Because it doesn’t have to be fun to be fun…
If you subscribed to my Stories blog the content has been merged into my Alpine Climbing blog. It still lives in a separate “Stories” category. I’ve also added a new page of photography gear I’d recommend.
Hopefully that’s pretty much it in terms of site upgrades and I can get back to writing new content, like the review of the MSR Reactor I promised to write.
One moment sitting on a glacier in the Yukon. Ten hours in later a diner in Seattle. Enough to make your head spin.
Thirsty? Fire up the stove and melt some snow.
Hungry? Better cook something.
Want to sleep? Get out the shovel and dig a ledge.
Need to get home? Read the map and start walking.Fancy a drink? Buy a Coke loaded with phosphoric acid.
Want to eat? Pay someone minimum wage to cook your food.
Sleepy? Check into a hotel. Who made the bed?
Going somewhere… in your SUV with GPS navigation?
Which is really more civilized? Get off the train, it isn’t taking you anywhere interesting.
None of this is true. It’s all fiction at best, outright lies at worst. In mountaineering, much like war, The Truth meets a prompt but messy death early in the proceedings. Fear makes terrain seem steeper, rock looser and routes longer. Ego compels the protagonists to perpetuate their version of reality even with the benefit of hindsight.
Life is simply too big; the Internet, multi-national corporations, global trading partnerships and hundreds of TV channels to watch the action on. My primate brain just can’t cope with a social group of more than a hundred.
A day spent at Knob Lock in the Adirondacks with Simon Catterall and Jim Lawyer, two fine climbing partners. Climb with them if you can but don’t listen to them…
Tyler Durden: Guys, what would you wish you’d done before you died?
Steph: Paint a self-portrait.
The Mechanic: Build a house.- Fight Club (1999)
There’s something incredibly satisfying about building something. Since finally buying a house The Susan and I have remodeled the kitchen and rebuilt the deck, along with a myriad of smaller projects.
It’s not that there weren’t times when I wished I could pay someone else to do the work, there were. Especially towards the end of the deck build when the weather turned bad and I was reduced to building in the garage. Or the time I turned my hand into a bloody mess with a mallet and then a hammer, both in the space of a few hours while finishing the kitchen counter.
But it’s yours, you built it. You get to go sit on it and drink beer in the sun.
There are no prizes for just showing up.
Anything of value requires commitment. Just turning up isn’t going to get you anything. Nobody is going to give you credit for just being there. You get out what you put in.
I thought this was a Lance Armstrong line but it turns out it isn’t. So I guess it’s mine.
This week I started doing hard time. My product team moved buildings and I got my own office. It was on a busy section of corridor so people dropped by to congratulate me on my new found status. After two years or so I’d moved up the corporate ladder high enough not to be forced to share a room.
Problem is, for the most part, I actually liked sharing an office. In fact in a decade of working the I’ve only had one other job that also merited an office all to myself. Come to think of it, that job, and that office, also felt isolating and impersonal.
Having a roomie to come in and shoot the breeze with every morning was pretty nice. Occasionally we’d talk about work but for the most part he’d tell me things I didn’t know; like about his brother working construction in Alaska. I’d reciprocate with trivia from my past or present.
People, well most people, aren’t designed to be loners. We’re instinctively tribal; used to eating, living and even sleeping in small groups. When will Corporate America get wise to this?
It’s raining here. It’s been raining here for days. If it’s not raining then it’s starting to rain, or has just stopped, but will start again real soon. So soon, that the water will still be dripping off the trees from the last downpour when the next one starts. The forecast says more to come.
Here today, gone tomorrow,
Don’t need myself remembered
But what I help create and leave behind,
is important to me.- Jello Biafra (1990)
This appeared as the opening quote in the front of my PhD thesis in 1993. I was living on unemployment and trying to finish writing it before Christmas so it wouldn’t be hanging over me for the holidays. I remember printing the final copies for binding late one December evening. I left them on my desk and walked home. It was pouring with rain when I left the faculty building for the half hour walk home. I was soaked within a few minutes. By the time I got home, I might as well have been for a swim. As far as I was concerned, it was a perfect evening.
Twelve year’s later Jello Biafra’s post punk mantra still seems as relevant as it did that wet December night. Life is emphemeral and we can’t all leave it with memorials like Abraham Lincoln but that doesn’t mean that the small “monuments” we do leave behind aren’t important.
