30 Essentials [#28] -- Retro?

Kerouac's 30 Essentials :: #28 -- Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better

From sometime this fall:

“I am Annie’s Ford car. I am the mess that is in your car. I live here as stuff. I am Annie’s jumper-cable. I am Annie’s gigantic blank tablet unfolding in front of me, each word. I am the consoling pad to describe the tremors of Darin’s soul.

I am the cloudy Rainey day that hovers over us. I am the drizzle that falls upon the windshield of the car. I am separate from all others but not alone. […]

I am the bottomless mimosa that drives the inner economy. I am the commerce of police lights intercepting a troubled soul. I am the subsequent citation and jail time; a malpractice suit follows.

I am the 49 degree that chills the summer spirit. I am the spirit – that of the music pulsing through your technology. I am the notion of being two places at once.

Or trying to be. […]

I am the recycled paper of a speeding ticket. I am now a failure to stop.

I am ultimately the racketeering letters of language.”

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I am not Chuck Palahniuk, nor Jim Uhls.

I am speeding along on some train, look above, there's the Puget Sound. The same rain falls on the spirit, just more often, welcoming the diaspora back. Look closely, the camera strains.
To focus on the raindrops adhered to the window ("Wow, a hydrogen bond!")or endless infinity?

Pen Poetry

Written 3/18/2010

#10 – No time for poetry but exactly what is

“If America is the car, Canada has been busses to me. Busses to catch busses that may not even be there. Busses of the same bus I’ve already been on once today already. This bus has less than five people on it and fine leather seats. Plenty of selection so I’m propped up against the window and sitting out in two seats to write properly.

Dylan has procrastinated on me: Tuesday or Monday we had spoken about transportation for getting down to Vancouver as he was trying to see his sister before she leaves for Australia. He has an environmental stewardship paper due tomorrow that he has been procrastinating on for some time. Perhaps he is unsure of the collegiate paper format but good luck to him on getting that done.

And since he was out climbing (in shorts) at the crag instead of writing he declined to give me a ride and didn’t notify me of whether or not he was able to provide transport. (Included in the narration of something pulled from a journal because of its dualistic, both-minor-and-major implications at the time of writing but since this is in parenthesis things obviously worked themselves out).

I gave up on him at 7, it’s now 8:33 pm.

No cash remaining for the Greyhound – a plan has been enacted, hastily, in place of the $20: I am thus taking (and writing from) the VANOC bus to Whistler, en route from Squamish, and hoping to catch one of the departures to Vancouver, though completely uncertain of the time it leaves. (Note for those unfamiliar with Highway 99 or haven’t figured this out yet: Squamish is in the very middle of both of them – so essentially I was going north to come south to go further south, all in the same trip).

The person I am going to see replies by text to a 160 character version of what I have just described and applauds it, wishes me luck, and my pen and writing begins to die.

“Helped me do a lot of things.
Write some good stuff.
An ode to a dying pen.
VBall Grip, Fine and thank you for
piloting the ink from the tip to my
paper and flowing wrist
across the page and
maybe black death is not
so imminent so do I
waste it upon a poem?”

The pen now sits at 5% ink remaining, I haven’t given it a death-write yet … perhaps a small essay can be derived from that or some haikus but the ink becomes so thin and transparent and slow to write that I enjoy keeping my pen in that purgatory stage where if I forget that if it was dying and pick it up again, I’ll curse myself for forgetting and be forced to run across the street to the drugstore to buy two new ones though a smart writer once told me to keep at least three operational utensils upon my person at all times.

21 cm

# 8 -- The unspeakable visions of the individual, and I don’t know exactly how to relate it to my recent, and upcoming experiences, but, wait, yes .

I envisioned most of this writing on the bus north to Whistler.

It had been a slow morning; I had set my alarm to make the 07:20 bus from Squamish but for some reason, kept sleeping. That dualistic battle. “I’m on vacation, so I want to sleep, but … all the freshies keep falling …. First tracks …” and dreams of snow so I keep sleeping.

The night before exactly all preparations are made to facilitate a smooth exit from the house: the coffee is preground, in the espresso machine, the water, already ready for boil. The English muffins at the ready near the toaster, complimented by the peanut butter and honey.

The kettle filled with water – the oatmeal packets and spoon already in the bowl.

Vitamins on the table. Lunch pre-packed. Clothes at the foot of the bed.

So leaving would be easy – the getting up was hard. I debated in my mind the efficacy of getting on the workforce bus without obvious work to do. Getting caught poaching. A lot of juju ran through my mind.

Sequestering that thought, I took off to make the bus – telemark boots on, ski pants, rain jacket, backpack.

Skis affixed to backpack, along with poles, riding my single speed mountain bike across Squamish to narrowly catch the bus. One minute to spare.

And I decided, as my clothes were drying out from the rain, that there has to be one essay, at least, on the actual skiing that takes place at Whistler – it is not a life entirely dictated by volunteering and writing from the Village to get away from Squamish. So today was the splurge – my one purchase of a lift ticket. A momento.

No mental grief. It had to be done – I couldn’t resist. The snow was coming down all the way from Alice Lake Provincial Park to Whistler … as I debated skinning up, I realized that today was the day I was going out with a bang.

I hopped on the gondola. Amped would be a good word. Amped that I was riding up with an Albertan from the tar sands, telling me he was making $10,000 per week.

Well, my own lack of $10,000 or $200 a day living allowance or not, I was riding.

And I remember the actual riding, the blistering winds at the top of Harmony Chair (eventually getting closed due to whiteout conditions) and the first run, the powder up to my knees, and I felt smooth.

I felt connected to the mountain – as if it was accepting my positive energy and creating a perfect flow of technique, style, lines, powder, just for me.

I was complimented on my telemark technique. “You’re hot,” the older woman said, of my style.

I blushed.

The trees were there, maybe, or I just didn't see them. I was just skiing pillows, lines where turning was necessitated by intuition.

The packed powder, the more, the better to rip, to flex my style, my quads, to show to Whistler the perspective Mont Du Lac puts on telemark style.

We can ski. Make no mistake about the Midwest telemark movement.

And once you get us on your mountains, expect nothing, only that you may find yourself learning from a way of skiing that was taught to me through watching. Once I got the chance to learn in the biggest, steepest bowls of Jackson Hole, WY, there was no turning back to alpine.

There, linking fifteen beautiful telemark turns, turns as a skier I knew were beautiful, brought an elation, a glow, to my soul.

“Keep riding – flex that foot, plant the pole – drop this escarpment, don’t think about the line, BE THE LINE.” (This gets easier with each cliff a person drops).

Telemark skiers know this – but all those that connect to energy through riding.

That is the unspeakable vision of the individual – that I feel that flow of energy and non-thought as I ski, just following gravity because I know it won’t lead me anywhere but down – and that’s exactly where I want to be.

Fiction: # 7: Blow as Deep as You Want to Blow

As I blow as deep as I want to blow, I’m thinking how. “Write about all interesting people, remove degrees of friendship,” I tell myself.

As the lack of energy in the air is palpable, people are confused -- it’s very quiet here. People are looking forward to the new Games.

As Paralympic flags go up in Whistler; I send Post back to the States.

As gone is the CTV Whistler Broadcast booth in Mountain Square, the bricks are back to being underfoot. People in general continue to pour off the slopes on this sunny day.

As some volunteers still have not gotten the memo about drinking in the uniform, après ski goes on … five beautiful girls sun themselves below the same sushi bar I waited with hundreds of others to catch a glimpse of the women’s Canadian bobsleigh team.

As décor is back to colorful snowboarders and Whistler women walking their dogs, 30% off Olympic merchandise signs go up.

As I’m trying to notice things for you, all around, there’s not much to notice on a walk and a half of the Stroll.

As one barista at Blenz asks another, “What’s going on here?,” the same answers her own rhetorical question. “There’s so much space!”

As I’m in Whistler because I had to get out of Squamish, I must go back to Squamish to eat.

As the cookies keep me alive, they are love to other people.

As I’m sunbathing outside with tea and talking to you on the telephone, I think of the moral of this story.

As the stories continue to flow, I work to deepen my integration. As I integrate, I get smarter. As I get smarter, I blow deep. As I blow deep, I remove the dust from my lungs and from the windowsills I look out upon the mountains.

Credit Card Theft and Happiness, part 1.

# 4 -- Be In Love With Your Own Life

I receive a call on the 24th, approximately 9:03 AM.
An extra ticket to the Men’s Cross-Country 4x10 Relay.

In love with my life.

It’s the premiere event of the Games for cross-country skiing, I would argue, topped only by the grueling endurance of the 50 km mass sprint.

The soundless segments of the 4x10 were often our motivation on the last race of the “regular season” -- the Grand Marais race – to keep the mental image of perfect technique in our minds.

Double pole, stride, rest, draft. Fluids, lunch, bibs back on and skating our way to stack ourselves up before the Sections team was named.

To see cross-country skiing, nobody narrating anything for me; I’m watching it, they come by directly twelve times from my vantage point, fresh snow on the ground, fresh snow falling as huge flakes, no more notes as the racers go by me a skate-pole length away.

Those extra centimeters gained from the classic poles come and go with the pushing and jostling into place to see the racers. Sometimes I’m close, the closest one, yelling as loud as I can at the entity of Petter Northug (with ghosts of Alsgaard propelling his glidewax and visions of Bjorn Daehlie and capturing his spirited sprint to the finish) and a cardboard sign to forever be there on camera. Then they are all gone, reemerging around the tricky right-hand corner and it’s a flat sprint in, one last side-step left, maybe forever as a racer, the final straightaway past the fans and Canadian flags and the camera-on-a-track.

And somehow Northug did it.
And somehow I’m being interviewed on NRK news for my (Pasha Kahn’s) sign. Somehow something tells me that now’s the time to make my once-in-a-lifetime-swag-Olympic-memorabilia: a hat, of all things. DnB NOR (think: the new Cresco) that I think I might be the only Minnesotan to own.

I scoop it right off of the head of a Norwegian, who got it from his brother Eldar Ronning. I cannot verify that it was his brother. I can verify I was standing in the queue waiting for the bus. He says it was his brother? Wrote the name down. Norwegians can be sly. The guy I bought it from was a Norwegian skiing out in Bozeman … so … perhaps either way.

The skiing, being there in person, without access to the big screen or Bob Costas brings back that intense moment of knowing the moment as an athlete. A desire to compete; to ski, to go fast and to go faster than others. That was love then; a requirement, training as an afterthought. Nobody is creating drama. No commercial breaks on course. No TV timeouts in a hotly contested relay.

My concerted efforts to make it to Whistler Olympic Park as a volunteer paid off. People on the Volunteer crew knew how much I wanted to go to a cross-country event.

Nothing but gratitude in return.

Things work out with emotion.
Back to Work, but volunteering, through the fog, to Whistler. Time is not a concern -- only happiness – to be in love with my life as it unfolds now.

Work ends.
A visitor from Minnesota arrives, freshly arriving from Victoria.

No posts while entertaining guests.
I do my best to show him around Whistler as to the best a quasi-local can.

Adventures begin.

More Norwegians tomorrow.

On the way to TEDx

# 2 -- "Submissive to everything, open, listening."

Ok Jack, for this one, many ways to go. I like to think of this re-manifesting itself in my life August 2009. But things actually started in February 2006 with an in-passing remark from Emily as we watched the Olympics.

"I want to go to the Olympics" was basically her decision after watching the figure skating. "I'll go with you."

So I began a coin collection four years ago, setting my goals in the back of my mind. And I am incredibly pleased that I am here now. It is still slightly unbelievable. As things in the rest of life began to go places, things had been working themselves out. The coin collection ends up around $60.

I get a call, working at 602 Pecan, it is VANOC, verifying housing for all volunteers back in August. "Do you have confirmed housing?"
"No, not yet," I reply.
"Well, that's the last thing to do before you're considered for an interview. I can uncheck this box if you can make an effort to find housing. Any idea where it will be? North Van? Burnaby? West Van?"
"How about Squamish?" I reply after thinking for a moment.
"Perfect," the woman replies.

Squamish was all I knew existed after traveling there for our bouldering trip, it was Chris Sharma's will upon my brother to find that inner rampage, to tear our tips, somehow get a call from Fischer, we're on the West Coast, picked up in a Prius and days later to Squamish, but only so quickly, so much left undone. Chris Sharma had first been here in 1999.

There was no other obvious choice for housing, nor a method to find it -- enter Craigslist. I click on eeny (too much money) meeny (nope, grammatical errors), miny (nope) and settle on moe.

Moe, besides being the Minnesota Daily's mascot, ended up being a random selection epitomizing "cosmos favoring the brave" (Correy's words) -- has brought me up to Whistler, introduced me to a brand of Squamish local, real people living here, I know these people now, everything is positive with an open mind and listening to what direction things are taken.

One of the people I met was able to get tickets to the Cross Country Sprints yesterday. Last minute she offered them up to me, knowing that it was my sport, a former passion, dormant recently but I know it always comes back to me with the seasons.

Submissive to everything does not mean I do not take time to stand firmly on things; it is that time when the conscience is not there, nothing is stopping things from being acted out when the doors are opened. Coming out here I had no idea I would be in for - tickets, events, dinners on behalf of the gracious nature of people and so much more is a result of a new attitude as a lifestyle and way of being, a perk to jumping at the opportunity to help others simply because there is no such thing as an inconvenience when the outline was defined four years ago and is finally being roughed out with detail now, edited on the fly to make sense of this opportunity.

A new $12

#1 -- "Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy."

So it is probably early on in the morning of November 24, 1987 that the destiny for this post was yielded to the world, a small baby girl born, all grown up twenty-two years later and back home from New York for a birthday celebration at a bar, coming to be known fictitiously as Block.

So a span of said time goes by. I meet this girl and friends and it is time to go. We walk along, in the rain, we take the bridge over the tracks.

I believe this type of thought is written in the notebook. But I don’t know where that notebook is. So that is why I’m hoping that my memory serves me correctly, it is doing ok so far, must not get too far ahead of myself now, so we keep walking.

I list off seven vices I have, aloud to the world to hear as we walk, still raining, raining heavy for so late in November I feel like, to Sam and Jordan and her friend who clearly was going to meet her man friend and leave us afterwards but they know vice is true so we finally arrive to perpetuate number three, drinking.

We get to the Bar.
We drink at the Bar.
We play darts. I consume one beer. The game of team cricket goes on forever, too long for an average attention span.

Jordan knows a lot of wonderful people, including Skeet, Ronko, Snoop, and Brent (I think), who all show up after a lot of frustrating texting between Skeet and Jordan.

I am taking notes, as per usual in bars, no longer finding the act of drinking exciting, only the meager bit of alcohol I can afford entering my bloodstream to be more appealing than the jumbled notes. I also encourage others to write something down – one girl is a journalism student who writes ten pages magnificently fast – too fast for Sam and I, but she is stymied on writing outside of a professional environment so I pass the notebook off to Skeet, he writes something? Or does Snoop?

Jordan is getting about ready to move. I don’t remember if we move. I think we go to Blarney, I really don’t remember anything then. Thus the notebook.

Jordan is not feeling superb as it often goes on a birthday.
It is still raining.
Jordan has heels on which pain her feet so I give her a piggy back ride.
Up and over the train bridge again, she on my back like a heavy canoe across a portage, running now to ease the pain and a desire of my own to get out of the rain, which we do.

We wake Leighton up, he is studying, studying away even in his dreams.
I fall asleep.

I write like Garrison Keillor, at least I hope I do, because I bring myself back on track here.

I lost the notebook. I have my theories – Skeet still has it or I left it at the bar (set it down subconsciously for others to have forever and read my thoughts on what it was like to sit in a deer stand for hours and what I saw; I hope you enjoy them, and my climactic descriptions of the shot and bullet through the heart of a doe) or I lost it giving piggy back rides. I lost it for a reason.

I lost it so I could write this.

I lost it so I could by four new little black books at $12 apiece to replace one that was lost, to restart chapter six, to bury away any panic of losing it again, to always have a spare.

I was without a life for a few days there. I went back to search for it the next day, retracing my steps, so many steps, nothing. I accepted loss forever (#19).