Saturday, August 13, 2005

You got rats on the West Side; bed bugs uptown. What a mess, this town's in tatters...shattered ... My brain's been splattered all over Manhattan.

Finally. It took two months, but everything is finally unpacked, set up and in its proper place. Today, I finished the garage. Everything is shelved, crated, hung, and both our cars actually fit. Barely.

It takes nerves of steel and utter concentration, but both cars fit. During this whole project, I repeatedly asked myself, "Self, why the hell didn't we buy one big house, instead of two smaller ones?"

In order to make room for the cars in the garage, a bunch of stuff had to go in the crawlspace under the house. Crawlspaces are what houses have out here instead of basements. They are less than four feet tall, sort of like a basement for midgets. For a man of my size, nearly six foot three and two hundred ten pounds, moving things around in a crawlspace is akin to a medieval torture chamber. There are floor joists, ductwork and water pipes, each of which I smacked my head on no less than three times.

I took a trip down memory lane in the garage by lining the walls with trail maps. When I would return from a ski/snowboarding trip, I would throw the trail map in a box. I had saved ten years' worth. Each map was represented a week's worth of memories- Vail, Beaver Creek, Arapahoe Basin, Winter Park, Keystone, Breckenridge, Copper Mountain, Snowbird, Alta, Brighton, Solitude, Steamboat, Kirkwood, Whistler, Big Sky and even Whitecap.

I remember Leo tumbling ass over teakettle down the Spaulding Bowl, UJ's indoctrination to the group, Matt and Camille getting engaged, midnight tubing with Kirk, Will and Dan, meeting the Dawg, reconnecting with Quagmire, flailing through moguls with Will Danger, laughing with Dan-O, getting buried in powder with Bells on his 30th birthday, then dancing in long underwear at the tram bar, UJ's Dale Earnhart impression, Jerry howling like a Wildebeest at the 'boat, and making fun of Frenchy...

"Hey, next time there is a World War, why don't you fight a little?"

Will: "Oh! Oh! Joe, you crossed the line there. Not as easily as the Germans crossed the Maginot line, but..."

Ah, good times. Good times.

After that, I went running. I have been running about 33-35 miles a week. Sometimes I run with music, and sometimes I don't. The White Stripes and the Who have been in heavy rotation. Either way, it works like meditation to erase my brain like a blackboard. I rousted a large white-tailed deer yesterday, and I watched her run for about a hundred yards across the meadow. Poetry in motion.

Then we went out to get a bite to eat and split a $ 14 piece of cake. Yes, it was $ 14. Seven layers: chocolate, mousse, vanilla, genoise (?)... a bunch of stuff. Even thin, 24 carat gold foil. Which we ate. Why?

Why the hell not?

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