Had a chance to ski a few different set ups this weekend. At Copper, I got hooked up with some Volkl AC50s for a twelve pack minus three road sodas.
These skis were super stiff with lots of energy in the turns. I was able to bob short swingers and get good edging but it took a lot of work to get them to bite in quick turns. They were superb at high speed on hard pack and felt bomb proof with zero chatter. Peppy is a word I want to use. I would definitely ski these again for straight running days and spring blue bombing, but not for the park at all.
Winter Park didn't come through like Copper - Had to pay the gaper price for the "high end" gear. After deliberating a bit and inquiring about the Volkl Mantras, I went with the recommendation from the BROder at the desk to try out a pair of Rossignol Phantom 87s.
These are "only" 80something under foot and were extremely fun to roll over onto edges. I could really get a quick pendulum turn flowing and the ski held a solid edge. But this ski should stay on the shelf for high energy skiers. There was no spring back and the ski felt dead on the snow. Any action with these skis is self generated. And the tip speed on this ski is bogus. Not sure if the bulbous tip shovel has anything to do with it, but talk about a slug! No thank you.
Ski on! Back home and back to the Prophets until the next OP to experiment.
I don't know if any one has told you, but I'm a pretty big deal. Everything that I do is very important, more so than those around me for certain. I like it that way. You know why? Because I can tell myself when I'm making coffee and shoveling the front steps that I made it. I'm kinda like a superhero.
I usually spend quality time with people that share my same area of expertise. They are also very important people because they do similar things to me. And, if I haven't told you yet, I'm important.
That guy over there? lazy. See that chick walking down the street? tries to dress up to make amends for being less than perfect. Those four in the corner? they keep to themselves cause they know what kind of low class they represent. That wierdo? criminal.
Me? If I didn't show up, it would all crumble down around everyone. Good thing I'm here. If you don't recognize that, my cronies and I will complain about you so much that for sure you will always mean nothing, especially to me. Don't worry.
Last Saturday evening, I had a great diverse experience with an extremely varied group or groups of people.
First, I hung out with some very driven, very intelligent folks who also happen to be some of my very best friends. They left early to head on home.
I went to club posh with two acquaintances that I promptly lost in the hustle and bustle. Rather than get bummed and start mentally accosting the clientele at armani du dad, I tried to take the place over. David Guetta, JayZ, Gaga, Chris Brown, Tinchy Stryder, Rihanna, Black Eyed Peas. No one knew what hit em! Eh, everyone probably just wondered what was wrong with me. Alone, dancing? Scored a 6 out of 10.
Met up with boxer bros at the late night food cart, bought them a hot dog.
Ended up at a hookah bar with boxer bros. Um, how did these three white guys end up in an all Arabic speaking after hours spot? Got a few drags from a guy whose religion probably strictly forbids the consumption of alcohol. As I looked around the room, I couldn't help but wonder how much discrimination this group of people have endured the last 8 years. My guilt pulled me away.
Out the door and somehow met up with Hobo Walter, train jumper. Walked with him for 30 minutes along the streets of Denver asking about his life, and pondering what it would be like to sleep in the streets, hop a train and just leave with the clothes on my back. Is that true liberty? Yo Chris McCandless and H.D. Thoreau!
From posh to poor, from trash to "terrorist" - quite a spectrum, it's all here folks and I don't mean a thing to any of them! TAXI!
Looking for good people. Qualifications: Empathy needed.
A friend reading a written word wants context; a stranger reading the same words wants content.
I recently posted a few quotes from Love in the Time of Cholera and I received a comment from a great friend asking for more detail as to why I found those quotes memorable. A few days later I spoke with my brother and he agreed; the quotes alone had little meaning to him. I see their point and understand: they know me and I love them for wanting context. It proves to me that they care not about the words, but about the author. I am glad to know that they fill an important place in my life and will continue to do so – I could only be so lucky.
If I don’t want my boss or some rando to read about my individual travails, then it doesn’t have a place on my blog. That type of discussion is best had over a pint or via a this-is-getting-long-my-cellphone-is-getting-warm-and-I’m-concerned-about-brain-cancer conversation. So let’s get together and I’ll give you some context! Beside the fact that I don’t think that online blogs are the place for journaling about personal matters; I recognize I could add by saying something to place myself within the quotes.
As I shared with my brother, the quotes did not necessarily represent a sentiment that directly relates to my current situation. What captured me when I came across them are the philosophical statements that they represent. When done well, works of fiction become a tremendous vehicle for philosophy. Fiction can simplify, give life, and make interesting fundamental statements of the human condition. What better, and more complicated, topic is there to discuss than love and relationship?
I read last night on a 60 Minutes piece that young people on average believe that adulthood begins at 26. Gulp! What does adulthood require? And since having turned 26, do I need to find it? As I briefly alluded to in my introduction to the quotes, the accelerating pairing of many of my peers that I noticed while reading Love has me asking the question: is it relationship? And my answer is no, and yes.
No. The nervousness of each age group to find their “mates” is a strange phenomenon. In Costa Rica it seemed that every girl over the age of 17 already has a child. Maybe they aren’t married, but they have a child. This sequence seems backwards to me, but in Costa Rica my time has past. At 26, I’m a creepy old single guy maybe with an impediment or I’m looking for a single mom. In the US, this nervousness is not upon me. Yet. This is especially the case in a place like Steamboat where most in my age group are adventurous souls with experiences to be had prior to the responsibility of relationship and, god forbid!, children. So time is still on my side.
Yes. My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse. I once had a feeling while flying back from New York City. I looked out the window of the plane. It was night. Probably somewhere over Ohio, the great bellwether of our nation, I saw the city lights and rural lights below. I was consumed with an immense nervous weight. How many people are out there to love? How can I find them? Spend time with them? Get to know them? Experience their love? Sure maybe before I go looking to every light below, I should start figuring out how to do a better job of expressing love to those around me now. But the questions hit me hard. Is this the worry that drives one to travel the world, to brave the empty promises of booze coaxed taverns, to acquire material wealth as bait? You either gotta go out and find it or you gotta get it to come to ya! So quick, kill yourself getting it or lose yourself looking – both lonely roads to companionship, no? The Sorrow of Companionship.Love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death How do we release ourselves to companionship? And should we? Look around and you find people protecting themselves with loneliness using facades, barriers, and creating ego blocked connections. Try to pierce through and you might be a weirdo. Try to drop your own protective cloak: hard task. Maybe this tactic is there for needed protection. Or, maybe it holds you back. Is this filter specific to young people? When you are old and gray with a more full knowledge of yourself, can you plop right into a comfortable state of companionship? If a young person is to develop an old soul: having comforted himself in his skin, released the ego, and found happiness in the sorrow that comes with relationship, is this the cure for loneliness? Or a path to some unwanted love induced afflictions?
Love’s Long Legs. It is incredible how one can be happy for so many years in the midst of so many squabbles, so many problems My grandparents have been living together for over 60 years. I see older couples, especially those who afford me a window into their personal lives. Their petty differences seem to consume the relationship. Even among roommates, past and present, the same dynamic evolves. Petty things take over and a true depth of relationship drifts somewhere around, and maybe just beyond, the fence line. Is absolute loss the only way to rediscover the mutual need and desire, to thaw the layer of ice covering the ocean? You know that surface: it’s not for walking; it’s for treading. But I get it, drifting is exhausting – some solid footing probably saves a few extra years on the end.
Recently I saw a list on Facebook put together by a friend, he entitled it “Men on Women.......the stuff we don't say”. Reading through the list, part of me wanted to puke. So trivial! Disappointed in my reaction, I brushed aside my elitism and saw the root of what he was saying. It is the same thing that I attempt to say here. And to me it’s good stuff.
I hope this isn’t trivial to you.
Maybe someday I can write some fiction so that it’s more interesting.
I finally finished this great book. Amazed it took me three sessions, but it did. Garcia Marquez is a master of words. It is funny how a book or certain quotes find relevance at certain times of life. Perhaps the fact that I waited to finish it while attending the wedding of a few friends was apropos (I almost wrote "not a coincidence - but this is B.Beall talking!!). A few of the quotes I found good in the last third of the book :
"With her Florentino Ariza learned what he had already experienced many times without realizing it: that one can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them. Alone in the midst of the crowd on the pier, he said to himself in a flash of anger: "My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse." He wept copious tears at the grief of parting."
"Fermina Daza stopped smoking in order not to let go of the hand that was still in hers. She was lost in her longing to understand. She could not conceive of a husband better than hers had been, and yet when she recalled their life she found more difficulties than pleasures, too many mutual misunderstandings, useless arguments, unresolved angers. Suddenly she sighed: "It is incredible how one can be happy for so many years in the midst of so many squabbles, so many problems, damn it, and not really know if it was love or not." By the time she finished unburdening herself, someone had turned off the moon."
"...they no longer felt like newlyweds, and even less like belated lovers. It was as if they had leapt over the arduous calvary of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death."
As 2008 ends and this New Year begins, with all its fledgling promise despite turmoil and crisis, it’s also that time when the media offers its lists of ten best or worst this and that of the previous year, an exercise that simultaneously entertains and infuriates.
Forced at knifepoint to make such lists, at least ours would be a little different. One would be favorite headlines of the year from The Onion, the hilarious weekly that doesn’t bill itself as “America’s finest news source” for nothing. If you can read it without laughing, you probably have been paying too much attention to your 401K.
Some of the ones we liked best:
$700 BILLION BAILOUT CELEBRATED WITH LAVISH $800 BILLION EXECUTIVE PARTY
GM COVERED WITH GIANT TARP UNTIL IT HAS MONEY TO WORK ON CARS AGAIN
AMERICAN AIRLINES NOW CHARGING FEES TO NON-PASSENGERS
CHINA RECALLS EVERYTHING
HOUSING CRISIS VINDICATES GUY WHO STILL LIVES WITH PARENTS
FACTUAL ERROR FOUND ON INTERNET
Of course, the problem The Onion’s editors have is that reality too often resembles parody. Take the story of Chip Saltsman, the guy campaigning to be chairman of the Republican National Committee by promoting himself with a CD featuring a song called, “Barack, the Magic Negro.” That ditty, you’ll recall, was made famous on Rush Limbaugh’s minstrel show, as sung by an Al Sharpton impersonator. Even The Onion couldn’t come up with that one.
Or the claim by Governor Rod Blagojevich that those wiretaps actually reveal how hard he’s been working for the people of Illinois. And the circus that ensued when he tried to appoint Roland Burris, a veteran Illinois politician, to Barack Obama’s Senate seat — the one the governor allegedly was ready to sell just weeks ago to the highest bidder — and Senate Democrats said, “No.”
No? From members of Congress for whom pay-for-play is as casual a game as Tic-Tac-Toe? Look at New York’s Senator Charles Schumer, chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. According to The New York Times, the week after he attended a breakfast of financial high rollers and promised them that Democrats would make sure their $700 billion bailout got through Congress, those same fat cats sent $135,000 in campaign contributions.
Or New York Congressman Charlie Rangel, chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, who reversed himself on a tax break for a business called Nabors Industries the same month that company donated $100,000 to a City College school for public service named after — all together now, class — Charlie Rangel.
Life imitates satire — and vice versa. Which brings us to our other unusual list. The best movies of… 1933.
Naturally, the original King Kong is on our list. So are The Invisible Man and 42nd Street. But our number one choice: The Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup.
Why? Because as we enter this final month of the Bush years, the parallels are remarkable. Sometimes it feels as if we live not only in the United States but also in the side-splitting state of Freedonia, the imaginary country in which Duck Soup takes place. In 1933, a time much like now of calamity, fraud and peril, the Great Depression gripped America. Franklin D. Roosevelt had just become President and declared a New Deal, while in Germany, Adolph Hitler was named chancellor, the beginning of the Third Reich.
As all of this was taking place, the Marx Brothers — there were four of them then; Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo — shot Duck Soup, a comedy that almost inadvertently transcended slapstick, becoming a trenchant send-up of power and vanity and the disastrous consequences of both.
Freedonia is bankrupt and asking for a bailout — sound familiar? The wealthy Mrs. Teasdale, played by the redoubtable Margaret Dumont, says the only way she’ll come up with the money is if the country appoints as its new leader Rufus T. Firefly — played by Groucho, as only a true clown can play a charlatan. He sings, “The last man nearly ruined this place, he didn’t know what to do with it. If you think this country’s bad off now, just wait ‘til I get through with it.”
Cabinet meetings are run with a decorum worthy of contemporary Washington. (Finance Minister: “Here is the Treasury Department’s report, sir. I hope you’ll find it clear.” Groucho: “Why a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child, I can’t make head or tail of it.”)
Freedonia’s Axis of Evil includes neighboring nation Sylvania, and Groucho/Rufus Firefly handles diplomacy with all the tact of a neo-conservative. In anticipation of a meeting with his rival’s ambassador, he says he will offer his hand in friendship. But suppose the ambassador doesn’t do the same? “A fine thing that will be,” says Firefly. “I hold out my hand and he refuses to accept it. That will add a lot to my prestige, won’t it? Me the head of a country, snubbed by a foreign ambassador! Who does he think he is? …Why the cheap ball-pushing swine, he’ll never get away with it, I tell you! He’ll never get away with it!”
Before you know it, the two countries are at war for no good reason, the rabble-roused, flag-waving public buying in as if taking directions from cable news.
Duck Soup is now seen as one of the great antiwar comedies of all time, right up there with Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (written with Terry Southern and Peter George).
Back in 1933, the world situation was grave and it was hard to hear the laughter over the sounds of civilization collapsing. Our chuckles today compete with the sound of renewed violence in the Middle East, melting glaciers sliding into the sea and champagne glasses shattering on the gold bricks of Wall Street.
Our situation may not be as desperate as the one that faced the first audiences of Duck Soup, who found in darkened theaters some relief from the grim world outside. Our current woes, nonetheless, are real, which maybe is why a little humor is the best antidote. As Beaumarchais, that 18th century playwright who doubled as a politician said, “I quickly laugh at everything for fear of having to cry.” This, from a man who managed to survive the French Revolution. So Happy New Year — but keep your fingers crossed.
Bill Moyers is managing editor and Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS. Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog, http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/blog/2009/01/bill_moyers_michael_winship_ma.html#more.
Posts
