Pet Cobra

Epic

Several years back, I took a trip to Yosemite Valley by myself. Just threw a bunch of clothes and gear into the truck and went. Got a back country permit upon arrival and spent three days on the trail - I circumnavigated the valley, via a trail that started at Mirror Lake, went up the valley walls, over Cloud's Rest, and down by the Falls and Half Dome. Just me.

I did this kind of stuff a lot - random solo trips to Mammoth, Joshua Tree, wherever. But that was a long time ago. I grew up a bit - met a gal, got married, found a career, had a kid. We recently realized that some alone time is a good thing - Beth took a weekend trip to Vegas with some friends and had a blast. I had a thought for some alone time for me, ran it by her, and she was very enthusiastic about my plan.

Tomorrow I'm packing for another trip. This time, I'm taking the Xterra north. Leaving Friday and not stopping until I get past San Francisco. Up the PCH to the Lost Coast for a couple of days. Bringing the surfboards and a journal (this is, in a sense, a research trip - my novel centers around just such a roadtrip, and I need to scout locations, actually see the world inhabited by my characters). Just me. And a whole lot of unexplored shores. Talk to you when I get back.

Coasting Towards Turkey Day

It's all downhill from here; tomorrow is Wednesday, then a four day weekend. I'm having trouble stringing together coherent thoughts; shot my wad over at The Zero Boss while trying to run two interview sessions and close a couple of offers. Multi-tasking at it's finest. The downside of guest-blogging for the Muad'Dib of the blogosphere (I don't really know what I mean by that - it just struck me as kind of funny) is that one is bound to get a few new readers. I feel compelled to write something for you folks.

Eh, can't do it. But since it is Thanksgiving, I give you a gift. Those of you thinking of busting out the Turducken this year, enjoy. (Skip the article and go straight to the comments. Thanks to commentor Bookworm on what's rapidly becoming my favorite site.)

Staying At A Friend's For The Next Few Days

I'm guest blogging over at The Zero Boss' this week. Which means that I have to come up with interesting stuff. Crap.

True At First Light

Up at 5:45 this morning, rising with the sun. Even though Surfline wasn't painting a pretty picture of it today, it was Friday, it was a long and tiring week, and water time was needed. Both boards went with me, the Hog inside the Xterra, the Hollingsworth on top.

Down I went to SSBB (which, I've learned, has an actual name - of course it does, lying there along the main coastal artery, but in the spirit of things I ain't tellin'). To the learned eye, it was mediocre; the odd waist high set pushing through a high tide. Three spongers and a guy struggling on a fish told the story. The Hog stayed in the truck; I broke my pledge to it and paddled out on the longboard.

Not a memorable time by any means; a reminder that the planned classic noserider was still in the embryonic stage, an unshaped blank resting in my garage, and had I carved out the thing and had it glassed and ready I would've caught a lot more than I did. Still, it was a revitalizing session; once I paddled in a bit, I caught a few inside, and was pleasantly surprised by the lack of pain in my left shoulder. Driving up the coast on the way to work, the day was bright and already getting warm. I passed an old VW bus with a window sticker that read "No Bad Days". Indeed.

The Write Stuff

It's a tough thing, this writing a novel. Not the part where one puts words to paper, or screen as it were - the part where one comes up with an idea worth writing about, and generates a voice to make that idea compelling.

I'm doing the NaNoWriMo thing, although I don't intend to finish the book in a month, primarily because I don't want the book to suck. This is the reason I'm not doing the NaBloPoWhaFuck thing, where bloggers are encouraged to do a post a day. More is not necessarily better. Michael Caine - he's prolific. He won an Oscar; a couple, I think. He was also in "Jaws: The Revenge".

It's not that I don't have blogworthy tales to tell. I do. Here's one. I'm at work a couple of days ago. I get up to go to the john. In the hallway I pass a guy who needs to talk to me. We'll call him Guy. "Hey," Guy says. "I need to talk to you." "Ok, can you stop by my office in a few?" I nod toward the bathroom door. "Restroom.""Oh, no problem. I'll wait."

I walk in. Guy follows me.

I find the stall - the large, luxurious handicapped stall, where I can stretch my legs and have a relaxing, stressfree BM. I shut the door, drop trou, sit.

Guy is there. He's standing right outside the stall. True to his word, he's waiting.

This is unnerving. There's a good two-inch gap between the stall door and the stall wall. He's got a bit of a view.

"Guy?"

"Yes."

"Gonna be a while."

"That's OK."

He remains at his post.

We've sailed past Awkward Point, the spinnaker is up, and we're heading at flank speed to Dude, What's Your Fucking Malfunction Island. There may be cultural differences at work here - Guy is from a Foreign Country. Not Kazakhstan, if that's what you're asking, but clearly from a culture that doesn't have the same neuroses about bodily functions as the U.S.A. Deus ex machina arrives in the form of his cell phone ringing. He leaves. The weird part is that he hasn't tried to find me since.

A pretty good story, all told. Or not. Eh, whatever. The blogosphere is full of shitty writers (and by "writers" I mean "people who blog with the intent of establishing a readership/fan base for themselves", not "people who do blog posts because hey, why not?") with nothing to say; yes, it's "democratic", but if everything were "democratic" in that way, I'd be starting at power forward for the Lakers. Worse, there are bloggers out there who co-opt other writers' work - copping ideas, and then marinating in the adulation of their regular commentors. (This recently happened to my friend and writing partner Charlene; she's too classy to write about it, but I'm certainly not. You know the theory about putting a million monkeys in front of a million typewriters, and they'll come up with Shakespeare? There's a lesser known theory - put one hundred monkeys in front of one hundred typewriters, and they'll come up with a bland rewrite of an article they found on Yahoo!, and Blogging Baby will hire them. Well, not entirely true. Every so often BB fucks up and brings on real talent - Jonathon and J.D. somehow slipped past the Reverse Quality Control Department.) There's a great interview with Chuck Klosterman in this week's Onion AV Club; in it, he points out that "the problem a lot of writers have is that they really, really enjoy people saying  'You're brilliant'. They let their self-perception be dictated by reader response".  This is absolutely true of the blogosphere.

I'm finding out the tricky part of the novel writing process is how to be your own best and worst critic. I did post the prologue to the book on my NaWriNoMo page; you can find it on your own if you want. You get the prologue, that's it. (It ends with a cliffhanger, BTW. And the NaWriNoMo page fucks up some of the formatting - there are some sections in the piece that should be italicized and aren't and it does detract from what I'm trying to say, which is another reason why I'm not putting any more up there. ) I don't really want to hear how good or bad it is before it's actually done.

So. Writing. It's tough. On that note, read the latest post from Neal Pollack, entitled "We Have A Dead Cat". That's what good writing looks like.

New Face In The Lineup

You'll permit me this small bit of stereotyping. Australians are the nicest people on the planet. Really, if the Australian legions mobilized and set forth on the path of global conquest, we'd all be better for it. (Except for Springbok and All-Black fans. They'd be right fucked.)

New mate Mick has started a surfblog, with one hell of an opening post. Check it out here.

Good Morning Indeed

What's the word I'm looking for?

Hmmmm...

Oh yeah.

PWNED.

The View From The Couch

I did, as they say Down South, shit-all this weekend. Other than work - had to attend a job fair on behalf of The Company on Saturday - I was blissfully inactive. A few reasons:

• Painful Pain in my shoulder ("I have a pain" is the statement I make when something of the corpus jasonus is malfunctioning; Beth's response is usually "What sort of pain?", to which I reply "a Painful Pain".) As of today, my shoulder has ached for about two months straight. I decided to not surf this weekend, after a few dawn patrols last week. Last night in a conversation with my mom, I put voice to my fears and asked about my dad's rotator cuff surgery. That's what I'm thinking I need, and if the doctors confirm this, well, better to do it now and sit on the beach for the next couple of months. This bothers me a bit - I've been on a roll, and am much closer to full operational status on the Hogfish than I was even a week ago. (I did make it out this morning; the encroaching tide made for a mushy experience, and had I taken the longboard I would've had a record morning - that said, I'm in a monogamous relationship with the Hog, and boy I can't wait to look at this site's search strings to see what fun traffic the phrase "I'm in a monogamous relationship with the Hog" drove my way).
• Friday night we went to a birthday party for one of our young single gal friends. A few pieces of sushi plus then equivilant of a bottle of wine topped off with a dram of 18 YO Macallan meant that there would be a hangover. Interestingly, that hungover actually occured on Sunday - my deeply ingrained sense of professionalism won the day on Saturday, and pushed the hangover back to Sunday morning.
• Sunday was Football Day. In all its forms. I was up at 6:00, and I found myself watching an English Premier League match, Chelsea v. Tottenham Hotspur. Now, I've long railed against soccer as entertainment. But over the past few weeks, I've caught bits and pieces of EPL games and by God, there were some sorta exciting bits. A few months ago, Bill Simmons (really the only sports writer worth reading) wrote a column about his search for an EPL team to call his own (that piece is found here - it's a great bit of writing); after careful consideration, he chose Tottenham Hotspur. So Sunday, the Spurs took on Chelsea, and damned if the game wasn't one of the best sporting events I've ever watched (a no-look header goal by Tottenham Hotspur defender Michael Dawson was almost as cool as Pele's bicycle-kicked goal against the Nazis back in '44). Period. And now I'm a Tottenham Hotspur fan.

Johnny Got His Gun

People are, somewhat understandably, giving John Kerry shit for his recent ill-timed comments. You know what I'm talking about.

The thing is, he's sorta right.

I've half-jokingly pointed out on a couple of other websites that history is on Kerry's side; by and large, nations' armies (including our own) have been composed of the lower strata of society. If you're looking to find a nation that took an egalitarian approach to filling the ranks, you'd need to set the Wayback Machine to Sparta, circa 480 BC. The rich don't fight wars; they either hire or coerce the less affluent to do it for them. And it's not a far stretch to say that the lower one is on the economic pyramid, the more likely it is that one's education is lacking.  Yes, these days we have a volunteer army, and the ranks are comprised of perhaps the best trained, best educated fighters in the history of warfare. Weaponry and tactics these days are a tad bit more complex than what Leonidas' hoplites had to contend with, so it's wrong to say that Gomer Pyle is the archetype for today's soldier.

But here's something to think about: in a Zogby poll of American troops in Iraq conducted in February 2006, 85% of the soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen surveyed said that they believed that the U.S. mission there was to "retaliate for Saddam's role in the 9/11 attacks."