Originally published in Denver Magazine
August 2009
…
“I had a strong taste for angling, and would sit for any number of hours on the bank of a river or pond watching the float.” –Charles Darwin
“Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.” –W.H. Auden
“Everything technology does for you that you could do for yourself diminishes you as an organism.” –John Gierach
According to at least one theory, life on the planet Earth began in a dirty, brown puddle of water. Teeny, little atoms clustered together in the warm, salty goop to form slightly less teeny molecules, which in turn developed into amino acids, proteins, carbons and cells—the building blocks of living organisms. These cells had an extraordinary ability to replicate and adapt. The microscopic narcissists produced billions of identical clones, which clung to one another like LEGOS and eventually evolved into larger, more complicated entities. Some of the cells clustered together and formed pond scum. Some of the cells needed to travel, so they developed fins, tails and long, sleek, torpedo-like bodies. Another group of cells wanted to leave the puddle, so they grew arms and legs and stumbled clumsily onto land.
Approximately 350 million years later, on a bright, gusty afternoon in the Rocky Mountains, a bipedal cell cluster named John Gierach took me fly-fishing. We each put on a pair of rubber waders and stood testicle-deep in another dirty, brown puddle of water for about an hour or so, repeatedly casting metal hooks decorated to look like insects onto the water. Gierach didn’t talk much during this process, aside from the occasional piece of advice on how to improve my casting technique, which was more or less the same mantra I’ve heard from coaches and sportsmen my entire life: It’s all in the wrist. Baseball, basketball, tennis, golf and now fly-fishing—my wrist has a lot of responsibility to live up to.
Gierach is 60something, slender and charmingly Midwestern, with eyes the color of a winter sky and a white beard that is frayed just slightly around the edges in a dandelion-gone-to-seed kind of way. He has authored more than a dozen books on fly-fishing and is one of the most celebrated writers of the genre in North America and the United Kingdom, although he’s reluctant to admit it. His books feature self-deprecating, existential titles, such as Standing in a River Waving a Stick, Trout Bum, Dances with Trout, Fool’s Paradise and, my personal favorite, Sex, Death and Fly-Fishing. During the course of our interview, he chain-smoked at least a dozen cigarettes and drank enough coffee to kill a small rhinoceros.
Gierach lives a stone’s throw from Lyons, Colorado, with several cats and his girlfriend, Susan, who is also a writer and sometimes wears a hot-pink T-shirt that says, “Not Tonight, Honey. I’m On Deadline.” On an average day, Gierach wears blue jeans, an earth-toned button-up shirt, a tan safari vest with many zippers and pockets, and a beat-up fishing hat that resembles an upturned bucket. I have seen numerous photographs of him taken over the past thirty years, but I have only seen him once without a hat. We were riding in his old, blue Chevy at the time, and he took the hat off for a moment to smooth back his hair, which is as fine and as white as spun cotton. I wanted to know what the hat felt like, so when he wasn’t looking, I reached over and pinched the bill between my thumb and index finger. It felt like a leather baseball glove that had been sitting out in the rain for about thirty years.
The place where we went fishing was a picturesque, ice-cream-scoop of a pond called Lily Lake, where tourists of all shapes and sizes stopped to snap photos with disposable cameras and young lovers walked around with their hands in each others’ back pockets. It was guarded by an elderly ranger named Robert, who wore a crisp, brown uniform and asked anyone carrying a pole if he could please see your fishing license, sir? And by the way, are you aware of the catch-and-release policy, sir? There was a well-worn dirt path around the outskirts of the lake and several crude log benches that looked as though they had been made crudely on purpose to give tourists the feeling of an authentic outdoor sitting experience.
By fishing standards, Lily Lake isn’t exactly what you’d call a prime spot. It’s too open, too commercial. Fly-fishermen can be a bit on the misanthropic side, and they generally gravitate towards more remote locations. Lily Lake’s only real claim to fame is the fact that it’s stocked with greenback cutthroat, which are a rare subspecies of trout that were thought to be extinct until someone pulled one out of the water in the 1950s. These fish have brown tummies and emerald backs covered with black speckles, and they are shaped more or less identical to their ancient brethren.
The greenback cutthroat are not the only fish that have faced extinction in Colorado—the pikeminnow, the razorback sucker, the plains minnow, the humpback chub, the Rio Grande sucker, the northern redbelly dace and the southern redbelly dace are just a few that have been placed on the endangered list at one time or another. As the human population on the Front Range grows, the aquatic population suffers. In many ways, it’s a battle over water, which both species need to survive. Fly-fishermen like Gierach have been working for decades to protect the rivers and streams where the fish live, but it’s been an uphill journey. Colorado is a semi-arid state that suffers through regular drought cycles, and water shortages have been a concern here since the Anasazis abandoned the area in the 14th century. The current laws governing water rights in Colorado were primarily created in the late 1800s, when the state’s population was much smaller, the economy was focused more on mining and agriculture, and few people were concerned about conservation. In general, Coloradans love nature, of course, but modern society has changed the way the average citizen interacts with their environment. Often, urban residents don’t understand how their actions are impacting the surrounding landscape.
Gierach has spent most of his life in nature, and he knows all about the plight of the greenback cutthroat. He also knows about salmon and mule deer and cottonwood trees. He can tell you when the damselflies are going to hatch and the difference between a fox squirrel and a rock squirrel. Over the years, he has informally studied biology, zoology and various other ’ologies, but like any good outdoorsman, he continues to be wary of science, relying heavily on experience and instinct to guide him. While we walked around the lake, he kept rattling off facts about the various birds and insects we came across as though he planned to quiz me on them later. Sometimes, he gets so caught up in his observations that the modern world seems to fade away. Once, while driving his pickup down a mountain, Gierach stopped talking mid-sentence and nearly ran the truck off the road. “Take a look at that,” he said, peering through the windshield at a large hawk circling overhead. “That’s something you don’t see every day.” I nodded and reached for my seatbelt.
* * *
My favorite piece of information that I learned about Gierach during the course of writing this article: He once had a regular column in the New York Times, but he quit because, as he says, “They were assholes.”
My second-favorite piece of information that I learned about Gierach during the course of writing this article: When he was a child, his aunt and uncle had a pet raccoon named Agnus.
* * *
Fly-fishermen come in all shapes and sizes. They are rich, poor, old, young, black, white. They are farmers, truckers, CEOs, accountants, cowboys, hippies, yuppies. Notable fly-fishermen include Robert Redford, Liam Neeson, Charles Darwin, Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Ernest Hemingway, King George IV and Henry Winkler. Washington Irving described fly-fishing as a spiritual pursuit. Tom Brokaw says fly-fishing gives him humility.
Overwhelmingly, fly-fishermen are male, but not exclusively. There is a popular story of a female angler whose husband wasn’t happy with all the time she was spending on the river, so one day he sat her down and forced her to choose between their twenty-year marriage and her favorite bamboo rod. It wasn’t much of a choice, really. She sure did love that rod.
Fly-fishermen can often be obsessive and meticulous. They like to perform an act over and over again until they get it right. Sometimes this drives their friends and family members to distraction, but it can also be a huge asset in life. It’s reassuring and rewarding to repeat the same function, each time expecting a different result (although some have also called this the very definition of insanity). When Gierach is on the water, every cast looks identical to the last, but you can see him working things out in his head, making small, strategic adjustments with each metronome-like swing of the rod, getting closer and closer to perfection. A psychiatrist in Washington who uses fishing as a counseling tool once told me that fly-fishing has more than a few things in common with gambling. They are both occupations that require countless hours of repetition, instinct and skill, but in the end, the respective participants are still hoping for that lucky strike.
To be a fly-fishing writer is to become obsessed with this strange, unpredictable sport to the point that it starts to take over your life. Arguably the first substantial piece of literature in English on the topic was a mysterious essay called The Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle. Although no one knows for certain who the author was, credit for the Treatyse is most often attributed to a Benedictine nun named Dame Juliana Berners. It was written in the early 15th century and hand-copied by monks until the printing press came along in 1440. Berners discovered that insect swarms varied according to the season, and she developed twelve different fly patterns, one for every month, that anglers could use to successfully catch fish all year round. The descriptions were so detailed and precise that fly-fishermen continue to use those patterns to this day.
More than five hundred years later, writers are still describing fly patterns and struggling to find the right words to capture the fly-fishing experience. You’d think they’d have figured it out by now, but the elusive nature of the sport is part of why it has endured for centuries. As a favorite uncle of mine liked to say, “Fly-fishing ain’t just about fly-fishing.”
Consider this passage from Sex, Death and Fly-Fishing in which Gierach examines the life of an insignificant, little insect and ends up combining ideas from entomology, religion, philosophy, literature and the Kama Sutra:
“A mayfly spinner lies on the surface of the stream in what fishermen call the ‘spent’ position. To picture it accurately, remember that the insect has just had the first and only orgasm of its life and is now, in the natural course of things, dying from it. His body lies flush with the water, wings spread, legs out flat, tails splayed wistfully. Usually he’s limp. If he struggles at all, he does it feebly at best. There’s probably a silly look on his face, although it’s hard to tell with insects.”
It’s not the type of paragraph you would get from an academic or a guy who is just interested in killing fish. This is an extremely talented writer/naturalist/philosopher wrestling with ideas that have plagued humanity for centuries. Like theologians or string theorists, the best fly-fishing writers are the type of whimsical, tenacious SOBs who are willing to spend their entire lives thinking about something they know they will never completely understand.
* * *
Gierach never planned on becoming a fly-fishing writer. In fact, he never even planned on becoming a fly-fisherman. As a child growing up in rural Ohio, he was raised by a family of avid outdoorsmen, but they practiced a more relaxed fishing technique, which Gierach describes as “getting drunk and drowning a worm.” His father was a small-town conservative who did not understand the 1960s counter-culture that was creeping across the country at the time, and was perplexed by his son’s shaggy hair and liberal politics. “My dad believed very much in traditions and following the rules,” said Gierach. “He was confused by my generation. I don’t think he ever figured it out.”
In college, Gierach studied philosophy and aspired to become a poet. He listened to psychedelic music, read about the Beats, experimented with a few recreational drugs, played very bad rock music, participated in protests, and hitchhiked to San Francisco to see what all the fuss was about. After graduation, he packed his meager belongings and moved to a cockroach-infested apartment in New York City’s East Village, where he landed a job as a bicycle messenger for a photography lab. “I was young and ambitious at the time, which is a good combination for making stupid decisions. I thought I needed to live on the East Coast in order to be taken seriously as a writer. The idea of the New York art world was appealing to a lot of us back then.”
But city life didn’t sit well with the country boy. Gierach did publish his writing in various small, literary journals around the nation and managed to put together two slim books of poetry, but the New York lifestyle began to take its toll. Also, the bike-messenger job wasn’t really working out. “It was a pain in the ass. I was robbed three times—once at knife point. They didn’t want money; they wanted the yellow courier’s bag that I carried all over the damn city. Apparently, they thought there would be nude pictures in it.”
Tired of being burgled by sexually repressed New Yorkers, Gierach followed Horace Greeley’s sage advice: Go west, young man! Go west! “I moved from New York to Colorado, and within two weeks ended up working for a share in a silver mine that never materialized in Montezuma. I was living in an unheated cabin with no running water or electricity, but it was like a penthouse in the Plaza compared to where I was living in New York. If I got hungry enough, I’d go out and shoot a deer, and if I needed firewood, I’d find a dead tree and lop it up and burn it.”
When the mining project didn’t pan out, Gierach found part-time work as a landscaper and settled in with the writing crowd in Boulder, which at that time contained such visiting luminaries as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and William S. Burroughs. He wrote poetry and worked odd jobs to pay the rent. When he ran out of food, he simply made a quick trip out of the city to hunt squirrels or catch trout.
This was an exciting time to be a young artist in Boulder. The city had become a hotbed for the hippie culture, and there was electricity in the air, a sense of excitement and optimism about the future. Young men and women descended on the Front Range from all over the country, hoping to reconnect with nature and create a place for themselves outside of mainstream society. “The trend was to find some task that was small and seemingly insignificant and really focus on that,” said Gierach. “A lot of people were getting back to the basics—making your own clothes, growing your own food, creating craft art, things like that. I wanted to do something I was passionate about. The mainstream culture was telling us that we needed to subdue our enthusiasms to get ahead in life. And we were saying, ‘Ahead of what?’”
It was at this time that Gierach first became, ahem, hooked on fly-fishing. Several of his writer friends were anglers, and Gierach decided to tag along on some overnight adventures. Soon he was at the local tackle shop, purchasing his own rod and picking out flies. The individualism of the sport appealed to the libertarian in him, and he enjoyed the repetitive, thoughtful action of the swinging rod, which had an almost Zen-like quality. But mostly he just thought it was fun.
“I wouldn’t over-analyze it too much,” Gierach said when I asked if his philosophy degree influenced his passion for the sport. “I think it’s trendy to link flyfishing with spirituality these days. There might be something like that involved, but most of it’s crap. In the end, it comes down to this: I like catching fish.”
However, Gierach wasn’t catching as many fish as he wanted. And he wasn’t writing as much as he wanted, either. It wasn’t enough to enjoy these activities as pastimes; he needed to spend every waking hour on them. For him, minimum-wage employment and paying rent were a waste of his valuable time.
As fate would have it, Gierach’s father passed away suddenly at this point in his life, leaving him with a small inheritance, exactly enough money to buy a secluded little house up in the mountains. “That was really a turning point in my life in more ways than one. It wasn’t much of a house. In fact, I’ll bet it was the cheapest house in Boulder County. You couldn’t buy a garage door now for what that house cost, but at the time it was a lot of money. All of a sudden I could live for property taxes. I could live on nothing. I could just do odd jobs and hunt and fish and grow a garden and keep chickens for food and cut my own firewood. And I just had all this time to write.”
And write he did, mostly on an old typewriter that made a noise like an angry woodpecker when Gierach was particularly inspired—rat-a-tat-tat-tat! Now that he didn’t need a full-time job to pay the bills, Gierach was free to attack the blank page. He left poetry behind and transitioned naturally into prose. He wrote clean, spare narratives in a Hemingway-esque style and published several short stories, receiving “thank you” notes and contributors’ copies for his efforts. The “thank you” notes were nice, but contributors’ copies wouldn’t cover his tab at the local bar. Finally, in an effort to completely remove himself from the nine-to-five grind, Gierach decided to try his hand at writing fly-fishing articles for one of his favorite magazines. He thought it would be an interesting side project, but he didn’t take it too seriously at first. “When I started, I never thought it’d become my career. You have to understand that fly-fishing was this underground activity at the time. Nobody was doing it except a few weirdos like me. Now it’s mainstream. Now everyone wants to be like Brad Pitt in A River Runs Through It.”
Gierach doesn’t recall the exact moment he stopped working on fiction and became a true fly-fishing writer. It was an accident, he says, a fluke. However, eventually that fluke became an obsession. Articles in prominent magazines turned into book deals from small publishing houses. Small publishing houses turned into large publishing companies. Best-seller lists followed.
It took a few years, but Gierach finally accomplished a rare feat: He was able to financially support himself with his art. He had a roof over his head, a steady source of income, and an opportunity to grow and flourish as a writer. He had separated himself from modern culture. He had beaten the system. Or so he thought. “The world has a way of sucking you back in,” said Gierach. “I thought I’d escaped society, but it eventually caught up with me. I began noticing that some of my favorite fishing spots were drying up because someone was taking all the water. I didn’t want to get involved, but I didn’t have much of a choice.”
* * *
The Rocky Mountains have always been a magnet for obsessive idealists—gold and silver prospectors, pilgrims, hermits, religious fundamentalists, mountain climbers, etc.—and in the past decade or so, the Front Range has become something of a mecca for fly-fishermen in North America, as well. According to a survey conducted by the Leisure Trends Group, total sales on fly-fishing-related products in the U.S. came to $804.8 million in 2007, and a whopping 37.8 percent of that money came from stores located in and around the Rocky Mountains. In the same year, while fly-fishing sales slumped throughout the United States, the Rocky Mountain area continued to thrive, showing a 6.7 percent increase from 2006. The Federation of Fly Fishers has announced plans to move its headquarters to Loveland, Colo., and in the meantime, the American Fly Fishing Trade Association (AFFTA) has beaten them to the punch and relocated to Louisville. When I asked AFFTA president Gary Berlin why they decided to move to the area, he seemed to think the answer was fairly obvious. “Colorado is the place for fly-fishing right now, and the Front Range is the center of everything. If you’re in the surfing industry, you go to California. If you’re in the fly-fishing industry, you go to Colorado.”
This feeding frenzy has prompted what Denver Post outdoor writer Charlie Meyer has called an “industry stampede to Colorado’s Front Range.” Meyer said that when he first moved to Colorado in 1966 “there was one fly shop in the whole damn state. It was in the front of a former motel and the size of the shop was about the size of your kitchen.” Now, there are dozens of fly-fishing outlets up and down the mountains, selling everything from graphite rods to carbonite reels to exotic-looking flies with whimsical names, such as Zonkers, Nervous Minnows, Royal Humpies, Psycho Princes, Vanilla Buggers and Crazy Charlie Browns.
Gierach is not the only successful fly-fishing writer in Colorado. Nick Lyons is a giant in the genre, as is Gierach’s good friend A.K. Best, just to name a few. Together these men have helped popularize and define a sport that was once thought of as a cult activity. They also put the Rocky Mountains on the map, and the result has been a boom in the local fly-fishing industry, which has had both positive and negative effects. With popularity comes population.
Over the years, as Colorado’s economic focus has shifted away from agriculture and mining towards tourism and technology, the state’s population has grown dramatically, and some projections say there will be more than six million citizens living here by the year 2030. Eighty-eight percent of Coloradans reside on the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains, concentrating specifically around Denver, Boulder and Colorado Springs; however, 80 percent of our water is on the western slope. In order to satisfy the needs of these sprawling communities, water is constantly being diverted from the western slope, causing alarming drops in stream flow for many rivers, which wreaks havoc on fragile ecosystems.
Ask any environmentalist and they’ll tell you that Colorado is in the middle of a water-shortage crisis that could become a full-blown catastrophe in the next couple of decades. The crisis has many causes, including inefficient irrigation practices in the agricultural industry, an unwillingness in the political arena to make water conservation a priority, greedy land-development companies, and a growing apathetic human population. In the West, water means money, and those in power are often more interested in cash flow than stream flow.
In order to make the type of large-scale systemic changes that would be necessary to avert catastrophe, the public would need to unify and force political action. But for the most part, the public has no idea that a crisis exists. “People in the cities aren’t really connected to nature on a personal level,” said Gierach. “Nature is a weekend activity for most Colorado residents. They go up to the mountains, hike around, look at the chipmunks…and then they go back home and dump a bunch of water on their lawns. It’s stupid.”
In other words, people are moving to Colorado because they want to be close to nature, but in doing so, they are helping destroy the natural environment they love so dearly. This is the conundrum.
Gierach first became involved in water rights around the time his writing career was taking off. “I could see what was happening right in front of me. The water levels were dropping, and every year there were fewer fish. It was happening fast, and it was scary.”
In the beginning, Gierach jumped into the battle with the same type of tenacity and passion that he had for his other life pursuits. The self-described misanthrope volunteered to attend long, litigious meetings conducted by politicians and lawyers. He spent nights attempting to understand the Byzantine language the water-rights laws are written in, and he published articles in local newspapers on the subject. He was never a ringleader in the movement, but he was a dedicated soldier for the cause.
However, results were either slow or nonexistent. The good guys won a few minor victories regarding stream flows and whatnot but that did nothing to solve the larger problem, and after a few decades in the trenches, Gierach lost faith in the system. “It just felt dirty. Every time I went home after one of those meetings, I wanted to take a shower, even if we’d won a victory. Especially if we’d won a victory. Every victory came with strings attached. It was really demoralizing.”
After one too many demoralizing losses and victories, Gierach went back to his house in the mountains, and he didn’t return for a long time.
* * *
Gierach no longer has to work odd jobs to pay the rent. Several of his books have become best-sellers, and he is free to explore his passions. He travels all over the world to fish, and when he goes on a book tour, loyal readers line up for his autograph. Every editor of every fishing magazine in North America knows his name, and they all return his phone calls. He now owns a five-acre piece of property in the foothills, which contains rabbit brush and buffalo grass, as well as juniper, aspen, cottonwood and elm trees. Over the past ten years, he has identified more than seventy species of birds on his land, most of them attracted to the seed, nectar and suet feeders he puts out for them. There are also bull snakes, garter snakes, cottontails, coyotes and elk. Sometimes a black bear or a bobcat will wander through, but that’s a rare occasion. The house has active and passive solar, several wood stoves and a propane backup, and it’s situated at an angle to align with the mid-winter sun. When the weather turns cold, Gierach still goes into the backyard, finds a dead tree and chops it up for firewood.
He has finally reached a level of personal and financial independence that he always wanted, but modern society still beckons once in a while. “I do the two things I ever wanted to do: fish and write. I live up in the country with my cats and my girlfriend. When I have to come down and deal with the real world, it’s just agony. I understand the problems with water rights and I’ve fought for it any number of times, but I just don’t last. I just burn out. A lot of this stuff just gets forced on you in the end.”
Despite his frustrations, every couple of years Gierach will drag himself down from the mountains and once again take up the fight to protect Colorado’s rivers and streams. At this point, he’s not sure if his actions are making a difference, but he won’t surrender the cause. He’s got that rare combination of dogged tenacity and skeptical optimism that only a fly-fisherman could possess. “Effective environmentalism is a long haul requiring patience and a clear head,” said Gierach while sitting at a picnic table outside a coffee shop in downtown Lyons. “If you start out expecting to change the world overnight, you’re bound to be disappointed. The simple truth is that most of the world doesn’t want to change. Most people aren’t necessarily evil; they’re just lazy.” He took a long drag on his cigarette. “I have no idea if anything I’ve done will make a difference in the long run, but you have to try. Every generation has to try. Because if you give up, the bastards win.”
The Eccentric Mushroom Bongo Test
January 13, 2012
Originally Published in Heads Magazine
June 2007
…
They called themselves the Dirt People and they wanted our souls. I knew this because their leader, a skeletal, albino hermaphrodite with a Messiah complex, who was wrapped from head to foot in a white bed sheet, his golden dreadlocks sprawled out like Medusa’s snakes, Derek, from Idaho, said, “We want your souls.”
“What do you want with them?” asked Paul, my friend, a pale, bald pygmy who exploded on the scene like a mouthy cannonball wherever he went. “I’m not using mine right now, but I might need it later.”
“The mushrooms are sacred. They come from the earth.”
“A lot of shit comes out of the earth.”
“Yes, and it’s all sacred.”
“Uh-huh. Well, you can take our souls if you need to—just give us the shrooms. We want to get fucked up.”
We were in Palenque, down south, the Oaxaca region, smack dab in the middle of the rain forest, hot and wet, sleeping with the beasties and the cannibals. The night before, our Dutch neighbors, Sven and Sven, had found a scorpion in their thatched cabana room, a hideous thing, part insect, part reptile, part demon, and they beat it to death with their wooden shoes. “Take dat!” they screamed into the night air. “Take dat! Take dat! Take dat!”
Actually, I don’t know if their shoes were wooden, or if their names were Sven, but that is neither here nor there. They were definitely Dutch. They drenched their french fries in mayonnaise and they had a fondness for windmills.
Palenque was one of the hot spots mentioned in the backpacker’s bible, the Lonely Planet, and therefore travelers from across the globe flocked there like ex-patriotic sheep, hoping to get off the “beaten path.” Of course, every path we traveled had already been beaten mercilessly, like an altar boy’s ding-dong, but we tried not to think about that. We didn’t want adventure, not really—we were young, bored, First World suburbanites who wanted to take the guided tour through the Heart of Darkness, snapping pictures with our disposable cameras along the way.
And then there were the Dirt People. They weren’t tourists like the rest of us. They were throwbacks. Cultural cavemen. The Merry Posers. The hairy offspring of the beatniks and the hippies. Forty years ago, they would have been littering the sidewalks of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, living in makeshift communes, gobbling up five dollar sheets of acid, freaking out the squares with their promiscuous sexual habits. They would have been relevant.
This abominable mind-fuck all began when the so-called counter culture movement died out in the 1970s, almost before it even started. When the decade ended, our parents abandoned their hideous experiment and left behind an impossible myth about Peace and Love and Flower Power—a myth that captured generations of disillusioned youth, boys and girls all across the American Heartland, confused, depressed, too cynical for pop culture, too passive for punk rock. They couldn’t go back to the Sixties and they couldn’t stay in the Eighties. There was nothing left for them in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Cosby Show.
So they packed their passports and their Birkenstocks and moved south. Not “South”—not Texas or Georgia—south south, down Mexico way. They said Adios to their parents and their country, turned their backs on reality, and they ran deep into the Mexican jungle, where they could grow their hair long and sleep out in the open, take drugs, listen to Bob Marley, learn to play the sitar.
You find these neo-hippies all across Central America. You can recognize them by the half-starved look in their eyes and their antisocial behavior. They know the locals will never accept them and they don’t associate with other travelers, except to sell them jewelry and drugs. They live between worlds, in the shadows of society, where they have no rights but more freedom. At least, that’s how they tell it. Either way, you have to respect their tenacity. It’s not an easy lifestyle.
Derek and the rest of the Dirt People lived at El Panchan, the camp where Paul and I stayed for three nights. They slept in hammocks and bathed in the river. They dressed in odd, colorful clothes made from leftover scraps, making them look like a group of savage court jesters. They boiled their water before they drank it. For dinner, they usually had rice with a side of rice.
The Dirt People shunned all practical skills and embraced the absurd. Not one of them could hold down a straight job sweeping floors or waiting tables, but they sewed their own costumes and juggled fire sticks and wove ornate necklaces out of tree bark and forest seeds. At El Panchan, they paid their room and board by performing for the customers at the camp’s outdoor restaurant, a surprisingly elegant establishment considering the rustic surroundings. Every night, after the sun had set and the tables were filled with smiling, satiated patrons, the Dirt People took the floor. Naked from the waste up, the sleek coffee-skinned boys attacked their bongos, which they always held at crotch level, making it appear as though their animalistic rhythms were a masturbatory act. And the women, those malnourished sirens, performed their serpentine dance, driving all the repressed spectators crazy with sexual desire. Later, those same tourists would go back to their cabanas to fuck like they never fucked before, their thoughts dominated by visions of hairy, writhing throwbacks from another world.
Of course, not everyone performed. Derek stayed back and worked the crowd, spouting his pseudo-philosophical musings to various onlookers, feeling out the room for possible drug deals.
That was how we met him. Paul asked him for mushrooms and Derek asked for our souls. Plus twenty bucks.
The Dirt People believed mushrooms were a spiritual tool used to open the mind. “I’ve been here fourteen months,” Derek said. “I was only supposed to stay overnight.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“I couldn’t leave.”
That was all he said. Not, I didn’t leave—I couldn’t leave. He handed Paul a plastic bag, then he drifted off to a table filled with wide-eyed Canadian girls, a magical shaman with predatory needs.
There were seven shrooms in the bag, firm, fresh, smelling of leaves and manure, and we took them to our room so we could devour them in private. We washed them off with bottled water and divided the lot, tearing the largest one in half, a monster that Alice might have nibbled on while conversing with a snarky, intellectual caterpillar. They tasted stale and earthy, like moldy bread that had been dropped in an open grave, and we savored every last bite before returning to the restaurant to finish the show.
Nothing happened.
There was a warm breeze coming out of the north that raised the hairs on the back of my neck. The waiter brought food. The hippies played “Buffalo Soldier.” I felt good but I didn’t feel high, and I was starting to believe that this drug deal had gone awry. I was about to suggest that we hunt down Derek and show him the true meaning of The Howl when Paul pointed at the pizza in front of us.
“Look at that,” he said.
“What?”
“The toppings are dancing.”
The toppings weren’t dancing, of course. That was ridiculous. But as soon as Paul mentioned it, as soon as those words spilled out, like an incantation, the peppers and unions began to wiggle back and forth right before my eyes. They began to jive. Then they started grooving. It was a party. I stared at them for what seemed like hours, entranced, not a single thought in my beleaguered buzzing brain, and when I looked up, someone had taken away the restaurant and replaced it with a Salvador Dali painting. And I was the artist inside the canvas, controlling time and space with my brush, bending the material world surrounding me as though it was all made of neon Silly Putty. Oh, what a ridiculous freak-fest it was! And, oh, how I loved being the Ring Master!
I was tripping.
Every physical sensation had new meaning that night. There were colors I’d never imagined before and the jungle was filled with an impossible cacophony of forest sounds. Nothing escaped my notice. The air ignited with blue electricity that filled up the darkness and illuminated everything. Suddenly, the beauty of the world was almost unbearable.
After an indeterminable amount of time, I looked up from my musings to discover that the music had stopped and everyone in the restaurant was watching me as I rubbed a bottle of Fanta on my bare chest. I had no idea when I’d removed my shirt, but it felt so good. The tourists were giggling and the Dirt People were staring at me in mute anger, offended that I dared partake of their sacrament with such flippancy. And I pointed at them and laughed and laughed and laughed.
Finally, we decided to leave, because, as Paul said, “I don’t think this room will hold us much longer.”
And he was right. The ceiling was getting closer. It was just a matter of time before everyone was crushed under it. I laughed again.
We went back to our cabana and ripped the place apart. I giggled while I shed my pants for no apparent reason and then, half-naked, proceeded to break every piece of furniture in the room. Paul wrapped himself in a bed sheet and tried to keep out of harm’s way. “Take dat!” I screamed into the night air. “Take dat! Take dat! Take dat!”
Then we slipped into oblivion.
* * *
Contrary to the preachings of certain New Age evangelists, it is not natural to eat mushrooms just because they come from the earth. Hemlock comes from the earth—ask Socrates how natural that shit was when it choked the life out of him. The earth hates us. The earth tries to kill us every day. It’s a war, and I for one plan to come out victorious.
I don’t know where the idea to unite drugs and spirituality came from, but it’s all a crock of shit. I’ve taken over a dozen different drugs on hundreds of occasions and never once did they expand my mind. I don’t take them to raise my consciousness. I don’t take them to cope with the world. And I sure as hell don’t take them because of peer pressure. I take drugs because I can. It’s that simple. I want to. I need no other reason.
* * *
The next morning, Paul and I woke at the crack of dawn to catch the first bus out of that beautiful, tropical hell-hole. As we shouldered our backpacks, we saw the Dirt People scuttling about with their morning rituals, washing plates, mending socks, praying to unnamed gods. They looked like colorful, domestic gorillas in the dawn light, and I felt like Jane Goodall with a penis.
“They still have our souls,” I said.
Paul shrugged. “Who cares? They need them more then we do. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
And so we did.
The Sky’s the Limit
January 13, 2012
Originally published in Boulder Weekly
September 2008
…
I’m thinking about redecorating my apartment. Nothing fancy, just a giant 7’ by 7’ Cross-Word Puzzle Mural to cover the east wall in my bedroom. It has 28,000 clues and 91,000 squares, and it comes with a 100-page help book and a nifty storage box, all for the very reasonable price of $29.95. Of course, if I purchase that, I’ll also need the World’s Largest Write-On Map Mural, which covers more than 10 square feet of wall space and features capitals, countries, major cities, political boundaries, time zones, ocean depths and more! This is the only detailed, eight-color 2006 mural of its size, and it’s a bargain at just $149.95.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that my living room is going to look pretty drab after my bedroom has been bedazzled with these unreasonably large wall-hangings. That’s why I plan to throw out my couch and replace it with a full-scale replica of King Tutankhamen’s Egyptian Throne Chair. At just $895, this detailed copy of the 3,500-year-old original is a steal. With a hand-painted gold exterior and a carved lion head on each armrest, it’s a must-have for any Egyptophile.
I know, I know — the throne is going to look ridiculous sitting next to my normal, boring oak bookcase. Which is why I absolutely must have the matching $895 King Tut Life-Sized Sarcophagus Cabinet, which looks like an actual sarcophagus on the outside but also has a surprising amount of shelf space on the inside.
* * *
I first discovered SkyMall magazine on a flight from Denver to Chicago in 1996. I was 21 years old, and it was the first time I’d ever been on a commercial jet. Consequently, I was scared shitless. I tried to relax by listening to music and digging my fingernails into the right arm of the octogenarian sitting next to me, but I couldn’t get my mind off the fact that I was sitting in a 300,000-pound hunk of metal that was filled with 50,000 gallons of flammable fuel hurling through the sky at 500 mph. For the first time, I truly understood the meaning of the words “death trap.”
After annoying the flight attendant with a million questions, most of them concerning the laws of gravity, I finally picked up a SkyMall and started to flip through the pages. I was immediately enthralled. Robotic vacuum cleaners; collars that translate your dog’s barks into human speech; fish tank coffee tables; musical toilet-paper dispensers — I was perfectly content for the rest of the flight.
Over the past decade, I have continued to collect SkyMall magazines, although I have never made a single purchase from any of them. My favorite issues sit on my coffee table (which, sadly, is not also a fish tank), and I look through them on a nightly basis. As a tool for understanding American culture, SkyMall is more important than The New Yorker, Harper’s, Newsweek, Esquire and Rolling Stone combined. These magazines can only give you facts and supply you with social commentary; SkyMall on the other hand is an ongoing sociological experiment. And since SkyMall’s only agenda is to make money, you can trust that it’s not influenced by anything except greed. SkyMall products that don’t sell are quickly removed from the magazine, but the popular items return month after month, year after year. Therefore, if you’re an obsessive nerd with a lot of time on your hands like I am, you can trace cultural trends by examining how the contents of the magazine evolve over time.
It’s important to note that SkyMall customers don’t fit into a single category. I doubt if bluecollar workers in Detroit are scratching their heads and wondering where they can find a portable commercial steam cleaner or an electric shoe buffer. On the other hand, SkyMall is not just a magazine for high-class millionaires, either. It’s difficult to imagine Donald Trump and his cronies ordering a toolbox with orange flames painted on the side or a bar stool with a motorcycle seat.
At first glance, SkyMall appears to be extremely random and chaotic: a hot dog cooker on one page and a tapestry depicting the French countryside on the next. However, if you read it consistently, you realize that SkyMall has actually tapped into an extremely specific piece of our national psyche: the desire for more. No matter what socio-economic class we belong to, Americans want more. If we have a 24” television, we want a 32” television, or a 45” television, or a flat-screen television. If we have an appliance that makes two pieces of toast at a time, we want one that makes four pieces, or six, or we want an appliance that cooks rotisserie chicken while it balances the checkbook and plays samba music. Americans defeated the British, we conquered the wilderness, we landed on the moon, and now we want a fountain pen with a builtin digital recorder and an FM radio. All for the very reasonable price of $89.99.
Normal is Crazy
January 13, 2012
Originally published in Boulder Weekly
September 2008
…
“I have a theory about Boulder,” he says. “Trust me, you don’t want to hear it. There are a lot of secrets in this city. I know a lot of secrets. Oh, yeah, you bet. A lot. A. LOT. I keep my mouth shut though. That’s my own secret. That’s how I stay alive, man. I never talk. Not me. There’s a lot of secrets in Boulder, but you’ll never hear them from me. I’m not much of a talker. A lot of people like to talk, they go on and on, but not me. I don’t like to talk much. That’s not my style.”
His name is not Frank, but that’s what he wants me to call him. Frank is tall, about six-foot-two, in his late 40s, with sandy brown hair and a mustache shaped like the bristly end of a push broom. He’s wearing a pair of crisp, new blue jeans with a crease running down the middle of each pant leg and a black T-shirt that has the words “Longmont Fire Department” on the back. Five minutes ago, I was sitting on a bench on Pearl Street, minding my own business, when Frank approached me and started talking, mostly about how he doesn’t like to talk. I asked Frank if I could interview him for my column, and he said yes, as long as I didn’t use his real name.
“But if you think I’m going to tell you something, man, just forget about it. You can ask whatever questions you want, but I ain’t saying squat. I’ve been around here for a long time. A loooong time, man. I know how things work. The media. Ha! The media. My lips are sealed. I moved to Boulder… oooooh, I dunno… 20 years ago, I guess, with my second wife. She’s a bitch. Nah, not really. Well, yeah, sort of. She lives in Louisville with my daughter. My daughter is a great kid. She’s really great, man. Not like her mother. But I don’t really want to talk about it.
“You see, my first wife was crazy. I don’t mean she was insane… not really. We just had trouble getting along and I, um, had to get a whatchamacallit?… A restraining order. I know, it’s messed up, huh? But that’s just how things turn out sometimes. There’s nothing you can do about it. Some people think I’m weird, man, but I don’t care. I like being weird. Being weird is normal. Being normal is crazy. Now, my second wife, she’s about as normal as you can get. I don’t know why she married me. I gotta theory about women, you know.”
Frank has a lot of theories. A. LOT. He has theories about politics and sports and bears. He has theories about public drinking water (“Do you know what fluoride is? I mean, do you know what it really is?”); illegal immigrants (“If they want my job, they can have it”); and basketball (“You have to box-out and crash the boards… it’s all about fundamentals”). But most of his theories are about being normal.
“I could probably be normal if I really wanted to. I’ve done it before. I was normal for about five years back in the ’80s. That’s when I was married to my second wife. It was terrible, man. I was taking a bunch of medication and working at Office Depot and I wanted to kill myself. Not really, but… yeah, kind of. I think you have to be crazy to be normal like that. But, hey, some people like it. That’s the whole point, I guess. If being normal makes you happy, then you should do it, but if being normal makes you crazy, then I don’t think you should do it, even if it makes other people happy.”
Frank doesn’t want to tell me where he works, but he says that he writes poetry and has a flower garden. He plays checkers. He drinks a lot of coffee. A. LOT. He visits his daughter on the weekends, and sometimes they go to the park but mostly they stay at home and watch SpongeBob SquarePants. Frank says that his daughter is normal, and he’s all right with that. She seems happy, but if she ever decides to not be normal, he will be supportive of that, too.
“I really actually hope that she stays normal, you know. It’s just a lot easier. I don’t want her to be like me, man. That’s a hard life, you know. I mean, I’m happy and everything, but it’s better if she’s like her mother…” He pauses and tugs thoughtfully on his mustache. “Well, maybe not exactly like her mother. It might be good if she was like me. At least a little bit, man.”
I am Stupid and so are You
January 13, 2012
Originally published in Boulder Weekly
August 2008
…
Recently, it occurred to me that I don’t really know anything. Not that I don’t really know anything about the mating habits of the hairy-nosed wombats of Australia or that I don’t really know anything about neutering housecats; I don’t really know anything about anything. It’s not that I’m necessarily stupid (duh) or that I’m misinformed (double duh); I just don’t retain any factual information. For instance, I can talk about the cultural significance of Little House on the Prairie and Hot Pockets for hours on end, but I couldn’t tell you the first thing about how a microwave works. (I assume there is a gaggle of tiny dragons inside that funny box that gently breathe fire on my chicken noodle soup when I push the magic buttons.) I can deconstruct and manipulate the semantic/philosophical world around me like a motherfucker, but I don’t know a damn thing about how that world operates.
And there is really no excuse for my ignorance. Interestingly enough, I am living in a sea of information. At no point in human history has there been more data on more topics in a more accessible format than at this very moment. I have books, television, radio, newspapers, magazines, the Internet, cell phones, BlackBerries, iPods, my next door neighbor who constantly feels the need to tell me about all her personal health problems (stop showing me your bunions, Rita!)…
Two hundred years ago if I wanted to know when the upcoming vernal equinox was going to happen, I would have to get on my donkey, ride down to my local alchemist, and watch as he examines a closet filled with astronomical equipment. Two months later, I would have an answer. Right now, all I have to do is type the funny little words in Google and three seconds later… Voila! (The next vernal equinox occurs on March 20, 2009, at approximately 11:44 a.m., in case you’re wondering.)
Ironically, the ready accessibility of such raw facts seems to be one of the main impediments to my ability to obtain and retain knowledge. The volume of information that’s available to me is overwhelming, and since I can access the data at any time, I don’t feel the need to learn it.
Is this a problem? Yes and no. No, it’s not a problem, because this is how our entire society is set up. Everyone in America operates within this system (and, actually, you could probably argue that everyone in the world operates within this system, although I’d have to look that up on Wikipedia). In fact, this is an essential part of our cultural make-up. Since we can’t all be Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking, we must rely on others to be “experts” in a particular field. Our normal lives have become so complicated that we can’t possibly understand even the most simplistic daily operations that we perform. Instead of learning how a carburetor works, we simply take our SUV to the nearest mechanic. If a raccoon falls in the toilet, we just call the plumber and the veterinarian.
On the other hand, yes, this is a huge problem. American society has become a giant, corporate entity and every employee is stuck in their own specialized department. Theoretically, this makes everything more efficient, but in the reality, it means that we are raising a generation of intellectual lemmings. Since we don’t know how anything actually works, we rely completely on other people to define the world around us. This is probably why the public is always so paranoid about the media feeding it biased information. Since we don’t do any research on our own, it seems like a conspiracy when something like 9/11 happens. What? People hate us in the Middle East? Why wasn’t I informed? It must have been a media cover up.
The concept of American individualism started to die as soon as Henry Ford perfected the assembly line. Everyone performs a small, specific operation in order to manufacture a product. At the end of the day, the factory workers don’t actually know how to change a tire; however, through their collective efforts, they have built a car. That’s how we manufacture ignorance in a capitalistic society.
What’s the answer to this dilemma? I would tell you to start educating yourself, create a cranial dam to hold back the flood of intellectual apathy, fight the system. But then again, what the hell do I know?
Death and Beer in Honduras
May 16, 2011
I recently published an article in Draft Magazine involving a trip Honduras I took in my mid-twenties during which I almost died. If you are so inclined, please read it and Facebook/Tweet it at the end. http://draftmag.com/features/death-and-beer-in-honduras/
Cheers
Mansion, Apartment, Shack, House
April 1, 2011
When I was young, my friends and I played a game called MASH, which stood for Mansion, Apartment, Shack, House. The goal of the game was to predict your future, and according to some, it was shockingly accurate. What type of house would you live in as an adult? What model of car would you drive? Who would you marry? How many children would you produce? All these questions could be answered with just a piece of notebook paper and a Number 2 pencil.
Of course, we all wanted the mansion. No one ever came out and said so, but it was fairly obvious that if you lived in a shack, you were poor. If you lived in a house, you were middle class. And if you lived in an apartment…well, there were no apartment buildings in the small town where I grew up, so we decided that the “A” in MASH would stand for “A Cheap Hotel near the Pizza Hut.” And if you lived in an A Cheap Hotel near the Pizza Hut, you were probably either a traveling salesman or a serial killer. Either way, it was better to live in a mansion.
* * * *
The first domicile I can recall with any clarity from my childhood was a broken down farmhouse just outside the city limits of a town called Fort Morgan. It was located at the end of a long, dirt driveway, and it included a garage, a row of palsied elm trees, and a wide variety of poisonous snakes. My father was a fundamentalist preacher who believed the end of the world was coming soon, and he insisted we learn to live off the land in order to improve our chances of survival in a post-apocalyptic world. Chickens were purchased, a garden was planted, and soon we were completely self-sufficient. Sort of.
It turns out living off the land is extremely difficult to do, especially when you are attempting to feed and clothe a young family. Money was tight and we couldn’t pay the electric bill with chicken eggs. A year passed with no Armageddon. And then another. And another.
Finally, when I was eight years old, we gave up on Fort Morgan and moved to an even smaller town called Yuma. I wouldn’t have called our new home a shack, but it was certainly closer to an S than it was to an M. The former residents were either meth addicts or members of the witness protection program. The entire house had been gutted shortly before our arrival, the carpet stripped from the floor, the windows busted out, the walls smeared with a mysterious brown substance. And if that wasn’t welcoming enough, there was a dead bird in the middle of the living room. I think it was a sparrow, but I will never know for certain because my mother snatched me away before I could properly investigate it. Something about bugs and deadly diseases.
The first year in the Yuma house was not a pleasant one. All six members of our family lived in the basement while my father rebuilt the main floor with the help of various plaid-wearing churchgoers. The basement was divided into two rooms by a plaster wall. My brother and I slept on a bunk bed next to the kitchen table, and my parents slept in the laundry room, a thin white sheet separating their bed from my sisters’. The television was positioned on top of the refrigerator. If you needed to use the bathroom, you had to climb the stairs and pray that the plumbing was working.
It took nearly a decade to get the Yuma house in working order, and by that time I was off to college, where I lived in various dormitories with obnoxious coeds. Some of my fellow students were shocked to learn that they would have a roommate their freshman year, but I was delighted. Bunk beds, cramped living conditions, unpredictable plumbing–I felt right at home.
In my late twenties, I moved to Prague and rented an apartment in the middle of the city, where prostitutes roamed the streets at all hours of the night, smoking cigarettes and propositioning male tourists from all over the globe. When I was drunk, which was often, I would stumble home from the bar and pretend the prostitutes were elegant ladies determined to gain my attention by any means necessary. “Hello. How are you this evening?” “You think I’m attractive, do you? Well, thank you. You are quite lovely as well.” “What’s that? Fifty euros, you say? Oh, no, I would never charge you for the pleasure of my company, my dear.” I didn’t make a lot of friends, but my confidence went through the roof.
The Prague apartment was the cheapest place I have ever lived. It was also the nicest. Hard-wood floors, a furnished kitchen, two bathrooms, twenty-foot-tall ceilings, a laundry room. All for just $200 dollars a month. Thank goodness for the post-communist economic collapse! My roommates were two medical students who were studying at the local university. There was always a human skull on the kitchen table and a book of hideous wounds next to the toilet.
After drinking my savings down to nothing, I returned to Colorado, where I lived on my friends’ couch for six months while I half-heartedly looked for a job. Finally, much to my chagrin, I found one.
Currently, I live in a mansion a few blocks west of the University of Colorado in Boulder. That is, it used to be a mansion. Many of the buildings in this area are beautiful Tudor structures that have been purchased by wealthy fraternities and sororities. When they were first built, several hundred years ago, I’m certain the owners had no idea that one day well-tanned coeds named Chad and Britney would be vomiting PBR on their solid oak floors and smoking pot in their foyers.
The building I live in was once a sorority house, but has long since been converted into a series of individual living spaces that are rented out to the dregs of society. Affordable housing is difficult to come by in Boulder, so this place attracts some interesting characters. There are illegal immigrants, welfare recipients, panhandlers, drug dealers, drug addicts, hermits, and one curmudgeonly writer. My room is approximately ten feet long by fifteen feet wide. There’s just enough room for a bed, a couch, and a coffee table. The bathroom and kitchen are both across the hall. You can’t run the microwave and the toaster at the same time or you will cause a building-wide blackout. Air conditioning, no. Mice, yes. We do have heat, but there’s only one thermostat for the entire building, so we all have to make do at 55 degrees, which is apparently the temperature most suitable for the cold-blooded miscreants who live downstairs.
Altogether, it’s not exactly what I pictured for myself when I was a young child playing MASH. When I landed on M, I thought my destiny had been determined. I would live in a mansion, drive a red Ferrari (like Magnum P.I.), marry Sandy Freytag who sat in front of me in homeroom, and have seven children. Thank goodness it didn’t turn out to be true. How would one fit seven children in a Ferrari?
I Have My Groceries Delivered to My Apartment
January 24, 2011
People of the jury, before you make your final judgment, please hear my case!
I’m not a shut-in. Not yet. But it’s getting closer. I can see the headlines in the future: MAN DIES ON USED COUCH, BODY UNDISCOVERED FOR 3 WEEKS AND SMELLS REALLY GROSS.
Now aside from the fact that this is far too long to be a realistic newspaper headline, this is a legitimate concern. I am becoming increasingly weird and misanthropic as I grow older, and these are things that add up to weird, misanthropic events.Ergo, death by choking on an M&M while listening to Billy Joel.
My journey into shut-in territory increased a few months ago when I started having my groceries delivered. This possibility was brought to my attention by my former-drug-dealer neighbor who informed me that I could order online from King Soopers for just ten dollars.
Now, for many years, I have tried to explain to people my life philosophy. It is really quite simple. Every decision I make is based on two opposing forces: Cheapness and Laziness. These are the yin and yang of my existence, the two powers that are continually in competition as I shuffle through this mortal coil. For instance, I don’t have a car. The last time I owned a vehicle was 1999. This is not because I am concerned about the environment and am trying to lower my carbon footprint. I wish I was such an altruistic person, but I am not. The car was an old Bonneville that I purchased from my parents during college. At some point, I forgot to pay the registration fees, and because I didn’t want to go to the DMV and because registration fees cost money, I stopped driving the car. It sat in the parking lot next to my apartment building for almost a year with numerous yellow notes on the windshield that were placed there by my irate landlord. One day, a woman knocked on my door looking for donations for cerebral palsy research, and I gave her my car. It had nothing to do with charity. I wasn’t overly concerned about cerebral palsy. I simply didn’t want to figure out what to do with the car. Cheap and Lazy.
Therefore, when I heard that I could have my groceries delivered for ten dollars, I immediately did the calculations in my head: Ten Dollars Buys Three Meals Or One Book + I Would Have To Talk To People – Going To The Grocery Store Takes Time And Energy + Taking The Bus Costs 4 Dollars Anyhow = Laziness Trumps Cheapness In This Particular Situation.
See how that works? So now I just go online once a month and order everything I want for just ten dollars and it comes right to my door.
I’m not necessarily proud that it has come to this, but I have made the decision. If you don’t hear from me in five days, come over to my apartment and poke me with a stick.
dale bridges writing 