Words, Music, & Outdoor Adventures

When I ask him “what’s up”. He replies:

Going to Hawaii on March 16 for a week.
My boss’s boss fell victim to of one of my patented rants and actually reacted properly (that is, to my liking).
Asked a NH software company if they had any T-shirts and got 10 of them, for free.
Haven’t missed an episode of 24 yet this season, but think the DVD route is the way to go.
Trying to see if I can go 8 weeks without going into the office.
Listening to the oldies show on WUNH.
Wondering if my neighbors think I’m dead.
Avoiding checking for belly-button lint.
Searching for Grand Theft Auto cheats so I can catch up with my brother.
Planning a fact-finding trip to Mississippi.
Driving a Kia (rental) till they find something better.
Mourning the death of Hunter S. Thompson.
Trying to stay perfectly still so I can hear the rhythm of the Universe in B flat.

how about you?

I reply:

Went out of town skiing this weekend.
Hanging out with a new guy who after the weekend tells me that he doesn’t really like me.
He wants to tell me why; I don’t want to know.
Going snowmobiling today up on Rabbit Ears pass.
I’m doing the snowshoe leg of a Pentathlon. It’s all up hill for the first mile. I think it’s gonna hurt.
Still training for my half marathon. 4 months until I have to run 12 miles. IF I run a 10 min. mile that is 120 minutes of running. I’ve never run for that long…..
I still love Steamboat. My one year anniversary is at the end of the month.
Life is good.

iIn my own worst seasons I’ve come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of a red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again.

It’s not such a wide gulf to cross, then, from survival to poetry. We hold fast to the old passions of endurance that buckle and creak beneath us, dovetailed, tight as a good wooden boat to carry us onward. And onward full tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute. To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another–that is surely the basic instinct. Baser even than hate, the thing with teeth, which can be stilled with a tone of voice or stunned by beauty. If the whole world of the living has to turn on the single point of remaining alive, that pointed endurance is the poetry of hope. The thing with feathers.i

“I have a picture in my mind of a tiny ranch on the edge of a stand of pine trees with some horses in the yard. There’s a woman standing in the doorway in cutoffs and a blue chambray work shirt and she’s just kissed her tall, bearded, and soft-spoken husband goodbye. There’s laundry hanging outside and the morning sun is filtering through the tree branches like spiderwebs. It’s the morning after a full moon, and behind the house the deer have eaten everything that was left in the garden.
If I were a painter, I’d paint that picture just to see if the girl in the doorway would turn out to be me. I’ve been out west ten years now, long enough to call it my home, long enough to know I’ll be here forever, but I stil don’t know where that ranch is. And even though I’ve had plenty of men here, some of them tall and nearly all of them bearded, I still haven’t met the man who has just walked out of the painting, who has just started his pickup truck, whose tire marks I can still see in the sandy soil of the drive.”

“I thought about the way we invent ourselves through our stories, and in a similar way, how the stories we tell put walls around our lives. And I think that it may be true about cowboys. That there really isn’t much truth in my saying cowboys are my weakness; maybe, after all this time, it’s just something I’ve learned to say.”

Wolfe’s letters resemble his novels: frenzied, expansive, rawly emotional and confessional, as chaotic as the American scene he celebrated. Most were written abroad, as the peripatetic Wolfe fled the distractions of critics and his destructive relationship with socialite Aline Bernstein.

Wandering and homesickness are constant themes.

Wolfe’s mercurial personality blazes forth as he rhapsodizes about America’s romantic grandeur and rails against “the sterility crowd,” the “sniffers, whiffers and puny, poisonous apes” like T.S. Eliot and other Lost Generation writers he felt were in love with despair.

Wolfe emerges as driven, intensely committed, locked in a torturous, exhausting struggle with his talent and material that verges on madness. A writer reliant on his editor’s judgment but also possessing a clear artistic vision. High-strung, hypersensitive to criticism and in need of constant reassurance, he is difficult, demanding and “crammed to the lips with living.”

“Straight from the heart - the truest “American” novel, February 17, 2000
Reviewer: Mark Shanks (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews

I feel sorry for anyone who can’t find echoes of their own youth in Wolfe’s undeniably Romantic writing. You won’t find clipped Hemingway-esque sentences, nor the pages-long obscure wanderings of fellow Southerner Faulkner, but Wolfe recreates his world so perfectly that filming it would be redundant. “Self-absorbed”? Yes, how else could anyone produce a literary translation of a life’s experience? Cliched? Not when it was written, although as a “coming of age” novel it has many predecessors, none were so ambitious in scope or detail. Achingly, achingly nostalgic, beautifully written, TRUE to itself, sparing nothing of the author or his vision. Pretentious? Hardly, especially when set next to the Oprah-fied books on the best-seller lists today.

This and its immediate succesor “Of Time and the River” are, to me, arguably the finest books ever written describing not just life in America but more importantly the sense of loss through time and distance of love, family, and home and the emotional maturation that follows.
No, I couldn’t recommend this to EVERYbody, but if you haven’t become too sophisticated to remember what it was really like to be young, lonely, in love, or homesick, or to see though a child’s eyes the wonder in a leaf, a stone, a door; to cry “Oh, lost!” over a memory, you will find much to cherish in this book.”

I keep tellin myself this is the right thing to do
I was wastin her time, waitin on dreams that just werenit comin true
And this old highway seems to understand
Leadin me on to somewhere that no one knows my name
I got the window rolled down, I got the radio up
Iim doin all that I can to get my mind off us

What I need to do is turn this car around
Drive as fast as I can til I see the lights of our hometown
And run to her, take her in my arms
Make her see how sorry I am, well that shouldnit be so hard
But I drive on, and on, and on

Eighty-seven more miles gets me into baton rogue
Thereis a buddy of mine who says he might find some work that I can do
Or maybe head up north to knoxville, tennessee
I know my baby sister, has got a couch where I can sleep
Now the sunis goin down on my broken heart
Lord, I gotta get back before I go too far

He started writing stories for Chicago newspapers and magazines, and then got a job as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Daily Star and went off to Paris with his wife Hadley. They moved into an apartment in the Latin Quarter. Hemingway liked to give the impression that he was a poor bohemian, but he actually had plenty of money. He and his wife traveled around Europe and went to the horse races and ate in nice restaurants.

He became friends with a lot of writers who were in Paris at the time, Fitzgerald and Joyce and Pound and Gertrude Stein. And he wrote every day, sometimes in his apartment, sometimes in cafEs. He wrote about one of those cafEs, “It was a pleasant cafE, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old waterproof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a cafE au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write. I was writing about Michigan and since it was a wild, cold, blowing day it was that sort of day in the story.”

“I’ve always loved the ocean and the feeling I get when I’m near it. It is odd becuase I grew up in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. The ocean humbles me. It reminds me of just how many possibilities in life there really are. It’s infinite.”

I did it! I’m officially a triathlete.

LODGE, KRISTEN Bib #1765 F 30-34 STEAMBOAT SPRINGS , CO 80488

Overall Rank 588 of 2761

Swim: 00:20:58 Rank 1349
Bike : 00:40:41 Rank: 404
Run: 00:29:57 Rank 607

Total Time: 01:38:47

I’m re-reading Living Off the Country. It’s a book of essay about Alaska. Mr. Haines has a particular sense of place. His place is Alaska and my place is Colorado. His experience in Alaska is very similar in theme to mine in Colorado although I am not living in a log cabin built with my own hand. But I agree place makes people. All the places I have lived have had a profound impact on my life and I hope to put it down on paper as eloquently as he does.

iSomething in me identified with that landscape. I had come to the dream place.i

iThis place and this life were what I wanted more than any other thing.i

“DH Lawrence has told us, there is a espirit of place.i In any landscape or region on the map, there is a potential life to be lived. The place itself offers certain possibilities, and these, combined with the capacities of those who come there, produce after a while certain kinds of life.i

I just finished this book. I liked it more for the setting: Northern Vermont and New Hampshire. There are references to the mountain peaks in NH that I love (and miss) and just the setting of the northern woods. This last paragraph takes me to the place; which any really good book should do. I’m reminded of Cannon Mountain (and hiking it with my dad), taking the tram in the winter skiing, the beauty of northern New Hampshire, and just how important family truly is.

Nevertheless, what I remember best about that day isn’t an image of my father leading in a heat of almost two hundred bicyclists, or my beautiful cousin racing down the beach of Echo Lake and diving gracefully into the water, or my uncle starting his trek up a ski slope with grass so green that the sun made it look almost neon. When I think about that morning I envision instead the moment my uncle reached the summit. He was greeted there by my father and my cousin, who, upon finishing their portions of the race, had taken the tram to the top. The three of them threw themselves together into the sort of ecstatically loopy embrace that had never marked the conclusion of any previous tennis match, golf game, or badminton contest in Seton or McCullough family history, jumping up and down and laughing with an exuberance rarely manifest by any of us. And when they posed for a photograph-*-*the two men surrounding my cousin-* you wouldn’t have known that my uncle had lost his arm or that once, a long time ago, he had almost lost his family.

MISS WINTER?

Me too. Snowmaking season is only about 100 days away. In the meantime, we’re selling winter posters. Pretty cool shots. Check em’ out and buy one here.

She ran away to go to college, University of Western Ontario, and studied journalism. She dropped out after a couple of years, got married, and had children. She became a housewife in the suburbs, a life which she did not care for. She said, “So many things were forbidden, like taking anything seriously.” She was trying to write fiction, but her schedule was very tightly managed. She couldn’t find time to do it, though she did try to get her kids to nap a lot.

She was in her 30s when she and her husband opened a bookstore. That, she said, made her feel as if she had a function in the real world. She locked herself in the bookstore on Sundays to write, and after nearly 20 years of struggle, she published her first collection of stories, Dance of The Happy Shades in 1968.

Her marriage broke up. She took a trip back to her home town to care for her aging father. She was only going to stay for a year, but she found that the landscape she had hated so much as a child suddenly seemed like the most interesting place in the world. She said, “People’s lives in [my home town] were dull, simple, amazing, unfathomableodeep caves paved with linoleum. It did not occur to me [as a child] that one day I would be so greedy for [my hometown] … to want every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held togetheroradiant, everlasting.”

Returning to her hometown gave her the material that she needed, and she’s gone on writing about ordinary people in small town Canada ever since. Munro is the author of Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You, The Moons of Jupiter, Open Secrets, and many other books.

i Appalachian Trail
i Write a book
i Spain
i Virgin Islands
i Italy
i Marathon
i Iron (wo)Man
i Build a log cabin in the woods
i Weekly column in a newspaper
i Go on a writeris retreat

1) Steamboat Springs, CO
2) Whitefish, MT
3) Asheville, NC
4) Killington, VT
5) Bethel, ME
6) Knoxville, TN

Cheney has won the latest entertainer of the year honors from both the Country Music Association and the Academy of Country Music. And he’s still on a high from his recent marriage to actress Renee Zellweger, an event that caught many by surprise.

“My friends were shocked, too, but they weren’t shocked when they saw us together,” he says. “We obviously didn’t date that long, but we didn’t need a year and a half to know.”

The last few years have seen Chesney sell millions of copies of his albums “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems” and “When the Sun Goes Down.”

“Even though my songs are called country, it’s not traditional country,” says Chesney, a Tennessee native whose influences range from George Strait to Jackson Browne. “Some people say, `Well, you’ve got to make a rock record one day because you have such a mass crossover thing going on.’ But that would be stupid. I can’t sing that way. When I sing, it comes out the way it comes out.”

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skillomore of each
than you haveoinspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your work,
doubt their judgment.

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
There are only sacred places
And desecrated places.

I haven’t seen you in forever
Oh you haven’t changed a bit
You didn’t think that I’d remember
How could I forget

We sang Bobby McGee on the hood of my car
Made a wish on every star
In that clear September sky
One bottle of wine and two dixie cups
Three AM I feel in love
For the first time in my life
Oh that’s something that just don’t happen twice

To this day I still taste that first kiss
How I prayed it wouldn’t end
In a way, seeing you like this
I guess it never really did