I’ve been talking about it for a while now, and have finally (or will soon) make the move to wordpress. I’ve decided not to import all the posts from tumblr to the new blog. So when justalifestory.com starts taking you to the new blog, you’ll still be able to find all the old stuff here.
Coma Baby from Bright Lights, Big City.
The general sentiment of this song more or less describes how I feel this morning.
I haven’t been blogging much lately. I’m still trying to find the limits and boundaries of what exactly I want to put out here on the internet for anyone to see. Recently a friend told me she’s been reading my blog and keeping up on my life, but then we quickly realized a lot more is going on than the small amount I’ve written about out here on the internet.
I’ve also been writing a lot of personal stuff, mostly short stories and poetry (me, writing poetry? Yeah, I think it’s weird too). I’ve started sharing some of it with close friends. I’m thinking about posting some poems on here everyonce in a while, but we’ll see (I’m very shy and insecure about it).
I also realized that I’m part of “the blogosphere” (although I like the word “blogdome” better). Punk Board News linked to this post I wrote about the Hipster article in Adbusters. (I briefly removed the post, because I wrote it very quickly and might not agree with everything I said, but I’ve since put it back up saying that).
But this made me realize that more people than I thought are actually reading this. Which means I need to put a little more thought into what I post on here.
Jerry: Excellent. I love your stories. You should start a blog.
Me: I have a blog.
Jerry: Oh yeah.
(I’m not sure I conveyed my thoughts properly here. I deleted the post, but then a friend told me I should leave it up with this warning. I want to say something about it, but I don’t think this is exactly what I want to say. The article definitely got me thinking and talking with people about it. Maybe I’ll say more later.)
Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization, Adbusters.
I agree with a lot of things this article says, as a stereotype of hipsters in general, but I don’t see things as bleakly as the author apparently does.
Maybe I was late to the party, I’m not really sure, but I think I first started hearing and using the word hipster sometime around the time I moved to Santa Cruz (about two years ago). We tossed the word around pretty loosely, mostly derogatorily, but not entirely. Most of the “hipsters” I knew were actually doing things, they looked the part, but they weren’t some sort of blind consumer, they were socially conscious people that dressed and acted “cool”.
“Less a subculture, the hipster is a consumer group – using their capital to purchase empty authenticity and rebellion.” This reminded me of a time a friend was complaining about Urban Outfitters. His argument was that they co-opted the anarchist clothing style and then were trying to sell it back to them at prices they couldn’t afford. (as someone with very little style when it comes to clothing, and no adherence to any one style for sure) I thought that was pretty silly, but I understood the point.
When I moved back to San Diego, maybe it was the fact that it was a year later, or maybe it was San Diego (or more likely that it was not-Santa Cruz) I started noticing the stereotypical hipster, mostly based on appearances. But as I started to meet these “stereotypical hipsters” and become friends, and learn about them on a personal level, not some standing-in-a-club-judgemental-level, I realized they’re not bad people. They’re interested people, sure some of them are consumers, shopping at stores like American Apparel and Urban Outfitters, but others are opening their own boutiques, designing their own clothing, making art and music. I know people that look like they could have just walked off the pages of Vice magazine, but they’re not the mindless, apathetic, consumers described by this article.
I don’t deny that people like those described in the article do exist, I just don’t think that everyone that looks like a hipster, is as shallow and meaningless as the article makes them out to be.
I don’t think the hipster is the end of Western Civilization, I think it’s a passing fad. People will start rebelling again soon enough (some never stopped rebelling, even some that might be labeled as hipsters based on their appearance). I mistakenly tend to think that everyone in the 60’s was a hippy, but I know that’s not true, there were plenty of people that weren’t socially conscious, both those involved in the “hippy movement” and those that weren’t.
A Bar Fight Before a Backpacking Trip. Photo by Greg Theilmann
We gathered at five am Sunday morning, seven of my closest friends and myself. None of us with more than a few hours of sleep, some of us with no sleep at all. All of us with a wild night behind us, ready to leave the confines of civilization for a week in the wilderness. After a 7+ hour drive we arrived at the trailhead in the Sierra National Forest.
We hiked five miles in the evening and camped above twin waterfalls. After eating a dinner of clif bars and trail mix, we hung the food and retired to sleeping bags, tired from the long day. As I lay in my bag, all sounds drowned out by the rushing water over the falls just feet away from me, I read from a poetry collection by Richard Brautigan. There in the river valley, with the sights, sounds and smells of nature, the poems were beautiful in a very special way.
The next day we hiked 12 miles and missed a junction on the trail, arriving at the wrong lake and mistaking it for our destination. We soon realized our error, but settled on the beautiful lake, 10,600 feet above sea level, as our home for the next few days. We drank tequila and lime juice and went swimming, exploring the island in the lake. We ate our first warm meal in 36 hours and went to bed early. Above the treeline where there are no fires allowed, you get in your sleeping bag pretty soon after the sun goes down.
The following day I faced a dilemma. Paul caught plenty of trout that afternoon and I was thinking about eating one. I had no real qualms about it and decided that if I was going to eat them, I would at least watch him kill and prepare them. As I walked over to the water the fish were all on a line, some dead and some alive. I crouched down low and took it all in. I reached out and touched a beautiful rainbow trout, its skin was so soft and smooth. It quivered as I moved my fingers along its body, its eyes looking me over with fear and curiosity. It was then I knew I couldn’t eat it. A few hours later everyone came back to me and the other vegetarian sitting at the waters edge and told us how good the fish were.
We got up the next morning and hiked cross country to the lake we were supposed to camp at. We quickly realized we were camped at a superior lake. We found a rock to jump off high above the water and spent some time jumping into the lake and swimming back out, only to do it all over again.
Inspired by Richard Brautigan we collectively wrote our own collection of mountain poetry. These instant classics were sadly lost the next day when the notebook fell out of a pocket.
Each night as the sun went down the mosquitoes came out. As the night got colder the mosquitoes slowly faded away with the remaining sunlight and the stars started to slowly appear. When it was all said and done it was one of the most dazzling light shows I’ve ever seen. The dusty Milky Way, the twinkle of millions of stars throughout the sky, the quickly vanishing flickers of shooting stars. And then the waning moon would come out, so illuminating that you didn’t need a flashlight if you got up to pee.
One day we spent the better half of the afternoon lounging around on a rock in the sun at the water’s edge, drinking and talking. As the afternoon became evening, and the bottles less plentiful, we noticed something strange. Five backpackers were stopped between us and the lake. Then they took off their packs, then they setup their tents. For at least three days we had hardly seen anyone outside the eight of us. Now there were five people setting up camp within fifty feet of us. After some time a few of us decided to go talk with them.
We met Amy and Ellie from Berkeley and Patches from Michigan. We took peace offerings and shared stories. We all told our stories and then we retreated back to our camp. Nearly everyone went to bed, save three of us standing around talking and looking at the stars for hours. When it was time to retire to our bags for the night we could hardly walk, but somehow managed to sing a nice country song before falling asleep.
The next morning a few of us hiked up above our camp, above the lake to get a view, and get above 11,000 feet. We spent the majority of our last day laying on a rock in the sun, swimming in the lake and just enjoying being away from it all. I was reading a book that wasn’t really about what it claimed to be about, it was more a coming of age story. It was a good book to read at a good time in my life. I read this and agreed with it: “There’s still freedom left in this country, but you gotta walk two days from the end of the road to find it.”
Friday morning we got up at six am. Packed up camp and started hiking. Two people fell in the water at the river crossing. The three of us that made it back to the car first did so in four hours and forty minutes. Seventeen miles with packs on in less than five hours, needless to say I’m still a bit sore. We celebrated with Banquet beer and then had a long wait for the rest of the group. The longer we waited the hungrier we got and the slower time moved.
After a long drive home (and many stops for food) we showered and most of us ended up at a bar around midnight. Many of our friends were there and it was a great time. The four of us could be picked out of the crowd by the scruffy, week old beards, and the stiff slow painful walking.
While standing in a crowded bar room, surrounded by good friends something caught my eye and I got the strangest feeling. A few feet away was someone that I didn’t know, that I’d never seen before. And I realized that I was back in society. I was no longer surrounded by my friends, open and free. I was back in the city, with people I didn’t know, that don’t necessarily care about me. I imagined I felt the way that people describe coming down off ecstasy, realizing that this love and openness that you felt was only temporary, and no longer exists. The feeling only lasted for a few minutes. Soon I was my usual self again, excited to meet new people and have more urban adventures.
More pictures can be seen here.
Disclaimer: some of the above may be fiction.
If you have about twenty minutes to spare I recommend you read this short story by Neil Gaiman. I liked it.
My favorite band’s latest album just leaked on the internet, if all goes well I’ll be listening to it as I sit in traffic this afternoon.
I don’t know much about it and I only heard about it recently, but it is apparently the second half of a double album (they released the first half last year, around the same time of year this one will be coming out). I don’t think they announced that there would be a “sequel” at the time.
Last winter and spring I listened to Okkervil River a whole lot, two albums in particular, and they made me really depressed. I wasn’t having a great time in general, and the mood of the songs didn’t help that. For a long time I couldn’t listen to those songs without getting sad.
(One happy memory I have of this time and music, and a song that never depressed me, was No Key, No Plan. In one of our showers we had shower crayons to draw and write on the walls with, one day while showering after listening to the song I scrawled some of the song lyrics on the wall. They stayed there for a long time.)
Later in the spring things started getting better, summertime came, I moved out of the co-op and generally felt better. I still couldn’t listen to much Okkervil River, but then I found their latest album online. At the time I was living at the Burns-Tabone Center for Reasoned Enlightenment, I didn’t have a computer, there was no way to hook up my ipod to any speakers, and at first I had no cds. After seeing the movie Once I went out and got a copy of the soundtrack. That was all I listened to until I got The Stage Names, the latest Okkervil River cd at the time. I listened to it over and over again. The songs were less sad, more upbeat, and I could listen to them without getting depressed. It was more or less the only music I listened to for about a month.
(The name of this blog even came from one of the songs on that album. It was about six months later. I had been in Brazil a little over a week, and I was halfway through a 26 hour bus ride, the first of many on that three month trip. I started to panic a little. I was a bit bored and a lot anxious. I started thinking about the future and life and all those things. I put my head phones on and started listening to music when I heard this, in a song I’d listened to many times before: “It’s just a life story, so there’s no climax.” It got me thinking about life, my life, there isn’t going to be a climax. Travelling around South America isn’t going to the the climax of my life, whatever I do when I get back isn’t going to be the climax, it’s going to keep building and be one adventure after another, no peak, with a build up and a decline on the other side.)
When I saw the new album online today the timing seemed very similar. Thinking about it though, that’s all that is similar between this year and last. I’m not living anywhere nearly as interesting as the B-T Center and I have plenty of music to listen to, winter this year was absolutely wonderful (well it was summer where I was), but I’m equally excited about this album as I was for the last one.
I feel like I’ve been watching a lot of movies lately. It seems like I go through phases watching a lot of movies at times and other times watching very few movies at all.
Last week for dinner and a movie night we watched an Italian movie called Malèna. I picked it out without knowing much about it. I was looking at the Italian section at Citizen Video, because I was going to get Bicycle Thief, but it looked a little too sad. Malèna turned out to be a bit of a downer in some ways, but really funny at other times. The father in the movie is hilarious (in a very stereotypical Italian way). We all laughed nearly the entire time.
I also saw Wall·E last week. I was pretty unimpressed. I think I had too high of expectations. Come on, I mean, a romantic comedy about robots? How could that be anything but amazing. I think it was thoughts like that, glowing reviews and recommendations, and not being able to find anyone to say anything bad about the movie, that built up my hopes and expectations just a bit too much, so the movie could never possibly live up to what I dreamed it would be. I was pleasantly surprised to hear Jeff Garlin as one of the voice actors though.
I watched Gonzo over the weekend and loved it. Both the story and the way it was made we great. I liked how much time it devoted to his early life, and his late life, but it didn’t dwell too much on the years between.
Last night I got to dinner and a movie late, I missed dinner and the start of the movie due to some prior commitments. There were about three times as many people there as usual (which was super cool!) and a totally crazy random movie. We watched Zardoz. I had some trouble following it at times, maybe because I missed the beginning, or maybe just because it was so crazy. It sort of came together in the end (sort of) — according to Paul, it was the movie John Boorman always wanted to make but couldn’t, until he made Deliverence and it was a hit so the studio let him do whatever he wanted. Sean Connery was in it, in a totally crazy role. It had some amazingly quotable lines and great costumes.
After the movie finished we watched the 10 minute versions (because really, that’s all you need) of Vertical Limit, The Core and Snakes on a Train (thanks to Tansco). I had never seen any of those in their entirety, and still feel like I don’t need to see a minute more of any of them.
