Tom Quigley

Now that my flight to Australia is less than two weeks away,...

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 01:11:39 -0500

Now that my flight to Australia is less than two weeks away, I’m finally allowed to start getting excited about this. I think that if I had started four months ago when I found out, I’d have exploded in anticipation by now. This is the Great Ocean Ecolodge, where I’ll be staying for three months working with the associated Center for Conservation Ecology. I’ll be living in a tent on property, waking up early and hiking in the Otway Ranges, where there is one of the highest populations of koala bears in Australia. Follow this with a day of feeding orphaned wallabies, koalas, and tiger quolls, and conclude it with a chef-catered dinner with fresh food from the sustainable garden, and you have my schedule for the next three months.

Oh, except for my days off when I’ll be exploring these.

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Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:37:40 -0500

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Thank GOD you can now follow my every train of rambling thought, 160 characters at a time. What more could you want?

Starfish and Hope: Perceiving the Homeless

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 14:58:00 -0500

When you’re living on a budget, there are some things you skimp on, consciously or not, and there are some things you don’t. Three meals a day start to seem excessive. Why do I need breakfast AND lunch when I can have brunch? Certain everyday items suddenly seem prohibitively expensive. How badly do I need to shampoo my hair every single day, anyway? and boy, my pasta making skills are getting better and better. But even if I can’t actually afford go out to dinner, I can still damn well look like I can. My down jacket definitely would have been warmer, but I let the apartment door lock behind me and thumb the two buttons snug on my pea coat. I catch my reflection in a car window as I descend to street level, and I hear my friend Leslie’s voice in my head. You play guitar, right? Acoustic, how did you know? You just seem like someone who would. She laughed and she gave me a look, and I granted her the concession: I’m a total American-fratboy stereotype. I look the part tonight, dressed like Winter Yuppie Ken – stonewash jeans, Sperries, charcoal classic wool coat, and plaid button-up – unkempt hair and beard that look a bit too purposeful to be believably Bohemian. I’m like a cutout from a corny blind date. I enjoy rock climbing, playing acoustic guitar, writing in my free time, and meeting new people. I’m just a small-town waiter with big dreams! Would you like a long walk on the beach with that bullshit?

I try to ignore the fact that I opted to dress up instead of dressing warm for a 10-minute walk to work, where I’ll only have to change anyway, and head off into the paved labyrinth that will spit me out in front of the Back Bay Social Club. People are moving hurriedly in two directions, with me and against me, pushing up and down the street littered with stop lights and stopped traffic. Their eyes stay down, fixated to phones, or they bore through each other with thousand-mile stares. The people are moving like rats in a maze, scenting cheese, and the rats are huddled warm under trees and awnings, watching the human traffic with interest or awe – or maybe it’s something else. It’s hard to read rat emotions. You’re doing that thing where you try to attribute meaning to something meaningless again, part of me chastises another part of me, which retorts, would you rather we just wander through a world devoid of purpose, assigning random values and ignoring potent symbolism? I think this part of me is probably wearing thick-rimmed glasses and wearing a scarf. They begin to argue – they’re not very good roommates – and I start to tune them out. They’re always doing this.

Boston is currently fighting through the awkward month of seasonal puberty, going through lots of changes it doesn’t understand; mood swinging from 65 to 35 in a day, sun to rain, just waiting for its clouds to open and its temperature to drop (protip – that’s a metaphor.) There are cold nights, like tonight, but they’re not consistent, and I’ve underdressed and overdressed more times this week than a runway model. Most people are on the same page tonight – heavy jackets and high collars, scarves and gloves, or hands in pockets. The pigeons are huddled together in eaves. Even the moon looks cold.

Work starts late, and the sun is on its winter schedule, going down earlier and earlier as the year draws on. My apartment has a window that opens onto what the architects probably called a “courtyard,” but is more similar to a chimney. If the person across the courtyard from me opened his window and asked for a cup of sugar, I could hand it to him without leaving my room. Well, if I had any sugar. He’d have to ask for empty beer bottles or dirty laundry to actually receive anything in return. Because of the confines of this vertical corridor, my room doesn’t receive any outside light, meaning I can wake up groggy and confused at 2PM, wondering why I’m awake before the sun is. By the time I get out of the apartment to head to work, the sun is usually already down. It’s like living in Alaska. I’ve gone half a week without seeing the sun before.

Looking ahead, I can see an odd eddy in the flow of people; the sidewalk is as double-wide as it’s been the whole street, but people are curving to the right, shrinking into a bottleneck on the road-side of the pavement. As I get closer, I start to hear a jangle like a can of BB’s, and I know exactly why everyone is staring ahead so resolutely as they herd themselves to the side of the pavement. There are so many reasons why we ignore the homeless, but their most potent force is to put themselves right in the public eye, and let pity play hard upon the heartstrings of some. I begin to hear his familiar plea as I draw near: “Spare change, please? Sir, ma’am, spare change for the homeless…” The crowd parts and I catch a glimpse of the man, and I recognize him immediately. I’ve seen him before, from the window of a bus. He’s made of leather, folded in many times upon himself like a crumpled receipt. His nose makes a complete C in his face when looked at straight on, like a broken nose that not only never healed, but that was never re-set. His nostrils point southeast on the compass of his face. He had been plodding along past a bus stop with a wide, stomping gait when I saw him first, and as I watched with my forehead on the window, he leaned heavily to the pavement, picked up a cigarette butt that someone had just ground out, brushed off the end, and dropped it into his pocket for later. As I recall this and his face gains purchase in my memory, I suddenly realize that he is staring straight at me, the single member of the pushing crowd not staring blindly ahead. I look up quickly, but he has already honed in on my recognition of his presence and although I am still many steps from him, he speaks to me directly, ignoring the crowd. “Sir,” he says, and I see him staring in my peripherals, “sir, please. Some change, a dollar, anything?”

I draw even with him, staring ahead, and I hear him shake his Starbucks cup once, weakly. He is old enough to be my father. I walk past, staring straight ahead, betraying not a head shake, no facial apology, no admission of his existence. The problem of homelessness is a great one, too great to be addressed by a single man, and a single man I am. I’m already on a short budget. If I gave money to every pitiable panhandler, I’d be left a pauper myself. I hear him speak as I depart from his station, and his voice grows softer as draw away. He says, “Have a wonderful evening, sir. Happy Holidays.”

I continue on. My collegiate mind identifies this as a logical fallacy, an appeal to emotion. There is, of course, no reason he deserves my money more than I do. I work like a slave for my money – I have four part-time jobs, two of them volunteer. Truly, I reason, there is no reason he deserves any money from contributing society, if he is contributing nothing in return. The homelessness isn’t without cause, I remind myself callously, be it addiction or illness. Neither of which I can do anything about with a dollar – one of which I could actively hurt. Behind me, I hear his coin jar begin to shake again, like a gypsy tambourine. There are homeless people on every corner. Why should I give to one if I can’t give to them all? And if I give at all, how am I supposed to decide who to give to – give to the most talented homeless person? That seems like it defeats the purpose, and seems a little too close to BumFights for me to feel comfortable with.

The light ahead of me turns red, and I stop at the corner as cars blaze past me. It’s cold, and as the wind cuts through my jacket seams I realize that I’m hungry, too. I finger the money in my pocket – about seven dollars – and wonder what sort of food I should use it on tonight. Nothing seems appealing, and everything seems expensive. I check my watch as I bounce on my toes – only five more minutes until I get to work and get inside for the night. I’m already cold from being outside for just ten minutes, and I’m not coming up with any cheap dinner solutions. I’m hungry, cold, and now irritable, but at least there’s an end in sight, and thank goodness it’s soon. Because I would hate to stay out for much longer in this cold.

God damn it, empathy.

It takes me less than a minute to retrace my path, and he sees me coming from the whole block away. I hold the seven dollars palmed in my hand like I’m paying drug money and shake his hand, passing him the folded bills. I don’t know what I expect him to say. I guess a thanks is in order, and I hadn’t thought much past giving him money, but as I hand him the cash he gushes “Thank you! Oh, thank you!” emphatically enough to make me incredibly self-conscious. I look into his face, and I can plainly tell in his eyes that he doesn’t give any shits or thanks about me. It’s not a “go fuck yourself,” but it’s certainly not a “thanks, now I can eat tonight.”

“No problem,” I say, and for some reason I don’t leave. He doesn’t say anything, and I don’t know what I’m waiting for, but I feel uncomfortable – like “Cut, take the money back and hand it to him again, re-read your lines, feeling this time people!” uncomfortable. Like we’re acting, and it’s clear to me he’s playing a role. He thinks I see him as Homeless Man #1, and myself as the Rich Charitable Gentleman, and now that he’s read his line for Grateful Charity Case #1 and I’ve paid off my guilt and received a little feel-good in return, he’s expecting me to smile and quote him a Bible verse and walk away. But I’m still here, and he’s almost as uncomfortable by that as I am. We’re misunderstanding each other, I think. That’s not why I gave him money. Why did you give him money? part of me asks, was it for him, or for you?

I try, but I don’t know what else to say. “Here,” “Thanks,” was supposed to be the end of it, and he’s looking everywhere but me now that we’re in this uncharted territory. Here There Be Uncomfortable Dragyns. And I don’t have time for a life story – I don’t really even have time to still be here – but I am, and grasping at conversation threads I idiotically decide to go with “So – what are your plans for the night?” Classy. Are you trying to pick him up or something? Now we’re both uncomfortable and I feel like an idiot. I guess I am a little curious about the daily life of a homeless man, but “so what are you doing tonight” was probably an insensitive way to phrase it.

“I don’t know,” he says, caught off guard. “I’ll eat, probably get some sleep in one of the ATM booths. Then at 6 am I’ll catch the bus to the shelter.” He’s looking up and down the street, everywhere but at me. He wants me to leave. I oblige.

The altruism coin goes like this – heads, you helped a human being, tails, you’ll never make a difference in the big picture. As I cross the street in the biting cold, I remember a story my friend told me once, a famous adage called The Starfish Story. In it, a man walks down a beach littered with starfish washed up by the waves. He sees a man approaching, picking up starfish at intervals and tossing them back into the ocean. As our protagonist approaches, he stops the starfish-flinger. “Why are you throwing these starfish back?” he demands, “look at the length of this beach! You’ll never save them all! How can you possibly make a difference?” The man looks at the starfish in his hands, then throws it into the ocean and replies, “I made a difference to this one.”

Six hours later, work finally spits me chewed up back onto Boylston Street. I’m tired, grumpy, still poor after only making around forty dollars for hours of work (waiting is a gambling game), now I’m cold, and I’m still fucking hungry. God damn it. I lower my head into the blast wind and start for home. In the course of four blocks, I am accosted by five homeless men. One of them follows me an entire block, asking if I’ll pay him to do a one-hand pushup. “Don’t be afraid of the one-hand pushup man!” he shouts until I finally say “I’m sorry. I already gave money tonight.” They all say the same thing when they leave – “Have a good night, Happy Holidays.” I feel played for an emotional fool, hungry, cold, and poor to boot. But at least I made a difference. At least I threw one starfish back into the sea.

I round the corner towards my house. In a stone archway, I see my starfish man with the crooked nose. He is unconscious, and he is cradling an empty gallon of Listerine in his arms.

Despite my most nihilistic efforts, I still believe in the starfish story as an accurate allegory, but not for the same reasons. I draw a different moral, and I think the story ends too early; it needs one final line: “And the two men watched the starfish as it flew out over the waves, and then disappeared under the ocean.” And there, the story ends, because no one really knows what happens. The man walks on, basking in the goodness of his deeds of the day. And that starfish could very well have been saved in that act – saved from the sun’s baking rays, or from choking on our air. But it is just as likely that as soon as the starfish dropped out of sight, it was snatched up by an ocean predator and eaten – or thrown back into a polluted chemical spill – or the man had simply thrown an invasive species of starfish back into an embattled and fragile native ecosystem, contributing to its ultimate destruction. No one knows. That act could have truly helped, but there are exactly equal odds that it only contributed to more hurt. But people keep on telling the starfish story, to children and classes and feel-good seminars, generations and generations, because in the end, the moral of the story doesn’t follow the starfish. Nobody ever ends with, “And the starfish lived happily ever after.” The moral follows the man, who walks happily down the beach in his dopamine-glow of altruism, even though he will never know if he helped or hurt. It’s never as simple as the choice to help or hurt. So why do we give? What return do we get for our money – we are throwing it away as surely as throwing a starfish into the ocean – so why do we continue? We have no guarantee our money will help, or that it will be used correctly; as soon as we give it, it is gone, and we know nothing more. With the knowledge that we may have just hurt as equally as helped, we should stay our hand, but homelessness persists, and we must assume that it is on the alms of others. We keep giving – why?

In the end, the moral follows the man. The starfish might not all make it, but it won’t be for lack of him trying. That token effort is like a toll – a small payment to allow him to feel that something is being done, that there is some sort of good force at work somewhere. It is not the act itself, but the assurance of goodness in the world, that he pays to feel. To feel that someday perhaps there will be a beach to walk upon where the waves are gentler, and the starfish sit comfortably on their seafloor homes. The man continues on, knowing he will never save them all, but instead of walking down a beach of corpses, he walks along a beach of hope.

For more photography by Lee Jeffries, please visit his Flickr page.

The Secret Art of Flying

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 11:37:00 -0500

Travel is inherently expensive, and one of the most frustratingly expensive necessities of travel is the flight itself. Whether you’re going around the world or jet-setting around the same continent, air travel takes a chunk of money that often ends up being up to a fifth of an entire budget. The most effective ways of getting around this are marrying an airline pilot, owning your own private jet, and becoming so famous that people pay you to fly to places. For the rest of us humans, there are still cards to play that will save you money and make you breathe easier. Where would you go if you had a free one-way flight inside the country you’re traveling to? Imagine what you could do with an extra thousand dollars added onto your budget. Next time you book travel to another country, remember some of these tips, and save your money for the tacky touristy knick-knacks you know you’re going to end up buying. After all, if you don’t work to save your money, who’s going to – the airlines? Take a minute to yourself to stop laughing, and read on.

1. Consider NOT flying. Flying tends to be one of the more expensive forms of travel, even at its cheapest. If you’re going over land, explore train options. Trains are often cheaper than flights, but the cost trade-off comes at the price of your time, so you have to be alright with spending a whole lot of it by yourself. Another benefit of traveling by train is getting to see the country you’re traveling through, usually covered in clouds via plane, and meeting new people. People traveling on planes tend to become catatonic for the few hours they’re in the air. You might get into a good conversation with the people next to you, but convexly, many people don’t know how to turn conversation on and off when they’re in close proximity, and many will just continue to talk to you for the entire 5 hour flight – which can be either a good or a bad thing, depending on how interesting they are. Spend a lot of time on a train, however, and everyone eventually ends up wandering around the cars and making small talk with fellow trainees, if you will. If you’re interested in making new friends, while traveling, train travel can be an absolute godsend. If you’ve got enough friends and don’t want to make any more, convince some of your current friends to take a road trip with you. Get inventive – depending on the country, you could probably finagle a junker dirtbike for anywhere between $500 and $1000, thus eliminating the need for any in-country travel, and opening the door to the possibility of breakdown-related adventures. There are even water-borne methods of travel, if you’re enterprising and intrepid – if you already have sailing or nautical skills, working on a ship traveling to the location you’re interested in is a distinct possibility. How does getting paid for traveling to your vacation spot sound? Sounds like a few extra pina coladas on the beach to me.

2. Forget booking services – or manipulate them. Alright, so they haven’t invented ocean trains yet, and your friends haven’t called you “Skipper” since that one time you got too drunk and started dancing down the street singing The Sound of Music, so sailing’s out too. You’re dedicated to air travel. What’s your first step? Kayak? Expedia? Orbitz, Travelocity, Hotwire? None of the above. The flight prices quoted to you rarely reflect the very cheapest flight you’ll be able to find if you do your own footwork. If you’re thinking about booking hotels, rental cars, and flights through the same company, think about using one of these booking services for simple ease of organization and then scour their user policies for discounts. But if you’re simply looking at flight prices, comparing price quotes from each individual airline will tend to turn up a cheaper flight than you will find using a service. Don’t know what airlines fly out of what countries? Here’s where the booking companies come in. Plug in your flight itinerary, and it will pop up with a list of companies with bids for your ticket. Write down the list of every company it comes up with, then go to each company’s individual site and search your itinerary to see if they’re holding out with a better sale price than they’re giving to Expedia. You’ll often come up with airlines you didn’t even think of. Who knew that China Southern Airlines would be the cheapest company to fly to Melbourne from the States?

3. Segment your flights. So you want to book your flight to Paris, but you live in Middlefart, Kansas? Don’t even think of booking your Paris flight straight from your local airport. First of all, I’m not even sure that there is a local airport in Kansas, and second of all, you’re going to get absolutely hoisted on fares. At this point, you’ve decided which international airline is going to give you the best fare for your round-trip travel. But regardless of who you go with, the cheapest international flight is not necessarily going to be the cheapest airline to take a domestic flight out of. If you’re booking overseas with Delta, and you tell them you’re leaving from Colorado, they’re going to include a leg from Colorado to an international hub, and they’re going to book through Delta flights – which may not be the cheapest flight you could find out of Colorado. All international flights will leave out of big hubs on the seaboards – LAX, Atlanta, Boston, and New York, as an American example. Since you’re going to have to get there anyway, when you schedule your oversea flight, schedule it out of the hub, not out of your hometown. So, if you’re traveling from aforementioned Middlefart, search to see which would be the cheapest city to fly out of between the eastern seaboard hubs, and book that ticket. Then, use your Holmesian tactics that you learned in step 2 to find which airline is going to get you to from Middlefart to Reagan for the cheapest. Give a few hours cushion in between arrival and departure times to account for delays and ensure you get to the gate on time, because odds are if you’re flying on different airlines you’re going to have to change terminals. Similarly, fly into an international hub in another country, and then explore domestic flights online to see what would be the cheapest flight to your final destination.

4. Fly roundtrip. No matter where you’re going, the savings on a roundtrip ticket are going to be so high that you’ll be disgusted you even thought about booking one-way in the first place. If you’re not planning out your travels that explicitly, a one-way ticket may seem like a more flexible option – if you don’t know when you’re leaving, or where you’re flying out of, it may seem to make more sense to just get a one-way and then purchase your second ticket when your plans finalize. Trust me on this one (or do the smarter thing and look it up yourself) – a round-trip ticket will save you hundreds in the long run. As a comparison – a one-way ticket from LAX to Melbourne is $1,300. A roundtrip ticket featuring the same cities, is $1,500. Why the price difference? Because airlines are run by the devil, that’s why. In fact, in many cases, it may be far cheaper to purchase a round-trip ticket, then throw away the return ticket, if you’ve no intention of using it. There are a few caveats to this, as well as a few loopholes. If you’re unsure of where or when you’re flying back home, and hesitate to lock yourself into a schedule and a point of departure, no fear – if you want to switch flights, airlines will usually charge a change fee (around $200) and then make you pay the difference in the costs of flight for where you are flying from. Sometimes they will force you to pay the difference between your original return leg and a new one-way fee, but some airlines will simply make you pay the difference between your original half-roundtrip and the new half-roundtrip. It is very well worth calling the airline and asking, and finding an airline that will offer you a change fare based on return-roundtrip pricing.

This tactic can also be used to beat airline scheduling, which usually only prospects out ten or eleven months into the future. If you are being a responsible traveler and buying your ticket three months in advance, booking in October and leaving in February, then the airlines will not tend to offer flights returning in any months later than next August. If you were planning to leave sometime in December, it seems your dreams of a roundtrip ticket are scuttled, but don’t worry, you’re not stranded having to buy a one-way. Buy your roundtrip and schedule a return flight as late as you can. Then, when the airline’s schedule opens up to next December, pay the $200 change fee and price difference and push your return flight to December. It may seem expensive, but using the LAX-Melbourne example above – two one-ways will cost you $2,600, while the cost of a round-trip even after the change fee will be $1,700 – almost a thousand dollars in savings. Throw some scribble math in for the difference in costs, and you’re looking at $800 in pocket.

5. Know your airlines. You’re about to book a $1,000+ ticket and fly over an ocean – don’t let some tween in an ascot tell you that you can’t take your third bag. Know which ones are dependable, which ones offer good food, which ones will let you check a bag for free. Don’t be afraid to call and ask, and do your research. Finding an airline that has a cheap flight offer but makes you pay for each bag you check can inflate the cost to higher than you meant to spend. Some airlines have particular offers that will absolutely vindicate your travel budget. Airtran offers a standby ticket that you can purchase if you are between the ages of 18 and 22, a one-way $70 segment with two carry-on bags included. Jetstar has a sales hour where the price of all flights will plummet. Qantas will let you book a stopover in New Zealand for free, for as long as you want. Not every airline has a kicking deal like this, but knowing which ones do will end up saving you armored truckloads of money as you book connecting travel.

6. Two words – reward miles. Yes, this is absolutely worth getting an entire new credit card for. Many airline sponsored credit cards will offer introductory deals and amazing miles-for-dollars rewards. The Delta American Express card offers 30,000 free miles if you spend over $500 in the first three months – which you obviously will – and the card is so easy to get, a homeless person could get one via internet at the public library. There is a yearly fee, but the first year is waived, and by the time it rolls around you should have already gotten your money’s worth for it. Use your new credit card to purchase your international flight and zam, you’re looking at enough miles for a free one-way – 10,000 mile equals $100 off of a flight booking. Shop smart, and you might be looking at TWO free one-ways. You’re going to be spending money all vacation – pay on the card, and let it pay for your next vacation flight.

Credit cards aren’t the only way to earn reward miles. Airlines themselves often offer frequent flyer miles for customer loyalty. Since you’re already looking at taking a long and expensive flight, find out if your airline has a frequent flyers program, and sign up to make sure you get points from your travel. Often these points will seriously offset the costs of your next flight, if they don’t completely alleviate them. Sometimes the frequent flyer points will count flights from a sister company, such as Jetstar and Qantas, so you have a huge selection of flight times, prices, and airport locations.

Shop smart, do your research, and play your cards right, and you could find yourself not only paying a fare hundreds of dollars cheaper than you would have, but also cashing in free connecting flights, and stacking up points for rewards the next time you travel. This next round of beers is on me, guys – don’t worry, now I’ve got the money to spare.

The Earth’s auroras as seen from the International Space...

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 15:23:54 -0500

The Earth’s auroras as seen from the International Space Station - and I’ve never wanted to go into space so badly. Although the auroras are beautiful, my favorite part is seeing the network of lights, and the clouds discharging lightning during storms - all visible from space.

A Mixed Bag

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 01:46:28 -0400

A long day deserves a good beer. After six hours of running up and down stairs, balancing over-portioned pasta plates on huge wet trays, and fetching glass after wine glass from the bar for the downstairs patrons, I finally clocked out and dropped myself onto a stilted barstool. My friend Brian, the bartender, saw me sit and within seconds had poured me a frosty pint of Switchback ale, which I gratefully nursed at as I watched the late diners file out of the restaurant. As Brian and I caught up over the mixed noise of kitschy Italian dining music and the scrapings of servers putting up the chairs for the night, my friend Chris from the kitchens joined me at the bar. Dropping a newspaper onto the bartop, a beer swiftly found his hand, and quickly returned to the sticky bar surface half empty. We continued our conversation as Chris peered his way through the classifieds, as the night settled out around us.

“Oh my god,” Chris interrupted from his silence, and almost fell off of his bar stool laughing. As we looked on quizzically, he managed to control himself for long enough to push us the paper and point out an ad halfway down the page:

ADULT VHS
$20 mixed bag
Call ###-###-####

Chris and Brian will probably not let me live down the fact that the first thing out of my mouth was “GIVE ME THAT NUMBER,” but I maintain that the practical joke potential of that number is a gold mine. And what’s better than grainy ole, hairy ole VHS porn, especially when bought out of a local classifieds? That has a sketch quotient higher than Craigslist blind dating. For the next twenty minutes, the three of us hit every octave between giggle and guffaw as we entertained ourselves with the posting and other classifieds.

“Look,” Chris pointed to another posting, “here’s another – ‘Contents of 3 Car Garage, $500 OBO.’ What, so just whatever shit’s in there?”

“It’s a 3-car garage, Chris,” I explained patiently, “so there’s probably 3 cars in there. That’s a great deal.”

“It’s probably the same guy who posted the VHS tapes. That’s where he stores all his tapes.”

“A mixed bag for $20, or a 3-car-garage-full for only $500? Now that’s a bargain.”

“ ‘Mixed Bag’ is probably the name of one of the tapes in the collection – I’m thinking 80’s interracial gay orgy,” Brian mused from behind the bar.

“Look at this,” Chris laughed as he kept browsing, “why would some people put out an entire ad for this? ‘One Piece Lavatory’ – ‘Free Barbie Clothes’ – ‘Sunbeam Flat-Iron, $10?’ I don’t even know what that is.”

“Ah,” I volunteered guiltily, “that one’s my personal ad. ‘Sunbeam Flat-Iron’ is my street name, back from stripping in ’86.”

“No, it was ’83,” Brian corrected me solemnly. “I’ve got the VHS.”

Another ad caught my eye. “Look guys,” I laughed, and circled the two postings: “For $20, you could either buy an adult VHS mixed bag, or you could buy an entire children’s DVD and VHS collection - $20 for the lot.”

“Only got $20,” Brian sighed. “What to do… what to do…”

“It’s too bad we don’t have $40,” Chris laughed. “We could get both and have a movie marathon.”

“Plenty of options,” I agreed, and we all laughed heartily at the absurdity of the classified ads. As our chuckling died down, my eyes strayed across the page, and then I stopped. My laughter died in disbelief as I stared at the paper in shock, switching from circled ad to circled ad to confirm what I’d thought I’d seen. And when I saw it, I almost fell off my chair, screaming in incoherent laughter.

Not seeing it? Look a little closer.

Now there are many facets to what is both hilarious and deeply wrong about this photo, but to me, the part that stands out the most gloriously is this: for twenty dollars, this man is offering his entire children’s DVD and VHS collection, both a current and outdated technological style, suggesting a smallish collection of movies, even with the added ease of being able to choose DVD or VHS. And yet for the same exact price, he has enough of a comparative magnitude of adult VHS tapes – a completely archaic and unused system – that he can afford to offer not his entire collection, but a mixed bag, a selection of styles and genres offered up like a cheese plate. For the same price, you could wipe out his entire children’s movies collection, or you could just scrape the surface of this connoisseur’s library of VHS porn. I mean, good lord.

Perhaps that was his 3-car garage, after all.

The Greatest Grift

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 00:43:26 -0400

On a recent trip to Boston, I was walking through South Station, a place I have never made it through successfully without being accosted for money. True to form, a man in beat-up clothes fell in step next to me and greeted me, but instead of the usual plaintive approach of the alms-beggar, this man greeted me cheerfully, showing off his front two remaining teeth with a big smile.

“Hey friend, mind if I walk with you a little while?”

I have lived in Atlanta for four years, but I have a soft heart, and I still am terrible at saying no to panhandlers. I weakly muttered something the likes of, “Okay, but I’m walking pretty fast…” and sped up. The man was not deterred.

“My name is Eddie, and I’m a riddler. Now I know you’re in a hurry, but tell me this: If I can tell you where you got dem shoes, what state you were born in, and how many children your father had, would that be worth a dollar?”

For some reason, my mind chose to ignore the fact that he had just asked a riddle, and went: He’ll guess Sperry Topsiders easy. Everyone has these shoes. But there’s no way he’ll guess North Carolina, or four children - those are pretty abnormal. Even if my mind had been astute enough to guess at the answer, I still would have been intrigued. “Yeah,” I said to him, “lets hear it.”

Eddie smiled his pumpkin smile at me.

“You got dem shoes, on your feet.”

“You were born, in a state of infancy.”

“And your father never had any children - because your mother had them all.”

Ladies and gentlemen - the greatest grift. That man must make fifty dollars an hour.

Thunder & Rain is a collection of a few different riffs...

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 22:51:55 -0400

Thunder & Rain is a collection of a few different riffs I’ve put together into a longer tune, and I’d like to mesh them together and stretch the sound out with some later production, a few layers, and a lot more repetition, but for the confines of my capabilities (no music software and my only mic on my point-and-shoot camera) this is what came through. It’s got a decent sound and flow, though - with a better mic, the resonance of all the strings would come through a lot better. If you like this, check out Antoine Dufour, Andy Mckee, and Erik Mongrain, all exceptional fingerstyle guitarists with amazing rhythmic picking skills.

A World of Tame Horses

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 02:10:00 -0400

After graduating college, most of my friends in the graduating class got jobs. Some of them didn’t. 41% went to graduate school directly out of college, after having gone to college directly out of high school. I would hazard a guess that out of the unemployed graduates, most of them didn’t plan to be. Yet a large amount of the people who are going to graduate programs, especially medical school, will drop out for lack of motivation, and many of the people who went directly into the workforce aren’t doing what they truly want to be doing, or what they’d always hoped to do, and many are only in it for the money. But the familiar is comfortable, and when you stray from the widely recommended path you step into a world of uncertainty. Just like we’ve always been told that college is the immediate step after high school, work is the immediate step after college, if you are to be a real life adult. So we run in place and work hard and earn money to decorate our fishbowls and live out our dreams on three-week vacations and widescreen TV. But it’s hardly surprising that this rote life routine has become so acceptable and non-threatening. During some of the most formative years of our lives, we are taught many things, but we learn that a test is on a sheet of paper, that the answers will fit inside a dim pink oval, that there is always one correct and indisputable right answer, and that this measure of rote memorization is an accurate judgment of your applicable and critical thinking attributes; that someone else has discovered all the correct answers, that you should believe what you hear, and certainly believe what you read, provided it has been peer-reviewed and assigned by a professor.

And this is only what is often taught in higher academia – what about the people who never make it that far? The ones who are told in high school that they will never get a good job without a college degree, and so college is the only dream that one should have upon graduating? The ones who maybe college wasn’t right for after all, who shut down their dreams like outdated computers, and spend four years of their young lives driving themselves thousands of dollars into debt just to gain a competitive edge in the job market, and then be told that that isn’t enough anymore? And what of the ones who don’t go, and believe what they’re told, who work a local job and proudly work their way up, and exist, and watch the rich and the savants become marine biologists, actors, musicians, and nod and run in place and let their guitars sit and gather dust?

Tame horses learn to obey fences. A horse is an extraordinarily strong animal, one that would have little problem jumping the stacks of wood we create around them. Yet they stay put and eat grass, which is given to them, and sometimes they run, but not often, because they remain in the same place. They sustain themselves. They survive. Not because they are forced to, but because they choose to – because someone created guidelines, and said, “Don’t go outside this fence,” and that’s all they’ve known. You can’t expect them to suddenly retro-evolve a yearning for the wild and snap their invisible tethers – it’s a terrifying world out there, where the hay doesn’t come in bales and the fence doesn’t tell me where home is. They have learned, early on, to obey the fence.

Would they be happier outside? Would we? Who is to say? Wild stallions pounding prairie grass to turf and bucking at lightning certainly seem to be living an enviable lifestyle. Put a wild horse inside a fence and it will break down walls to freedom before you can turn your back. It cannot be kept – why obey a fence? It’s only a wood demarcation, separating one patch of grass from another, just a line in the sand. Wild horses run with a purpose. They wander the earth searching for something. Perhaps they will never find it – perhaps they already have. Perhaps in the search itself, they have found something worthwhile. Broken horses have no such desire – home is a patch of grass outlined with a few planks of wood, and they’ve never known anything besides that. Perhaps there is more, but life is easy here, and the woods are dark. Every day you sleep, eat, piss, run in place, eat, stand around, eat, sleep again. They teach their children to be tame, to stand close to them, to obey the fence. They chide the wildness out of them, as we discourage aberrant dreams of peering over the fence, college at our backs, trying to make out where in the woods the darkness ends and the light begins. And although it’s hard to see, we can dimly make out a world where the tests are moral, the answers require creativity and nuance and cannot be fit in a bubble, where there may be many right answers, or none, and where you may be forced to choose between them. But we are a generation turned away. “Obey the fence, child,” we have been told with loving condescension, “to dream, you must first afford to dream.”

In a Sunburned Country: An Infuriatingly Famous Misrepresentation of the Land All Americans Want to Visit

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 10:43:00 -0400

I was interested in reading In a Sunburned Country from the start, not just because it is widely considered as one of the great Australian travel books, but because of some of the parallels I share with Bryson that (initially) gave me a sort of inclination to the fellow. Bryson is from New Hampshire, a characteristic which in itself will give a NH native a feeling of immediate fraternity, the type that any other person in the world might get from meeting someone who happened to live in their old hometown. He is an author, a traveler, a comedian, all of which I aspire to be, and he had written a book about Australia, which I already have a fairly strong magnetism to. In short, Bryson was poised to become one of my new favorite authors.

To put it in Australian, he bunged it proper.

On the very first page of any actual writing involved, Bryson acknowledges the native ballad from which the book draws its name, a poem named “My Country” by Dorothea Mackellar whose second stanza runs such: “I love a sunburnt country / a land of sweeping plains / of ragged mountain ranges / of droughts and flooding rains.” Bryson states that he has included this acknowledgement to forestall the tumult of letters from angry loyalists, telling him that the accurate name for his book should be In a Sunburnt Country. As he brazenly puts it: “I know it should, but it isn’t.” At first, I assumed that this was a literary device, one that he would return to later, long after I had forgotten the phrase in the first place, and tie in earlier anecdotes as to why he had chosen to take it upon himself to re-upholster a phrase held dear to Australian nationalism. And I probably would have forgotten it – or not even noticed it at all, had he refrained from pointing it out – if he had actually done so, but the further I read the further distant we seemed from him making any such concession, and the more Bryson’s title choice seemed to represent an American ethnocentrism that the Australians all rather expect from us at this point.

Don’t get me wrong – Bryson is an amazingly thorough researcher, a compelling writer, and has a pleasing comic wit with a British flavor that sneaks through in some of his exclamations (“not very sporting, what?”) He has a true talent for comparisons and parallels that make his experience more concrete for us at home, such as pointing out that the entire length of the Great Barrier Reef is longer than the west coast of the United States. Many of his historical anecdotes make for great factoids or storytelling. His book gives extensive insight into the history of Australian colonization – not total, but far better than, as he points out, the great big nothing that we Americans know about Australia other than that we’ve always wanted to go there. My main complaint with the book is this: Bryson wrote a 304 page book about Australia, most of which is about his experience, not including a 3-page bibliography with 66 cited books, most of which he (probably) read fully. And for all I can tell, he has spent no more than 3 months there, made 0 friends despite traveling alone, and had 0 notable adventures.

Most of his time is spent in cars, hotels, or bars. For 95% of his trip, if he isn’t describing driving through featureless landscape, he is drinking alone, reading, or taking leisurely strolls through the city or parks. To his credit, Bryson is a good enough writer to entertain the reader while this is happening, but when you finish the chapter and try to recall what happened, you begin to realize that most of it is just puff. He does not make a single friend, which I can say with positivity, since this would have been a singular enough event to merit almost an entire chapter, given his multi-page dedications to passing conversations with Aussie strangers. His only interaction with an Australian “native” is his extended visit to a recent British ex-pat. An entire chapter is dedicated to Canberra, an episode that I can sum up in one sentence: “Canberra is boring and there are a lot of parks.” At one point, he drives to Surfer’s Paradise, walks around town, filling the break between lunch and dinner, then returns to his car and drives south, and fills half a chapter with his perceptions of Surfer’s Paradise. He doesn’t even try surfing. A more egregious example with the same conclusion – Bryson makes the pilgrimage to the Great Barrier Reef, arguably the most notable natural wonder worldwide, an experience that is highly worthy of great elocution, even without the added excitement of Cyclone Rosa, the largest “wet” in 30 years which was at the time turning the shoreline into a dynamic warzone of waves – the makings of a great adventure story. Bryson gets in the water, sputters, gets afraid, gets out, spends a paragraph describing the reef from the viewing deck of the ship, “precisely like being at a public aquarium”, and wraps up the whole experience with the phrase, “Well, it was wonderful.” Where he excels in armchair research, he fails miserably at on-the-ground experience. His travel stint in Australia is almost completely without incident, and yet he obstinately has written a book about it. It would be cheapening the word “experience” to describe his travel as such; more accurately, it was an “observation.” In his attempt to describe Australia, he has completely left Australians themselves out of the equation. His spiced-up title is, in a sense, an appropriate allegory for the book: not properly indicative of Australia itself, but rather of Bryson’s perception of the country, built almost entirely from a visit roughly equivalent in duration to a college study abroad, and substantially less exciting.

I suppose I should be grateful, really, since he didn’t write the book that I hope to - that niche still remains open. Although Bryson cleverly described Australia, he didn’t tap into what it is like to be in Australia, and if I wanted to have a tourist’s exploration of Australia without actually diving in and experiencing it, I’d save my $1,900 plane ticket and curl up at home with In a Sunburned Country. To sum it up: I recently talked with a bartender, who told me that through some sister’s cousin’s boss’s girlfriend’s connection, he had met and talked with Bryson for a while. (Bryson is, after all, a Hanover native, some 40 minutes from my home.) This bartender mentioned to Bryson that he had recently finished hiking part of the Appalachian Trail, referring to Bryson’s first book, A Walk in the Woods, a novel describing life on the Trail that propelled him into international spotlight as an author. Interested, or perhaps just making conversation, Bryson asked my friend how much of the AT he had hiked. The bartender replied modestly, only around 700 miles or so (out of approximately 2,200 miles complete.) As Bryson nodded sagely, his wife looked at him sidelong and remarked candidly, “That’s a hell of a lot more than you did, Bill.”

This is the way I imagine climbing every time I’m on the...

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 01:19:00 -0400

This is the way I imagine climbing every time I’m on the wall, and the way I imagine non-climbers think of climbing at all times.

Many of these shots were taken at Mt. Arapiles, Australia, where I will be spending a month climbing in June 2012.

For more amazing climbing shots by Simon Carter, check out Onsight Photography at www.onsight.com.au

Take a listen to my cover of Home, by Mumford & Sons. This...

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 00:28:00 -0400

Take a listen to my cover of Home, by Mumford & Sons. This song is coming out on their next CD, which can’t come soon enough. This is the first song I’ve recorded on my new Seagull cedar top guitar, which I’m SUPER excited about - like a little schoolgirl crush. Listen to the original Mumford song on Youtube, and also check out the cover by Walk Off The Earth - both are beautiful versions of a beautiful song.

Hurricane Irene. Be safe. Be prepared. Get your kites,...

Sun, 28 Aug 2011 00:44:59 -0400

Hurricane Irene. Be safe. Be prepared. Get your kites, umbrellas, and space blankets today - before it’s too late. All Hurricane kayaks are free, as are the BD Storm headlights. Get your snakebite kit - what if it starts raining snakes? Are you going to be the hero, or just another snakebite victim? Be the hero. Be prepared. Buy a kite.

Searching for a Porpoise

Sat, 27 Aug 2011 14:57:00 -0400

When I tell people I swam with porpoises over vacation, they don’t wait for me to tell them the rest of the story before they fill in the details themselves. Suddenly, in their heads, I am either the pipe-smoking father of an 80s nuclear family petting a tame and labrador-stupid dolphin in a Seaworld tank, or a skindiver holding the fin on an ocean roller coaster beneath the surface of Photoshop-blue water, my snorkel bubbling away like a streamer behind me.

Neither of these is what it is actually like. If anything, it’s closer to Jaws.

It was eight AM, and I was watching my grandmother play solitaire on her iPad after taking a quick morning dip in the ocean. I never caught the end of my aunt’s sentence that began with “Look, there are porpoises -” as I bolted off the deck, but as my feet churned the morning beach into sprays of sand, I could only assume she was going to finish with something like “- out where the obvious fins are, past the breakers,” and not “- on the coloring book I found for you!” (which, with my aunt, was a distinct possibility.) I hit the tide at a run, Baywatching my way over the knee-high water until I was far enough out to dive, and then threw myself headfirst into a swim sprint to the horizon. The waves were low, and each time I popped over a crest, I could see a gray fin disappearing into the distance a little further away than it had been. I pressed on, far past the breakers, into the calm water, but each reconnaissance yielded fewer porpoise sightings. They were swimming away. No need to push all the way to England for nothing, I decided, and slowed to a lazy tread with a vague shorewards inclination. And as I was catching my breath, no further than a short-bus-length away, a gleaming gunmetal body surfaced, blew a plume, and vanished again. And I suddenly became aware of a number of things.

The thing people underestimate is our years of Hollywood training. Although I know definitively, as an animal enthusiast and biologist, that there is literally nothing to be afraid of, decades of dumb movies slam back to you in an instant, and you begin to notice things. Things like, the shore is very, very far away. The water is so murky that I can’t even tell if I have toes. And that I am alone, for hundreds of miles on some sides, hundred of meters on others, and who knows how many fathoms below - alone, that is, except for the glittering tubes of solid muscle invisibly reveling unnervingly close to me, and revealing themselves with a wave of a fin that my blockbuster-conditioned mind tells me looks an awful lot like a shark’s. I thought I had been looking for them as I swam out, peering above the waves, but as I bobbed and waited for the next time they would decide to show themselves, I became uncomfortably aware that I was no longer watching them - they were watching me. The sonar of cetaceans is so powerful they can essentially see through your body. I couldn’t even see my feet, and they could were watching my heart beat out its nervous drumroll under the water. I was in their world now, and it was no mistake that out of the entire shoreline to swim in, they were close enough for me to hear each plume. They were investigating me. I was sunburned, muscularly tired, comparatively weak, mostly naked, and above all, completely helpless at the whim of three very smart, very strong, and very wild animals.

I floated at the surface as they spiraled around me, paddling slowly in place. The water would be unbroken for what felt like minutes, and then close by in my peripherals another fin would cleave the waves. I had no idea where they were, or if they had gone, before another playful tail would slap the water to my side. And then finally, as I waited for another, the minutes extended and the surface remained still, and I realized I was alone.

The world is alive, brilliant with the entwined lives of millions of species, but the idea of an inanimate landscape is something incultured into us as we grow up around great cities and man-made marvels – machines built to do our bidding and only exactly what we command them to do. They will not move unless we direct them to. They will die without our fuel, or our energy. Roads lash the country to the earth we inhabit like great granite webs, and cars travel these veins like cells, washing through mountain passes in days that a century ago were impassable. I don’t know how a computer works. I trust it. If I was thirsty, I could go inside, and with the turn of a handle, an unimaginable labyrinth of steel pipes beneath my feet would deliver a cool cup of clean drinking water into a glass. As I watched the sun set later over the endless condominiums stretching along the coast out of sight, I realized with a touch of sadness that I could barely picture a beach unmarred with the warts of civilization.

The wonders that mankind have created have allowed us to live lives that divorce our physical needs from the difficulty of obtaining them – food, water, are but a car trip away – but our dominance over nature has come at the price of our wonder. The earth no longer represents a living, gently breathing giant – and if it does, it is as Gulliver, tied on its back by thousands of miles of electrical cord, highways, and shipping routes. We mine away its essence and transmute it into deadly chemicals, which we spray into the air and the water in which we live and depend. We mindlessly wipe out entire species to eat, and move on to the next, callously and systematically collapsing entire ecosystems. With any generational knowledge, we could realize the difference, and correct our mistakes. But, myself included, we are born into a generation cleaved from our mother. Water comes from a bottle. Food comes from McDonalds. Where else would it come from? We have no knowledge of any other way of life. And now I’ve told you a story about swimming with porpoises, and you are thinking how lucky I am to have done so, when decades ago whole pods of dolphins and porpoises would match pace with fishing ships and clippers and race alongside, celebrating the glory of life in the sea. Now, we stay inside, and those who go outside are shocked by the realization that the earth is even still covered with glorious nature. Now, most of this biodiversity is ancient history, spoken of only in stories. I will likely tell my grandchildren of the time I swam with porpoises, before the poisoned sea choked them into death, and only photos and stories remain, to be heard but not learned from. And it occurs to me that if I had told the first people to land on this beach that in a few decades, their children’s children wouldn’t be able to remember a landscape not crammed with houses – that they would spend most of their days sitting inside a box, staring at a glowing screen – that most of the species that existed then, would by now no longer exist, and few people would know, and fewer would care – they may have returned to their ships, and left.

I think back often to those first explorers, creating human footsteps in the sand after months of ocean voyage, no true knowledge of to where they were sailing or what they would find, if they would find anything or even ever see their home again. I imagine the world that they placed foot upon, and the thrilling trepidation they must have felt, seeing naked land, dunes and grasses extending across the earth on each side. They existed as a bubble of survival, nursing the land for each meal and each cup of water, with each day greeted as a further boon of life. But as they stood alone on that same beach, shivering in the wind, I imagine they felt as I did on the ocean that day, blind to the world beneath – that feeling of being dwarfed to nothing, the thrill of entering the void, the frailness of one’s body compared to the grandiose and the glory of nature, as an unseen great wildness observes, and beckons from the woods.

Que pasa, party people? The heat is dying down, and either...

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 00:48:00 -0400

Que pasa, party people? The heat is dying down, and either sun-down end of each day is starting to bear the temperature hints of an early fall. Tell-tale leaves are switching hue, and the breeze nudges a little more insistently on your frail sunburned skin. And you know what that means - climbing season. Friction abounds, cats and kittens, and you’ll stick to those granite nubs like NONSENSE - that is, if you’ve been training for this moment all summer (which I’m sure you have, you dedicated climber you.) But before we get too ahead of ourselves, lets take a moment here to remind ourselves what other adventures exist, what we have to look forward to after the first frost, after getting to those crags become a hellish snowshoe-y battle. While you nurse your skinless tips, to’ up forearms, and battered egos with a cup of Mom’s cider and warm apple pie, get a load of MSP’s new project, Attack of La Nina. The production value, natural beauty, and sheer skill of these professional skibums come together to make an altogether exciting taste of what we have in store for these long, arduous winter months. Get out those down jackets, pups and poodles: the bitch is back.

"“The most dangerous room in the home is the bedroom, the principal scene of the most common..."

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 00:16:35 -0400

“

“The most dangerous room in the home is the bedroom, the principal scene of the most common fatal home accidents - death by falls, fires, poisoning, and suffocation. Another perilous place is the bathroom, where hundreds drown in tubs. There must be a better way to die.

Surely there is a better way to live.”

”

- from Personal Risk, The Human, The Orchid, The Octopus - Jacques Cousteau

Watching the Glass - or, how waiting tables taught me to rock climb

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 00:12:19 -0400

Watching the Glass - or, how waiting tables taught me to rock climb:

Here’s a link to my most recent article about the progression of solving a boulder problem, from first touch to final send. From now on, all my climbing articles will be posted on Cruxn, and I’ll link to that page from here. Its a little less crowded and a little more aesthetically pleasing that way.

Three classic boulder problems from Blackjack Boulders, Rumney,...

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 22:21:39 -0400

Three classic boulder problems from Blackjack Boulders, Rumney, NH. Cock Block is a pinchy V6 that felt soft for the grade. I climbed it first and used some crimps from the problem to the right, Block Problem, so I gave it a few more burns and managed to do it sans extra holds. Spragueasorus is a classic V5 that gave me a few days of trouble - a pinchy, overhung start gives you just enough burn to make the crimp festival at the top hell on your forearms. The Whale’s Tail, V4, felt harder, but once you get your beta down (apparently what I did isn’t how the world does it, but I felt this was easier) it cools down. You can hear my final slap to the top behind the music.

Nicole Northey giving the granite hug to a boulder at Magnetic...

Sat, 30 Jul 2011 23:12:46 -0400

Nicole Northey giving the granite hug to a boulder at Magnetic Island off the east coast of Australia. Although this island is sometimes overlooked, I think that being able to climb gnarled granite boulders on the beach of a cove of azure water and white sand, coral reef dappling the distant water, and not a single person around, cannot be valued higher.

Beautiful shots of our wheeling cosmos from South Australia, The...

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 00:22:05 -0400

Beautiful shots of our wheeling cosmos from South Australia, The Great Ocean Road - this is where I’ll be spending 3 months starting next February, working and living out of a tent, climbing and hiking on weekends, and seeing this sky above every night.