High Temple Of Chocolate

The next best thing to the coffee already being brewed when you crawl out of bed in the morning (which NEVER happens) is when you come home from what could be described as the longest day evah and there's a tidy brown package sitting on your doorstep from mom and dad, and inside this tidy package are a couple treasures wrapped gently in newspaper along with a note that says "from our trip to Sicily"—and these treasures turn out to be CHOCOLATE. Yeah, the dark evening sings when you get to bite into a thick bar made in the old style with cocoa beans so freshly ground you can feel the grains sliding over your teeth. Cut with butter and sugar, spiced with the deep mysteries of a foreign land. It nearly saves your life, this type of thing.

Sicily is, your google machine will tell you, the "high temple of archetypal chocolate." I am simply lucky enough to be bound by blood to someone who has journeyed there.

Desert Dreams

My feelings about the desert can be summed up in these pictures. The heat coming off the sandstone. The cool shade of the canyons. The dead and live pinions twisted by the wind. At sunset, a soft ponderous silence settles over everything and you can sit there on the edge of the esplanade, awash in light holding every color of the spectrum.

Around about November, I can't help thinking about the desert now and then—wishin it was a little closer, maybe an eight-hour drive away? If it were, I'd be there right now, typing this from a picnic table on the rim of a rincon. However, such places are many days traveling away, so I'll settle for the kind of pictures (and dreams!) that—on a deeply soggy morning like this one—give tired men hope.

Sojourning

In fact, sometimes you gotta get out of town. Even if it's just to the beach for the day—even if it's just to walk all clumsy through the deep sand with ocean-bred ions washing over you and the dog running far in the wildness of joy. The drive's only an hour, it's not like you went to Mexico or anything, but a short trip like this can be just the thing for telling at least one embarrassing story in the car (maybe about your freshman year in high school), and then eating a couple diagonally cut sandwiches in a parking lot near the beach trail—the food tasting resplendent because you're outside in the salty air. It's not like you conceived the fucking meaning of life, but you did get out of town. Do you know what I mean about this?

Also, maybe you'd have enough time to stop at the Tillamook Cheese Factory and watch people in hairnets and safety glasses chop colossal blocks of cheese down into the manageable 12oz hunks we see in the grocery. Frankly, the enormity of those primordial cheese blocks will be forever emblazoned in my memory. So. Much. Cheese. If a girl like myself had to measure my cheese intake for the year, would it amount to one of those?!!! And after seeing said measurement, would I ever eat a bite of extra sharp cheddar again?!!!

Denver I Do

After I walked up the side of a mountain and gasped in the razor-thin air; after I ate an all-veg meal from my parents' large garden; after I skated Lafayette park in ungodly heat with Ben and some Midwest road warriors; after I stood outside watching the night sky flash like a pink strobe light with the thunder rolling around in my rib cage; after I smelled fresh rain on hot dirt; after I drank too much wine and played very many matches of ping pong, which is an odd game requiring infinite finesse ... after all that, I watched my big sister get married in her backyard in the city of Denver in the state of Colorado.

If you don't believe in love as a politico-religious institution, then you're in good company. But all you gotta do is watch closely and see the way two people can look at eachother with flashing eyes to know that there's some real-love stuff in this universe (although it gets confused with lots of other of things, I think).

Aaanyway, Melissa and Sarah climbed up in front of a small crowd of people and read some lines they'd written about each other—talked about being a family, about knowing themselves better in the face of each other, about overcoming their own deficiencies in order to form a more perfect kind of whole. Some of us trembled and gripped our hands over our hearts. Some of us blinked away big tears. Say what you want—this lay-your-souls-bare shit is pretty heavy when it's real. The rest of the night was a blur of champagne and ganache. And for real, can you believe we live in a country/world where peeps won't give these two the right to enter into the social contract that is marriage?!

Sarah and Melissa—civil union number 440 in the state of Colorado!

Sizzling at Lafayette, but SO fun.

I never go stag to a wedding.

Wedding DJ of the future!

Sk-amping

I'm not sure how I could possibly be lucky enough to have spent a weekend doing things I like very much with 9 other people I like very much. It all started as a plan in my neural pathways but became a skateboarding/camping trip of kinda epic proportions. As the first mision of the summer, there was nothing to compare it to, but I can just  hope that any subsequential trips (of which there'll be many?) will measure up.

First stop, Hood River skatepark; second stop, the Hood River (brrrr); third stop, 76 gas station for ice cream and chips; fourth stop, The Dalles skatepark; fifth stop, the patch of shade beside The Dalles skatepark; sixth stop, our campsite along the Deschutes River. We made camp under the watchful eye of the ranger, who didn't cut us any fucking slack on our perimeter even though we had seven tents to fit. That's okay—it was cozy. Then dusk fell, and so came one of the best parts of any camping trip—sitting around the firepit sharing snacks and sips and stories.

After dark, the wind carried the smell of night and sage brush. The moon, I need to report, was an orange crescent that had risen slowly over our roasting hotdogs, and then a few hours later—as we lounged on a dark hillside neath the stars—plunged back below the horizon impossibly fast. Jesse played the guitar. We all watched it go.

Tight quarters.

Hood River secret spot.

Last light on the Deschutes. No reason why you wouldn't want to stay right there, right then, for, like, ever.

Camp cooks.

Almost as many dogs as humans—at any given moment at least one of them barking.

Morning light, dogs and dudes everywhere.