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Letters from the road: Tom’s wedding

October 12, 2012 by campbell Leave a Comment

Good morning Carina! Last night was wedding night for Tom and Maria. This morning was clean-up morning, but as the old saying goes: Many hands make light work. All the tables under the big tent were cleared in about twenty minutes. With tablecloths pulled and garbage off the ground.

I took the dogs for a little walk after breakfast. That was when I found this pocketknife in a field. All morning long I’ve been asking people if they know anyone who lost a pocketknife. People keep saying no. I may own a slick new knife!

And now it’s Monday the 27th.

I kept asking around. I couldn’t find the rightful owner. I kept the knife.

I’m house-sitting for Tom. He’s out in Hood River with his new bride.

Weddings are kind of hard for me. For a variety of reasons that aren’t worth getting into here. I spent a fair amount of time after the actual ceremony just wandering around the farm, avoiding people. Then I shook it off and joined the end of the line for dinner, and getting food made me feel better. And I wound up staying awake until two a.m. dancing and socializing.

Socializing is another thing that’s hard for me, for reasons that I can’t get in to here because I don’t know what they are.

Being bad at weddings and being bad at socializing means that I overcame a synergistic life skills hurdle this weekend … I’m totally putting that on my résumé.

I feel fortunate to have good friends. I don’t do well with the typical “oh hello tell me in three minutes about the last six years since I’ve seen you” wedding chatter. I sucked it up and had a few of those conversations, but I also had some good conversations about the heavy things in life. You never really figure life out with these conversations, but for me at least it goes a long way toward making me more comfortable with not having it figured out.

#1. Bow and Arrow. Mr. Bow and Ms. Arrow joined forces to kill. In a rugged land of prehistoric bloodshed and survival it was at first a marriage of convenience. But soon they grew to love each other. Together they slew millions of men and beasts, but always returned home together to keep things spicy. Their offspring include the better known couple Guns and Ammo.

#2. Pencil and Paper. Although Pencil and Paper seem to be worlds apart from that other noteworthy power couple, Bow and Arrow, it was actually Bow and Arrow’s bloody pairing that made Pencil and Paper’s more cerebral coupling possible. Creating a stable society through the use of deadly force allowed for the creation of a noble class of philosopher kings whose important work paved the way for this steamy office romance.

#3. Pie and Ice Cream. The most delicious pairing of the bunch also has the saddest story. When Ice Cream began melting on Pie, these star-crossed lovers were eaten alive on their wedding day.

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Letter-to-Carina-02-rear — Collage from reverse side of page. Click to embiggen.

Letters from the road: Putting a bird on it

October 12, 2012 by campbell Leave a Comment

Letter-to-Carina-01-front — Click to embiggen.

Hello Carina! Greetings from the humble metropolis of Salem, Oregon. I assume this town is named after the city in Massachusetts or the brand-name cigarette or the Israeli extreme metal band and definitely not the Salem witch trials.

I stopped in Salem because I somehow managed to lose almost my entire supply of felt-tip pens. And so now I am sitting pen-rich in a downtown Starbucks.

The non-Starbucks coffee shop I found was out of business. I don’t know where the cool kids in Salem hang out, which is just as well because I’m thirty-two years old and about as cool as a pair of argyle socks.

The radio station they’re playing here seems calculated to make me feel as old as possible. My friend Tom gets married tomorrow on a farm north of here and south of Portland, and that also makes me feel old. But what really makes me feel old is complaining about stuff, so in a way all this bitching is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thankfully, driving around avoiding reality makes me feel not old.

Salem is a sleepy little town whose economy appears to be based on antique shops and road construction.

Hello again, Carina! This time it’s greetings from beautiful Portland, Oregon. Per the local city ordinance I have included a picture of a bird in this artwork; please find it below. Today I woke up and ate a waffle.

I am in town for Tom’s wedding, and this morning I met up with my friends Reid and Megan, who are in town for another person’s bachelor party. They brought their new baby, so I expect things at the party will be pretty tame.

It used to be that weddings were a good place to, you know, I guess what I’m trying to say is that most folks at the weddings I attend these days are already married or coupled up themselves, and my “date” for the shindig is a pair of dogs. Also, it doesn’t help that I have no house and live in a van, which almost necessarily entails a concomitant decline in daily hygienic standards.

I think I recall a recent Cosmo magazine poll on what women want, and “infrequent showerer” was second from last, barely edging out “man who lives in vehicle”. But that’s Cosmo readers, and this is Portland. I’m seeing a lot of grungy clothes and unwashed hair this morning, and suddenly the odds look good.

Letters from the road: Frugal alternatives to a Syncro Vanagon

October 11, 2012 by campbell 4 Comments

Hey Mark! Greetings from California. I’m up in the mountains at Castle Crags State Park in Northern California, just south of Mount Shasta, sitting next to the Sacramento River. A Union Pacific Train just passed by on the opposite side of the river, and now that it’s gone you can hear the traffic on Interstate 5. Beyond I-5 is the rest of the park, including the campground where I spent last night and the actual crags for which the park is named.

I took some artistic liberties with the drawing above — I didn’t actually drive to the top of the crags, although I did hike up to a viewpoint. The helpful sign at the viewpoint informed me that Castle Crags is a rock formation known as a granitic pluton, although I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with that information. I’m pretty cynical, so I assume that some granitic pluton awareness council placed the sign in hopes that it wool encourage me to buy granitic pluton futures or invest in a granitic-pluton-based hedge fund.

Ever since the pig attack earlier this summer I’ve had some impressive scars on my legs. Unfortunately, they are like magnets for crazy people. Yesterday in Redding a weird guy on a bridge started talking to me, and when he found out that my pig attack happened on the same day that he chose to leave his apartment and all his belongings behind, he started acting like we shared this great kinship and launched into a tirade about his former neighbor who smashed his window in, and how the cops didn’t believe that his neighbor did it, and in fact they thought that he had smashed his own window in, which proved that his neighbor was a cop. Fortunately, I’ve learned that it’s easy to disengage from a guy on a meth rant with the six simple words “I have to go now, goodbye”.

Later on, at my campsite, a weird but harmless dude who’d ridden his bike here from Florida talked about his plans to end his trip by climbing Mt. Shasta, which is not really advisable, at least not if you’ve never climbed a mountain before and plan on doing it alone and don’t know that having snow on a mountain makes it easier to climb.

Hey Mark — While driving this summer I’ve had a lot of time to think about what works well with the Vanagon — both mine in particular and the model in general — and what doesn’t. And I’m pretty happy with mine. Even though it’s only two-wheel drive, I haven’t had any problems getting around. But still, a Syncro would be nice. The problem is, everyone else feels the same way.

So I took the liberty of designing some budget-conscious alternatives. Do you think Rocky Mountain Westy might want to offer these conversions to customers? If so, I’m willing to license any of these designs for a modest fee (payable in either cash or sandwiches, depending on my financial situation).

The first design is the easiest to implement, but would require you to partner with an equine specialist. My advice is to beware of anyone who thinks it’s okay to give an animal a name with six or more syllables.

The second design is a little trickier, and plus it looks like the kind of thing someone on the Internet has already probably done.

But the third design — this is where the Vanagon aftermarket is definitely heading. Practical, but plenty of character. A V-8 diesel 4×4 powertrain for less than the cost of a barely running Syncro Westy. Better (i.e., non-zero) towing capacity. And cup holders that came built in from the factory.

Sure, the idea seems like Volkswagen heresy now, but give the world time. Pretty soon we’ll all be wondering how we ever lived without it.

Page-two-collage-excerpt — Excerpt from collage on back of letter.

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Letters from the road: Stitches out in Red Bluff

October 10, 2012 by campbell Leave a Comment

Hello Morgan! Greetings from Red Bluff, California! The Golden State enjoys a reputation as one of our country’s most liberal places, but I do not think the people responsible for propagating that reputation have spent much time here. On the one hand you have San Francisco and Los Angeles and et cetera, but on the other hand you have pretty much the rest of the state, which ranges from mixed-bag to Palin-esque (in terms of both attitude and policy preferences). It’s a big, weird, politically schizophrenic state.

Red Bluff lies somewhere between mixed-bag to just-right-of-mixed-bag, or at least that’s the sense I get. I’m not sure why I’m going on about this, other than that I drew my proposed California state mascot and I guess felt compelled to explain it using information that I assume you already know.

But here I am in the state that gave us Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, gay rights, and a world-renowned state university system.

I like Red Bluff. Or at least I like substantial aspects of life in Red Bluff. I like that it’s not a big city, I like the hills and oak trees that surround the Sacramento Valley, I like the proximity to the mountains, and I like the hot, dry summers and cool, rainy winters. Over on the coast the culture is I think what you’d get if you could put Ken Kesey and all the characters from his book Sometimes a Great Notion into a superpersonality supercollider. Over here it’s more like Jonh Steinbeck and pre-sobriety Johnny Cash raised a child together and it turned out to be Red Bluff.

The more I write, the more I think I really like Red Bluff best when I’m just passing through.

I spent a couple days down here at my aunt and uncle’s place after taking about a week to travel north from San Francisco along the coast and then through the mountains. I had the staples removed from my legs back in Santa Rosa, and I had the remaining stitches removed from my legs a couple days ago thanks to the help of a family friend. The “examination table” for the procedure was the La-Z-Boy recliner in my aunt’s living room. I think I got better health care here in Red Bluff than I did on any of my follow-up visits in Santa Rosa.

Hello, Morgan! It’s now mid-afternoon and I’m about thirty miles north of Red Bluff. Redding is warm and sunny and the air coming into town was hazy with the smoke of forest fires burning to the east. The fires are big, and Red Bluff was a little hazy this morning, but this is really something.

I’m sitting at a picnic table above the Sacramento River, looking at the Sundial Bridge, a pedestrian/bike bridge designed by a guy named Santiago Calatrava, who I don’t think was super well-known when he designed this bridge, but has since become Mr. Hot Stuff. He designed the transportation hub for the new World Trade Center site, and … I don’t know, also a bunch of other stuff. The point is, Redding was into Santiago Calatrava before he was cool, which I guess means the Redding city planners are architectural hipsters.

I watched a short-ish documentary about the bridge on Netflix. From what I remember it seems like the bridge was a controversial project whose construction was a hard-fought victory. I think it’s a good-looking bridge. In fact I would probably describe it as funky, but that’s mostly because I’m listening to a funk mix on my headphones, which engenders positive feelings and a tendency to describe things I like as funky. (Conversely, when I listen to the Democracy Now! podcast, I feel depressed about the world and have a tendency to identify things I think are undemocratic.)

So, here I am in Redding, listening to 1970s funk and enjoying the warm weather and campfire-scented air. And I’m eating cherry tomatoes from my uncle’s garden, with a side of dry-roasted peanuts. I think peanuts and tomatoes have a brain-clearing effect, because after yammering about funk music and a footbridge I don’t know what to write about next. In fact, I must have paused for a good five or ten minutes before writing that last sentence, just staring at the river.

Okay. Golly, I’ve eaten a lot of peanuts and spent a lot of time staring at the river. I don’t know why this place is called Turtle Bay. It’s clearly a river, not a bay.

Later today I drive north toward Oregon. My friend Tom is getting married in Portland on Saturday, and I want to be there for the shindig. It’s essentially a de facto college reunion for me. After that I’ll be orbiting Portland for a while, I expect, trying to draw out the summer, camping and doing what hiking I can.

I don’t think I have a good conclusion here. I like rivers and bridges, maybe? I’m not sure what the take-home message is there.

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Letters from the road: The people you’ll meet

October 9, 2012 by campbell Leave a Comment

Hello, Cheyenne! How are you? I am doing swell. I am sitting at a picnic table in Northern California, writing you a letter. I suppose that latter information is obvious from context. This isn’t an official campground I’m at, it’s a makeshift (and presumably illegally “constructed”) hunting camp in a clearing. There’s not much to it. An impressive fire ring, a plywood bench, some shelves and a floodlight nailed to a tree, and also this picnic table, which was stored upright under a repurposed scrap of discarded carpet. Some distance off is a toilet seat affixed atop a metal drum; I haven’t had the courage to lift the lid, let alone try to, you know, use it.

When I first got here I thought it was a grow operation — I’m not sure if I’m still in Humboldt County or not — and I thought that certainly some unkind person would be emerging to chase me off. But there’s a feed trough for horses nearby, and I really can’t imagine a surly marijuana grower smoking a bunch of his product and then saying, “You know what? I think I’m gonna go for a trail ride.” Although earlier today a dude and his girlfriend rode up here on a four-wheeler looking for rolling paper and matches.

And that’s what your letter is all about, Cheyenne: The people you can meet. I’ve met a couple of characters this past week. One was at a coffee shop in Santa Rosa. I mean, he wasn’t in the coffee shop, although he did ask about the advisability of riding his motorcycle through the front door. He was in the parking lot, sitting on his broken motorcycle, talking to any chump who would listen. Unfortunately, one of those chumps was me.

The conversation began with him observing the scars on my legs and expressing his approval of my totally awesome scar “tattoos” and then realizing that they weren’t tattoos, but the real thing. His inability to discern the difference between an actual traumatic leg injury and a tattoo depiction thereof should have been my cue to say thanks and goodbye, but I missed that cue. Hard.

The guy on the motorcycle asked me how I got the scars, and then he started asking things like, “What do you think? Should I just walk in there and clock the bitch?” For the record, if anyone ever asks you this, the correct answer is “no”. Do not answer as I did, by saying, “Who? Where?” Sometimes additional information is not necessary to answer a question, and asking for that information will earn you a disappointed “Don’t you know, man??”

Then he started asking me how he could end the pain, if I would like a ride on his broken motorcycle, if suicide was the answer, if I would beat him up, and he also cheerfully suggested that he had a knife I could use on him if I liked. At which point I disengaged and called the cops — maintaining my lifetime record of only calling 911 to report white people — and then split when he was distracted by the task of parking his motorcycle in the street.

I saw a cop car heading toward the coffee shop after I took off, and the next day’s police blotter said he’d been arrested. At which point my white liberal guilt kicked in full-scale as I wondered whether he’d be subject to California’s three strikes law. The sad thing is I think his motorcycle was just out of gas.

After that I took off from Santa Rosa and made my way toward the coast. I stopped at a fruit stand on the road out, and sitting in the parking lot I was approached by a man who noticed my Iowa license plate and wanted to give me a fist bump for American Pickers, a History Channel show set in Iowa. He smelled like alcohol but I ignored this and continued talking anyway. Pretty soon we were talking about all the weirdos that live in California and also everywhere else. And that was when he dropped what I like to call “The Wisdom”:

“Now, you can’t carry a gun everywhere. And fuck a knife. A lot of cops, a lot of rangers, they’ll give you grief if they see a great big knife on your belt. So you know what I carry for self defense? A road flare. That shit is 800 degrees, man. No one’s gonna come at you if you’re waving an 800 degree burning road flare in their face. Scares the hell out of ’em.”

He went on to say how innocuous they look, and they’ll fit right in your pocket, and stranded motorists on a busy highway really appreciate it if you throw one their way. I said I thought this sounded great, and I asked where I could get one. And you know what? He gave me one. Right there. And also a bag of corn chips. Wow!

So in the world of people you can meet, I fit somewhere between the tweaker on a broken motorcycle and the drunk ‘Nam vet at a produce stand handing out road flares for self defense. Creeped out by one, conversant and friendly with the latter. And to think I ever thought I had trouble fitting in in the world.