Speaking of being a roadgeek…

It’s always fun to track the progress of the crew that’s clearing the North Cascades Highway.

Helas, it won’t be open before I leave.

Here’s a chunk of website by a guy who gets a link from me because: 1) He created an incredibly detailed web site about US highway 395 (I mean really incredibly detailed), and 2) He used the term ‘roadgeek’ to describe himself.

And look: Not a mile 23 sign, but to stop and take it at night… Seriously roadgeek.

The Devil’s Roadgeek Dictionary.

There was a horrible shooting today on Capitol Hill. Seven dead, including the gunman who shot himself rather than submit to the police.

I hope all you Capitol Hill Xangans are OK….

I talked to my mom the other day, and in response to this ‘blog entry about climbing up on top of the school, she says, “It’s too late to spank you.”

In other news… The van passed emissions, which I already mentioned, but I like saying it so I’ll say it again. In that same conversation, my mom said she’s pray for a positive result, so maybe prayer works.

Also, the idle switch on the throttle assembly does need to be replaced, rather than simply squirted with contact cleaner and adjusted. The engine idles at 2500-3000 unless I tap the accelerator pedal, thus triggering the switch. Could be the throttle cable, but it’s probably the switch.

Via mefi:

From The Window.

This kid rocks. As the mefi entry quotes:

“I have no desire to be a dependent thwarted bitter crip living out decades of boring meagre existence. I have my path mapped out clearly. Artist.”

Emissions passed. Third time’s a charm. Tab registration tomorrow.

To do: New tires (ordered and on the way), minor mechanical (rear hatch struts, leaky rear heater hose, flush coolant, power steering fluid, and gearbox oil, etc), and…

…Replace power steering rack. Not a hard job, but a job nonetheless.

BEHOLD MY LEET VOLKSWAGEN SKILLZ!

The trip to TX will be straight on, no stops, no nothing, through Idaho, southern Wyoming, eastern Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and east Texas. No frivolities, though if it’s the right time of day I’ll for sure stop for a thing or two in Boise. The trip back will be the saunter.

Up until just a few minutes ago, I was trying to sleep. My mind was racing. This happens sometimes, especially when there’s some stress in my life, which there is right now.

I’ve discovered something that helps in this situation, and that’s rooibos. It’s the leaves of a rooibos tree, dried and made into tea. There’s also a fermented variety, and I’ll have to try that sometime, but for now it’s the Numi brand name version, with ‘org. Rooibos’ as the ingredient list. (The Numi web site is pretty much exactly what you’d expect an organic special-blend tea vendor’s web site to look like, right down to traditional third-world-y music on the splash screen.)

I’m supposed to let the tea steep for 5 minutes, which is always hard for me. Why is it so difficult for my brain to acknowledge that there’s a step that comes after the pouring the hot water part, and before the drinking part?

Anyway. This entry has taken me about 5 minutes to write, so here I am, drinking my tasty tea.

Rooibos is supposed to be as good for you as green tea, without any caffiene or tannins. And it calms your nerves. In South Africa (where the rooibos tree grows), they give it to colicky babies. So WAAAAAH!

An interview (RealAudio) with Rob Breszny from New Dimensions, discussing ‘pronoia,’ which is the opposite of paranoia.

This is a topic I keep coming back to when I just start writing. I’ve ‘blogged here about this before; congratulations if you can find the entries.

I used to sneak out a lot. Not really sneaking, but I’d go out and wander around and do semi-sneaky things. As a little kid, I’d go to the nearby elementary school building and climb up on the roof. I’d watch my neighborhood go by.

I remember going to school one day and some kid bragged about climbing up on the roof. He said he had climbed up there and no one had seen him. He showed me where he had done it, too. I don’t recall what my reaction was, but I felt that in order to be cool, I should do it, too.

So I did. But it didn’t make me cool. In fact, I didn’t tell anyone about it. Telling is part of how such things end up being cool, but not in my case.

I climbed up the way he said he’d done it. There were some electrical panels in the back, and the conduit pipes were sturdy. You could go back and forth from one to another, gradually getting high enough to pull yourself over the rain gutter.

The roof was completely flat. I remember there were ducts and conduits in an almost chaotic pattern up there… The orderly right-angle geometry of the building’s interior always made me feel like there was some kind of master plan to the whole thing, as if the placement of each electrical socket, the wiring for each florescent light, was laid out in a huge mandala of pre-adolescent learning and development. As if the electrical wiring was designed to wire my little brain by osmosis.

But the conduits on the roof put the lie to that thesis. They seemed haphazard, disorderly, weathered. The roof vents popped up in strange places, and the duct work twisted around like a big aluminum vine. It wasn’t a fire hazard or anything, but my mind needed everything to line up, and it didn’t. Even if it wasn’t dangerous or ill-maintained, it was ugly.

This is when I learned about perspective in architecture. No one, not even adults who were theoretically responsible for such things, would discover this disorder, even though it was literally right above their heads. The roof line hid it from all who were below.

The building was laid out like two big squares of classrooms, with the inside of each square a small greenspace. The greenspace was an architectural blessing I hadn’t yet come to appreciate; I took it for granted that one could sit on grass in the sun during breaks. Between the two squares was the ‘cafetorium,’ a combination cafeteria and auditorium. The cafetorium was about two stories high, so it was a large obstacle to walk around on the roof. And that’s what I’d do.

I’d circumambulate the cafetorium. Near the front of the school, opposite my climb up, was a barrier I couldn’t quite surmount without help. The school’s library and offices were more adult-sized, so the roof line rose about 4 feet. There were two chunks of 2×6 that made an easy ramp… Either some other kids had put them up there, or more likely the maintenance man was sick of having to hoist himself.

One time, I got trapped. Someone spotted me and called the constable. I saw the patrol car in time to duck down, giving myself a good spot to hide from ground-level view, along with the embarassing duct work. At the same time, I could see the parking area with only a small risk of being seen.

It seems as though I was there for years, but it was more like 15 minutes. If you’re a cop, you’re not paid to climb up on elementary school roofs. He parked his car in the lot, walked over and called up. As if I would answer.

So I waited. He left, and I went back down. People don’t really care that much about this sort of thing. Whoever called in the cops didn’t care enough to leave their house and investigate, and the cop just waited until he could say with reasonable certainty that no one was up there.

This is the value and danger of perspective. You think you can see what you can’t, and you don’t even know what you can’t see. But in the narrative of your life, maybe that’s all you really need. I needed to do something forbidden, and I succeeded. I went up there maybe a dozen times over the next few months, because it was slightly dangerous and because it was a new perspective.

Earlier today I was at Sears, in the tool department, getting a metal tool box, and a torque wrench, and a big-ass flathead screwdriver of the kind you end up using a lot, but never to actually drive screws. My cell phone rang… I had been playing phone tag with a friend of mine in Houston, who I’ve tried to keep in touch with but haven’t had as much success as I’d like. We exchanged pleasantries and I explained that I was at Sears buying tools. He told me that Pat Stallings had died.

In 1988 I was in a band. I played keyboards in a band called The Bends. Somewhere between Frank Zappa and XTC, via Genesis and King Crimson.

Anyway, the point here is that Pat Stallings was in this band, The Bends. He was a really great guitar player, of the kind that usually goes on to become a Rock God of some kind. We’re talking Steve Vai with bad representation. He had the chops, Brett and Eric had the songwriting, and I had the studio/production chops. Sort of. There’s always overlap in bands. We marched to the beat of a few different drummers, my favorite being Todd Harrison.

Pat played a lot around town in various projects, and I wish I could list them. But the fact is that I never really got to know Pat. He was always off in his own world. I hadn’t known he was married until Brett told me today, on the phone there at Sears. The circumstances around his death are somewhat mysterious, and I won’t fathom to guess, much less write about it in public.

I’ll update this entry tomorrow, after I can dig out the tapes and pull something representative into the computer so you folks can hear a blazing solo or two.