127 Hours at Burning Man

She calls it a day but probably she just ignored the time and counted the interval between sleeps as a day.

Wait, no! I'm such a dork. She does write of 24 hours. I counted 'em.

This was published months ago and I missed it, but here it is. Surely someone who stops here will enjoy it. It's just about right. Enough to give you a hint, but not so much you get lost. Every time I try to write about it, I get lost. Trying too hard.

24 Hours at Burning Man

Related stuff at the same site: search results.

More Boldly Going

More Camping Caving Spelunking pics and random commentary.

This was our last outing. My scout turns eighteen soon and then it's all over. I didn't get all weepy. Most guys don't really appreciate that.

Nature was kind. It rained heavily during the night and sometimes during the day but never when we were cooking.


There was an eagle's nest nearby, up on a pole specially made for it, I think to keep the eagles from nesting on power lines. A mating pair waited patiently for us to quit messing around near their pole.


Here's us before we went in. You can tell it's a before shot because we're not all muddy.


Here's another of me because the cute redhead who fitted us up took it and so I have to publish it. She took my camera because visitors aren't allowed to carry cameras while going down the rope. Probably they had too many dropped cameras shattering on top of people watching down below. Did I mention how cute she was? And a redhead. Real easy-going, too, I think foothills life is either very slow or very, erm, hemp-enhanced.


Done with the rope thing, we went spelunking. This is where you follow your guide, preferably an adorable redhead, down into the mountain and crawl through mud-enslimed cracks in the bones of the earth. Passages have names like Devil's Chimney and Meatgrinder. I was the only adult to go on this part. Somehow the tale of another trip in which one of our heftier ASMs got stuck between two rocks and had to wait in the dark for three hours before they managed to get him out failed to inspire the other grownups to go. Some of them, to be fair, couldn't go because they had smaller boys to look after. Maybe it's just a general rule that grownups don't go. That would explain why I do.


Not a place for the claustrophobic. Also helps to be able to pull your weight with just your arms, because some places there just wasn't room to get a leg in place with which to push. Wriggle an inch at a time is what you have to do, while protruding rocks dig into whatever spine or hipbone is convenient. It's a lot of fun. It really is.


Once back out in the main cavern, we watched some more scouts do the rope thing. It’s a wonderful thing to watch a twelve year old boy who’s never done anything like repel 165 feet down a rope take his fears in hand, focus on the moment to moment motions, and make it to the bottom in one piece, filled with a quiet triumph. You see a positive growth that will never be taken away. I strongly wish no child would be ignored, but would be guided through the paces of their choosing, challenged, facing fear, and coming out a winner. How much happier would the world be?

Boldly Go

Sometimes you stop at the gas station and right when you’re out in the open space between the pumps and the mini-mart a huge gas truck comes barreling down the road and turns into the gas station and you think, damn, if that guy’s having a bad day and or his brakes are out this going to be a day when everything changes.

Big-ass gas truck is hurtling down the road, I can hear it, and there’s really nowhere to go and avoid it. Either it will hit me or it will not but either way, everything is going to change.

Not just kids moving out, empty nest looming. That’s the driving factor but not the only factor. Instincts proclaim it is time to change things around. Yes, because the kids will be going but also yes because my long-suffering is tired of the drama. Kid drama? No, no, well, yes, but I’m the kid. A life struggling against the box I put myself in. Time to break the box. Time to be bold and risk it. All of it.

Because it is for the most part inevitable, it really shouldn’t be so hard.


That’s how it felt last weekend, as I hung from a rope, one foot on a mud-slimy rock wall, the rest of my skinny ass hanging out in space. I really didn’t need my foot on the wall anymore. I was way past the point it did any good. ‘Deed it was above my head at that point. I just didn’t want to let go, to lose my touch on Mother Earth and trust everything to a slim winding of fibers. But I was already trusting them completely. A booted foot touching a wall above your head isn’t much use if the rope breaks.


So I pulled my leg in and spun a bit and kept on going. Fed the rope, looked down, enjoyed the view. 165 feet is more than far enough to make thought of anything going wrong fairly pointless. Just do it! Go, and boldly.


Repelling and spelunking at Moaning Cavern. Camping amidst rain-wet scrub oaks and soaring eagles at New Melones Lake.

Clockwatching

Why am I still at work? Because things need doing before the weekend starts.

A neat-o app called Zonetick keeps me apprised what time it is where all my coworker buddies are. It is telling me to go home.

If I could make time, I could write stuff all week long. Maybe it wouldn't be interesting. But who cares? Maybe it would.

No more to say. This was just sort of an AADD moment. I have a lot of those.

Getcher fur boots

'Tis the season.

Intermission

Suddenly it occurred to me that though Natasha Richardson got injured in a country with universal health care and therefore insufficient funds to keep a med-evac helicopter anywhere near the ski resort, her wealthy if left-leaning family wasted no time getting her out of the Canadian hospital she was late to and over to New York. Seems to be rare indeed for people with money to waste time leaving their sick or injured loved ones in countries that claim to take care of everybody. I'm not sure how proponents of universal health care address that fact. Sorta reminds me of those folks who think gun control is a reasonable response to crime, yet are unable to claim that Republicans and the NRA and others who fight for gun rights are actually soft on crime.

Not that I'm opposed to everyone having coverage. But to serve everyone, a society really has to build up the wealth first. Not there yet. Keep the pressure on, by all means. But the problems of war and economic disparity precede. Freedom comes before justice.

Pampanito

I've slept aboard a couple times, thanks to Scouting. Bay waters whisper against the hull, and Bay mist and diesel fumes drift about. A ghostly light from the City's distant nightlife comes down through the fog. Boys run and play and parent chaperones snore. Blood in hair is not uncommon, the hatches being short and rimmed with steel edges. The parent who's still mostly a kid wanders through taking pictures incessantly, imagination all ahead full. It is extraordinarily tight quarters.

A sweet story about a man who got to see it again: Aussie comes to S.F. to see sub that saved him.

U.S.S. Pampanito -- Pix I've taken over the years:

  

        

  

Or Is It Freedom

Sometimes this deadly shyness hits me like a bomb. I know a fair amount of people now, but few of them well, and if it weren’t for the random associations of the workplace and of my kids’ rapidly disappearing family-related activities, I have the strong potential to know no one at all. I hate the shyness. I despise it. It is part of a broader sort of brokenness that stands between me and the rest of humanity, an Olduvai Gorge that has me more often than not watching the floor as I walk, watching potential acquaintances remain strangers, watching potential friends remain acquaintances, and watching friends evolve back into being strangers.

I fake it pretty well, though the fake-out is not sustainable. My 50th birthday party was a success, and certainly everyone got the impression I had a lot of friends. It was no doubt a surprise to all of them. I know it was to me. But I gather most folks have an instinct to remain in touch somehow, to manage all those relationships such that they remain alive and breathing, and it is that sort of social management that entirely escapes me. Not the mechanics of it – it’s child’s play to write down a list of things one should do. It’s the instinct that is missing, or that is too weak to overcome the fear.

What the fear is of, I can’t say, but if you are a shy person, you already know as well as me.

So anyway, the bomb hits when I realize that my instincts to focus on my own work and not make continual little investments in human relationships not only augurs a life that will never be a less lonely one, but is the number one reason why my career has never really taken off. Yes, I’ve raised a family, have a good house, got to travel the world a little on the company dollar, might even be able to put the boys through college. All of that is good stuff for which I am thankful. But that’s about the limit of it. In this competitive industry, staying on track and going fast enough to avoid being run over by the train still isn’t enough. Taking the long view, if further contractions and other workplace turmoil costs me my position, the ultimate cause clearly will not be from being less valuable through misbehavior, insufficient smarts, or lack of productivity. It’s a given that one should get mustered out for any of those. If I am vulnerable it is because, just as in the social context, I am not plugged in to the crowd. I don’t swim with the school. When in amongst the herd I either edge to the outskirts or keep my head down in the grasses. People don't always know what I really do, therefore, and that alone is recognized as a weakness. This lack of managing impressions allows for poor impressions where a whole lot of solid and valuable work may not be so visible.

The above is the sort of thing I write and then delete because it looks like a bunch of whining. This time I’ll post it instead because I’m brave like that, brave being another word for nothing left to lose.

Shocked, I Tell You

Shocked that I learned by random backchannels that Obama gave a speech on education today -- shocked not by that, but shocked that I agree with everything he said about it. Shocked that I completely agree with the president!

So I read a presumably liberal slant from the AP and for balance looked it up on Fox. The AP told it straight. Fox prefaced their story with a bunch of whining about the imploding economy.

As if an imploding economy is a bad time to talk about spending money on education. Christ, guys, an imploding economy is a pretty strong sign that we are way late on the spending!

Yay for holding teachers more accountable, paying on merit, supporting charter schools where they work, increasing funding at the early stages, and especially yay for saying,

"The bottom line is that no government policies will make any difference unless we also hold ourselves more accountable as parents."

Apropros of naught

My favorite lesbertarian sez:

The continuing crash of the markets is not only due to the uncertainty created by the current administration's seeming inability to develop a coherent policy to deal with the banks — but a well justified fear that Barack Obama intends to put a stake into the meager libertarian-lite legacy of Ronald Reagan, and create his vision of a socialized and federalized America.

Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, sounding like one of Rand's villains, admitted as much:

"This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."

Today the president himself announced that the crisis is our great opportunity to remake America.

Yes, I was a skeptic and a downer and suspicious that somehow I had missed a toke on the same good shit that had everyone else in raptures over Mr. Obama's candidacy, election, and fresh new Presidency. And, no surprise, he has done some good things, such as reverse the ban on stem cell research. But my overall doubts were founded on an impression made by the man himself, and it seems that those of us who watch now not with rancor but simply with open eyes and who increasingly find our '08 concerns coming to fruition are growing in number. Interesting times aborning, as always.

Not What They Used To Be

Y'know?

Wingnut

I just realized that since

• There's no problem with gay marriage
  
• CCW (Concealed-Carry Weapons) permits should be issued to anyone who applies and meets the requirements
  
• Marijuana needs decriminalizing
  
• As does independent prostitution (i.e. non-pimp non-brothel)
  
• Illegal immigrants should be deported
  
• Illegal immigrants' medical bills should be reimbursed by their home countries
  
• Public school funding should be tripled
  
• Public school employees should be hired/fired/compensated on professional criteria rather than as though represented by some labor union
  
• Private school vouchers should be encouraged, based on models where they help the poor
  
• Rent control should be eliminated
  
• Capital gains taxes should be eliminated for anyone worth less than say $5M
  
• Any community can and should define areas where nudity is legal
  

(and I could go on) I must be some sort of nut. Am I a wacko liberal or a crypto-conservative? Do I care? Do you? Why am I still up?

Darwin's Doughnuts

How to show you is smart:

1. Party hearty at Beer Can Beach
2. Go for a cigarette run
3. Spin some doughnuts in your car before you go
4. Forget where the river is

I'm not unsympathetic. Terrible all around. But geez.

Five Things That Were Wet Last Month

Street


Sea


Paw


Swimmer


Sculpture (see the smile?)