Funny is it not? such a robust and energetic start I had. I grant you that.
I’m great at that; running off the rails like there’s no tomorrow.
I’m actually good at keeping things going, too. At least if you want to factor in the work ethic I had hammered into me–the one that says “keep mindlessly and dutifully allowing your soul to be sucked away piecemeal”–in an endlessly useless, fruitless, and barren wasteland of hapless idealism, warped polyanna doctrines, and Stepford-level stupidity on the first floor of interpersonal accounting.
Try as I might, I cannot seem to shake what I call the “Bail of Hay” maxim. By this I mean the following, pessimistic algorithm, and how I truly believe it has some sort of transcendental value over my exploits.
It works like this: I am a free and reasonably happy traveler, cruising unencumbered on life’s Route 66 in a convertible. Wind blowing through my hair, sign ahead says “Destination 10 miles.”
Right above me, a C130 cargo hold accidentally releases a rogue bail of hay at the mile elevation. By all reasonable calculations, the chances of all factors–wind resistance, trajectories, velocity and the sort, should run the probabilities into nearly infinitesimal levels that I will be struck.
Yet, time and time again, it seems, probabilities seems to have some kind of oversight committee behind them.
SOMEBODY’S got an abacus–and a front-row seat to my angst.
Then, of course is the mirror. 47 isn’t really that old, but it certainly doesn’t excite the central creative vortexes out there–you know–the ones that need to deem anything you do as marketable? I mean I started this thing thinking I had some kind of rhetorical x-factor–that I have some special finesse to the word that sets me apart.
Yeah. Right . . .
Look around–there’s a million other carpers out there, saying the same cutesy-fied crap I’m hammering out. Just in some other fashion. Getting above the noise is . . . well, subject to algorithms I don’t control (see: Bail of Hay).
Meanwhile, Miley Cyrus’ talentless bully-pulpit makes millions . . .
I can’t even formulate the contiguous flow I usually have for these things. In short, I’m finally coming to realize something that someday I hope I can just suck up, shut up, and internalize beforeI die:
Extraordinary ability means nothing. And in my case, attaching any transcendent meaning to it has been the biggest mistake of my life.
I really wish I was a one-note samba. I mean it. I wish I had one ability, one passion, one benevolent, artistic master to which I paid supplication and deference.
But that isn’t me. One minute I’m a blogger. The next turn, I’m a magician. The next a guitarist, singer, teacher, writer, comedian, film maker, and general syntax consultant to my friends.
One minute I’m carping about writing a satirical tech manual. The next, I’m hoping a magazine article goes vertical.
I believe the clinical term for this is, schizophrenia.
Today, I am a ukulele instructor. Look. See?
Front
Back
I ordered 500 of these little babies. I even hatched, to quote Baldrick from the Rowan Atkinson series, Blackadder, what is known as a “cunning plan;” Ukulele virtuoso, Jake Shimabukuro, is playing the theater near my house in 15 days. 999 people will fill that theater. Jake’s tireless ambassadorship of the instrument will convince at least 30 to seek out lessons.
That’s right. Mr. Precocious will be there to save them when Jake releases the Kraken. I even got permission to have these stacked at the drink counter when some of the more refined audience members draw a causal relationship between Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and . . . um, alcohol.
Anyway. All my other offices, manifestations, theophanies, identities, a.k.a.s, noms de plume, reconstitutions, reinventions, and alter-egos are still viable.
I’ve just managed another one. I DO also teach guitar, but right now, I am enjoying the ukulele journey–and trust me, it’s a lot more fun than I EVER thought it would be.
Growing up in a varied and independent pentecostal/charismatic circle of spiritual youth-rearing had many cool side-effects. Not the least of which was the ability to pursue music that was loud, melodic and passionate.
At age thirteen, I bought my first guitar off a friend. It was a EPIC pile of junk. Yet, no one told me that, so I learned to play with strings 3/4″ off the fretboard, and with horrific intonation.
It also started me listening to guitarists.
The other providential aspect of my era was that the cadenza–otherwise known as the “guitar solo”–was a literal prerequisite for nearly every song of merit in the 1980’s. This stood true not only for the Angus Youngs, Eddie Van Halens and George Lynches on the secular side, it also was the prevailing doctrine in the winds of what was called “Christian Rock.”
Now, if Christian Rock was a categorical pursuit on Jeopardy, I’d run the table without a glitch. I was a fence-sitter in terms of my allegiances, but also wasn’t the type to dismiss epic musicianship out of hand just because my Sabbath-head friends thought Jesus was a dumb subject to go on about.
Besides, Sabbath couldn’t have been the cacophonous “Yang” without first having a “Yin” off which to launch anyway.
My best friend and I wound up venting our musical spleens over the music of Petra, and another band, known as the real progenitors of Christian rock: The Resurrection Band.
Resurrection band–also known as “Rez” to the fans, was not just some run-of-the-mill group of erstwhile hippies looking a for a record deal with an easy mark. They were Bona-fide street people from Chicago’s inner-city–interested in reaching Chicago’s inner city (for the record, they still are, 45 years later). Their music was theologically firm. Yet, it ascribed the walk with God as one that also included a social conscience. Their songs talked about the 80’s Atlanta shootings, the demonic paralysis of war, drug addiction, prostitution, brokeness, and the eugenic dismissal of the unborn and infirm.
And racism. Primarily manifested in South Africa’s Apartheid behemoth.
Google wasn’t around for me to just pop up the news. I had a good, old-fashioned television. But I never watched it because I was playing outside, or ripping my callouses on my guitar. So I learned a lot about the social predications locked into the gospel through these guys.
So–off I plunged–into what became my favorite record of theirs: Rainbow’s End.
When I came to the song Afrikkans, I was properly stunned out of my wits. Not only did this song lay out one of the myriad of wrongs in the world–the song literally cries. It cries aloud. Glenn Kaiser–at that moment–became to me what few other vocalists would ever become; a genuine voice. And in my top tier of influences and unbeknownst mentors. His wife, Wendy, holds a tight harmonic line right above him.
I knew that man meant business when he sang it. What I didn’t expect, however, was a guitar solo that would forever haunt me like no other.
As a musician who, has many times crossed over into that “4th dimension” while playing (And I simply mean that to mean that something bigger was afoot when we were playing–not just some vague, metaphysical claptrap that sounds all Carlos Castaneda or anything), I STILL–stand in awe of the moment of pure pain and empathy that had to be present to play this.
And Stu Heiss will forever live in my pantheon of greats–playing the guitar like no one else.
I have this friend named Stu, who told me his conversations go like this:
“I’m headed to work today. Can’t wait to get there.”
“Why, what are you going to do?”
“Play Ukulele all day, and you?”
This doesn’t necessarily mean gigging–although in his case, it does sometimes.
He teaches.
So today–TODAY–I officially certify into place the first official–student slots into what I hope becomes the new chapter in my life; passing the guitar and ukulele torches to others through the same channels that inspire me:
Let’s make cool sounds.
What isn’t so clear, is every cohesive avenue towards teaching others. Everyone is different.
So I’m heading into the ether to see what happens. Oddly enough, I have a feeling my own journey–if chronicled correctly, will be of vast importance to others.
But for now, I defer my inspirational flash points to Bass virtuoso, Victor Wooten:
As parents who took the active and on-purpose step of homeschooling their children, one becomes acutely aware of the creative permutations available in the process; there are brilliant thinkers out there, finding ways to hack the process into something far more effective and individualized while conversely diluting Common-core homogenization.
Yet, creative homeschooling also allows for those who might like Common-core approaches to take that road entirely, if they’d like. There are even forums and support groups that allow for healthy debates about what these approaches bring to the game.
Being able to meld the inherent educational needs of our children with interfaces that perhaps sweeten the deal is also one of the great upsides. “Unit studies,” a way of having a child research in depth singular topics that interest them at the time–is one such approach. They may love horses, but by the time they’re finished with a unit study on them, they’ve now broached veterinary sciences, pathogens, and even taken a number of lessons on the proper care, feeding and interactions with these magnificent creatures.
History happens to be one of those subjects that either invoke immediate interest–or a complete bungee-jumping session into the abyss of lethargy.
Enter Doctor Who. To my mind, my attempts to watch this thing was thwarted when I saw the futuristic underpinnings of narcissism and plastic surgery played out as a character devoid of a body–and relegated to nothing more than a talking, facial membrane stretched out like a canvas; I got the joke, but my brain was just too tired to go the foot-miles necessary to follow.
Meanwhile, my 14-year-old would like nothing better than to build a TARDIS (basically a phone booth/time machine amalgam) in her room.
So yesterday, imagine the smile on my face, when a FaceBook buddy posted link to Amy Dutsch’s Traveling Through History With Doctor Who. A phenomenal idea. Not even that complex an idea–but a lot of genius ideas aren’t–they just need someone to breathe life into its nostrils.
Think about it. Doctor Who (played by a myriad of actors, as they change seasonally), travels forward and backward in time, engaging some sort of peril. The episodes nearly always depict genuine, world-historical events and people in each episode, and while many of the ancillary characters and villains are campy and one-off, the historical figures are kept within their integral bounds. Sure, Charles Dickens might be interacting with people 150 years in the future, but at the end of the day, his sense of anachronistic interference is abated.
The course is currently free for the independents who handle their own grading (such as R-4s), but it can most certainly be rung in as extra credit, even in the public school environment with a teacher willing to accept it. The graded course is either full, or nearly full as of this writing.
Essentially, the synopsis is thus:
Students taking this course will learn history though the fun and exciting world of Doctor Who. Students will watch a historically based Doctor Who episode each week, discuss the event or historical figures and research the event/figures. At the end of the course, students will choose their favorite episode to write a small research paper on the historical event/figure in the episode. While various perspectives are welcome, we will not focus this course on any religious basis, but polite discourse is welcome.
My favorite line from the layout is:
***The episodes WILL go out of order. A basic understanding of Doctor Who and the doctors’ regenerations and time travel is very helpful!**
Of COURSE I’m already running with a wheel in the sand here. I’m dad. I can’t possibly be cool enough to have a “basic understanding”of Doctor Who’s devil-may-care penchant for anachronistic volleyball. I’m not entirely convinced I know which Doctor is which–or why I got a flag on the proprietary 40-yard line for abbreviating “Doctor” in a text:
“The tenth doctor, that’s Benedict Cumberbatch, right?”
“Dad, that’s David Tennant. Everybody know that!”
And perhaps that’s the wedge–the motivation–the essential glitter of intrigue it carries for my kids: The idea that they become the cognoscenti of their own historical supplementation.
All that is required is a Netflix account with access to the episodes, or some other interface, a willingness to confront death, famine, mortality and the general declining state of affairs, and a sixth-grade reading level.
Which, last time I checked–WAS the nature of history.
Er . . . maybe I will head back over to season #1. They might have something with that whole “membranic visage” thing. Or at any rate, engender a cameo from Mikey Rourke.
One thing is for certain. Googling about hiking to Half Dome bears little resemblance to being there. Another thing is for certain: that previous assertion cannot be made into anything more banal than it already is. Banality, however, does not rob it of its essential truth.
Housekeeping Camp
My friend, Rob, and I respectively headed from our homes in Las Vegas and Redding, Ca. towards Yosemite’s valley floor to the homogenized, downscale and glutted-down–Housekeeping Camp. We literally arrived within 40 minutes of each other–around 2:30–3:00 in the afternoon. After the “it’s been three years” sort of chronological accounting, we were off–time to start tinkering with the preparatory process; we were slated to start the laborious trek up the Half Dome trailhead at 0615.
Basically, you start where it says “Happy Isles” over there on the left. I think it becomes painfully obvious from there.
Let me just get this out of the way. If you’re in any way someone who only hikes intermittently along trails with gradually ascending terrain, then you can immediately dispense with any hallucinogenic notions about the hike “being about 8-10 hours.” Because it’s going to take you six to get up there. If you’re an inculcated cardio-hound with the ability to factor in altitude acclimation, you might do it–but why go to the top of Half Dome unless you’re going to kick it up there for at least an hour?
Oh, and if you’re a camel, that helps, too. Being a camel will get you there with even greater facility, because no matter how much water you take, it still won’t be enough–which is where logistics, and understanding one’s proximity to the Merced River becomes paramount.
Let’s a give a simple rundown of the sectional traits of the trail:
The first mile is paved. You will cross a bridge downriver from Vernal Falls. At this point is the second-to-last restroom you will encounter, and the LAST source of potable water.
After a short, and rising grade on a relatively smooth dirt trail begins a series of granite steps rising dramatically. If you’re not already sweating and drinking water here, you’re better than we were. The need to stop and rest was frequent, but needed. However, you have two choices–because there IS a fork in the road:
1. The John Muir Trail to the right
2. The Mist Trail to the left
The John Muir Trail is “easier,” per se, but a little over a half a mile longer in trod-length. It has less steps and more switchbacks. Those with knees not-so-amenable to the stark gain may want to go this way. It will take you past Vernal Falls, but it will do so by placing a giant gulf between you and it as you make your way towards Nevada Falls.
The Mist Trail is the “truncated” route, if you will. The stone ascendancies are numerous, ominous and seemingly endless. These however will take you past the stunning Vernal Falls (within a distance that will soak you in season). Take heart. You will soon climb to the top of these falls in a short period of time. Drink water. You’re going to need it.
Vernal Falls from the Joh Muir Trail . . .
Approaching Vernal Falls from the Mist Trail.
These two trails will merge at the top of Nevada Falls (594 feet high). Congrats. You’ve managed to ascend 1,945 feet in elevation in a 2.5 mile jaunt. Only 5.7 miles to go.
The next two miles or so dispenses largely with the steps, and becomes a series of sandy and dirt switchbacks, hills and turns. At one point you will be walking alongside the Merced river–a section that is NOT near a giant, yawning precipice that will suck you over if you were to lose control and fall in. FILL YOUR CONTAINERS WITH WATER. Purify them, or set them up for whatever filtration device you have. you WILL regret not doing so because you think the” hard part is over.” Because once you see the sign “Backpacker’s Camp,” you will not see the river again until you return from the summit (just factor in a round trip of “eight miles until water” into your mental and hydration calculus)
The next 1.5 miles from this sign is comparatively easy to deal with.
Then, you will encounter this sign:
Two miles from the summit. Get ready for the trail to get challenging up ahead.
By now, you’ve also ascended another 1040 feet in elevation. The psychological boost provided here was amazing. From this point, Half Dome’s primary lid becomes visible through the trees and starts to seem within striking distance.
Yeah. Right.
The next mile and a half feel pretty good, but the trees start to sparse out (you will, of course be leaving the tree line abruptly). Then–you will meet the accounting ranger at the base of what is known as “Sub Dome.” The cable route seems literally “right there.” It looks like all you need to do is walk around the corner and start climbing.
“How long until we hit the cables?” I asked the iPad-weilding accountant.
“45 minutes to an hour,” he said.
“Allrighty, then . . . “(furtively digging through my backpack for a Hemlock root)
This sub-dome sequence isn’t that long, but its vertical jump is staggeringly stark. You will now encounter stone steps again. Many of them. At one point the trail becomes a bit . . . um, malleable. You will find yourself scrambling across graded granite sheets with ZERO shelter from the sun (if you didn’t wear sunblock up to this point, put it on when you have your permit checked). This seems to go on forever, and you will find yourself passing people that passed you earlier.
Then, they will pass you, as YOU struggle to recover, and deal with the altitudinal downgrade in oxygen levels. Also, the majority of this hike does not feature moments in which you are within an error’s length of sliding into some unobtainable abyss. But this sub-dome sequence does–not because you’re riding a razor’s edge, but because the possibility of slipping on the gravel-laden granite could cause one’s body to shift into an unrecoverable reaction. Take it SLOW and STEADY.
Then–suddenly, you walk over a curve. And there, right in front of you, are the infamous and (yes visually daunting) Half Dome cables:
Rubber underwear is at least worth considering at this point.
What becomes immediately noticeable is how high those things go, and what else becomes noticeable is the ability to wet one’s pants in direct proportional reaction TO them is almost impossible, as some odd apprehension/dehydration/renal failure trifecta is now running the show.
If you have water left, use some now (like I’d have to tell you). Take a breather. Watch the cables for while. You will see ebbs and flows of hangups and crowding. Glove up. be ready to hit them when it sparses out. It’s okay to be on crowded cables going down, but going up, you’re straining your arms for position and security.
Once on top, you have opportunities for shots like this one:
Take out your phone and call someone. I called my wife, and believe it or not, Yosemite’s Verizon-centric valley floor was still no obstacle to my pathetic AT&T issues; I had all five dots. My emails came ripping in, texts and FaceBook updates.
8.2 miles of sheer effort, anguish and catharsis.
So let’s talk about some things that I WOULD advise, if you are planning to do this. You may need other things, but THESE are paramount to ME:
You have two choices: Make this a one-day trip–valley floor-to-summit-to-valley floor (17 miles). Or, hike into BackPacker’s camp, rest for the night (fish the river nearby) and ascend the last 3.5 miles early.
Take high-energy food that will not take up a lot of space. Nuts, Clif bars, bananas, and trail mixes, with maybe ONE dehydrated meal. You need the bursts–not a full belly of sand.
WATER: If I had it to do again, I would pack a Camelback full of water AND carry stand-alone containers. Save the Camelback water for the sub dome and cable ascents–because you won’t have to take your pack off to access the water, and you WILL want to drink water while on your way up.
WATER–AGAIN: Not to panic you, but you might want to leave all your Bear Grylls minutiae behind if its space requirements works to the detriment of being able to carry that extra liter. I would advise finding a way to start with four liters if possible, and then fill up along the way.
FILTRATION DEVICES–whether it be the charcoal straws, or tablets or drops–must be considered. We wound up gulping two liters each from the Merced when we got back down.
ONE MORE EXTRA BIT OF WATER: If you’re the pay-it-forward type, have an extra water to give to that poor soul who does not. It may be what keeps them from scrapping the ascent at the 8 mile mark. You might just save their bucket list for them.
Gatorade: If you can manage a small bottle–take it. My electrolyte deal came running up and hit me in the face; I thought I was on an another planet there for a while.
Sunscreen: If you don’t, then enjoy the fallout of being exposed to the merciless sun in an open-bay dutch oven. Minimum SPF 30.
Flashlight: Yep. Going down isn’t a cakewalk either. Just ask your traumatized knees and shins. It may take longer than you thought. Believe me.
BODY GLIDE, ANTI-CHAFING STUFF: It looks and feels like underarm deodorant. Apply it where you KNOW it’s gonna get bad. It simply will NOT chafe. No matter how bad everything else gets, THAT area will be thanking you later.
SHOES: Make sure you have a pair of shoes amenable to slicker-surfaced granite for the final “pitch” up the cables. You will not regret that. If you don’t, get ready to look like you’ve skipped every day but “arm day” at the gym.
Then, on saturday night, I’m sitting in on an acoustic show with Mr. Big lead singer, Eric Martin for a couple of songs. Apparently he likes the undiluted gravitas, star power and overall tour-de-force of musical inertia that me and my Taylor 314 bring to the game.
Any engaged writer that has ever sat and Googled “How can increase my blog traffic” soon realized: the sites you are sent to did the same thing once and figured out that making a blog about increasing web traffic does something kind of peculiar.
It increases their web traffic.
My problem is–I’m more diverse than that. I couldn’t maintain a site with that narrow of a focus if my actual life depended on it. It’s not so much a “I want to be Elvis–not Colonel Tom Parker” sort of narcissism. It’s just thatI don’t have it in me to try to breathe life into a perceptibly mundane corpse.
But really. How many of us are? We’re all blogging because we tend to believe there is a point–a special time when something we craft will rise above the fray. And we’re all hoping for that one moment when we become as viral as any ONE of the “unlikely, gangly and possibly handicapped second-classer blows away Simon Cowell” videos.
All we need is that “moment.”
But until that comes, we stay within the confines of the blogging maxims. You know:
Blog everyday if possible. Especially for the first year.
Comment on other blogs
Promote other blogs
Here’s what I’ve noticed about number 2: The more followers a person has, the more self-promoting in tone many of the comments start to become. Such will be the case with this blog as well as soon as my now EIGHTY followers blows up exponentially. I know this will happen because I believe I do have something to offer–and a larger core audience will find its way here.
But as of right now, my comments section is lightly consistent, and substantive. My hope is that whatever I’ve addressed has sparked a genuine thought. Such has been the case with the blogs I currently follow; all of them give me something I can chew on–and in some cases, I don’t even agree with their world views at all. But they’re good.
I have also noticed that some really high-traffic sites can also take it for granted. One blog, with 15,000 some followers, is the perfect example. It goes something like this:
BLOG POST:Went to the organic farmer’s market today. I like their produce better.
FIRST COMMENT: RE-BLOGGED! You hit the nail right on the head!
SECOND COMMENT: It’s funny, but I just covered this subject on my own blog as well. We think alike:)
Of course, that last comment is SURE to have a hyperlinked Gravatar onramp so you can immediately run over there and see what’s going on.
What’s a bummer is that neither of these comments are wrong, unethical, or whatever. It’s just most of the people attempting to cross-dress their gratuitous self-promotion as aggregate contribution wind up looking like a Luddite hitting the makeup section at Macy’s.
Twitter is even worse. I will use as my case in point, the Learning Channel’s muscular and and coiffed lead necromancer, Mr. Zak Bagans. Head of the infamous Ghost Adventures triumvirate.
Now before I do, let’s talk about what it is he does for a living. Bagans goes around the world, investigating notoriously haunted places, documents what he finds, and does a show about it. To wit: He’s a millionaire because he’s getting paid to be a Goonie.
Okay. Fine. So the question becomes, is it the sheer visibility of fame that causes the following to be retweeted TWO HUNDRED AND TWENTY-SIX TIMES?
Or it it because that many people see some raging, carb-free protein boost in the information?
I’m not even going to ask how nearly a THOUSAND people had the synapse connection that said “By George, I’m adding that to my favorites! That’s a real knee-slapper!”
I’m not maligning Mr. Bagans. And his overt tendency to retweet other people that address him in Twitter-world creates a sort of perpetual-motion generator. So I can’t blame HIM–he’s chumming the waters for ersatz-fans all the time.
So far, I cannot bring myself to manufacture comments. Granted, I DO think I could do it and never make it look like it leaves the Auspices of Honor. But I just don’t have that in me.
And there is something to that. The followers of this blog have thus far decided to do so at the behest of something they’ve read here. Would I LOVE it if Tyler Perry (Who I think, could make me rich by simply tweeting “Send Ron Giesecke a dollar,”) sent me a stratospheric launch by sharing a post of mine? Sure. Maybe one day I’ll do a some one-ff Madea rundown and catch his eye. (Note to self: Put “Tyler Perry,” “Madea,” and “Oprah’s Surprises” in my tag section).
But there’s something to be said for building this brick by brick. The wall will be so much stronger. And so perhaps, the resultant success for which we all strive.
A while back, I saw a favorite blogger of mine–someone who does what’s called an “overnight thread” make a brief pass at this subject. It was an exercise such as this one in which a full story arc can be galvanized into a mere six words. I distinctly remember one that was referenced back then, which told me everything I’d have ever wanted to know about trying this:
For Sale: Baby shoes. Never used.
But why six words? Why not five? Seven. Twelve?
Maybe it’s part of our conditioning mosaic. Maybe it’s the Biblical calibration of the number 6–the one that seems to consistently imply imperfection, degradation, or incompleteness. You know, the way the supreme nether-lout will have a 666 accompanying his nomenclature–in a sort of triune cocktail of wretchedness, intellect and infernal underwriting.
Speaking of which, looking through the New Testament one time, searching for numerical oddities, I found a number of cool things–such as the fact that you can only run three consecutive sixes as a referential point on one place: John 6:66.
Oddly enough:
Upon this many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him.
And if you understand the context of that verse, it too–is a scary/sad story.
Back to my point. I have no idea why the matrix says six, but let’s go with it. It doesn’t have to be macabre. It just needs some cold wind blowing through it. I’d examine why THAT is the case, but then again, re-read everything up this point. Question answered.
Thus. I posit in a mere six words, the most reverberatingly horrific venture into the void that comes to mind at the moment:
Box Number Seven 