Currently Listening Ocean Avenue By Yellowcard Back Home see related

            Funny how from seventh grade your life focuses on getting away.  College is the big deal.  It’s higher education.  It’s forging the person you’ll be for the rest of your life.  It’s all that bullshit they feed you in the brochures and flyers.  And it’s parties, drinking, sex on Superbowl Sunday in the lounge and the Daytona 500 on the big screen.  But most importantly, it’s the mainland.  And we all have to get off this rock.

            Funny how that goes.

            I got so fed up with Hawaii.  The beach.  The trades.  The shaka.  The sand.  Kalanianaole Highway on a bike at midnight.  North Shore Grindz, Are You Hungry and Rainbows after school.  Five corners at five in the afternoon.  Sprinting Waikiki in the morning in the rain.  And Jordan coming to work all rip, like, "Ho brah, las' nite was so NUTS, brah!"  "Yeah?  Where you guys stay?"  "Ho brah, I dunno, brah.  Forget already, you know dakine?  Ho brah, but we was so bus', brah you know dakine?"  Yeah, Jordan.  We all know dakine.

And now look.

            Tacoma is one big, fat, obnoxious shopping mall.  And when the big shopping mall stops, you’ve got thousands and thousands of tiny shopping centers…mini-malls you could say…to fill in the gaps between.  It’s Sunday night…or Monday morning, depending on how you look at it…it’s one o’clock, and I’m on the bus.  At the end of Union Avenue you’ve got Tacoma Mall.  The main east-west road is ablaze with neon lights and gas station billboards.  It’s a neon inferno out there.  It’s like you walk down the street and you can get a tan.  And these aren’t Hawaii signs.  The biggest sign in Hawaii is at Chevron.  Small game.  The people in Tacoma do it right.  For starters, the Chevron sign is twice as big here.  That’s probably because every other neon sign is twice as big.  If it’s “Open” for business in Hawaii, it’s “OPEN!!!!” for business, amen goddamnit, in Tacoma.  Blue, red, pink, yellow, green, white, orange and every other color imaginable.  Macy’s, Taco Bell, Shari’s, Chevy, Olive Garden, Auto Zone and Bill’s Olde Tyme Fishing Supply.  Hundreds of tiny shops awash in a neon glow.  And, of course, it’s not enough to have the BIGGEST sign out there, because there comes a point where if you made them any bigger, cars on the street would run into them.  So they put them on flagpoles.  Some of these signs are fifty feet high.  I saw this three-story Best Western in and the sign was taller than the hotel.  And when THAT’S not enough, they put it on a SPINNING flagpole.  Hell, some of the Dodge dealerships have signs so big you can see them from I-5.  It’s ridiculous.

            So I’m at the mall, and I transfer to the Lakewood Transit Center.  And you read about it in the city guide.  Transit centers are “convenient connection hubs.”  They “have well-lit, highly visible shelters, seating, telephones and travel information.”  Well, if you consider a stainless steel shack by candlelight around 30-degrees at two in the morning in a snowstorm a “shelter,” it’s practically the Hyatt.  So it’s two in the morning, I’ve been waiting at the transit for an hour when genius finally gets the brilliant idea of walking around to find someplace indoors to chill…or rather, warm up…until the SeaTac bus comes.  And the neon Denny’s sign never looked so good.

            There’s this girl that works at this Denny’s.  Her name is Tiffany.  She must still be in high school.  Nice girl.  Soft spoken, a kind smile, and the cutest little fairy-nose that turns up at the end like an elf.  This Denny’s is in the middle of Nowheresville, Washington.  It’s a city just south of Tacoma, just north of the Air Force and smack dab in the middle of a god-forsaken concrete slab glitzed up with tacky neon billboards and dotted with quiet Irish pubs filled with Negroes and Hispanics. 

             So it’s slow, being Sunday night at two in the morning.  And who the hell is out on a Sunday night at two in the morning?  Apparently some high school delinquents in the corner smoking weed and talking sex.  There’s a middle-aged couple and their son, rolling in the door drunker than a skunk.  The room reeks of pot and whiskey, my patty melt doesn’t look too appetizing anymore.  The cook walked off the job as I sat, sipping ice water, reading Carl Sagan.  The manager went off after him, never to be seen again.  Tiffany does her best.  I have to go to the bathroom sink to refill my water, but it’s late and I don’t mind.  Denny’s is the candle in the window on my journey to Boston.  Refuge.  Warm and safe at last.

            Tip Tiffany out good.  Service sucked, but it’s three A.M. and she’s had a rough night.  The warmth and quiet was worth every penny twice over.  I look back, and she’s watching me walk across the parking lot.  Flash the shaka and the Hawaii smile.  Thanks, Tiff.  I see it now.  Shit.  It’s fuckin’ cold.  The snow is falling horizontally.

The bus is waiting at the transit.  The driver’s got the Supremes blaring, and he’s just having a grand old time, driving an empty bus on empty roads, driving his life away.  The bouncing and rattling feels better.  It feels like motion.  It feels like progress.  My iPod glows.  

Turn up the volume and blast some college music, the type that makes you feel young, reckless and ready to change the world.  Everything is behind me now, the papers, the presentations, a hundred pages of reading each night.  A long journey lies ahead, and finally I am free to fly.  Take one last look back.  It’s cold out.  Tiffany is talking with the high school kids.  And that Denny’s sign doesn’t look so bad after all.

             So what?  Yeah.  Lucky you live Hawaii.  Perhaps the saying is true…you never quite know what you’ve got until it’s gone.  Funny how that goes.

Currently Watching Crash By Holly Hunter, James Spader see related

I have just had a life-changing experience.  Something that has had such a great impact on me that I will remember it forever.  And my bike will too.  I've already hit a mailbox, a bus, a minivan and an unsuspecting Jaguar XJ8.  But this was something entirely different.  See, regardless of speed and direction, all of these objects are relatively soft.  Stamped sheet metal flexes qutie a bit, mailboxes give way if you hit them hard enough, and because of their wide profile, busses generally spread out the impact over a wider area.  But this was different.  Much different.  Today, I made friends with a pine tree.

The team had just finished spinning down after doing hill repeats (yuck...) and everyone headed back home, so thankfully none of my teammates saw.  But I was riding down the 6th Avenue hill toward the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.  And 6th is the main east-west road, so the cars are pulling 40 easily, so if you're feeling good and keep up you can get a great draft as long as you don't catch the stoplights.  Besides, you don't want to be riding any slower if you can help it on 6th.  So I'm riding behind this pickup truck, and you can't really see that far in front of you when you're drafting off the bumper.  Apparently there was a crash at an intersection just before, and there was still glass on the road.  So the pickup truck goes right over, no problem.  But seeing that a pickup truck's sidewall rubber is thicker than my entire tire, and seeing that my tire is inflated to 140 psi, the truck goes over glass fine and the bike doesn't.

Now there's two types of flats, the slow kind and the fast kind.  The slow kind is tricky.  If it's the front tire, the frontend gets loose and unresponsive.  If it's the rear tire, the bike starts to skid under power.  Sooner or later you lay the bike into a corner and OH SHIT the flat tire squirms off the bead and the wheel steps out.  And then you stop and say, oh yeah, there's a flat.  I knew that.  The fast kind are easier.  You're riding, minding your own business, and suddenly....psshhhhhhhhh!  Aw, shit. 

This flat was neither slow nor fast.  I was riding across the intersection and I hear two loud BANGS.  Shit, I thought somebody died.  I was looking around to see what happened and the tire just shredded itself apart.  So I press on the right pedal to help it along to the side of the road, because the rear end is all over the place and the frontend isn't turning, so something's obviously wrong.  And the bike slides out and now I know it's going to be a complete disaster.  I hear the bike hit the pavement, and it makes that God-awful scraping sound as pedals grind against the road.  It's dark already, so the sparks come off the road and break against my glasses.  Like all crashes, you don't feel the hot road-rash pain; you just get the wind knocked out of you and think, DAMNIT DON'T SCRATCH MY PAINTJOB!  And I remember my head getting knocked back as the back of my lid hit the curb.  So by this time the bouncing has stopped and the sliding starts.  Usually you slow down pretty quick once you start sliding, but that's on the road.  I found out today that you don't really slow down if you're sliding across wet grass.  So I'm dropping in on somebody's front lawn when I spot this big, tall, dark, brown thing coming at me.  And it's getting bigger.  Much bigger.  Of course everything is happening so fast, because literally half a second ago I was drafting a pickup truck.  So my brain begins to think to itself, "what the shit is that?!" 

And then it hit me.

After downloading the workout data from the computer, I found out I had spilled at 44.6 mph.  Now I don't know how many people have got into a fight with a pine tree at that kind of speed, but let me tell you, the pine tree won.  It's nothing like hitting a bus or a minivan.  See, pine trees don't have safety features like, say, crumple zones.

Just another little fun fact I've stumbled into during my first month in college.

The new form.  Soldate 60 add 1.5% red iron oxide, wheelthrown to 12-inches.  Rust terra sig stain add 8% red iron oxide.  Greenware.  Will fire to Cone 010 bisque and Cone 06 in reduction, no glaze with ferric chloride spray.  And I call it The Funky Buddha, because in order to be the funky buddha, one must funk the funk and brew the brew.

High on pots baby. 

Soldate 60 add 1.5% red iron oxide, wheelthrown to 15-inches. Terra sig stain with 4% red iron oxide and burnished with olive oil.  Greenware.  Will ramp to 010 bisque and saggar-fire in reduction.  With banana peels, because they're high in potassium...so it'll be red maybe?  So if anybody in the Seattle/Tacoma area likes bananas, I need ten to fifteen pounds of banana peels.

And this dude's the man.  David Greenbaum.  White stoneware, wheelthrown and hand altered, 23-inches.  White terra sig sprayed and fired to 010 bisque.  Second firing is saggar in reduction, with the bowl masked.  THIRD firing is pit with grass and copper in heavy reduction to the unmasked areas.  Amazing what you can do with clay, hay and a garbage can.  This piece was featured in Ceramics Monthly, August 2002 and sold for $2400.  Jeff Chang never even had a chance.

Currently Listening Say It Like You Mean It By The Starting Line see related

College rocks. 

So THIS is what y’all have been up to all this time…lucky bastards!  Who cares if the food sucks and it’s fricken 2-degrees outside!  Walking into Harry Potterville every day is the SHIT!  And professors that actually know what they’re talking about…what a CONCEPT!  It’s kind of a shock after coming from Kapiolani Community “College.”  The first thing I thought as I walked into my first class…what?!…you can’t just make shit up and be right all the time?!  What kind of college is this?  And we’ve got a ceramics room with more than one kind of kiln.  And ALL ACCESS, 24/7.  Sweeeeet!  Of course hardly anybody uses the studio, which is good because almost everybody sucks.  They’re too busy studying to play in the mud.

Speaking of which, you study the weirdest stuff in college.  The people at UPS are the smartest dumb people ever.  They actually understand this stuff, which is kind of scary considering what’s coming out of these books.  For example, our Philosophy class is dissecting Decarte, and if the goal is to break down our cultural lenses, Decarte is doing demolition.  We can’t trust our senses because Decarte must destroy everything doubtable?  Well how probable is his hypothesis that an evil genius created the Universe to deceive it?!  That dude was HIGH on some MEDIEVAL shit when he was doing his meditations.  How can you logically reason that your senses are deceiving you and yet conclude that your conceptual processing “intellect” can understand the world without ANY sensory input?  Sure a blind person can understand the concept of color.  Sure a deaf person can understand the concept of pitch.  But can somebody completely senseless…and I mean someone without sensory input, not somebody like Decarte…understand anything at all?  Our understanding of the world, and the means by which we can understand that world, are assimilated through our senses.  But it seems to make sense to some dumb smart people in class because he's their hero.  I just can’t seem to understand how somebody so smart can come up with something this retarded.  Oh that’s right…he’s French.  But seriously, who walks outside every morning and says, my underwear isn’t real, it’s really God deceiving me.  Because if they did, why the hell would they put them on?!  Hmmm…maybe Decarte was onto something after all…

And what the hell is a “Social Justice Hall?”  I’m living in a dorm full of these mopheads who advocate “social justice.”  And why is that?  Because discrimination makes society “less efficient.”  We need society to PROGRESS!  We must CARE for one another and treat everyone with the respect they deserve.  Even French philosophers.  Well dickheads, I’ve got news for you.  If you want to CARE for people in order to turn society into a socially and technologically progressing machine, how’s that different from discriminating against people to turn society into an economically progressing machine?  Civil rights, slavery.  Same concept, different means.  Sigh.  An entire floor of smart dumbasses.  It’s funny to watch.

No wonder college kids have that spaced-out pot-smoking reputation.  You got to be on something to understand this crap.  I mean, if you put enough big words into some textbook, I’m sure you could make the majority of the student body believe the sky is falling up.  And they’d be like, yeah dude…totally man.  Radical.  Stupid dumb smart people.

There’s only two things I miss.  The nice weather would be one.  Because you don’t know the meaning of cold until you ride the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in triathlon gear.  In the rain.  Yeah, bad idea.  The other would be the Dave Special.  Fresh island chicken, pan sautéed in garlic-infused olive oil, finished in a Marsalla-wine butter sauce, served over a bed of seasoned linguine pasta with caramelized onions, garlic, sautéed mushrooms, fresh baby spinach and sun-dried tomatoes.  And possibly a shot of amaretto to finish?  Oh yeah baby.  Happy, happy.

And how about them Seahawks!  WE'RE GOING TO THE SUPERBOWL!  Maybe we'll have another wardrobe malfunction.