started!

Or maybe finished. For some reason, I can’t help but envision paint getting into the hard drive of my computer in the near future.

I guess we’ll just have to see what happens.

Me-Haul?

When I moved away from Wisconsin, it was the right thing to do. I’d begun to cultivate what some may consider to be an unnatural disposition for cheese, I was referring to pop as “soda,” and the very thought of the Green Bay Packers wasn’t nearly as revolting as it had been in years prior. Cleary, it was time for me to move on. Not that I disliked the people there, mind there, it was just time.

The only downside to moving to the Twin Cities was the actual act of moving to the Twin Cities. This was because I did it in a small UHaul, during which time I realized that I had the potential to be, if I put my mind to it, the worst commercial truck driver in the history of the world.

I hated driving that UHaul. I was constantly looking over my left shoulder to check my blind spot, despite the fact that the UHaul had no back windows that I could use to accomplish said task. It took several hundred failed attempts before I began to get used to this phenomenon. At that point, I began to try and use the extra mirror equipped on the truck, which allowed me to see my blind spot, but which also warped the reflection so badly that I couldn’t tell if the cars behind me were a mere few feet away, or perhaps in Michigan.

So I sort of just guessed. When I needed to change lanes, I’d put on my signal, wait for about ten seconds to let everybody get out of my way, and then slowly merge over, all while praying to various deities, some of which I'd made up on the spot, to keep me safe.

And that was just in Wisconsin. When I hit rush hour in St. Paul and Minneapolis, it got much, much worse. I’ve pretty much blanked the entire experience out. I believe that I closed my eyes, gritted my teeth, and shrieked my way through the entire ordeal. (Sort of like how I got through college.)

The sad thing is, the UHaul was pretty tiny, for truck standards. Any big rig driver would just roll their eyes if they heard my petty complaints. However, in my defense, I was used to driving Stratuses and Accords and Escorts, where if you looked over your shoulder you were pretty much staring into the trunk.

Anyway, somehow I survived and made it to the Twin Cities, and after kissing the ground several times, I vowed to never again drive a UHaul, even if it was the only means of transportation available to spirit me away from a horde of marauding zombies or – even worse – marauding lawyers.

Flash forward to just recently, where I again found myself moving, this time within the Twin Cities area. Despite my previous experience with the UHaul three years earlier, and the adamant vows I’d made after miraculously emerging from it unscathed, I’d foolishly rented another one and was standing in a parking lot in Crystal, Minnestoa, staring it down.

“So,” I said, as I began to realize the full ramifications of the Pandora’s Box I’d just opened, “we meet again.”

Honestly, I said that.

I wondered if this was somehow the same UHaul I’d driven before, and if it was now doing its best to keep a straight face, knowing that it had a first class ticket to some major entertainment in the near future, namely me freaking out as I drove it into a lake or a Wendy’s.

And here’s the best part: This was a ten-foot UHaul, like I’d driven from Wisconsin, and it was sandwiched between two much bigger trucks, making it look like their child, or perhaps their pet wiener dog. Despite the fact that I didn’t even want to drive the 10-footer, a small part of me, driven entirely by male pride, was embarrassed that I was renting something so small. “You should have gotten a bigger truck,” that part of me said. “If anybody sees you in this wimpy piece of junk, you’ll never hear the end of it!”

I calmed my male pride by promising that I’d drive wearing a fake moustache and a fedora as a disguise.

Fortunately for me, and unfortunately for everybody who wants to read a disaster story along the same lines as Sharknado, here’s where the story falls flat: After all of this dramatic buildup, the move actually went fine. I didn’t drive into lake. I didn’t create a new entrance into a grocery store. I didn’t somehow find myself airborne, as if I was participating in a scene right out of the Dukes of Hazzard. Instead, I survived by driving like an eighty-year old man – which isn’t that far of a stretch for me anyway. I hugged the right lane of the freeway, kept to minimal speeds, and watched as cars streamed by me on the left, all while mostly keeping up with the occasional tortoise on my right.

When I dropped the UHaul off, having aged about a decade in several hours, I vowed again that this would be the last time. I would never move again! And if it I did, I’d sell all of my stuff and start over from scratch! I’d be like Jack Reacher, traveling around with a toothbrush and an ATM card, and buying my clothes on the fly! (Although I’d probably be the one always getting beaten up.)

I meant it this time! Seriously!

Which means it’s just about guaranteed that I’m going to get transferred to Iowa any day now.