I could not bear to put the Heckler in the recycle bin, we’d been through too much together. So I took it out to the desert and gave it a proper burial.
with a great view
rain brought out all the ghetto-tubeless residue, and set the tone for ceremony
Up Bell from the Scottsdale side, down Bell and Windgate to East End, up East End to Tom’s Thumb, down TT to Windgate, back up and over Windgate to Bell, down Bell to Parasdise. No nimby HOAs, no dodging herds of slack-jawed hikers around Sunrise and Lost Dog, no horrible dirt road, no push up Sonoran Trail to give back 500 vf coming down a sidewalk.
Nowhere as bad as one might think. There was 15 min of HAB near the top of Bell, and 25 HAB to get up East End. We relaxed and took pictures.
up Bell?
drizzly day in the Valley
the fountain is still shooting in Fountain Hills
up East End let us study all the switchbacks for the next descent
we hid from a snow flurry inside the oft-photographed boulders atop Tom’s Thumb
Maad caught in the act of blogging about his radness
The rain made for hero-dirt, I dabbed once on the descent. Maad also nailed switchbacks better than any prior run
20 miles, 3.5 moving time, and my best time ever down Paradise Wash 7:53! Stats show almost 5500 vf.
The girls have always behaved differently around me. There are things that transpire, depths of activity and imagination that are an antithetic wavelength from my wife’s. The girls connect to her viscerally, obsessively, an umbilical chord. They adore her and melt around her. They are magnetized by how she nurtures them.
I am their left brain, their directed adventure, their challenge to learn and improve themselves mentally and physically, their kick in the ass to quit being wussies and have fun. They ask me questions, I give them answers. I tell G she is smarter than Kila, except Kila fights better. I tell her cursing is ok if she is ready for the consequences. I tell Alana she can take whatever she wants as long as she carries it, then quickly walk away from her. I let them paint in the kitchen. My agenda and pain and structure get timeboxed, i love them wantonly, recklessly, as long as they don’t whine.
I try to balance who i am with my role. Two roles now. Beckie is traveling 4 days a week, and her void reminds me everywhere. I sink, willingly, sorta, into a gentle trudge, a pain cave with bursts of beatific light blowing through it. The edges are smoothed by lack of sleep, anejo, and weariness from a high-fat low-workout diet. The sitter got sick, I could not bare resetting them in the car for a trip to the gym and screwing Kila out of another walk. I keep fading, fogging over…I need to help G with a school art project, at 11:30 i finished my day job and started a half-assed beer-fueled workout.
I convinced\strong-armed them to walk Kila around the block with me. All of us a little too tired, G skyping Beckie I was being mean, shoving them away for 17 minutes to keep the house from crumbling down. Getting out fixes almost everything, smiles and jokes returned. It is beautiful, if I can keep my sisyphean conscious from rolling down on me.
G wanted me to take pictures of her climbing the Eagle. I did not have a camera, which made no difference, since really she just wanted to pose. She quoted Phineas and Ferb about mental picutres. Hehe, she quotes shows…on her way to geekdom, pretty blonde popular geekdom. Sure baby, i’m down with the fakey photos, saves me time cleaning the memory card, and i can be lazy while they run themselves retarded up and down a pile of rocks.
Except, ‘Say cheese‘ lasts for 3.5 pretend pictures, until they lose all interest and spell my doom.
Me: Maybe you haven’t been keeping up on current events, but we just got our asses kicked! G:Daddy, take another picture, or I’ll start choking Alana Me: I don’t wanna rain on your parade, but we’re not gonna last seventeen *hours* against them things! G: Daddy!!!! i found a rusty knife, some acid, and this dead skunk!
Panic!
PANIC!
We still had the Despicable Me thing going on. giggle, laugh, cry, whine And i do love this commercial
Soon it became eagle, cat, Kila, cow, jaguar, silly, chicken, frightened, pteranadon! G kept up. so did Alana. Hands, and feet and faces, standing on top of a rockpile posing in the dark. And there we 3 were, in perfect harmony.
We rolled home, G enjoying a scooter so she could keep down with Alana, still on her dumb-ass-baby-trike that she insisted on taking. And pedaled the whole way. By the end she pushed, she carried, but she did not quit. Blew my mind, I was ready to carry it rather than be dickDad to whiny Podford — better place better time for correcting this behavior. But she made it! The next night she picked up and almost dropped a 15 lb dumbell on her foot. Really…15 lbs, who knew?! The drop scared her, but for once she did not implode. I explained owies, and rock falls, and certainty. Then bumped knuckles and exploding knuckles and grabbed butts, and still she pouted, but did not quit. By now G at 3 would be laughing dropping the dumbell again. I put her in bed at 12:41, after she finally passed out at 12:36. She stirred when i started to drop her, a nod to Inception, and rolled awake screaming that she wanted to stay up.
Every RP trip develops its own vibe. One of the best ever. 90′s highs 70′s lows, low tide from 2p-sunset every afternoon, barely any wind. And my bud Yuri and his 2 great kids Pia and Tate romping with my Monsters. Swimming til sunset in the warm water, bike rides, pastry runs, salsa and seafood orgies leasing out days i can slow down and love life and family. Alana floated in the ocean untethered. I ran in sand 3 days for 30 minutes, my quads blew up, my liver displayed the strength of its training. We established the rules to Mudball.
Rule #1:You are not playing Mudball unless everyone agrees you are playing Mudball
Rule #2:There will be no mudballs to the face, or nose, or eyes, or ears or neck or junk. No uncool mudballs.
Rule #3:3 mudballs in a row and you chug
just before the string caught on my ear and ripped out an earing
Yuri trying the g-out
palm tree needs viagra
zombie apocalypse
leisurely lunches with a view
Les Artistes
alone together or together alone? wgaf, not hassling mom and dad
free range podford
Go here, and see my good friend with his good eye capture familiar scenes differently.
Very eye opening. A lot of people I know – neighbors, colleagues, school friends – are likely considered the top 1%. Or likely to be there if they continue on their current pattern of working and saving. My wife and I have years of college, Beckie 5+ years working on a post-grad degree, continuous post-college high-pressure employment, and consistent savings. For the past 15 years we’ve maxed our 401k’s, saved probably 1/3 our incomes, driven our cars til they were 10 yrs old, paid off our monthly credit card balances, and avoided any debt other than mortgages which we set up so that they could be paid by either one of our incomes. The author is right that is not a bad place to be, and I’m thankful every day for my brains, stable family growing up, good health, education and the country that allowed me to do well when given those opportunities. But I got fucked in the recession too – huge loss to the savings I’d contributed to for 20 yrs, house value fell to what I paid for it in 2000. Not as bad as someone who lost their house and job, but like 30% of my net worth *poof*. 6-7yrs of working every day *poof*. So, yeah, I’m mad as all get-out.
What I don’t think people who are so anti-OWS get is that its a very fine line between the guy who took out student loans, bought a house at the peak, and didn’t save vs. the bottom of the top 1%, those 53% paying taxes but still struggling. We still got jacked by an unfair system. The people poo-poo’ing the movement as ‘lazy people who want handouts‘ are so busy being repubnicant to see that, well, 99.5% of us have a lot more in common than different. Yes, living within your means and saving has softened the blow to you, and thankfully there are a lot of you and I still solvent and keeping the train on the rails. In return we still have a house and a job while others have lost almost everything…but we are still swimming upstream. That is not America. America is about a level playing field. Rupert Murdoch’s zombie army need to open their eyes and read their damn bank statements. It really is time for a class war.
MoveOn, or whomever is going to harness the awareness OWS is raising to these systematic inequalities, needs to keep this in a centrist framework. I don’t think they are at all capable of doing so, too beholden to their liberal audience and too fundamentally liberal themselves to see the broad themes instead of getting their pinko panties in a bunch over pimples. Typical idiot democrats. Instead of sending around a centrist message, MoveOn sends me requests to email the Mayor of Oakland chapping him for his over-aggressive police. Why don’t they send me the address of my Congressman and the Buffet Chain Letter? People living in a park and banging drums can not be the lasting image of opposition to the inequalities in our system! EVERYONE should get behind leveling the playing field, Congressmen being compensated like the rest of us, consistent tax rates for all entities, and intelligent bank regulation. Fracturing into extreme positions like social justice or universal health care will continue to highlight our differences. These issues are symptoms of our economy failing and moving towards plutocracy. Even libertarians espouse the need for corrective action towards flaws in the system. A healthy stable economy and fair opportunities will go a lot further to correcting these other symptomatic problems than some masterplan like Obamacare or other non-centrist proposals.
I am not optimistic. We’ve let the argument be co-opted for too long already, another symptom of a deteriorating system,I don’t think the average person is capable of opening their 3rd eye and taking our economy back.
The cherry topping on this giant pile-o-shit cake was that it came after rock climbing class. G is on Fall Break, and we did not clue-in to kindergartners actually having an actual ‘Fall Break‘ in time to avoid 5 days of Hurricane G to the chest. Her climbing coach said it was her best ever day. I’m sure, rested and antsy and ready to blow. After class I climbed with her. She became the teacher. She has 4x the hours on a climbing wall I’ve ever had; six months weekly has made her hands and forearms powerful. and i’m coachable. G said ‘look up, don’t look down.’ The extra effort i spent flailing my feet were easier on my body then the drag from pointing my head down. On the second run i started remembering where the toe-holds were, or getting the most out of a quick glance and sticky climbing shoes. Suddenly it made sense how carelessly she hops up the walls flopping on only 2 contact points; she is good. And my 3 runs were so much easier than they looked from the bottom, a milestone for me…thanks t.Human!
I was about to ask the staff for the next belay class when G baked the pile-o-shit cake. Suddenly she was kicking and screaming and writhing on the floor about tying her shoes. *boom*Welcome to Genevieve’s meltdown.
It was so obvious, when I look at it now.
The day before, Alana — also being vagrant due to teacher career enhancement training at Kinder Care (which *groan* i wholeheartedly support) — threw a too-expensive-for-toddlers bowl of peas into the wall. I shrugged and ever-so-mildly berated myself. Saw it all coming, saw her not-nap, nod off in the car, slide into bitchiness. I was too very weary to care, it was just a bowl.
I got beatdown at work, beatdown by housewifing, beatdown by my house and wife, and blown from 30 minutes climbing and an hour lifting. I may still have been feeling dt’s after Tuc Fxs.
It was so obvious, when I look at it now.
But in the moment, it was an insult, her personal grudge against all the work and patience i’ve given her, a submission to her lazy self-indulgence. She knows…KNOWS…i can take just about any of her bullshit anywhichway…except shrieking, too many years of that. “oh no you didn’t!‘ I thought while my inner angry black chick waggled her neck.
I felt awful all next day. tummy-twisting awful. don’t-look-in-the mirror awful. be-nice-to-awful-coworkers awful. move-out-failure-as-father-&-husband awful.
Things are not as bad as they seem, and blogging is dramaqueenization. Focusing on improvement is my best effort at closure on pile-o-shit cake mistakes. Words hurt, and i’ve always been too good with them. When you make a nearly-6 yr old cry for 5x longer than when she ate shit on this big hill, i don’t need to be told twice a correction is required.
Sometimes i hate my wife for my burdens and bondage. Then, her comprehension of my dynamics awe me, remind me of all that’s genuine between us. She said: G’s not a bad kid, she’s tired, sometimes she needs help, sometimes you punish her. I chapped Beckie a few days prior for letting Alana faceplant when she 75% knew it would end in a faceplant. Touche, thanks Sweet Honey for the knowledge. ‘
I apologized to G an hour later, while she was washing her hands. M’eh, the moment was there. I’m sorry i got cranky, i was tired. you know how it gets when your’e cranky?
Then Beckie went away for 2 days. and G was still off school for 2 days. Genevieve, Alana, and Paypal – i was monster-herding every second, i dreamed about my stress. Thursday was luau night at the Fishbowl! G spun nearly 3 hrs nonstop, exploding from a good day of movies and cooked-to-order meals and Starfall. ‘May I have some broccoli‘ = parenting heroics. Alana was much the same. At the Fishbowl, I looked for it, saw it, caught it also in myself, then loaded us all into the car and got the fuck out, before any vampires feasted. All night i calibrated on helping, not pushing. The return of positive-dad [insert estrogen joke here]. I explained it to G when i was starting to lose it, and she said ‘i’m gonna take my cranky face off too’, then passed out in the car. Alana was so jacked on candy she yapped nonstop, but i finally got her to lay down and sleep without yelling 2 hrs later. By Friday i was hungover and drunk, kept marching on, brought G to my office and the library and Fresh&Sleazy. She ate everything in sight, she spoke to me and i listened to her, she was beautiful for 6 hrs. I finished my work day at 12:04am.
Parenting is probably better both hard and soft. The positivity of going soft is immeasurably easier.
James throws a massive tailgating party every year for his beloved Sooners vs. Longhorns game. The one and only upside of Beckie traveling 3-4 days a week for work is that I can cut out guilt-free. The game started at 9am on Saturday, the brisket had been baking since the day before, so I rode out 30 miles to East Mesa at 9pm Friday, arriving in time to partay mostly non-stop til the next afternoon when Beckie and the kids picked me up. and ate, and swam, and tailgated themselves.
Long night rides across the Valley are deep and dark and mind-opening, stealthy spins across the grid and the grain of your angst and issues. When I finally landed at James’ I looked like Tron and felt peaceful.
On McDowell road near Val Vista in Mesa (a decent neighborhood),i got tagged by a couple dooshbags in a lifted light-colored pickup. I heard a loud rumble and realized i was not hurt and watched cups roll off my shoulder and into the street. Good shot fellas, you nailed my helmet. Seriously, thank you for hitting my best-protected spot. My next reaction after was ‘cool a car actually saw me!’
I never thought about catching them cause it was pointless, and other than a little wet i wasn’t hurt. I laughed, i suffer so much on a long ride and have so many injuries from falls…90 minutes in and a little ice didn’t even make me lose cadence. As i spun on i thought what if i caught up to them or i was packing, and then realized in AZ its just as likely the other guy is packing too. If I’d been hurt I probably would feel differently, but all I wanted was to get off the road, cause i started thinking now they’re emboldened and might come back. Fighting a car-full of dudes was equally stupid. I passed a Mesa cop 3 miles later and told him what happened, thinking maybe they will still be in the area. What else was i gonna do? jic the jerks picked up their pace as the night went on…maybe he’d see the truck and be aware of them. Mostly i’m glad that in all my years riding this is the worst I’ve had yet.
I arrived to a beer and a shot and The Man in full swing. Apparently the Meat needs towel service.
I woke up 8am, i have no idea when we slept, i was so disoriented and drunk i grabbed a bloody mary and jumped on the bike for a 45 min sanity spin around Las Sendas. I repeated later when the game became a blowout and my rhythm got antsy. Mid-day golf-course tresspassery, the Valley in the background, James’ absconded bike in the fore, Security chasing me on riders’ left. They’re hard to see in the pic, but they are there . dumb slow fockers .
Sunday i was very weary. Beckie schemastizized, and it was brilliant. All of us with Kila on bikes to the Library, Horizon Park, Cold Stone, then home.
DAD and Mom, January 17, 2012, on Zoo: The videos are terrific! Looks like a great day was had by everyone.
chollaball, December 25, 2011, on Xmas Eve on the 50: i need a camera for xmas. doh! yur acting like this trip was some kinda last-minute surprise ?
maadJurger, December 24, 2011, on Xmas Eve on the 50: dude…time for a new lens…your shots have the Barbera Walters, Massingill Douch soft focus effect…..other than that….you...
tims, December 21, 2011, on Bump a knuckle, brobra: nice writeup! thanks for sharing My pair of nearly new Dabellos sit in the closet ready to jump into the Salomons that are hanging beside...
u2metoo, December 21, 2011, on Bump a knuckle, brobra: ahsum dood, I am so freaking jealous.
. dumb slow fockers 
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My pair of nearly new Dabellos sit in the closet ready to jump into the Salomons that are hanging beside...