Esthetic Ravings (again)

Going to a party in the desert is a undertaking.  Between the packing, the planning, the organizing, the trip, the setup, the party, the booze, the tear-down, the trip home and the unpacking, there are a great many things which are added together to create the experience. This creates a situation where only the dedicated appear at the show, making for a less dramatic weekend, but also makes you see and realize a great deal of things.   A few of these things really stuck out in my mind, and I will now share those with you for what is bound to be another journey through my thought processes.

Things learned this weekend:

- The correct music is essential for a good road trip.  Breakbeats or Drum and bass for the night part when you are so tired you kinda want to stop driving, Tom Petty and Willie Nelson for driving through Eastern Oregon ranch land under a bright sun, and something fast paced and fun for the beginning.  Chill tunes for the drive home.

-  Fast food is essential for road travel, but nothing that makes a person disposed to filling up with gas that he is then forced to diffuse into the cabin of the vehicle.  Onions are another no-no, especially when mixed with carbonated vegetables.

-  Driving with your knees to do such things as change CD’s, hit the person next to you, mess with the stereo, eat food or look for something that probably isn’t really that important in the grand scheme of things is ok, unless you are driving a car with bad ball joins, loose steering and a bad alignment.  In that case I would not recommend it.  One can only wobble all over the highway at 70 for so long before the Cops or Murphy’s Law begin to take notice.

-  Some people would think that getting up in the morning and eating breakfast burritos while drinking a luke-warm beer placed outside your tent before stumbling into it to pass out for the evening would be a terrible idea.  Those people would be wrong.

-  Everything is better when cooked in bacon grease.  Everything.  Vegans and vegetarians don’t think so, though in this case I am not able to defer to their judgement.

-  There are a very few things in this world or any other than spending a weekend with your nearest and dearest friends, surrounded by nature and permeated by high-quality music.  It’s just not very good for your pores.

-  Dancing is good for you.  I cleans out your soul, gets you exercise.   Dancing next to a huge, deep, nearly invisible mud puddle is bad for your shoes.  Please keep this in mind.

-  Flirting with a cute woman who looks as if she works in a library but still has a Rock Shoxx sticker on her car is something that is fun to do.  Keeping her attention on and off for a couple of hours is fun to do as well.  I recommend everyone try it.  Just don’t try it on the highway, or else there is a chance you will end up almost run off the road by a tractor-trailer loaded with farm-impliments.

-  Potato guns sound like real guns.  They are not – they are actually far cooler than real guns – though one does not look nearly as awesome firing one.

-  Oregon has the coolest town names ever.  Be it The Dalles, Dufur, Fossil, Celilo, Blalock, John-Day, Haines, Umatilla, or any of the other plethora of names used by the Native Americans to name their people and transferred to the possession of the not-as-native Oregonains, they are awesome and make for much laughter when driving across the state.

-  Getting back to the city after spending a weekend in the desert is a jarring experience, especially when returning to Portland.  Coming in from the east on 84 you are surrounded by trees in one of Americas most beautiful places and within literally 2 miles are in the middle of the city.  It’s dirty, shiny, and has too many straight lines.  It smells like exhaust and is full of people moving fast.  It is a far cry from the relaxed and plesent atmosphere of the Idaho back-country.  It kinda sucks.

This is but a sample of the things that crossed my brainicles while on my sojurn as desert-camper.  Unfortunately I forgot my notebook, so I had to write these from my memory, and for those of you who know me, this is a somewhat dicey proposition.

Evolutionary Ravings (get it?)

There are a few things I want to write about concerning the crazy weekend I had last weekend.  I’m going to put them into a few different posts here, in no particular order other than the way they came out of my head into my notebook.

Onward:

Unpacking after a trip is usually a marginally entertaining affair at best.  In this case, after driving across three states (ok, across one, halfway through another and about 10 miles of the first), partying my butt off with a thousand of my closest friends, seeing things that I can;t put into words and then driving home with a sleeping friend in the car and deep, dark techno on the speakers, I find unpacking to be a bit of an even in and of itself.

I find myself listening to a mix from a good friend of mine that was especially tailored to get ready for the desert party season and pulling things out of my bags that probably shouldn’t be there, and experiencing things that I shouldn’t be experiencing.

A list for you:

- Dirt. Or rather; dust.  The dirt where we were camped is dirt only in name.  When I think of dirt I thin k of dark, healthy stuff that my mom grew roses in or that I always seem to get stuck to some part of my clothing when dressed up.  This stuff is a fine, Talc-like dust that permeates everything it comes into contact with.  Nevermind that I still had dust from last year in one of my bags, every single thing I pull out of these bags and tent-sacks is covered with a fine, static-charged layer that wont come off under any but the most direct application of force.

-  Clothes.  Mine stink.  It rained, was sunny, humid and dry, hot and cold at the same time sometimes out there by the Arrowrock res.  Indeed, my body went through so many fluctuations of temperature my sweat glands didn’t even know what to do with themselves.  Add to that the sweet smell of said dust, the burny smell of repeated bonfires, the grody smell of close contact with people who have been going through the same ordeals as I, and that scent released by tents and tents alone and you can imagine what the clothes coming out of my bag smell like.  Also: socks.  gross.  (I want to take the time to point out that my spellchecker does not recognize the words burny or grody to be parts of the enlish language.  It is wrong.)

-  Cigarette butts.  They are everywhere.  In pockets bags, bottles….  It seems as if these nefarious little packages of used-tobacco got peeved at the prospect of being left to (possibly) bio-degrade in Idaho and jumped into whatever transportation vessel they could find and hitched a ride home with me.

-  Wires.   Only a DJ would bring this many god-damn wires to the desert to go camping.  srsly.

Other random things found while unpacking:

- 11mm socket

- 3 headphone adapters (I showed up with one)

- glow in the dark junk of several lengths, widths and sizes.

Anyway, the unpacking of this trip would tell someone who witnesses the slow progression of strange revealing itself from my luggage that this trip was anything but an ordinary trip to the woods, and it is serving as a reminder to me of the amazing time I shared with some amazing people.

Except for Joe.

Esthetic Forecast: Awesome

HELLO EVERYONE!

I hope that you happy campers that are going to Esthetic this weekend will get some tasty info out of this.

Your Evolution weather report is as follows:

According to the National Weather Service page for the area northeast of the Arrowrock reservoir, the days will be in the mid eighties with a slight chance of thunderstorms on Saturday, and the nights around 50 with, again, a slight chance of thunderstorms.  So bring yer suncreen kids.

Also making an appearance in the skys over our little gathering will be some pehnomena that most people wont know about:

There is a slight (slim to none) chance of Noctulescent clouds making an appearance in the northern sky just after sundown.  Look to the north and west to see if you can get a pic of these rare and beautiful clouds.

Also coming over the horizon will be the International Space Station.  This is a very bright dot in the sky, shining at roughly magnitude -2.0 (brighter than Venus and visible in the daytime sky) and traveling out of the south/southwest sky at 5:30 am and taking about 5 and a half minutes to travel across the sky.  Exact info can be found here.

Your Music Forecast reads 100% chance of bangers with a good chance of chill shiz, with daytime oonts brought to you b those who have sound camps in the meadow. (hint: I’m playing Friday afternoon, so come check out some chunky funky techno)

Let me take this as a moment to remind you all that this is a pack in/pack out event.  This means that you bring out everything that you brought in with you, in trash bags, all the way back to Boise.  Please do not pile trash near the buildings on the way out, as the promoters get charged extra and it just makes us look like a bunch of goons.  We are going there to be close to nature, so please help keep it preserved for the next people who go out to do the same.  Any other info that you may need wil be at the Esthetic site.

I can’t wait to see all of you out there in the desert.  Camping in the desert with a bunch of my friends and some good choons is one of the things that keeps me going through the dark and wet winters we have here in the NW, and I can’t wait to share the nature, music, and fellowship with all of you.  Please party safely out there and please, if you see me, come say hello!

Love and Peace

-Jeremy-

Your Mom’s a Ball Joint.

My car ahs a problem; it pulls to the left, and has a tendency to wobble down the freeway.  Due to this, I took it in to get an alignment today.  No big deal, right?  The guy in the big shed works his magic and I get a car that drives in a straight line.

Not so much.

It turns out that I need new Ball Joints.  Not a life-threatening thing in their own right, loose ball joints lead to things like wheels not having the strength to maintain straight-line orientation that they are supposed to have, thus affecting alignment and things like that.  I tell the jolly man, “OK, so how much to have them fixed?”  his response was enough to make my cringe visible from the moon: 750 buck.

So the debate begins to rage in my head: is the money the car fixer-upper says he wants to fix-up the car worth the heartache of doing it yourself?  Let’s see.

A new set of Ball Joints will cost me a little over a hundred bucks, with tool rental and grease and such.  It will cost me an afternoon of cussing, sweating, probably cutting myself at least once, cussing some more, getting dirtier than I probably need to, dropping small parts on a floor that is not conducive to finding small parts, and generally being pissed off and frustrated.

The benefits are that I will have once again proven my worth as a dude who can fix his own car, will have a new texture in my skin (at least until the grime wears off), will be somewhat lighter due to water and blood loss, and will have saved a sum equivelant to one-half the GDP of most South-American nations.

In light of this little discussion we are having, I think I’ll do the work myself when I get back from Desert Fiasco V1.0 and hope to god that I get it right.

Wish me luck?

Dear Sir:

To the Jack-Hole in the BMW SUV who looked my car up and donw and snorted contepmtuously at it,

I am writing to make a few things clear to you which I don’t believe are.  Indeed, I believe that in your actions you have proven that there is little between us but animosity and thus I believe that I should be allowed to voice my opinion of you as bluntly and publicly as you did to me this afternoon while sitting in traffic on I-84.

I do, as you so glaringly pointed out, drive a vehicle that would be considered by most to be somewhat less than ideal.  My car was built in a time of somewhat questionable aesthetic sense.  It’s 234,000 miles have been rather unkind to its exterior, and there are some rusty spots and some paint deficiencies.  All told she could definitely use a good buff and wax, but couldn’t we all?  My vehicle is loud and large and has a tendency to wobble down the highway, and yes, it kind of smells a little like gasoline and hot metal when I put the pedal down.  So believe me when I say that I understand your reaction to her looks.

To a point.

All of that being said, the fact that you had the audacity to sneer at me while I passed you serves only to high-lite the negative parts of yoru attitude and the positive sides of the vehicle that I drive.  Yes, your car was built in Germany (perhaps Mexico) by German engineers and such.  It also cost 70,000 dollars to purchase.  Mine cost 55.  Your vehicle consumes dead dinosaurs at a rate that would make an Abrams tank blush, but mine can drive halfway across the state on a tank of those same ‘Saurs.  Your vehicle screams at the pretense and overall attitude of the person who drives it – in this case your painfully smug ass – while mine shows that America was once good at building cars and that I am secure enough in myself to drive a car that doesn’t glimmer in the sun.

Indeed, sir, I beg you to consider the position that you have put yourself in.  By blatantly projecting your upper-class holier-than-thou attitude onto those around you you have firmly cemented a place for yourself in the stereotypes that you probably don’t even know exist.  Indeed you are the very epitome of what I hate about the upper-crust Portland elite.

Please take the next possible opportunity to wrap that overly-expensive piece of precision-machined sheet metal around the nearest Oak tree and rid the populace of this glorious city of the prospect of having to deal with your smug attitude and truly, truly terrible comb-over.

Thank you for your time, and I hope desperately that you fall headfirst off the Morrison bridge. The favor of a reply is not requested.

Regards,

-Jeremy Mills-

It’s A Twister! (But Not Really)

I write in here about the weather quite a bit.  I am a self-described weather geek who loves extreme weather and has a slightly unhealthy obsession with clouds; one that usually manifests itself when driving down the highway listening to loud music.  This has the effect of giving me yet another reason to look somewhere other than the road, and getting me weird looks as the guy who is always looking at the sky.  Luckily for me, I live in the Northwest, a place of perpetually changing weather patterns and people who have no idea what to make of that fact.

Today while I was at work this came clearly into focus.  Around one people started talking about the “Big Blow” that was coming, spreading tales of tornadoes in Salem and Hurricane-Force winds in the Gorge.  They said these things forgetting that there are always Hurricane-Force (I think anything that sounds like a super-hero conglomerate needs to be capitalized) winds in the Gorge and that there has not been a tornado in Salem in…. ever, I don’t think.

People were complaining to me, as the sky in the south grew darker with towering storm clouds, that they were worried about getting home (on one of the largest and busiest interstate freeways in the country), that they were afraid for their house (despite the REAL tornado that came through a couple years ago and did almost no damage), that they were afraid for their animals (even though animals are far more resilient than people), and that they were afraid fo the power going out… as if a lack of power means the end of the world.

Actually, since we would have stopped serving those addicts their caffeine and sugar impregnated drinks, it probably would have been.

Anyway, the storm showed up and the wind almost blew one of our umbrellas over.  Yes, it blew, it rained about an inch and a half in about 20 minutes – the only real dangerous part of this storm since that is flash flood-style rain – and I saw one lightning bolt.

One.

Then the clouds went away and the sun came out and evaporated all the rain and everything was back to normal… except for the news stations, who had their trucks adn talking heads all over the city showing the grisly details of the branch that fell off of a tree because of the wind or the intersection that was totally flooded out with the three inches of rain the drains couldn’t handle or the few thousand people without power.  Basically totally blowing things out of proportion and making a spring storm look like a midwest-scale supercell breakout.

It’s no wonder everyone here thinks that the slightest weather is going to bring about the apocolypse.

Granted, the last couple of years have been kinda grisly as far as weather is concerned.  We’ve had some floods, an ungodly (for us) amount of snow, and a couple of decent blows.  All things that made today’s storm look like a summer picnic.  That being said, the amount of worry and terror that I saw in these people’s eyes as a single cloud moved into town was so unwarranted as to be asinine.

And despite it all I knew that I was the one with the real problem as I watched that cloud move in and got all tingly hoping to see some really severe, scary awesome weather.

RABBLE!

Well kids, it finally happened.

The colossus that is GM has finally succumbed to the fact that its cars suck and has declared bankruptcy.  In any other nation this would meant that its assets would be auctioned off and its wealth spread around to all of its shareholders to make good their debts.  This would allow other companies with ideas that weren’t forged in the early 20th century to step up and innovate, refresh the consumer, and come up with their own version of a market for their wares, thus spurring the improvement of the overall economic environment for their country.

In America this means that the shareholders and bondholders are given the royal shaft and the company is allowed to keep its monies and reorganize itself into another company whose ideas WERE forged in the early 20th century and thus stifle any further competition by upstart companies and perpetuating the continuous economic downturn caused by poor planning and shitty cars.

Ok.  Now that I have that out of my system, lets look at this another way.  I drive a GM(C). It was made in 1992 (shut up) and runs like a champ.  It was built when the dominance of the American brand was complete, and a 4.2 litre engine could still drive a couple hundred miles between fill ups.  It has 230,000 miles on it and still runs like a Swiss watch.

Well…  like a good Seiko, maybe.

Still, this car was built by a company that knew what would work and what would not.  For some reason this is the same company that thought it an intelligent action to create a brand of cheap, high-mileage cars to sell to the masses.  Saturn then began to compete against GM in general and started winning, meaning that GM was effectively sapping its own money away from itself by undercutting its own larger, more expensive models.  Way to go guys.

And let us not forget the fact that GM thought it a good idea to acquire Hummer.  Lets take a vehicle that was originally designed for the military to fight in forests, burns bunker-fuel, and has the un-refuled range of a go-cart and market them to people who are hearing the first rumblings of their self-induced environmental degradation and know – at some unconscious level – that they are the most gluttonous people in the world.

Where is the disconnect here?  Where is the point that the poor decisions made by this company over topped the good ones and tipped the company over the brink into the financial netherworld?  Is it really possible that the sheer size of these American companies and the institutional momentum involved in their decision making has put them so far behind the curve that they are no longer feasible in the world market?

The answers to these questions are I don’t know, years ago (though only those who know anything about cars – thus not the vast majority of Americans – saw it until now), and emphatically yes.

That is why they have to go.  They have to.  We need to allow some of the smaller companies in this country, those that are straining at the bit to get their new ideas out from under the umbrella of corporate special-interest and presented to a waiting populace a chance to take their place as the alternative to trucks/SUV things that have 6.8 litre HEMi engines and could tow a supertanker into dry-dock.

Electrics, hybrids, solar, shit I’d drive a steam-powered car if it got better mileage AND polluted less than the 8,000 pound particulate-spewing monstrosities that I dodge on a daily basis in my rather nice neighborhood.  These technologies need government money to come to fruition, money that is wasted trying to keep anachronistic companies with outdated business plans and no real idea what the market is like anymore afloat.

I know I’m on a big soapbox here, and that the problem probably isn’t as simple as I make it out to be (though I’m pretty sure it’s close) but still, come on.  Doesn’t it make sense that things need to change when the entire world is making cars that out perform ours in every regime except raw horsepower and the American people are taking money earned here and sending it to Japan by buying cars made in Nebraska?

Just doesn’t make sense to keep on going the way we have been, that’s all.