stuffminusthings

[stuffminusthings]

And then, US

When five pounds and four paws of little Polly Pocket came zipping around the outside corner of the newly built one-room General Store and announced her presence eight or ten times in the middle of the clearing in the woods on the shores of Rock River known as Rockin' Retro's, I knew the universe was giving me a sign.

We're in the foothills of the Beartooth Mountains, just outside of Red Lodge, Montana. It's big sky country. Home to eagles, bears, and wolves, but little Polly Pocket runs free.

The General Store also serves as the main office, where, amongst all the supplies one might ever need for camping at half the price—Roxie, one of the owners, has a hard time asking more, she's too modest. It's here the tour begins, first the bathroom facilities--all clean, bright and new, and then off to a retro camper to sleep in. Each camper has a name and a personality. Emrie, a red and white camper accented with love, is about to be our home for the week. The interior decorations match in the remarkable way that nothing seems to have come from the same place, but everything fits together.

Just like our new four-pawed friend fits perfectly here amongst the ancient Beartooth Mountains on the border of Montana and Wyoming. She leads the way down a path from the trailer to a clearing right on the river. Sun chairs and picnic tables look right at the river where beaver keep the saplings in check. After a few kind words, and some instructions on how to use the heater, Claire and I are completely alone together after the two days of travel it took to get here.

The timing is right. Time is everything, and all around us, time has been used well.

There's nothing cookie cutter here...in fact, there's a KOA Kampground right next door where the experience of sleeping in a trailer has been boiled down to a science. But you have to provide your own camper, or perhaps stay in a tent. Not that there's anything wrong with joining a hundred or so other guests at the foot of the mountains, nor picking any of the other options on Air BnB.

But the idea that creation through restoration sticks with us.

As artists we both make things all of the time, but we also know that endless manufacturing is unsustainable. Sometimes it's constantly revisiting something, reinventing, and caring for it that makes it new. We experienced this lesson together for the first time when we adopted little Zoe into our lives. At eight, and mostly toothless, and too terrified to sit on even my lap in the moments we met. Her prior owner, and elderly woman passed suddenly in her sleep and left little Zoe behind. But after three days she made the leap and two years later now only leaves to greet guests. Every. Single. One.

It's the confidence gained through the experience of restoration that builds us stronger. Not just the restoration of other things, but of ourselves and our own work. Restoration requires attention, wear and tear mean that sometimes operation takes understanding. Sometimes we don't even need time to break down our ideas, they do that themselves. But it takes faith to know that on the fifth or seventh revision of an idea that started out as a mistake, something will finally snap, even if it's just the idea. And when the ideas break, which they often do, it's faith and love in each other that let us move on. We know every step we take is liable to change not only where we are outside, but who we are inside as well.

Maybe it's the fact that our trailer started its life with very different intentions, probably fell by the wayside for a bit, and then was loved back into reality. That's something Claire and I can relate to because little Zoe was part of Claire an I's first restoration—me.

It was ambitious, only a couple months into our relationship, to have a life-altering event happen outwardly to only one of us. Claire's been there for everything from trying to keep me from hitch hiking home from the hospital despite the fact that I was in a wheel chair to the sometimes more frustrating dropped conversations that emerge from anywhere when everything seems to be just right.

A fuse blows in our trailer kicking the heat off our first night. It's Claire and I's first night without puppies between us, well, ever. We wrap our arms around each other as the sun manages to poke it's way over the river, across the pines, and through our window. I slink off our camper-bed and out the door with Emrie's coffee maker. Thanks to an extension cord and a nearby outlet I begin my most serene use of a percolator ever as the bubbling begins to match the flow of Rock River just beyond.

We tell Kerry, the other half of Rockin' Retro's about our trailer after I wake Claire all the way up with a cup. He's exasperated. I can see emotion start to emerge from behind his glasses and before he can react all the way I assure him with the most calming words I have at my disposal.

“It's O.K. We're from Michigan. Actually the U.P. We don't really think it's cold here.”

Claire and I had spent some of our more romantic nights bundled up in the back of station wagons across the midwest, so we were already high enough from the mountain air. But I could see that he wasn't all of the way convinced, not because he doubted Michigan, but because he genuinely wanted us to have an amazing time using his work.

Kerry and Roxy had spent A LOT of time paying attention to every single detail at the camp ground. Everything from the fish cleaning station to the chopped wood and wire starting material in water tight bins next to each of the fire rings had been put there with love for others to relax.

“Other couples just get old and watch tv news all day, we couldn't do that.”

Instead they risked all of their emotion into an idea that people might like to come to Montana, and experience an old idea a new way when they come down from the mountains or out of Yellowstone Park. Claire and I are there to snow surf and skateboard. In the whole world there aren't that many people looking at the mountains of Montana differently, but in Montana, it's what everybody does. Trying to open a retro trailer campground in a place where there are already the best camping/hotel/VRBO options most customers will ever experience is like trying to learn how to ride a bicycle on active streets—the goal is all mental until the wobbles go away. You just gotta see past the wobbles.

I do my best to make sure the situation is calm.  Kerry comes back with a full thermos of coffee and we thank him. He assures us he'll have the trailer fixed during the day, and we go back to enjoying the wonderfully warming nearly-summer morning.

We've learned that the only thing we're ever really looking for a way to smile from our current vantage point, and I've seen hers enough different ways that I know it's the surest way to bring about mine. Even when it seems like it isn't, with her, time always brings about understanding.

Everything from the curls of the ramhorns perched proudly atop the beasts already perched proudly where nothing else wanders to the hands we hold in yet another new place that feels familiar takes only one thing to occur—time

And the obvious thing after all this time is that I want to spend all of the rest of mine with Claire. I know she feels the same way, because we're married before noon at the courthouse.

[stuffminusthings]

Woah there, sport.

Maybe, just maybe, you're getting a little excited.

I have to admit it's a little bit nerdy to wax poetic about learning how to snowboard, especially after age 15. The feeling of freedom. Man, I've been making fun of that since at least 21. Having beginner experiences is just so out of my character.

Was out of my character.

The most amusing part about chronicling myself, is that it gives me a chance to see myself from the perspective of anybody reading these words. I get to re-absorb what's been expunged.

After a good 2+ year hiatus from chairlifts, I got to ride them as a total beginner not only from lack of practice, but on a board instead of skis as well.  I got to consciously re-experience the thrill of speed and snow since the car accident that damaged my brain. I'd had just enough experiences since that car accident that I'd become sure of myself.

Big faux pax. No Gavin, you are not alone on some strange new frontier on your snowboard. It might feel that way, and that's ok, but it's just in your head. In. YOUR. Head.

And in your life, Gavin, you've only been in this head for a couple of years.

The childlike overreactions to experiences have dulled down at this point. So much, I even forget they happen. Which is why writing is cool because then I get to interpret it.

Reading about it gives me a chance to reflect on my reflections.

It's a practice I've been practicing since the accident.

It's a strange thing to keep talking about over and over again, but, unfortunately it's one of those things I just can't undo. It happened, and without referencing it, at least to myself, it's easy to get carried away.

Oh, but the redundancy!

I used to get incredibly aggravated that the only topics at church seemed to center on Jesus.

“But what about foot ball?” Child Me asked with a smirk.

Now, all these decades later I understand that, in the scope of things the promise of our eternal salvation might be more exciting than football, but I hadn't lived enough yet. And despite how many people thought they knew just when enough was, football was the only thing in that period of time I completely got over. The idea of eternal salvation, whether or not it is true, makes the NFL possible, look at how comfy and drunk we all get on Sundays instead of going to church. They tell you why that's ok at church.

In Christianity, there is a defined starting point to the ideology, Jesus. Without his presence the entire practice is just text used by bullies to maintain order. There were other orders in place before.

Like getting married, or having a child, or getting retired, I've just entered a different order. I'm sure married sex feels different. I got to experience sex for the first time all over again, only this time I knew my perspective wouldn't change nearly as much as it did the actual first time.

(I did however set the reset button with condoms, so going without is yet to be discovered all over again. I can save so many cool things more my later years.)

It's less embarrassing to talk about snowboarding.

And so at the expense of seeming like an asshole and a maniac I have to move forward with the perspective of somebody who has suffered rom a TBI. It means I get wildly excited, but it also means that when the dust settles, if I take a look at what actually happened, I begin to see the folly of it.

In fact, the only thing I learned from football, and I'm forever thankful for it, is that Cannabis is an effective treatment for the negative effects of some TBI's.

And now that I've dropped the C word, I feel at ease talking about the other set of letters.

I've always been incredibly determined to never be able to be defined by any conventional system. I quit acknowledging awards of any sort in high school. I didn't think the grades I got in high school meant anything, so I quit worrying about them.

Grades are an attempt at making a moment in time history that forecasts the future, but in a world where extra credit and real work have the same outcome, it's clear there are many paths to a point, some of them more intentional than others. So when my car crashed labeled me TBI and I spent the next few days insisting we were in a cave hide out on Mackinac Island, MI under attack from armed forces, my local acquaintances quickly evaporated—they'd seen those letters before.

My good friends, the ones I'd managed to string together over nearly twenty moves in under a decade, got the unfiltered version of me they'd always loved as I got better. The one with a mischief filled grin as I set off towards yet another intangible goal. The goals almost never happened, but when they did they'd yield spectacular results.

And I, being human, often had no idea how to handle those intangible results.

I mean, until junior high, my only experiences with action/extreme sorts was breaking my pinky on rollerblades I borrowed from my cousin. They had grind plates for sliding down handrails, but that didn't do a damn thing about rocks on the sidewalk.

I've come a long way, so far in fact, that learning how to snowboard down mellow runs and feeling completely transformed seems just a little too spiritual.

As a chronic kidder of all things spiritual, I myself have to start examining my letters.

Is it possible, Gavin, that you're over-reacting to a relatively normal phenomenon?

Letters. Redundancy.

One of the side effects of that accident, is that all of your memories are in tact, but scattered. To really understand going fast, I actually had to go fast to remind myself what it actually feels like. The first feeling of speed is usually reserved for 6 year olds, but lucky for me I got to do it all over again.

It's hard to make speed redundant.

And so, on my snowboard I finally got an experience similar to something my brain held as holy, but was for a couple of years intangible.

But it's been a couple of years, so my processing speed is finally down to a few weeks. In that couple of years I've re-discovered a lot of things that at first seemed very tangible, then became completely out of reach. But if I dig deep enough, intangible is the only thing I've ever aspired for.

Well, that's not right.

There have been other life-altering events in my life. The time I moved from Michigan to Arizona. The time I tested into language, but not math advanced placement. The time I got put in advanced placement the following year anyways. The time we moved back to Michigan. The second time I moved back to Montana, but only in a van for the winter.

I can't even mention skiing in that list, because, skiing was always the last part of skiing. Those fleeting moments of speed always came at the end of a long day the night before with work due yesterday, and no sleep tonight.

And yet, here I am again, in the dead of winter waking up before four every morning as my bowels are still tied in knots from all of the internal bleeding that occurred as a result of my pelvis being crushed, bones broken, and organs lacerated. I make 3-5 trips to the bathroom before anyone else wakes up every morning. Then it's off to the bathroom again for a couple of hours and then I tackle every day just as fearlessly as before.

Recently I've started work on my Fascia in Physical Therapy. The twisting and stretching of this system, as well as the nerves running through it have began to open up not only my bowels, but my centers of balance. Every day I find coordination I didn't know was possible mostly because my insides have been misaligned.

But should I feel bad about the good feelings I was feeling?

Were they as real as I thought they were?

As real as JNCO Jeans made anybody feel. As nerve-wracking as the summer of eating chocolate dipped crickets for free ice cream at Cold Stone Creamery.

This too shall pass, summer comes every year.

Woah there, sport.

Redundant.

[stuffminusthings]

Eating the Forbidden Apple or My Switch to Snowboarding at 31

I already know how to ski.

That was the main reason I never spent more than part of a run snowboarding in the 11 seasons I spent skiing. Skiing took me anywhere I wanted to go. It was the ultimate form of consumption. Pop. Set. Grab. Four point. After a few thousand turns under the night lights of Michigan's ski hills, skiing was hard wired into my reptilian brain.

I stopped worrying about how I was getting places and just started going. I heard there were mountains in Montana so when I found out school was cheaper there after a year of residency I made the switch without ever visiting. I had seen the mountains in videos. I was ready to live that life.

The funny thing about living in the mountains is that when you learn to live in them, it's easy to stay above the riff-raff. I'd have my moments poking my head into those heavenly clouds only to point my tips straight back down.

It wasn't the turn I sought after, rather the change.

Here. There. Black. White. On. Off. Exercise at sun rise, if only to burn off all of the sex drugs and rock and roll the night before.

The whole time, all around me, there were snowboarders. On the mountains, in my classes, where I worked. There were times when they wouldn't go the ways I wanted to, riding or not, and I always thought it was because they lacked the mental fortitude and commitment it took to barrel blindly down the hill with me. I always knew my skills and my equipment would get me through whatever I encountered. My reptilian brain was amazing. I assumed theirs was as well.

“Same thing just different,” I'd always think to myself, imaging each turn in any direction on a snowboard to be just the same as skiing. “I don't need to, because I already know how to ski.”

But I'd spent enough time on skis that I wasn't really skiing anymore. I was just going places on my skis. I had no plans to change, and then one crushed pelvis/spine and wobbly hip joint later, skiing 's been out of the picture for the last two winters, and the next few for sure. As a method of easing myself back into the world, I went full fledged into powder surfing (I'd played with it the previous two winters).

When I first started powder surfing, I treated it just like skiing. See a place and go there. The surfboards I made were based off of my understanding of how a ski boot drives a modern pow ski. The kick tail at the and of the rocker was based off of how fun it was to do pow manuals on a ski, and also how that was an effective method for speed control on straight lines. The elevation curve matched the only place I knew side cut would be used. The shape profile was based off making an easy swiveling ski.

And so I bombed down the hill, over time, slowly picking up my boards tendencies to climb back up hill. I was just excited about the maneuverability and increased reach on my lines. Although at the end of a couple of winters shaping I had all of the right shapes to ride a wave, I lacked the knowledge of feel for riding bigger and more graceful lines.

And then summer came and I decided to learn how to skateboard. I was 30, turning 31, and still pushing mongo. I watched a youtube video by a guy named Sergio Yuppie about his rise to success sliding a skateboard downhill in Brazil. He said that skateboarding taught him respect, and that although downhill slide was his core, he loved and respected all styles. I realized that if I was going to start taking powder surfing seriously, I'd have to learn all sorts of boarding. I wasn't sure how I was going to learn respect, but then it came.

It came in the early morning hours when I could go to the skatepark while it wasn't crowded, so I could take up space with my awkward learning. That came from the kids. None of them ever said a cruel word to me within earshot.

They would quit skating and sit off to the side of the park without making eye contact if I was being to clumsy. As much as I was trying my hardest, they were too. And the more confident kids did there best to be creative about letting me know when I wasn't welcome. One hot summer day no less than four kids less than half my age all did the move I was trying for 10 minutes right in front of me. All in a row.

I couldn't help but smile and skate off. If I was cooler I would have learned how to play with them, but I wasn't there yet. Every day I got better at skateboarding was still a day that I was still worse than people half my age. But it didn't matter because I was getting better.

By the end of the summer, after I could ride all the transitions and learned to stay out of people’s way without causing too much of a scene, I even got a few nods. And I’ve never been happier about something so small. The sun only stays up for so long. There’s only so much time to skate. Being welcome on any level into the free time of strangers whether skateboarding or playing baseball takes a lot of understanding, skill, or good nature. 

In developing the needed skills, I learned good nature through humility. Nobody cares that you skateboard. Nobody cared when they started either. If they got better it was because they crashed. If you crash you just get laughed at. And maybe you should get laughed at, you’re the one who just wrecked on a skateboard.

After a summer skateboarding I wasn't prepared for the snow to fall.

And when it did my first five feet on one of my surf boards was better than all of the ones before—my time spent riding a board a new way gave me a new perspective and confidence. I still remember the thoughts running through my head as I rushed forward over a dusting of snow on grass.

“If it takes that much to flip a board balanced on four tiny wheels, there's almost nothing to be afraid of.”

It's true. With reckless confidence, it doesn't take extraordinary skill to slide straight downhill on any board on almost any surface, solid or otherwise. With the proper boots on, it's possible to skip the body english required to turn a single board, and instead efficiently manage two. Modern ski shapes/construction make the boot/ski interface as effective as a joystick at an arcade. With chairlifts powering every turn, repetition became the name of the game. I made good turns, because statistically, I'd made enough bad ones to discover the feeling of a good one, and though the first one may have come unnoticed mid-run, the law of averages meant that after enough turns, I'd make more good ones than bad.

On the other hand, the lack of recklessness surfing the snow brought me—with no chair lift every ride was cherished—immediately defined the attraction to skateboarding for me. Sure I could try something new on a skateboard, but that meant I had to be able to walk away from it if I made a mistake.

Falling on a skateboard is terrible. Asphalt is not my friend. To try something new on a skateboard meant risking my skin. But after I gained the ability to skateboard down a sloped parking lot, I saw my own ability to improve.

6 months of skating every day left me making more turns than I ever imagined, and I'd only imagined to get all four wheels off the ground once. Instead I'd learned to explore the world around me without leaving it. Long runs down hills making turns transformed my small town into a ski area.

But it wasn't just the streets. The steep slabs and curved concrete of the skate park drew me in. Fixed frozen waves I began working on turning my board all ways on the wave. It's all moves I would have figured out as a kid if I didn't roller blade or bike everywhere I could have just skated. Instead I saw skateboarding as a version of what I wanted to do, not an extension of something before me.

In fact, I always saw surfing as something separate. Growing up without waves in the state of Arizona Skateboarding only came to me through the internet in its infancy, and CCS mail-order catalogues. I spent hours pondering decks I'd never own never even thinking of how to use them. I never understood that each skateboard move is a continuation of a move done on water.

Moves first made hundreds of years ago all over the world. Moves that only change in style, but not function. When riding a surface of any sort, the same set of physics applies. The style in which they are used changes, but once the physics are learned, each board becomes a way to interpret them.

I didn't understand this until my legs started falling asleep from pushing and I had to switch styles.

That came from watching a video about a fence post getting turned into a street surfer.

The reviews said with Carver skateboard trucks like the ones attached to the fencepost, it was possible to pump just like on a surf board—even up hill!

I cut out my own surf skate deck from one of my blemished powder surfers and set off into the city sidewalks. The ability to carve turns on wheels instead of slide through them making the traditional skrrrrrrttttttt sound while shedding speed blew my mind. At first it was because I lacked the coordination required to slide to a stop, and instead I could make a series of quick turns to make a stop.

I didn't know it, but I was being introduced slowly to the lateral travel that makes surfing more than just sliding down the face of a wave. All I saw was a looser x-axis for controls that allowed for an intuitive combination of manually pointing the front end of the board where I wanted it to go and leaning, very opposite of the normal skateboards I was used to that required first a lean, and then either lifting the front wheels or sliding or both for major changes in direction. Sudden stops on a skateboard are called a power slides. There are no sudden stops on a wave, but it is possible to shift your velocity in a given direction another very suddenly.

It's this experiment in sudden change in inertia that makes surfing special no matter what medium it happens on. The simple reminder that everything, everything, is just a wave of energy suspended at different speeds.

There, balanced between being and not being, is where the conscious choice to make a turn or not takes place. How we make those turns, if we choose to make them at all, is up to us. Everything that is existence is already in motion. Waves on water are just natures way of making visible to us the medium we actually inhabit.

Energy.

This was NOT how I was familiar my reptilian brain thinking.

Hell, at this point it wasn't even my brain thinking. It was allowing the world around me to exist and then adapting to it, in a style that's been around for hundreds of years if not longer. The thinking done by the folks at Carver for riding waves immediately started translating into how I saw the streets and the skatepark, and soon steep hills became stacks of manageable waves I could play on instead of race down. Less steep hills became one big wave with bottom turns, top turns, and cut backs. I started seeing sliding on a skateboard as the same thing on a snowboard. Going down the hill, but not gracefully.

Level ground became everything but. Everything can be surfed if it's looked at the right way.

And so after six months of skateboarding and a few powder surfing trips, I traded a board I made for a discount on a board from Elevated Surfcraft. The past two winters without chairlift rides due to my inability to ski were enough. Snowboarding would be just like powder surfing and skateboarding and surfing.

Surfing. That was the key. If I'd learned anything from my summer skating, it's that I wanted a directional board. And I wanted to surf. That focus is what makes riding wheels fun for me. The all new way to interact with my environment. Throwing a turn in an unconventional place became as exciting as any extreme move I'd ever pulled, even if it was just a turn.

I was so ready to be as bored of snowboarding as I was of skiing. My first chair lift ride I watched as the mob of people sped below me flat based down the groomer face. I'd gone down the same runs on my skis backwards without turning as a kid, so I wasn't totally terrified going up. I'd already conquered the bunny hill too, so this was the same thing, just steeper I thought.

And soaked in sweat at the end my first blue run I thought I was right.

It wasn't until a week later, when I finally got to ride powder at Michigan's Mount Bohemia, a place notorious for stranding beginning snowboarders did I finally feel the light.

In the that first day, through the trees, over rocks, with powder up to my knees, Bohemia's steep faces and rowdy ridges became one big beautiful right. And after a few waves I worked up enough courage to ride some lefts. By the end of the day I could ride both indiscriminately, always taking the high line over the tracks of skiers and snowboarders alike through nearly un-reachable powder with ease.

It was the first time I'd ridden at speed since my accident, and by the end of the day I felt fresh. Surfing the most pleasant line through the rowdiest places is a gentle way to go about life, and I like it.

Ok. Powder snowboarding was cool. But I still like surfing when I can.

And then the temps fell, but that was it. Back to the groomers.

Back to the groomers.

For five or six days I showed up at the ski hill just long enough to get a few laps in. Groomers. Groomers and some stashes that were supposed to be closed.

But groomers. On a board that was mostly meant for powder, but I'd seen carved. I kept trying to carve, but it was hard. There's a lot of blind faith in turning back side, and because I was on a directional board, a lot more movement makes the turn, so it made riding groomers a sort of annoying necessity.

Until I did enough back side turns in powder to understand their appeal. Blind faith when executed properly is a beautiful thing. It's trusting a form that's been there since people started sliding sideways regardless of where or how. It's universal, more so than any dance move, because it moves to the ever present waves of energy, you just have to be patient enough to feel the rhythm.

Fortunately for me, falling on soft snow made me comfortable enough to try it elsewhere. It's something like this I probably wouldn't have worried about as a kid, but now makes me ever grateful.

Seeing the world on edge, instead of positioned between two sliding surfaces, allows for an entirely new perspective on the environment. The ability to turn on a dime, just like on a surfboard or a skateboard and change your inertia the complete opposite direction with relative grace is a move at the very abstract of skiing, requiring a special course, giant/steep spaces, and/or incredible boot fit. On a snowboard, only takes an imagination and confidence. The kind similar to what comes from learning how to jump a bicycle, but from a much deeper, more thought out pool of knowledge. As a species, we’ve been sliding sideways longer.

It's hard to see snowboarding as any different than skiing as a skier. They still do the same thing just different. But if you want to understand snowboarding as everybody else, the best way to start is to look to surfing. If you want to be thankful, as you should be, snowboarding is the combination of so many ideas that have nothing to do with skiing, so maybe, if you want to be thankful, learn how to skate, but don't ever forget to surf.

As for eating the apple, talking about it any further is probably copyright infringement, I have faith in that.

[stuffminusthings]

“Freedom is in the Turn.”

It's a Warren Miller quote I can only borrow from my friend Chris, because I can't place quite where he said it. Miller is a skiing Legend, but I'm pretty he isn't talking about skiing here. Miller was heavily involved in creating skate parks and other modified blank spaces before he passed.

Using that quote is my choice, and placing it is up to my style. It's the same as seeing a hop turn and executing it on a slope near(or far) from you.

To me, that's the whole point of a blank page, that is, if you keep in mind that the only points on an actual blank page are the corners. Take an entire mountain, cover it with snow, and the results are remarkably similar. How we choose to seek, explore, and interpret these blank spaces becomes as much a part of us as we let it.

When it comes to mechanics, they print bibles pretty close to the way they print porno magazines, and both of them start on blank paper. The trees never get a choice in how they pass to their next form, and they have the same odds of being worshiped as they do burned in either form...so they just keep growing.

It's us who then decide which ink is evil, even though both claim absolute truth.

But we could just do something else, like:

Caring for my 6.5 lb, newly-adopted senior Chihuahua tamed my insecurities.

When she first came to my heart, I was only three or fourth months into a TBI recovery. Acceptance of my new changes horrified me. I was hell-bent on proving my worth after losing my job. I was spending hours a day trying to make 3D models because none of my drawings made sense to anybody.

And then my girlfriend showed me the picture of a tiny, snaggle-toothed dog: Zoe. At first all I could think about was that our wood floors just got so much better. I wasn't moving anywhere very quickly, so the thought of not getting knocked over by a dog seemed appealing. And then I read her description, it went something like, “My owner died, and the next day my whole world was different and I don't know why.”

I had just had my own memory wiped and woke up in a hospital myself. For some reason I felt like fate was speaking to me. I had been anti-little dog my whole life, regarding our tinier four legged friends as useless. On the day I was allowed to finally go to my own home, our German Short Haired Pointer, Lilly, died of old age in my arms on the way to the veterinary hospital. Unsure of how to process anything, I held her closely as she passed. A few days later, my girlfriend's tiny-Lo mix sat on my lap and fell asleep.

I massaged her shoulders the same way I would have massaged Lilly's. She'd groan in approval the same way. To get me out of the house, I took Lo for walks. At first, both of us would get distracted by the same noises, and Claire would often walk ahead of us as we stared into the night after whatever bumped.

When Claire caught us staring, she laughed, and through the fog of my head injury, I understood that Lo and I were experiencing the world as similarly as we could. I also realized neither of us actually had a choice in the matter. It was as if deep down, both of us were the same thing, just driving different space ships.

I can't really do any better at being a puppy than they can at reading the mail, or even buying groceries. Claire gets SOOOO pissed when I just jump into her lap while she's painting no matter how cute I try to look.

So we invited Zoe into our home, and she was so terrified of me she wouldn't sit on my lap. She just sat at the opposite end of the couch and looked like she wanted to be held but couldn't trust me.

So I didn't try. I just left her treats when I could and let her know she was great as often as I could.

After three days she finally sat on my lap. She hasn't really left since. She couldn't go for walks at first because she was too out of shape, which was fine because I was still re-learning how to walk. I carried her everywhere, only putting her down where it would be fun to run in short bursts with her.

Now we lead hikes together, and when we have guests she sits with them instead of me because she's become so social. We're still working on her behavior away from the apartment, but she's got 8 years of  learning a different way before us so it takes time.

She can't charge through the snow, but I have a reason to keep my house clean, and to allow enough peace to comfort a pair of senior dogs. Our lives both changed, but we're making it work.

It was the freedom I allowed myself to try something new that's brought me happiness. The ability to adapt and overcome in my own way. Because life is a blank page, and if you want to explain the freedom of the mountains, you have to understand that words only work when they leave the page.

It's on the mountains that your to understand that you still have to come back down, and that's often the only evidence of what you did in the first place. But there are only so many pages and there is only so much space.

Snow melts just like pages burn, every extra step is something you and only you'll earn, you can learn everything you need to know about having fun on the snow from Chihuahuas, freedom is in the turn.

[stuffminusthings]

Dear Montana Family,

Dear Montana Family,

It was nice to see you on your visit to the U.P. For the first time in a minute it was nice to see some family. I'm sorry if our conversations may have seemed a bit forced, but since this life is short, I'll do away with some of my remorse.

You asked me how my novel was going. A sign that you paid enough attention to me to read the headlines somewhere in 2014. There's been a bit since then, but, I'll catch you up.

When I last left writing my novel in Socorro, New Mexico, it was because I hadn't been able to write for two weeks. I kept telling myself it was unfocused attention, and a lack of discipline. I was in an agitated state when I arrived in New Mexico, a last ditch effort at avoiding the School Loan creditors. They had been systematically tracking down my old employers and requesting that they hold payments. When they finally got to the construction company in Missoula where I was working I wouldn't have a way to eat, so I left, with a goal of living on a bicycle (rent and expense free) until I wrote something I could actually get paid for.

It was that or the oil fields, and in New Mexico, just before my writer's block stopped my novel, I got a phone call.

My school loans were to be paid. That's it, that's all, go on with your life now.

Every single time I had trouble writing before that moment, was due to the fact that my phone never stopped ringing from the school loan creditors.

“Can't you just get another job?” They'd ask me while I was in Boulder between Santiago and Salt Lake City. Because there are so many part time jobs with international requirements.

It was time spent figuring out how to pay my bills instead of doing my job that lead me to a trailer in New Mexico in the first place, and now that I didn't have that, writing stopped making sense. I became agitated, and my sleep deteriorated. All of my clothing felt scratchy.

Maybe I wasn't supposed to write a novel. I couldn't go five minutes without having a melt down.

Maybe this was my chance to be a Ski Journalist finally, that's how I tried to pay my bills the first time.

In my madness, I stopped thinking about writing my novel and started thinking about the ways I wanted to make money. Being a ski writer was fun. Now that I only had to pay for myself, I could finally afford to do it.

And then I was diagnosed with bed bugs.

After being driven to the brink of insanity, driving away from New Mexico and my writer's block couldn't happen quickly enough. I was offered a part of a magazine for my work, and having faith in my ability to work, I dove straight in.

After a winter of starving myself in a van I didn't get paid back for until I got kicked out of it, I took a part time job in advertising, because nobody wants to deal with a hangry person while they are skiing.

Being hangry is the opposite of why people go skiing. Skiing happens because there is too much comfort and enjoyment that it becomes restricting. Skiing is creative dissonance. Jazz instead of the marching band.

The point is that it's still making music, not a mess.

It takes understanding and/or intuition to value music, and it takes security to follow your intuitions. Up until that point in my life I really, really, lacked understanding. And money.

So when a job that actually paid money came up, conveniently close to my mom's house where I could live rent free, I took it. It was part time on the books, but I was allowed to work up to 40 hours a week on-record, and beyond that was up to me.

I'd been working for much less for much longer, so working overtime for free didn't phase me at all, especially in my Mom's home area, where coincidentally, I was also born.

The cost of living—bar tab included—in Marquette, Michigan affords more quality of life than anywhere I've ever lived. But the locals haven't left, so they don't really get it. They know everything they've seen on TV, and TV doesn't talk back to them, so nothing they know is wrong. Not really mixing with the locals never bothered me, I was still trying to write a book. I'd given up my dreams of ever ski-writing ever again, it was just advertising skis, and no longer exploring a way of life. Getting people to explore the way of life in Marquette, to me, at least put money in people's pocket's before corporate profits rose.

But I still wanted to Ski. Or slide down hill at least. I discovered powder surfing at the end of my ski-writing career in Montana, and bought one when I moved to Michigan. I could finally afford to buy my own, and when I found out how much fun I was having by myself, I bought another so that other people could join the fun.

Summer came and I had spent a whole year ignoring my novel. I was too excited about the possibilities of powder-surfing. If people spent this much time exploring their own back yards, maybe we'd finally get the litter situation under control. Maybe we'd finally meet each-other in person instead of just knowing each other online. A surf board cost less than most cell phones, and that was all anybody needed to get started after it snows.

That good feeling, the one every advertisement tells you about, is just a turn away. And although there is no right way to do it, sometimes that good feeling is great. And you're the only one who is ever gonna feel it, just for a moment, and then it's on to the next. Or on to lunch, or work, or whatever.

I wanted to write a book about freedom, but it took me doing something nobody ever asked me to do to finally feel it. And once I felt it, I began to feel like writing was a waste of time.

The revolution won't be televised. It won't be online. It won't be in print.

For the revolution of freedom to occur, it must be felt. And for the majority of us, feeling anything requires some movement first. It takes a well-exercised imagination to conjure feelings on it's own.

All we had to do was snurf I thought. With an expendable income and some friends, I bought 6 powder surfers worth of materials, some tools, and decided I would begin spreading the word people weren't financially equipped to experience myself. If they liked it—I knew they would—they could buy their own powder surfers afterwards.

I felt on top of the world when I took a week's worth of paid vacation to test them out in a freak snowstorm at the beginning of October, now a full 2 years after I left my novel.

When my boards worked well enough to slide on, I decided to do the right thing, and get serious about my job, which paid for me to make my boards. I got a raise and promoted to full time and salary.

It was then, my mom asked me how my novel was going, and I told her that I didn't have a story anyone would listen to, and that I needed to finish my own story first.

And then there was that car accident where-according to my family-I'm doing jut fine from.

And so despite the fact that it took me months of teaching myself to re-interpret the world because my optometrist didn't want to deal with me because I was coming down off fentanyl—he thought I was a junkie—I've sort of managed to put the world back together in a way that makes sense if you only read the headlines. I don’t need to talk about the broken vertebrae or the torn muscles, that make even sitting in a stuffed couch uncomfortable, that’s complaining too much. Way too much.

Right there it's clear to me that I don't have anything worth saying that can't be summed up in the headlines.

He got in a car accident. He's Fucked. I wouldn't do what he's doing. Hell I wouldn't have done any of the things he did.

And so there's no point in reading any further. I haven't finished my novel, because there's nothing to say.

Do what you're told and everything will be fine.

As for me, well, I’m going to keep moving the only way I see how.

[stuffminusthings]

It’s been a really crazy year for everyone, so do yourselves a favor and hang onto the ones you love, no matter how much they stink. From My Roomies, to the rest of my family: Enjoy yourselves, 2019 is coming https://www.instagram.com/p/Bru3AjfFRX_/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=8zkoqf3uznr4

[stuffminusthings]

And then he took a break from building cities that fit on stages and space robots for movie screens and went skating, and his friends were forever thankful. https://www.instagram.com/p/BoZB2vUn2u0/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=nwu501gkz0g3

[stuffminusthings]

A Prologue:

“So when it feels like you're on PCP or whatever”

“LSD or Mushrooms” I correct her. A warning light goes off in my head. You don't confuse PCP with anything, especially if you work in a NeuroPsych Unit.

I mistake the lack of expression through most of our conversation as professionalism. The other Doctors smile or frown depending on how they feel about what I say. Doctors aren't supposed to share their personal opinions with you, so I let the narcotic mistake slide. Months after this, I begin to recognize that people hide their confusion by keeping a blank face. But I'm not processing blank faces very well yet.

I'm talking to Dr.(NAME) about my experiences after severing my brain into pieces in a car accident a few months before, and I am trying to explain that I'm sick of doctors, but also that I need to work. I'm describing my experience with psilocybin to illustrate my over reactions to situations. My biggest problems in life come from dealing with my employer, an overly assertive midwestern-mother-type woman who currently is in the act of embezzling the community to pay her children. She has no idea how to do her actual job and needs my advice for every move, but she can't admit to that because then she might get caught. She's spent months talking poorly about me in preparation for her preservation and people have been saying things.

Eventually I tell Dr.(NAME) I don't look like myself, my hair, my dress, everything is a product of being forced into it at work. I hate myself. I hate the way I look.

She tells me she can't tell me to quit my job, but my boss sounds difficult to work for.

I quit my job the next week and when I tell Dr. (NAME) I did, therapy is over. I feel relieved. My insurance case manager is there and when she hear's I quit my job she gives me a hug. All of this just sounds crazy and doesn't directly impact anyone I tell, so it isn't actually happening. This is going on at around the same time as the Nassar case, and I'm starting to wonder if just sweeping things under the rug is a Michigan thing.

I have some toys I made for fun, and they're really good, so my family encourages me to give it the old college try.

I jump full force into it contacting every person I've ever met regardless of the time elapsed between our last meeting and void of context. Less than six months after separating the loaves of your brain, you're incredibly liable to act like a crazy person. Especially when you are told that you've had a miraculous recovery and should seize the day.  

I'm tired of starting my story and not finishing it. I'm tired of only being the clips and phrases people know of me at best. As if I remain in every act the same as the last, as if because for a moment our perspectives ran parallel it's possible to predict my path. But if I've learned anything it's that people are at their furthest standing next to each other, where skin gets in the way of shared ideas.

When I started it didn't matter where I finished as long as I was starting something else. At the advice of my parents I started out by getting ready for both college and the olympics in the fourth grade. In a world of child televangelist superstars, capri suns, and Little Big League, you immediately separate yourself from the people sitting next to you just by trying to get to anything more than recess. The other fourth graders might not understand your goals, but they just aren't gonna be ready for college or the Olympics. The other kids didn't have goals as good as mine, I was told, so I was justified in being different.

By the time we left the only remnants of the farm fields were the irrigation ditches running through the desert, watering something, somewhere. I only see them now in flashes interrupting my day.

“You put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle it becomes the bottle. You put into a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow, or it can crash.

Be  water, my friend.”

And then a grin.

The grin Bruce Lee made in grainy monochrome video after that statement instantly became my goal. Well, my goal was to be the best, and at the time I thought his grin was because he knew he could beat anybody in combat. A sure sign of being the best. I was watching him on home video at the time because I wanted to be an olympic wrestler. A gold medalist at that. The best. I used to wear a hat that said “Future 5X Olympic Champ” with dozens of Safety Pins, one for each time I pinned an opponent in a match. I was a tween proudly displaying  war headdress, with a future reign of dominance spanning two decades at least.

Lee didn't say be the best. He said be water.

At half the size of adults, children use megalomania to climb to eye-level. All Bruce Lee meant to me was victory, at the time, I didn't even know if he was alive or dead. I did know that I was a wrestler, and beating all of my opponents, I thought, would also give me that smile.

That smile was confidence. As a new kid in an ocean of new kids in Arizona, confidence is all any of us were looking for. I was sure anybody who was the best had confidence.

It was the '90's and cross-training was just being introduced into the mainstream vocabulary. For me cross-training meant learning how to kick people's asses in any sport. Not getting my ass kicked meant a lot of confidence. Wrestling was supposed to be the best sport, or that's what every wrestling coach kept saying. Being the best at the best sport meant all the confidence in the world.  Too busy to meet anybody that didn't wrestle, I didn't get a lot of variety. As a kid all I had to go from was what I heard from others, and cross-training lead me to Lee.

Be water, my friend.

I latched onto his concept that the ultimate fighting style was no style because, at the time, I was cross-training as a white-belt Judo, but an Arizona state champion wrestler . I kicked ass in the beginner judo category in my first tournament. I didn't even know the proper way to start a match, but I knew ippon got the win. Talk about confidence.

Talk about judo people not liking me immediately.

Being able to pick battles (wrestling) inside of battles (judo) gave me a distinct advantage simply because I knew how to move my body according to another rule book.

I didn't know it at the time, but this was my first experience with the full effects of the forces of water crashing.

Rock. Paper. Scissors. Hurricane Andrew.

I felt the effects of this rule book for the first time in the big home town wrestling match between two of the high schools in my city. I'm actually supposed to be attending the third, but the wrestling program is... better... so I go by two high schools on my way to the third. These sorts of activities are frowned upon, but my family has found all of the right loop holes, and I just wanted to be the best wrestler.

It's the 00's. Loopholes are in. We just got around Y2K with a Patch.

While shaking hands, an opponent from a junior high I attended but was also not supposed to, head dove into my knee and fractured my tibia, and tore my ACL and Meniscus.

It might've been a dirty move, but it's not totally impossible to see the justifications to attempting anything slightly less damaging. Errors were incredibly likely in both my anatomy and his judgment, both of us were starving ourselves to make weight at the time.

It wasn't until several years later, after falling out of the sky and onto the dirt while executing a perfect break-fall through some bushes to avoid injury did I fully connect the essence of training in Judo, or the gentle way, for free-ride mountain biking. Rushing rivers take debris with them. But we're not there yet.

“Get Mad!”

It's been a few years since I first saw Bruce Lee's grin. My coach yells at me from the side of the wrestling mat, clip board like semaphore in an earthquake.

Losing by points in a dual-meet match with my family watching from the stands, a switch flips. I want to giggle.

“Get Mad!”

My coach never stood a chance against Bruce Lee. When you know your master can be defeated, it wears on you. I wait for time to run down.

“Get Mad!”

I'm at my second high school. Nothing clicks here. The team doesn't like me because I won't warm up in the matching sweatpants. I've never viewed loyalty like they have. They don't like me because I don't try and pin every opponent in a little as time as possible. I try and score as many points as possible. A process which not only allows giving up points myself in the process, but has a totally different goal. I see every point as one in hundreds over a season, they see every point as an achievement in itself. To them, wrestling is about being on the team. To me, wrestling is an art, practiced by individuals. Our perspectives clash. By not “traditionally” crushing my opponents, I am crashing into my surroundings.  

At this point in my life I'd spent nearly a decade spending at least 2 days a week in the gym on top wrestling daily wrestling practice. I get up and run 3 miles before school daily. All of that so I can get mad?

My opponent scored an early lead due to my own miscalculations and has been hiding in plain sight the rest of the match. Getting mad will only make me chase him. I wait for him to get confident and come to me so I can use my superior technique, strength, and conditioning late in the match to pin him.

Be water, my friend.

Only I don't get that stupid grin. The look of relived anxiety around me points out two very serious problems with the world around me:

1. My coaches and family know how much work I put in. Because they don't actually do the work they don't feel the same way I do about it. They “know” running, but they didn't know the meaning of the frosty glow of the northern lights over Escanaba Mi at 5 am Like I did.

2. High School Sports are supposed to be recreational. If we're getting angry in our recreational sports, how the hell are we supposed to view the world around us?

When water gets too warm, it evaporates. That doesn't mean it disappears.

I quit wrestling that year after eating, sweating, and bleeding wrestling for a decade.

It was an easy choice after I wasn't allowed to go “night skiing” after winning the regional championship because I might get injured for the next “state championship” tournament. I had just spent two years in an out of leg immobilizers due to a wrestling injury. I had only discovered skiing the month before.

I went on to lose well before finals a week later against somebody I had already beaten because my heart was no longer in the sport, and they did everything they could leading up to that match to beat me. Hard work is rewarded.

Gold medals make shiny paper weights at best.

When I quit wrestling, I was “wasting my talent.” I didn't care. Wrestling wasn't making me any happier no matter how much I won.

After evaporation comes condensation, and then precipitation.  

It's snowier in the UP then it is in Hell, MI. I didn't really know that until I was 16, spending the majority of my childhood in Arizona, where snow is mostly a legend. The Northern Lights were a legend growing up too, and after I first saw them, I started to understand the real purpose behind running before the sun lit up the clouds of my icy exhales. Running put me in the shape required to get a late-in-life start at skiing.

Be water, my friend.

I saw Bruce Lee's elusive grin again while I was learning to ski in the neighboring town of Gladstone, Mi. It manifested itself on the face of a kid who was at oldest, a 4th grader. I was teaching myself how to spin a complete 360-degree-rotation off of a hand-shoveled jump on the side of the slope. I made quite a show of my crashes and was gathering a crowd of pre-teens who were better than me. Being in your place is important here. Little Lee stepped on the back of my ski binding, releasing it without my knowledge and dropped in in front of me, spun the trick I wanted to do perfectly, and skied away while making a face. Determined to stop my embarrassment I followed again.

I was a teenager skiing in an orange jumpsuit from GoodWill with a red flannel hat.

Teenagers don't know anything other than gusto. They just found out they can be heard. Instead of success I fell out of my ski and onto my face before I even started. The same competitive mentality I grew up wrestling with ignited itself again here. I could handle this. Hell, I liked it.

Ran by the community, the ski hill was closed more often then it was open. The snow still slid even when the ropes weren't yanking us up hill. I started skiing after the ski area closed until I knew how. When I got better at skiing I was just left alone during the day time. I didn't fit my role as the awkward older kid anymore. I lost my place and took a new one nobody knew what to do with. Walking up the hill again and again in ski boots was strange behavior.

Lee didn't say the best, he said be water.

When the population was larger, and full barstools forced the local population outside, “good” skiers skied there. Only because before the 1980's, most “good” skiers skied at their home mountains. Commercial airfare wasn't really commonplace before WW2, making long distance travel for pleasure an incredibly new concept to anybody but the wealthy or the deranged. Television cameras didn't fit in a shirt pocket back then either, so the best skiers most people had seen were the ones they could go see themselves.

Wrestling, the kind they do in high school, never gained the mass acceptance skiing did, so nobody ever saw it on TV. You could be a terrible wrestler in Gladstone Michigan, and as long as you beat other terrible wrestlers there, you could be the best. Naturally, it's easier to know a good wrestler in Gladstone, Michigan that it is to know what to talk about with a good skier.

Either way, to get a help from a stranger in Gladstone, wear a purple shirt.

No matter what shirt you're wearing, the bars in Gladstone, Michigan, are still good as they can be. The pool players are some of the best anybody knows. To show up from somewhere else in Gladstone, Michigan and be too good at is the sign of a pool shark. Chicago is just down the lake—regardless of your intentions don't look like a shark, this is the first place they get lost.

Sharks make water miserable for everybody else.

We value water above all else, if we value life. We valued that snowy hillside because without many rules, the fourth grader could be king until his mom picked him up no matter who else came. There wasn't anyone to look up to other than who was having the most fun. Sure, there might have been trophies for being the “best-skier-on-the-mountain” somewhere in the cabin, but with hot chocolate and a fireplace waiting they went as ignored as trophies in trophy cases anywhere do.

In the entire history of the world, most of the monuments we know are from the last 100 years or less. Sure there are others, but even though we all know the pyramids, we can't agree on what they're there for. Show anybody anything you've purchased in the last 10 years, and the overwhelming odds are that you can't because you've replaced everything you have in that interval at least once by now.

But that grin. Something close to it probably happens it in the event a trophy is won, but trophies aren't required. It's easy to know it no matter who wears it, but most of the time it's impossible to understand where it comes from on first glance. If you need to ask how to get it, no matter how hard you try, you'll never wear it yourself. These are the sorts of things you learn when you spend years outside playing in the snow. Sure, you might read about them, but the more you know without doing, the less you'll understand

Rock. Paper. Scissors. Tornado.

“You need to calm down.”

There in the hospital bed, where I'd been for a couple days, I saw no reason for peace. Unknowingly high on painkillers and a TBI with no idea how I got there, and not a visible scratch on my body I didn't understand why people kept telling me my pelvis, ribs, and spine were broken. I had no idea how long I was there for, but I knew I was supposed to be at work.

Working at the job I took specifically to pay me enough money to enjoy my time not working.

It's the first time in my life I've ever done anything not to be the best. I'm trying to fit in when everyone wants me to be what they view as the best. My disconnect causes it's own ripple. I'm good at it, but I don't play by the rules. My Boss doesn't play by the rules either. She hires me because I might make her team better. She's on the team to pay for her family's needs. Both of us wore the smile that comes from getting what we want. Only, as a County Convention and Visitor's Bureau, work for is literally supposed to represent the people and the place, not us. Regardless of being able to work around the rules, it's not a good idea to break them.

With several year-long projects meeting their deadlines, all involving contracts with her children, she needed my input, even if I was in the ICU. Her plans depended on them.

It wasn't her voice telling me to calm down after she left. When the sides of your brain separate, the connections sever. Brains heal, but not instantly. Every connection from the point of injury is a new one, even if it's been done for a lifetime up to that point.

At the time I can't explain why I need to get to work, all I know is that if I lose my job as a Digital Marketing Director in Marquette, Michigan, I'll have to move. I've moved no less than a dozen times since the advice coming to me was to “get mad.”

Until my accident, I was the opposite of mad. I had the stupid smile that comes from doing whatever you want.

There on my slobber soaked pillow, I had obviously fallen out of my container, and I was eager to get back in. But that's not how water works.

Water can flow, or it can crash.

In retrospect, the car accident itself was one of my least spectacular crashes.

There, upside down in front Big Gus, the world's largest chainsaw, the biggest news was that I replaced the airbag on my CRV prior to figuring out how to flip it over before I brake a sweat.

For a solid decade if I didn't know how to flow in a situation I crashed my way through. You learn that when you stop moving long enough to look back.

It brought me some pretty cool places. My ability to crash and come out unscathed landed me all sorts of snowy jobs a kid who grew up in the suburbs of Phoenix could hardly even imagine. It's easy to see that after spending a year crashing into things without any of the grace, and all of the awkwardness I used to have. I didn't discover the error in my ways until a recent wedding when I finally understood what crashing sounds like.

I've spent over a year without drinking alcohol by choice, because of the effects of my injuries. Rather than doing my best to enjoy myself I'm enjoying everyone else. Right up until the married couple's dance. Every few verses into the song the emcee announces an anniversary line and everyone who has been married less has to exit the dance floor.

Other than the first dance, it's the most anyone pays attention to dancing all night. After 45 years, only two beautiful couple remain dancing. Somewhere short of 50, only one couple remains. Amidst the cheers an exclamation is made:

“I bet he doesn't play ball in a league.” Says the man—my grandfather—who danced just a little less, but more than nearly everyone but his wife and another couple.

It's the first time I see myself missing the point of a moment entirely—so many other times. Whiskey might have made me wander around that moment, but forced to notice the world around me, it stings. I've always loved my grandma, but in that moment I learned a deep respect for her.

TBI's can do that. Change your perspective. But all things change over time. Crashing water is crashing water no matter the energy behind it. Water flows from the same energy as well.

All this crashing and flowing lead me to another Bruce Lee Quote:

“I'm moving and not moving at all. I'm like the moon underneath the waves that ever go on rolling and rocking. It is not, "I am doing this," but rather, an inner realization that "this is happening through me," or "it is doing this for me." The consciousness of self is the greatest hindrance to the proper execution of all physical action.”

I was wrong to try and be the best all of those years. But it's made me who I am. It's my job to organize this energy into a wave. Rideable waves have entries, rides based on interpretation, and exits. Here we go.

Be water, just remember that although Arizona knows both the Grand Canyon and countless flash floods, they're nothing compared to the Great Lakes (If you're in Michigan). Anybody thinking about the Mississippi or the Pacific right now just doesn't get it.

To have a perception about me is your right, but also my privilege. The interpretation of that perception isn't guaranteed, so for me to do anything about it other than what I want is false—no matter how good it feels. For the first time in my life I'm doing something not because I can, or because I should, but because I want to. For somebody who has always been able to see the opposite of intent, I now know why. Anybody can know what isn't, and though knowing feels good to the self, understanding what is nourishes our reality.

[stuffminusthings]

2018

I'll never see the greatest minds of my generation—

there are too many resume builders to wade through

packed on by too many proud parents,

who have given their lives to make sure

their child is the best. The best that THEY know after

finishing mid pack from Ostego Highschool.

Home of the Knights.

Get the best. It's what they deserve.

Because they have to make their parents proud,

the ones who sent their parents to nursing homes,

the ones doing everything they can to stay out,

because, well,

we'll understand when it's our turn.

Wait.

Maybe I'll meet them under the fluorescent bulbs

and above the linoleum like the good

part of a sandwich. Only by the time we get there

linoleum will have gone the way of

and old sandwich but it won't matter

because our time will be up soon anyways.

There.

Stuck between reason and action

we'll stay perfect and

safe. Perfect little bundles of joy

easily packed away when we're

spent. And if one is brighter than

the next

pay no attention.

It will be over quickly.

I swear there is some deeper meaning,

that doesn't come from the SparksNotes

version of FUCK YOU now let me get back

to my NETFLIX and Chill.

Jesus Christ.

Line Item Complete

[stuffminusthings]

We’re just here for the good time. #powdersurfing #surfing #superiorswell #puremichigan

[stuffminusthings]

Nature’s Reaction to Education

“In case this happens” he said, snapping the top of the sapling clean off mid-sentence.

 I never heard the rest. Instead, just gasps from the hippie kids, and giggles from the kids that wanted to be loggers. Standing in the middle of both of them, after almost a year-and-a-half of college, it became apparent that the accumulation of knowledge about trees wasn't going to do anything to save them, or cut more down.

I never learned what happened to the trees next because I dropped out of Forestry, or applied ecology, and changed my major to Journalism. Journalism because I wanted to tell the truth to the world.

Clearly text books weren't enough.

I only lasted one year in that major because I was offered a journalism internship the next summer. I couldn't get credit for it in the School of Journalism, but the English Department was more than enthusiastic to get my money.

I spent the next two years arguing.

Instead of just hippies, and logger kids, I was surrounded by all the sorts of people that were around me in k-12. Most of the people taking most of my courses were filling requirements.In a lot of ways, enthusiasm around me for showing up to school was so much less than the I had in the forestry lab. Instead, students had zest for the rest of their lives, so nobody had anything to lose when they talked. Without some banner to cling to, we spent a lot of time learning that it was understanding we lacked. Finding out that you're insufficient after trying so hard to be the best is tough.  

And then it happened.

If you're reading this, you've got a pretty good idea of what six inches is. You know what you could do with six inches. You can even double check your illusion of 6 inches right now, using just your hands.

And you are in the OVERWHELMING minority.

The world uses the metric system. Nobody, anywhere else, has to convert back and forth between “standard” and “metric” regularly. Knowing that conversion is almost ENTIRELY unneeded for the majority of life on earth. Even the term “Standard” under most context is a lie.

Our most basic building block of reality, the concept of size, doesn't match anywhere else in the universe no matter how smart we think we are. Let's not even get into the fact that every word you just read would have come with more duende if you read it in Spanish.

I was always amazed by my professors sheer lack-of-response to the reponse to his tree-topping demonstration, but he must've been some sort of reformed hippie, completely aware that anything happening in his hands was completely a product of our imaginations. No foreseeable proliferation of forestry lessons left his conscious clean.  

[stuffminusthings]

Cooke City is a Nightmare.

There will come a point, Captain Throttlecock, when your lactic acid shocked forearms will unexpectedly shiver just a bit while hoisting a first drink at the Miner's Saloon in Cooke City, Fucking, Montana. Elevation's lack of oxygen makes this mistakenly feel like triumph, or manliness, or maybe just a little bit of your mojo that left when Becky did. Sure, you hit 12'o' clock summiting over Daisy Pass, and the only casualty you suffered was a pulled muscle from clenched butt cheeks. You've got so much track speed you can pow turn on roads. To top off the excitement, you drove your sled right to the front door of the god damn bar. Cooke City is a proving ground. You're here, but you're not conquering.

Swimming in a sea of Gore Tex, surfing on solar panels, silently swishing your way skyward to summits. Sweat summons success. Or so you think, you silly skier. Sure, soulfully stomping skin tracks from your sprinter-based living situation is serious, sorta. Social Media made you do it. The sledders same spasm happens while snapping a selfie of suffering in the Miner's Saloon.

That little twitch isn't a sign of success, rather it's the first way your body is telling you that it's time to go home, because Cooke City, Fucking, Montana, is fucking terrible.

It doesn't matter how you got here, you started making mistakes as soon as you entered the park, during the day time. Yellowstone National Park's primary four legged attraction is the bison. Thanks to roads crisscrossing their natural habitat, they seem limitless in the park. These enormous, lumbering beasts aren't dangerous because of their size, or their tendency to be on the roadways. They're dangerous because Iphones make it hard to steer while braking and brakes are applied often. It's nobody's fault, the earliest human graphic representations of anything are bison and buffalo. It's as human as sin to make a buffalo picture. So drive Yellowstone at night, when the bison take on an important property. They become nearly invisible, and therefore less likely to cause Eileen Jenson with a twitchy foot from Arkansas to suddenly slam on the brakes. Sure the shiny silver dollar eyed motherfuckers are more active at night, popping out of bushes en masse at close range in a horrifying stampede-styled Frogger game, but they're still less dangerous than Eileen and that eight-sled trailer isn't stopping any faster than the doobie-passing #vanlife 'rs when a rare “sleeping buffalo” shows up in range of the viewfinder.

There are two options for lodging in Cooke City, Fucking, Montana, and they only disappoint.

All those bloggers telling you to live in the dump are either already living in the dump, or have never stayed. For starters, you'll probably finding yourself waking up to Madonna's Greatest Hits every morning because a leather jacket wearing pirate is already camped there and doesn't care if your sprinter isn't soundproof. Only one-in-five pee spots in every sled trailer parking spot is human, the rest belonging to the free form pack of local dogs that all rip harder than you do. And it's a dump. And in the spring, there are bears.

But let's say that your 42-sled mega trailer from Calgary doesn't include sleeping accommodations so you and you're 44 other friends all rent out rooms at one of the many fine hotels. You'd be all set to live out your perfect Post Apocalyptic Snowmobile roll out into the great wild unknown would be perfect except for the fact that there is a group of twenty something dirt bags who managed to claw there way out of the dump partying in the parking lot making a mockery of every last grim look of determination you have while changing a belt out 45 minutes from now. They're crowded around an ever growing pile of empty booze bottles because they know something you don't.

The skiing or sledding in Cooke City, Fucking, Montana is either too dangerous, or already fucked.

When the snow is “good” it's impossible to find anything that hasn't been hit already by people that actually know what they're doing. If you're a sledder, some asshole skier is likely to drop in above your high-marks. If you're a skier, every single run out is carved up with sled tracks. No matter how serious you are, the leather-jacket-wearing miscreants living in the dump are doing it better, and waking up later.

You'd be able to tell if you could check your social media, but you pretty much need to be a pro to get the wifi passwords, and there's no service otherwise. Your best bet for entertainment is to watch confused vision questers with eyes glued to their GPSs buck their cars wildly on snowmobile ruts while attempting to drive to Red Lodge.

Which brings your twitchy, weak forearms to the Miner's Saloon where your hand-spun, reservoir-tipped crown of confusion really begins to shine.

The four girls at the left of the bar next to the jukebox will be the only women in the bar. They do all the things you wish girls in Owatonna, Minnesota do. And here they are, in your mecca. But here's the thing, they all know you're sitting there getting drunk enough to talk to them. It doesn't help that you've always dreamed of meeting a girl like this. To her, you're the exact same person who was here last week. If you were to stay here passed this coming Sunday you'd be forced to fight a carbon copy of yourself for the right to exist in the same universe. Sure your dad always wanted his ashes spread on Lulu pass, but the snow is starting to turn black, and quite frankly, you're glossy-eyed memories are sootier than your 2-stroke on the snowscape.

Go Home.

It's 10 Fucking Thirty and the bartender can't stand stand a 6'th hour of your big-group-plastic-cup-cheersing, bro-hugging, bad song playing bull shit. He can't serve anyone because he's too busy skipping the next song on a jukebox where metal music has already been removed. No, you can't stay, and no, Can I Kick It? did not just start playing inside of the doors you are being pushed out of.

Don't look up to see the stars bouncing light off the peaks where someone has already shot a time lapse and expect anything but a dizzy feeling, because even the stars in Cooke City, Fucking, Montana, are terrible.

[stuffminusthings]

“Snowboarding saved the ski industry.”

Sure. The ski industry. But what about having fun on the snow? Did snowboarding save that, or did it just open up a slightly lower cost of entry to one of the most lucrative real estate and entertainment industries of the sixties?

When snowboards became shaped to carve on snow that's already been stepped on, they didn't save the ski industry, they made mountains into skate parks. And then the skiers, once they realized they were in a skatepark, stopped carving altogether.

Snowboarding killed ski school. And it should have. The PSIA is a Ponzi scheme. Want evidence? What else besides legal tender, and maybe an ID, is required for a lift ticket. And ski school should die so that hard working ski instructors can come up with a new plan. In the mean time, everybody already working can still pizza. The average age of a skier is north of 35. That's because it takes about 30 years to save up for the gear required to enjoy it. And there's still a line.

Snowboarding saved the ski industry actually means that snowboarding allows old white dudes to recreate how they want to at the expense of opening their gates a touch wider. Snowboarding, in it's endless fight against skiing, only preserved it in the process. Want evidence? How many ski areas shut down have shut down while we argue about whether or not Shawn White is a sell out?

To even have an opinion on that subject is privilege. It's privilege because you see winter as something other than extra cold at night. Being able to see that is a huge step forward for humanity. To bicker about the subtle nuances of how Shawn celebrates his time on earth is to forget that there are people on this earth who only know winter for its lack of warmth.

“Snowboarding saved the lack of warmth.”

If I've learned anything from watching Scandinavian kids ski, it's that warmth comes from within, and yes, the whole world is a skate park. A man made structure for doing tricks off of.

Yes. Man Made.

Man Made only means that a human is involved each time it is used. Most of the ramps I skated as a kid used to be trees. The trees weren't man made, but the wood after it was cut was. Use changes with perspective. The right dirty dishes will cure an upset stomach.

Man made experiences are a bust. But to experience  the metamorphosis between natural and man made is truly divine. It's why we love surfing. It's why skiers and snowboarders love powder.

It's the feeling all of us know but attribute to our consumer identities. There's only one thing to know:

Only kooks surf only in the summer.

[stuffminusthings]

We'll Just Pick Sides When We Get There

When I woke up in the hospital in November or early December of 2016, it was to Donald Trump getting ready to take office. It's the same world we all occupy, but for me after a head injury, it became the start of the only world I know. Just like everyone else I watched some of the inauguration, but I wasn't reassembled at the time enough to remember much of it.

Right from the get-go everything seemed sinister. My mind began looking for some grand narrative behind his actions. I was looking for a side while I was supposed to be getting better. I was supposed to be getting better and taking care of myself because I wasn't going to be able to keep my job if I stayed in the hospital. I was already working overtime before my accident almost every week under the table already because my boss told me she “needed” me. She even filed workman's comp insurance on my accident that occurred on a Sunday because I was working so often.

She was just doing her best to take care of her employees, because if her work suffered, her pay would suffer. As for my pay, in a meeting at the end of October she told me that her “first concern is getting my [her] kids through college, after that we can talk about what's next.” Having her employees absent from the office and impossible to replace put a serious dent in her ability to put her kids through college.  So she wanted her employees back period. She told the insurance case manager that she'd hold the job for 6 months. I just had to do everything I could to get back to work. I got my eyesight checked, cleared, and signed off for work and driving while wearing my puffy coat inside because I was having fentanyl withdrawals. 

When she knew that my head wasn't right and changed my work requirements to be in the office instead of at home so she could “keep an eye on me” she was doing her best to make sure her paychecks kept coming. I didn't know what was going on at the time, and I quit my job because I didn't understand why I was being mistreated. I even told my doctors about it and they gave me a hug. I filed all of my overtime with the Marquette CVB Board of Directors as evidence of my commitment to the job.

When they asked her about it she lied her face off so that she could keep employing her children.

The insurance case manager was soooo good at her job, that the insurance company measures her progress in dollars saved. When a business says it will hold a job for a non-work related accident, the insurance company isn't required to pay if an employee loses their job for ANY other reason. My insurance case manager gave me a hug when I quit my job too.

I didn't even know what was going on until I saw the movie Memento, and I saw Leonard apologizing to his wife the way I was apologizing for everything, did I even grasp what I was going through. And when all of these people did their jobs for their motives to the best of their abilities, I wound up jobless, confused, and recovering less than 6 months after a near fatal car accident and completely up to my own devices.

I had a brief window of clarity and good intentions from a Dr. at the hospital who is currently battling life threatening illness with a their spouse. But I don't know how you're supposed to work when your spouse is dying, and the place you work for won't pay for a replacement. She faces the inevitable departure of her husband, and to the corporation that is supposed to be taking care of both of us we are just numbers on a spread sheet, that will be translated into a high five somewhere.

For the first time I see Donald on television and I don't see a sinister man. I see a man who lost pride in a football wager with no connection to reality doing what he thinks is best. People throw each other's lives away for their own sakes all the time.

We'd miss the game otherwise-we'll just pick sides when we get there.

[stuffminusthings]

The Nurses Are Going on Strike Soon.

It's confusing news here along the shores of a sea that lacks salt, where news doesn't happen.

I used to hear the phrase “no news is good news” all of the time. If you do some homework on the origins of that statement, it goes back to King James in 1616 saying that “No news is better than evil news.”

Evil news.

For a time, here in the UP, news from the outside world came in the form of men showing up for work. Often to fight off the evil of the outside world. The steel used in the World Wars came from here, and was mined by foreigners fleeing evil elsewhere.

Before that there was no news at all. Just the occasional SLAP of a beavertail on still water whenever news got too close in the first place.

Now news comes silently, with men in the form of electrical impulses from elsewhere. And it comes always and often, and unless it brings mining equipment, the beavers only feel its warmth.

And so sitting here in hysteria wondering about what to do with the news, I have to remember why that saying about news lingers in the back of my periphery.

If only the nurses going on strike were as easy to understand as frightened timber rodents—we've been getting news from elsewhere for so long we don't understand our own warnings. Sadly, it's not just the dams that will fall into disrepair if we fail to take care of the ones caring for us the most. Will we understand the clear warning signal being sent in our own community?

Evil News.

More people in Marquette have educated opinions on when to kneel righteously than any clue about what's happening at the Hospital. More people have an opinion on what Lives Matter than have actually shared a beer with any of the lives they suddenly worry about. Meanwhile the nurses here are forced into working too much to have time for a beer at all.

“We're all pulling around here, they need to just suck it up.”

It's the easy reaction to a bunch of young adults misplaced into a community where they are viewed as expendable. They are expendable, because the city of Marquette just shouldered several million dollars in expenses for Duke LifePoint for road construction: the hospital corporation sucking the community dry.

Duke is importing nurses at double the costs as members of our own community would be making for the same time.

Maybe it's time to focus on what's happening here. I don't want to know what happens when there's nobody left to fix the dams.

[stuffminusthings]

My view from the something something Market-

I get why people go off their meds.

It's all I keep thinking to myself wandering around the something-something market in Grand Rapids, Michigan where I am, for this lapse in time, totally lost. It's exciting to me because I remember that my girlfriend and her family are across a street somewhere, assembling together what at this time is the coolest piece of art that I've ever been apart of, in one of the largest art shows at this time. I've also been out of my meds for almost a week. It's also my first full fledged attempt at making a part of art myself. I think.

I don't really know what I am or what I'm doing though because I'm lost in the market across the street where I used the bathroom up the stairs and down the hall way.

There.

That's the hang up. Which hallway. There are so many glass windows and cheerful young people here I'm lost. It's like each moment is different than the last. Everybody in the something-something market is so engaged whether it's on their screen with their friends or with their friends on a screen. I like it because I can never tell what's coming next.

“That's what drug addicts say.”

My friend Amber looks at me with exasperation I can barely notice because I'm answering emails on my cellphone. It's 10:30 PM at a coffee shop turned late night bar in Avon, Colorado. I showed up seven minutes earlier after setting up a ski demo and then skiing that morning in Utah. I have work to do so I'm not paying attention to anything because I'm behind schedule at work. And my friends notice that I'm behind schedule with them too. Amber asks me why I like it, and I stop and think. In the last month I've lived in a van and driven from Colorado to Oregon and a few places in between. Working no less than 18 hours a day. In that time I discovered that sometimes, when the sun is coming up over the rockies, there will be a ram silhouetted against the sky just like you always imagined. I like it because I can never tell what's coming next.

When I finally see my way back to the art display out the window, I remember where I am. I remember how hard everyone across the street is working and how much more sense it must make for them to go to the bathroom without time traveling. I think about how well everything is going, despite the fact that I'm wandering. And the sun shines on me while I wander.

I get why people go off their meds.

[stuffminusthings]

Weekend Plans With Other Friends

“So you're from Negaunee, but you're not froooom Negaunee.”

I located the EXIT sign at the back of the bar before going any further. In a town of 4,600 where the population has only fallen a few hundred since my birth in the 80′s, myself now included in the fallen, it's easy to spot faces that don't match the only faces you've seen your whole life. I don't fit in. I wear shirts with words that people have only seen but haven't seeen. All eyes on me. 7, no, it's just dark in here, 8.

“Your uncle is a good man.” He tells me, three drinks later while bowing and shaking my hand.

Negaunee is a mining town. Iron ore dust coats everything. Built out of 100% RAW GRIT and Steel. No joke. Winters here are unparalleled, the closest help often still is 250 miles away. In a town like this, liquor polishes something lovely  while it's wet, and like any other mining town, the more local locals shine with it's application.

In mainstream America, this is a scene. It's a scene here because up until reading this, you didn't know Negaunee. Statistically speaking, this might be your first encounter with Negaunee, and it's with a drunk man bowing to me because he knows my uncle.

I take a drink.

It's not that weird though, in fact, after a few drinks it's tough not to get close to the people you love. What's weird is to single somebody out because you don't know them. The odds of you knowing anybody are 1 in billions. Often the only thing we have in common with anyone else is that we don't know someone else. Uncertainty is uncomfortable if you thrive in the world you know.

If you've known the same people to be dumbasses you whole life, your perception of a dumbass gets pretty narrow. About half of us are capable of being the nephew of a beloved uncle, the same goes for dumbasses. I can't speak for women.

One night, a few years later walking in downtown Chicago with a friend while dressed in white button up shirts and khaki pants, a short bearded guy I had never seen before was just seeing me for the first time as well.

“You're killing my town you fucking hipsters.” He yelled while running at us down the sidewalk in his own white, or maybe striped, button up shirt. I started running too because when I looked at his feet, I saw only socks.

I know not everyone on Chicago is on crack. I have other friends in Chicago, and they aren't on crack. We laugh it off over drinks when we finally get to the bar, past the bouncer, where people behave.

“Other friends” winds up being the key phrase of that statement. In a town where the population hasn't changed in nearly 3 decades, there are no “other friends.” Shit, there's not even enough people for a bouncer, but, miners are fucking tough, so they don't need one anyways. I don't think they handle short shoeless men any better than the rest of us though.

And you?

You couldn't even read this without the same emotions you use on the sports page, so I'm not taking you anywhere.