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August 7, 2011
Quit Your Job and Skate
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I saw a wheatpaste by "Alleged" in the mission with Greenspan saying "Quit Your Job and Skate" and I thought...that's about right. Sort of the mantra of the counter-culture. Instead of the "He who dies with the most toys wins!", it's more of a "Life is short, Play hard" type of approach. One that seems more and more alluring as one spends day after day shuffling through the airports and offices, always wondering what's up ahead? Is it salvation, or spinning blades?
The truth is that no one knows. And the more adamant someone is about their belief that they know the answer, the less certain they are also. This is a little gem handed down by Robert M. Pirsig.
"You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt." - Robert M. Pirsig
This weekend, I flew in and picked up Jen at her summer camp. Normally, I give her these big long breathless rundowns of all that happened in San Francisco, and she replies "I got some new shirts". But this time, she has lots of stories as well, and we both just babbled breathlessly like school kids on the playground. Always fun to catch up, of course.
We get home and I tell her that I can't find my license. I tell her I'll pay her if she can find it. So she digs through all the mail. Eventually, she comes up with it somehow and I hand her $20. She's saving up to buy a chinchilla, which I've not agreed to by any stretch of the imagination. I have a hard enough time keeping critters out of the house, without letting them in on my own.
Jen and I went camping in the Rocky Mountains. We got all packed up Friday evening and got up there, but I'd forgotten the tent. We just laughed about it because, what else can you do? We had all these camping lists that go one for pages and pages and I'd gone and gotten the tent, but then left it in the driveway behind the other Tahoe. (Yes, I have two.)
So, we just called it our "dry run" and we came home and crashed and made a point of picking up a few things we had forgotten. Then we went again Saturday afternoon, this time with the tent, of course.
And we get up there and some other people were in our campsite. We don't pay to camp. We camp in the national forest and we sort of rough it. We camp out in a tent and build a camp fire. Fairly primitive. The only luxury is that we have an inflatable air mattress and I use an electric pump to air it up. But we don't have radios or tv's or anything like that. We trade the cell phones for pistols and the computers for campfires, hoboes, and smores.
I try to set up the camera to get a shot of the creek where we camp. I prop it up on my old-skool pink RAZR phone, and the phone promptly slips into the creek. The screen starts going nuts, but I just pop the battery out and tell her it will be fine. It's not like it's an iphone, after all.
We talk a lot around the campfire. I always try to use these opportunities to bring up a chautauqua or two. I won't go into the nature of most of these, but one of them was about my upcoming trip to Alaska.
I tried to explain to her that she was going to Florida, and I was going to Alaska, and somehow that made sense to me. She needs to go see her cousin, and I need to go see if I can cross half of north america on a dirt bike. It's all the same, but just different, see?
Over hoboes and smores, we invent the "International Smore Competition", and pretend to be judges, judging entrants from all over the earth. We're especially hard on the Russians, of course. At some point, we fall asleep and in the middle of the night, I awake to check out the stars. So bright up here in the shadow of the continental divide. You can see the Milky Way and it's so clear and bright and it makes you really wonder what it's all about.
We get home and unpack the truck. Jennifer says to me, at some point, in an off-handed sort of way that there's something on her bedroom ceiling and she's not sure what it is. I'm thinking...spider...moth...cobwebs....it's a bat. And, I'm looking at it like...seriously? How could you not know that that was a bat. It's clearly a bat.
I catch it in an empty trailmix jar and release it outside into the daylight, and it flies away, in a fairly circuitous route.
"Seriously? You didn't know that was a bat? Can you see, child?"
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Posted by Rob Kiser on August 7, 2011 at 10:03 PM
Comments
Enjoyed reading this Robert. I think you have done wonderful things with Jennifer and you should be so proud that she off handedly tells you there's "something" on her ceiling. I would have run shrieking for the hills and I'm pretty sure my kids would too, especially if they were unsure about what it was.
Posted by: Susan on August 9, 2011 at 7:14 PM
Oh, puhleeze. She so afraid of spiders she gets a rash if she sees one. I dunno why she handled the bat situation so calmly. I'd have been "Oh my G0d there's something the size of an 8 ball clinging to my asbestos ceiling. It's brown and furry with wings and I have no idea what it is but it needs to die in a big way."
Posted by: Rob Kiser 
on August 9, 2011 at 11:13 PM