Or at least too pretentious. Thanks to being unable to resist a year of webhosting and a domain registration for the absurdly low price of $9, I now have my own journalish website. I'll still keep reading LJ, but if you're curious about me, head on over to vacillatingvelocity.com

Hello out there in internet-land! I am about to embark on what will surely be an epic journey through the northwestern chunk of This Great Land, and I will likely have intensely sporadic access to email during the trek (although these days, unsecure WiFi is about six months away from coming free in your Frosted Flakes Of Probably Not Rat Heads). I would like to instead communicate via the poor man's subject-line-only-email-from-a-non-respondable-address: the postcard.

So, anyone who would like a postcard sent from what is equally likely to be a beautiful natural park, dilapidated roadside attraction, local microbrewery, or minimum-security prison, send me your address! I believe my email is on my info page, or you already have it, depending on the value of you.

You're much more likely to get a postcard if you send before the hypothetical departure time of Saturday morning. That's 48ish hours, kiddies, and the clock's tickin' - this limited-time offer won't last long!

I would just like to point out, for the record, that I am writing this post while sitting in a car on the side of the road on Kirkwood Meadows Drive. It appears I am close enough to a condo where some unknown benefactor has left their wireless 'net unguarded, and I get to check email as snow falls down onto each of the 360 degrees of windows that encircle me. I knew there was a reason I decided this would beat sitting around the house, even though I'm unable to hit the slopes myself.

It appears that, much like the boy that cries wolf, my thick veneer of sarcasm might occasionally cause people to mistake my sincerity for flippancy. So, just for the record, and to get the mundane details out of the way;

Sunday morning, March 13th, 2005. Benjie and I get to the 'wood and head up for another day of riding. It's just us two so far, although Becky and Bryan are meeting up with us as soon as they arrive. We take accursed chair 7 up and over to 6 from the not-so-secret lot, then take a warmup down the main run and through the park and pipe. We get to the bottom and go up to do it again. On the lift, or pehaps just before, I quiz Benjie about his bindings' forward lean. I don't have any to my new Drakes at the moment, but it occurs to me that he and Chris¹ both do. Ben says he has his set about halfway forward, so I decide to try this out. It requires really jamming your foot in there good and cranking down hard on your bindings. I set it up and head down, with the (standard) agreement with Ben that we'll meet at the top of the park.

Forward lean is pretty great. It angles and grabs your foot and lower leg in a way that gives power and decisiveness to your carving. It will also quickly cut off your circulation, which is why when you ride that way, the tendency is to not only unstrap one foot for the downtime of lift riding, but loosen your other foot as well.

Unfortunately, about halfway down 6 - to the right of the trees which are to the right of the slow sign - I hit a patch of icy moguls. I decided to ride through it and speed-check when I got out - no matter how sharp my factory-tuned edges and no matter how responsive my kickass bindings are, ice is a bitch. Unfortunately, I got launched off one mogul, lost it in the air, and came down, ass first and going fast, on the next one.

Snap crackle pop spine krispies.

I didn't know right away, of course. I took a minute to shake off the fall. Then I took another minute. A skiier stopped above me to keep me from being run over. I managed to sit up, although it hurt. At this point, my feet were killing me, so I reached down to unstrap my bindings. Oops. Pain so severe that I ended up right back on my back. It was around this point the skiier asked "are you ok?" and I had to say "Uhh, I don't know." He called (or had someone call) ski patrol.

Montage: Phone calls, ski patrol, oxygen masks, gurneys, xrays, IV mishaps, morphine, concerned friends, ambulance, ER, a doctor sticks his finger up my ass (is it Friday already?), CAT scan, hospital bed, auto-morphine, insomnia, jell-o, vicodin, back brace.

The long and the short of it is that I have a compression fracture of the spine. Spine chunklet T12 go smoosh. Spill out a bit towards the back of the spine, but not enough to require surgery or, you know, paralyze me. I'm sitting around the house out on disability for probably 3 months total, or a little more than two more. Doc says take it easy this summer, but I'll be back on the slopes come next winter.

I feel very lucky.


1. Who, if you throw in Jon, make up the Snowboarding Samurai (I was high, we were wearing facemasks, Burton has that Ronin thing going on . . . shut up), who among my friends are my only real peers, ability-wise, on the slopes.

(apologies to alongtheway, whose journal I was in the midst of posting a comment in when vanity took over and I decided I wanted this Deep Thought more clearly marked "MINE!")

My housemate's fraternal twin brother loaned us Gran Turismo 4 and his racing seat / force feedback steering wheel setup. It does a remarkably good job of conveying your virtual car's responses to its drive through a virtual world. Sitting ten feet back from a wall where the game's painstaking recreation of expensive cars and exotic locales is being projected in ten-foot-wide-screen is, in a word, great. I spent many hours playing these past few weeks, still unable to drive a real car but enjoying the faux ones just fine. The section of the game that I devoted by far the most time to, though, was a relatively small subset of what's available to do - the dirt tracks. With the wheel, you can feel the car slip and slide, grab and release, its contact with the road ever-shifting.

Navigating the course but not quite in control; a little messy, a little too fast. No wonder I enjoyed it so much - when I type it out like that it it sounds like a spot-on description of my race through life. A ride that gets a little scary at times - pockets of heart-pounding-stomach-churning-uncertainty that can freak me out until I realize how alive they make me feel.

Dear Posterity,

Something bade me write to you this morning, to jot down little memories of last night so that they might be bottled and preserved for the future. As if they were more important than the thousands of other little snippets of my past kept far past their expiration date, until they decompose and sink back into the grey matter, waiting to fertilize thoughts-to-be.

The three openers were expectedly unremarkable. I must remark, though, that the star of Napoleon Dynamite introduced the third and final opener, a brief moment of semicelebrity. It would have been 27% more exciting if I had yet bothered to see the movie. I was recently instructed to, so I suppose it will happen soon enough.

After about a song I decided my time would be better spent popping outside for a quick trip to the liquor store for cash and a beer. After the beer I bummed a smoke and as I stood outside, a gaggle of teen girls came streaming out, being shoo'd away by concert staff so that they wouldn't have to call the police and report that two of the girls were plastered. The two drunkies saw my brace and came over to be inquisitors #2 and 3 of at least 5 as to the legitimacy of my spinal injury - as if maybe I'd just donned it on a whim, some sort of fashion statement ahead of its time. They were bubbly-teen-girl-drunk-friendly and their friends were embarassed.

Fall Out Boy themselves were fun but relatively bland and un-chatty relative to prior sightings. They did, however, play the song I tried to get them to play the last two times I saw them - Honorable Mention.

And that's about it.

The next time I play "I never," and someone says, "I never fractured my spine", I have to drink.

In continuing a trend where I'm trying to make a point of verbalizing the seemingly endless flow of thoughts, feelings, and ideas I've been internalizing recently: goodbye, politics. Disillusionment doesn't even cover it. I'm declaring myself Apathetic Towards The Machine. I've unsubscribed from all the mailing lists - the DNC, MoveOn, America Coming Together, even the ACLU. Don't get me wrong - I'm glad they're still fighting, and maybe Dean will figure out how to do so effectively (Howie - I suggest you put Incubus' Beware! Criminal on repeat until your blood boils), but I'm too fucking revolted by the whole process and what it reveals of my countrymen in the aggregate to have anything to do with it for a good long while.

I'm fairly certain that HP Proliant DL320 1U rackmount servers are, on some distant, genetic level, the descendants of banshees. And I'm currently sharing my office with one. I'm doing my best to ignore the fact that I'm good at working with computers and can get paid pretty decent money to do so, because these days, I hate them.

I just got my first valentine of the day (well, second, really - thanks johnnystiletto!). It was from Southwest Airlines, and was a flash greeting that invites you to use an animated nutcracker to break open a peanut and reveal what appear to be testicles with love notes on them. If I even remotely bought into this holiday, I think this would dramatically depress me. Instead, I laugh, because testicles are funny.

I'm pretty sure I just saw, out my window, a woman hotbox her Geo Metro, step out, spray a half-bottle of perfume on her person, and come inside, which implies she is a client, which implies she has a child, which is scary. The entire second story of the building smells like "Eau De Crack Whore" and it's giving me a headache.

Stayed at our newly-favorite cheap motel this weekend, and the room they put us in had a sink whose drain was not fully connected to the plumbing underneath - their fix for this was to have a small garbage can underneath to catch the water that didn't make it. By the time we noticed, we were already too settled in and tired (read: drunk) to request a room switch. Partway through our game of trivial pursuit, my multi-substance-addled brain decided it would be a good idea to empty the garbage can. I'm so helpful! So helpful, in fact, that I picked up the garbage can and emptied it - into the sink.

non Fall Out Boy fanbeings will be patently ( uninterested )

I just ate solid food! It was glorious. I think I may celebrate by donating unused oatmeal, soup, and applesauce to my local food bank. Next step: create super-cool necklace using my wisdom teeth. Might want to clean off the caked blood first - nah.

I CANNOT FUCKING STOP LISTENING TO Incubus' Crow Left of the Murder. Holy shit it's good.

I know this is inane, but I missed my poor, neglected LJ. Deal.

Back at work after two weeklong vacations bookending a shortened, deserted, and wholly unproductive pre-christmas workweek. I'm not even close to ready to turn my brain back on, and I seem to have misplaced my motivation completely. So I used the last hour or so to finally spit-shine up my writeup of my Whistler vacation and grab a few representative photos to accompany it. It is ( far too long. )

This post brought to you by the vitamin I.

Back in full-on snow junkie mode, checking weather reports and watching webcams while I work. I just found a link that advertises weather one-on-one phone chat for the low, low price of $2.99 / minute. "The doppler radar is showing us a high-pressure storm system moving on in from the east, but here in my pants, the temperatures are tropical, baby - warm and moist." I want to be in bed and so does my brain.

Some more excellent early season riding took up the bulk of the weekend and the bulk of my body's energy. Saturday night after riding most of a day that began with a 5am wakeup call and an 8:50am lift load we went out for pizza and then fell asleep around 7pm. Sunday morning en route to the hill Becky and I were pumping adrenochrome or whatever it is Rockstar contains into our bodies when we drove by the Rockstar truck. We raised our cans in toast to them and were rewarded by having schwag thrown through our window; Rockstar cola (which tastes surprisingly similar to a combination of, well, rockstar and cola) and branded armbands. We put them on and drove off into the sunrise, rocking our way into corporate whoredom.

Bad Religion last night good, Warfield mosh pits bad. I only went in a few times, especially because the setlist changed by about one song (Man on a Mission, godamnit, they still didn't play Athiest Peace). Still, good stuff - Mr. Brett was playing with them, Fatty came out and sang a chorus of 21st Century Digial Boy as he is wont to do (and did a jig while exiting stage right), Greg taunted us by constantly referring to it as "'frisco".

Today my desire to post eclipses my lack of interesting narrative. I'll leave you with ( a thousand words compressed )

Because I've been so scatterbrained and my response to Mike's calling me on some of my shit is tucked into a comment in my last post, I just want to make clear that I don't actually believe that Christianity, or any religion, is why Bush was re-elected. I also don't actually equate all Christians with the fundamentalist asshole-type that Bush is - in fact, I'd imagine the majority of them are tolerant and loving, Christ-style, just like the majority of Muslims probably think that those fuckwit terrorists are giving them a bad name and just like ~40% of red states are probably as appalled at the outcome of the election as I am. The problem I guess was that I lumped all those groups together because of my overall disdain for organized religion and people who buy into any iteration of it. So for that much, I'm sorry, I was being a reactionary fuck and rather stupid about it. It's obviously a very complex issue and I boiled it down to one target for my venting, and then didn't express myself very well anyhow. I hate it when I let emotion overtake logic in my brain, and I hate it that I stooped to the level of those who want a specific thing or group to blame for their woes when one doesn't exist. Weak sauce.

That said, I still think organized religion sucks.

Uncertain where to begin middle end.

I had a nice weekend. Went to Chicago to visit my best friend. Found out their art museum currently holds the original Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Pointillism and pixels are similar so I have an affinity for that one. Lucked out and got to see Bad Religion headline. Slept a lot but evidently not enough. Life has left me feeling perpetually drained recently. Just watched the season premire of The OC. Struck me as I watched it how as an observer, all the melodrama seems absurd and the answers simple, but my own life's drama leaves me in uncertain search of answers. I would be smoking a cigarette inside while I write this if I didn't live with other people which I guess is a blessing as cigarettes are stupid.

I feel betrayed by my countrymen. That's my best explanation for my last post which I absolutely do not apologize for nor recant. Although in my haste to churn it out before my flight, I said something like "midwest" when I really meant something more like "the south." I talked with Sarah to try to gain some perspective on my admittedly one-sided view of religion, since she majored in religious studies @Stanford and is now in grad school for the same, despite or perhaps because of her atheism. She still respects the believers while I simply somewhat comprehend them. It's hard to separate a person from this stupidity even when everything else about them is fine. I'm not going to respond to the comments on my last post but I appriciate them all - I was clearly looking for a response.

Sarah's explanation was that religion (to be specific here, I am talking mainly about Christianity, although it applies to all the religions especially non nature-based-stuff) was started by one guy who had nice ideas about being good to your fellow homo sapiens. He attracted followers 'cause he had a good idea. That's about where it all went wrong. The problem is, people are stupid. Education is not sufficient to make people be good to each other and make the right choices. So instead of saying "Hey, be good to people because it's the right thing to do and ultimately you and everyone else will be better off," you've gotta use "Hey, be good to people or you will burn for eternity." Great! Only its big strength is its big weakness - this fear of God is easily co-opted by powermongers who realize that it can be used equally easily for their own ends. Sarah sez that education isn't a valid substitute for religion because people are stupid and it's a depressing yet convincing argument. So the answer to religion is unclear. Anyhow, her explanation of Bush's win was this: by stressing his 'faith' and painting the struggle as a classic Good (or "Us") vs. Evil (or "Them"), he made Kerry look, well, petty - with all his "words" and "facts" and "intelligence." I'm so paraphrasing it hurts but I don't have the wherewithal to spell this out more. Honestly, at this point I think you either get it or you don't. And that standard exuse for Faith In God that goes "It's just something I need to get through the day" - lying to yourself isn't useful to you, only those who seek to manipulate you. If you want a community, find it for a reason other than mutual gullibility. If you want something to help you through the day knowing what a fucked-up place the world is, well, good luck. Me, I like the sauce. And yes, I realize that I'm being divisive and intolerant, that I'm generalizing, vilifying, and generally being republican. The irony is not lost on me. If you don't realize how self-aware I am, you don't know me.

I think I might've had more but I'm going all ADD as usual. If I owe you email or some variant thereof, I'm not ignoring you, I'm just lazy and easily distracted. Keep that breath bated.

I think about politics a lot. I haven't always. This is the third time I'll be voting in a presidential election, thanks to a conveniently-timed birth, but the first time I've really been informed. I'm ashamed to admit it, but for the first few months of Dubya's administration, I honestly thought he was his dad. I credit him, though, with getting me interested in and informed about politics. That, and little too much websurfin' on the ol' company dime. Anyhow, I've followed this presidential race to the point where it made me crazy at times, and it felt really good this morning to go and cast the vote I've been waiting so long to cast. (I wanted to vote absentee, and registered as such, but the ballot just never came) I didn't actually have to wait long at the polling place, probably because I showed up right at 7am to avoid the crowds. I was the first person at my polling location to demand a paper ballot. Now I'm just going to sit around being nervous until this is over - I have my hopes that it will be determined by tonight, but I doubt it.

I'm not sure if it was leftover FaQuil crack from the night before or just my usual neural misfirings, but my dream last night was kinda wacky. I was on the set with Jay and Silent Bob (no, not Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith), which of course, seemed like the perfect opportunity to buy me some pot. Unfortunately, they were all out - so they suggested I buy some from Joss Whedon instead. Of course! Joss had the hook-up. He was driving me to pick it up, but then we got sidetracked somehow. Once we got back on track, he realized that he couldn't show his face around that dealer anymore, so he arranged the whole thing for me. I was to go into a diner down the street and order a Flaming Milk Tea, which was apparently code. So Joss took off down the street in his van and I went walking towards the diner, only I was stopped halfway across the basketball court by some thugs. We got in this big fight, mainly me against this one other guy. I was kicking his ass when a park ranger came in and broke it up, only I played it off like we was just wrasslin'. This endeared the thug to me, so he pointed me down the street, towards a couple of guys in a dark alley. I handed them forty bucks and they handed me some weed. Mega happy ending. Then came the sad part - I thought to myself "ooh, I want to write in my LiveJournal about this - only I'd better protect the post so I don't get Joss in trouble."