Cooler than You: Stupid Things I Say and Do

I'm been waiting to find the moment to escape back into Seattle.  Don't ask me about recent events.  This, this, is your (and my) diversion.   *** In what feels like a lifetime ago, I saw my original hometown for a moment last summer.  In all reality, it was how I ended my long sojourn off the east coast, through the midwest, and nestled in the peaceful slopes of the Cascade basin in Oregon.  As I took one last Greyhound up to Portland, walked less than half a block to the train depot, and boarded I begrudgingly accepted the ideal retreat my summer had been was already fading.   Limey had already been returned , my clothes were packed and shimmied into one carry on, one back pack, and one suitcase.  Six week's worth of muscle, memory, and trinkets were packed away in my literal and metaphorical spaces.   As a long weekend, at the end of August, rounded out my travels there's something to be said about the tranquility of returning to a...

Life back on the east coast has fallen back into its rhythms, as we say.  The weather has cooled, the leaves are changing, I have my annual end of September cold.  Predictability and rhythms are important sometimes.  Right, now as a I sit here amid long essays I'm filing and composing predictability seems to resonate like a founders ale at a locale beer show.  Dark, deep tones of amber, smooth edges of nutmeg and cinnamon making that ale a pumpkin seasonal spout.   Of course, pumpkin anything--in the changing, colorful days of fall--has been a pop culture affection/affection/addition of basic white people .  Even as I sit here now, with a regional pumpkin cider ( Harpoon , to be exact) in a flannel left over from last year's make, I feel a mix of melancholy and romance with the changing seasonal tides. For as much as I love fall, it's colors, and its crisp air it also singles the end of the summer, long days, and sun kissed skin.  Though, this...

I'm back in NYC these days, and while the weather slowly changes (or refuses to) I tread on . . . remembering the long, seemingly lazy days of last summer.  Days I want to make come alive again, in spirit and reality.   Newport.  Newport, Oregon for your pleasure.  When traveling I often rent a bike, as its cheap transportation and typically fun.   In this case, spending a month in Corvallis, Oregon I certainly needed a mode to shuttle me about town. Granted, my own two feet would have sufficed, but the little Lime-colored Townie I rented (for a flat rate of 55 bucks a week, lock included) has certainly paid for itself in spades.   I’m told it had—at max—thirty miles on her when I picked her up.   I am certain I have logged more than thirty on old Limey (for the record, when I turned her in the 24th of August, I cried a little tear of goodbye knowing her and I had seen more than a hundred miles of road together).   Aside from getting lost aro...