Cooler than You: Stupid Things I Say and Do

In what feels like the passing of a few years of yesterdays sunsets and roadways of Left Coast Greyhound rides and trains through the mountains have turned into the fading colors and brightly hued sunsets of an East Coast fall with sunflowers between sun's rays and around the corner of protruding Halloween decorations.  If we pause to blink we will surely miss it as Christmas will erupt upon our collective souls before Thanksgiving has come or even settled in our bulging stomachs.   After six weeks of living from a suitcase, a carry on, and one large backpack the need and desire to roll around in piles of clothes has fallen to the wayside.  More like, the accruements of a capsule wardrobe are still enveloping me and the resting of ideals of using less, writing more, and finding a greater balance and return on take home pay threaten to become dethroned with the pressings of life and need to pay rent.  There's probably a deeper analogy embedded in those bags;...

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...

I haven't lived in the mountains in years.  In about sixteen to be exact.  That was when I found myself living in Las Cruces, NM with the Organ Mountains in the background. Then I moved back east, and headed northeast to New York.  Yet, in years of moving and shuttling about I forgot and suppressed the memories of where I started.  Seattle.  All those years ago.   I'm in Oregon for the month, on work and research officially and more so is the resounding reset of me.  Pretty much from the moment I exited the Portland Airport a sense of comfort and ease began to settle in on me.  One of those moments when you realize you are home . . . in my case it was a home I always knew I had, but along the years I had suppressed it and moved on.  In the days since, things have fallen in place like natural kismet, without strenuous effort and with buttered ease.  I started out in Seattle, and we lived in a little house on A Street in Tac...