Seven Things To Do (Incomplete)

This is part of a meme I was tagged with about two years ago. I don't do memes, but this one section of it intrigued me. It took me two years to come up with five goals worthy of a list.

Traverse the Book Cliffs from Douglas Pass to Rifle Gap with nothing but a backpack and a rifle.

It's about two hundred miles, so it should take a couple weeks. I know I can do it, my capabilities are not in question. The only real question is how I would do it. Would I take down a deer the first day and pit smoke it so I have meat the whole trip? Would I take a few rabbits along the way? I know there's plenty of wild potatoes and onions along the back ridge of those mountains. The country is rough, and for the most part, wild. The wild doesn't scare me and never has. I am comfortable around the primal. My only fear is that I may never come home. Not that I would die or anything that dramatic. I am afraid I would see a little too much the basic fallacy of civilization. Freedom may be too hard to leave. That's a lot of obligation I'd leave laying on the side of the road.

Maybe I'll look at it as the final probation of civilization, the determining trial of society where I decide just how important it is to me.

Join a Band

I have been in a few bands, working and otherwise. I miss the camaraderie of the musical process. I don't want to be a rock star, and I don't want to be big some day. I want to commune with like-minded artists. I want to have guitar cables strung all over a floor and my old pedals strung up to an amp. I want to hear the same bullshit compliments everyone always pays the house band.

When I was younger, I would play out in the honky tonks and dive bars. It felt good to have the gear packed in the back of my Scout and later, to ride in a van and listen to warm up music, and fight over whether we wanted to be inspired by Korn or Buddy Guy (guess which side of that argument I was on). When the band was working, nothing was better. The feeling of four part communion in the creation of music is comparable to sex, but better than almost anything else. I hate to see more and more stages taken over by DJ's with their enormous boards and MacBooks instead of old burnouts and young delusional kids. There is something sacred about the playing of music. Not sure how it relates, but I really hate midi jazz. When I was in Asia the first time, I waited all day for a well advertised Live Band(!) to show up. When they did, it was a guy with a keyboard, a guy with a fake drum set and three sequined singers. Then they fired up the “jazz.” Somewhere in the world, all four members of the Lifetime hung themselves.

I need old dusty JBLs and analog. If it isn't chaotic in nature and prone to AC hum, it does not belong a stage. I got two nickels and a paradigm, it ain't spelled right, but it rhyme.

Build A Still

Obvious.

Build That 400

I got a Ford 400M sitting up at my dad's house under a tarp. I want to rebuild it and drop in the roomy engine compartment of Il Beasto. I would go into detail, but I would lose people. Well, I would lose the “men” that read this shit, and turn the women on. I got to be careful with that anymore. Suffice it say, high rise cams and four barrels.

Take That Trip And Write That Book

There are all these field guides to for different nerdy subjects: botany, rock hounding, butterfly collecting, etc. Invariably, these books are written by some nerdy couple who have a picture of their pickup camper out on some mountain pass in the book's color plates. Then they have some sappy bullshit dedication to each other in the forward. Anybody who's hung out with a significant other outside long enough can tell you that there is nothing like spectacular scenery, science, and fresh mountain air for catalyzing scare the bears off hair pulling back injuring aerobic country people bone bumping.

Basically, they travel around screwing out in the forest and pass it off as a field guide and then make money off it. At least 25% of their entries for a locale are along the lines of “We didn't quite have time to make it out there to look for the zeolites, but we heard they're there.”

So what are they doing if not looking for the subject of their book? Fucking. That's what they're doing. Then they run this scam where they write about whatever they happened to find in their free time outside of all the wilderness fornicating and charge you 12.95 for the paperback at Borders.

Well, I got a half ton 4x4, a bunch of camping equipment, an English 112 class under my belt, and a free summer. You put it together.

My plan though is to give more than lip service to the science of geology. But when I get into the petrology, I want to put in the important information those other people leave out. Such as:

“Basement rock is Black Canyon semi-melt metamorphic and ultramafic
granites, along with a few pegmatitic dikes. Rounded large boulder and cobble
size talus are generally found at the toe of free face cliffs. Rounded cliffs
are good speculation areas for tourmaline, micas of the biotite and white mica
families, and quartz varieties. Some topaz can be found in dikes, distinguished
from quartz by tetragonal crystals and hardness of 8. Lay down a blanket on the
rock if you plan on being naked, as friction will embed mica fibers in your ass
and knees and the palms and wrists of your hiking partner.”