Expedition

Did you know that to this day, the bodies of some of the best mountain climbers of all time remain on Mt. Everest?

Most of them caused their own demise -- took a tiny misstep and fell a thousand feet into oblivion.

Some lost focus because of oxygen deprivation and didn't hammer their pitons into the rock or ice deep enough and the pitons pulled out sending a whole team cartwheeling down a jagged rock face to be chewed up as if in a meat grinder.

Others didn't notice avalanche conditions because of exhaustion and disappeared into a thick wall of white.

A few just kept marching into a blizzard whiteout and have never been seen again. Not much to do when that happens. Even if you stop and bivouac, you're probably going to become a meatsicle.

Some knew they were going to die if they kept climbing, but kept going anyway -- unable to admit defeat. They could have turned back, but didn't.

It takes remarkable commitment to make that climb and once you've committed to the mountain some people can't give that up.

So maybe the worst of all the mountain predicaments is when you have lots of energy, are well-supplied, in great shape, feeling rested with lots of oxygen, but suddenly it just becomes obvious that there is no way to continue the climb. The weather makes a completely unexpected change. The only realistic route is obliterated by an avalanche. Someone on your climbing party becomes sick with dysentery or is stricken with altitude sickness for the first time... or somebody just loses their nerve and freaks out.

But the wheels are in motion!!! You've trained and practiced for this expedition and have spent a fortune on supplies and travel. C'mon dudes, let's do this!!

Nope. Thats a younger climber's mistake. Once you get a few climbs under your belt and you've seen some bad shit you become wiser and more disciplined. 

Bail. Go back home and plan for the next one. There will always be a next one, right?

Sit down and bleed...

“Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it -- don't cheat with it.” 
― Ernest Hemingway

On a whim I took a "selfie" picture during a recent fishing trip.

In it, I look more grizzled than I have ever noted when looking in the mirror -- maybe it was sleeping on the ground for a week in the rain, but for the first time I looked old to myself.

Certainly delusional, but to me I even appeared to look like a little like Hemingway's iconic Old Man and Sea picture taken after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

No, I'm not there yet, but I can see it coming.

Since it's Hemingway's birthday coming up soon (July 21), why not obsess on him for awhile?

Hemingway's short stories and novels about his younger self-protagonist, Nick Adams, really helped me get through high school. His ultra bare-bones style made it seem possible to write something without a lot of bullshit:

Nick was happy as he crawled inside his tent .... It had been a hard trip. He was very tired .... He had made his camp. He was settled. Nothing could touch him. It was a good place to camp.

—Ernest Hemingway, "Big Two-Hearted River"

By today's literary standards that seems absurdly sparse and staccato, but at the time it alluded to a subtext that made it clear something was not right in the heart of the character... you just didn't need to go into a lot of whining about it -- his now famous "Iceberg Theory" of writing. 

I read the Nick Adams stories over and over. 

I learned an important lesson when I went to college and an English professor called Hemingway, "the greastest asshole in the history of the world." The class laughed and I felt like somebody has punched me in the balls. It really made me question my own writing ability, my intelligence, my taste... my... mojo. What I learned is not to listen to what failed writers say about other writers. 

When I read Hemingway, I learned about the world and about writing:

"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."

and

"We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master."

and

“The first draft of anything is shit.” 

Write what you WANT to write, not what somebody else thinks is good. If you only get three pageviews on your blog... who fucking cares? At least you're still you. Your writing is what you are -- even more so than what you look like or what you say. What you write is what you believe... and it gives you at least a tiny chance to try and define what you really mean and what you believe and what you feel.

Fallen angels...

Her name was Marianne. The name sounds pure and virginal. Maybe she was once.

I met her in the Levi jeans section of the Bon Marche (now Macy's) at Southcenter Mall in Tukwila where she was a salesgirl. We were both 25.

"Can I help you find somethin'?" she said. She had just appeared from around a shelf of Levis and was standing about three inches from me when she spoke and I noticed her. She had on a tight  black mock turtleneck and acid-washed jeans (it was the late 80s), some of kind of short black go-go boots, long, dirty blonde, wavy hair and I could smell some very cheap perfume -- the kind teenage girls shoplifted from Kmart. She was wearing a bra, but I could see some big, slightly pendulous breasts under the turtleneck and some big hard nipples the size of late summer blackberries poking through.

She was white with a fake tan and too much makeup trying to cover some modest acne. Her voice was rough -- you could hear the smoker's voice... and smell cigarette smoke too.

But the thing I noticed most was her eyes. Very cold, hazel, emotionless eyes that made her appear to be tough and jaded. She never broke eye contact with me. She wasn't smiling, but she wasn't sad or angry. Those eyes said, "I know what I want and I want it right now.  I dare you to give it to me."

"Uh yeah... I need some Levis," I answered.

"What are you, about a 30-inch waist, 32-inch inseam?" she asked. She nailed it. While reaching in the shelves for the right size she made sure to brush those giant tits against my arm. There was no way I was going to fit into those jeans now.

"Sure you don't want to try them on?" she said. She actually grabbed the front waist of my Levis and stepped even closer to me. I think I gave her a shit-eating grin, but I was in shock. She didn't bat an eyelash or flirt, but kept that dead gaze at me. At that time in my life it was impossible to believe that a women I just met would lead me into a dressing room at a department store, unzip my pants, take out my painfully erect cock and blow me to the finish line. That stuff only happened in Penthouse Forum. But that's just what she did.

It took three minutes at the most. She was an expert at it.

I tried to return the favor by putting one hand up her shirt and under her bra to squeeze those giant titties and I reached down the front of her pants with my other hand (she wasn't wearing panties... she later said she never wore them) to touch her pussy which was soaking wet. But she stopped me and said she had to get back to work or she'd get fired. I took my hands out, but if you looked close you could see the crotch of her jeans was already soaked through.

I guess I bought the stupid Levis... I really don't remember. She didn't work on commission so she wouldn't have cared.

Afterwards we made some quick small talk about stuff I can't recall. Her manager started hanging around close by clearly displeased that she was spending too much time with one customer. I gave her my business card for the hack newspaper I wrote for in a nearby suburb. I wrote my home phone number on it (waaaaayyy  pre-cell phone days) and told her to call me if she ever wanted to do something. She actually looked happy when I did.

"Kurt, huh?" she said looking at my name on the card.

"Yep... and Marianne?" I answered, nodding at her store nametag.

She called me the next day.

"You met me at just the right time," she said. "Let's go do something." I didn't have anybody I was seriously dating so I was eager and willing. I suggested a movie where we wouldn't have to talk a lot, but she said she wanted to go out to eat in Seattle. She liked Mexican food. She wanted to go out that night.

I knew a place I had been to a couple of times in Belltown. I picked her up at her shitty duplex not far away from I where I lived and worked in Federal Way, WA (stupid name for a city) and we drove the 20 miles into Seattle proper. I suggested we first go to a place close to the restaurant for drinks -- Five Corners, a hangout for the hipsters... like me.

Unbelievably, a guy I had met a couple weeks earlier at a party was there. His name was "Joe" and he was famous amongst the guys I hung out with -- a very smooth, handsome operator who was revered for getting whatever pussy he wanted. In fact, at the party I had met him at two weeks ago, he had picked up two women and fucked them at the same time. That's not just a story... I saw it. The girls were best friends who worked at a Planned Parenthood office in Seattle. When I woke up out of my drunk, he was in a room fucking one of them and fingering the other with the door wide open. All three were obviously having a good time.

My good friend and photographer partner from the newspaper, Paul, was sleeping in a bed with a relatively hot blonde who was engaged to somebody else. I had gotten drunk off my ass. Two very nice women had taken pity on me and had made sure I at least slept if off on the couch. I remembered making out with one of them while I was hammered while the other one mostly watched. I made out with her a little bit too, but I was way too fucked up to close the deal. I never saw either one of them again.

So anyway... here was Joe Cool. He saw me and came over to greet us. This looked like trouble to me. This guy was cool on a scale that didn't include me. I could see that he had recognized me, but he also had taken note of Miss Dirty Blonde Big Tits and was smiling his 1000-watt smile at her.

To be continued...

The world is less today...

James Joseph Gandolfini, Jr.

(September 18, 1961 – June 19, 2013)

One of the greatest actors of all time -- and more importantly one of the greatest human beings -- died of a heart attack at age 51 yesterday.

"He was a genius. Anyone who saw him even in the smallest of his performances knows that," "Sopranos" creator David Chase said in a prepared statement this evening. "He is one of the greatest actors of this or any time. A great deal of that genius resided in those sad eyes.

"I remember telling him many times, 'You don't get it. You're like Mozart.' There would be silence at the other end of the phone. ... He wasn't easy sometimes. But he was my partner, he was my brother in ways I can't explain and never will be able to explain."

Of course I never even met the guy, but he felt like a brother -- or at least the best friend I would have wanted. You never really know what anybody is like unless you've known them for a very long time, but by all accounts, Mr. Gandolfini was an extremely down-to-earth, humble man and respectful to all.

I admired the guy more than any actor I have ever seen. He was the middle-aged tough guy in an age when it's no longer cool to be a tough guy. He was the ordinary lug who charmed people and always got the girl. He was NOT a cry-baby, but he wasn't afraid to cry.

He was so shy and reportedly hated interviews, but he did an extended interview at the Actor's Theater that I have watched over and over (like I have every episode of the Sopranos that I have on iTunes). Please try to ignore the subtitles:

Josh Ritter...

Northwest boy (Moscow, Idaho)... has the world by the tail. Kid's amazing...

Hmmm... don't know why, but I love this song:

Kathleen

All the other girls here are stars

You are the Northern Lights

They try to shine in through your curtains

You're too close and too bright

They try and they try but everything that they do

Is the ghost of a trace of a pale imitation of you

I'll be the one to drive you back home Kathleen

This party is made with the night air and the chance that a smile

Will wind its way from your face to one of the boys in your line

You act like you're hip to their tricks and you're strong

But a virgin Wurlitzer heart never once had a song

I'll be the one to drive you back home Kathleen

And I'll have you back by break of day

I'm going your way anyway

And if you'd like to come along

I'll be yours for a song

I know you are waiting and I know that it is not for me

But I'm here and I'm ready and I've saved you the passenger seat

I won't be your last dance just your last goodnight

Every heart is a package tangled up in knots someone else tied

I'll be the one to drive you back home Kathleen

So crawl up your trellis and quietly back into your room

And I'll coast down the length of your drive by the light of the moon

And the next time we meet  a new kind of hello

Both our hearts have a secret only both of us know

About the night that I drove you back home Kathleen

Banned by clowns...

Not creepy at all

I don't like clowns.

To be honest, I fucking hate them -- hate their noses, hate their face paint, hate their hair, their costumes, their shoes... but mostly I hate their eyes.

"Coulrophobia" is the psychological term for a fear of clowns, but I'm not afraid of them -- I just fucking hate them (okay, maybe I'm a little afraid of them). I know I'm not alone in this and that this is not a controversial stand.

It started in 1971 when I saw a giant sad-eyed clown picture in our neighbors' living room (for some reason every other living room in America in the 70s had a sad-eyed clown painting). Those goddamn clown eyes seemed to follow you wherever you went (even when I ran past the damn picture as fast as my little 3-year-old legs could take me).

Probably this..                    but to me looked like this

So it was probably inevitable that eventually I was permabanned from Cirque du Soleil (French translation: "Satan's Circus") for punching a clown in the nose in Seattle in 2000.

It looks so cool on public television with amazingly talented hot chick acrobats in tiny, tight stripper costumes flashing full frontal cameltoe splits every two minutes. That ain't the way it is in real life. IRL, Cirque du Soleil is a French-Canadian corporation (based in Montreal) that has 4000 employees and makes nearly a billion dollars a year.

They have 20 separate companies touring around the world at any given time. With that many people out performing, eventually it's going to water down your talent pool. I think many of the performers in the 2000 production I saw in Seattle must have been heroin addicts snatched off the streets of Montreal.

Preparing to eat a small child

There weren't any acrobats in the production my wife forced my 4-year-old son and I to attend -- just clowns, hundreds of clowns. They spent the show wandering into the audience to pluck some unlucky yahoo out of his/her seat to humiliate on stage. I am a shy guy from Minnesota so being chosen to come upstage when I'm at a performance of some sort is about my worst nightmare. 

It's a proven fact that clowns can smell that particular brand of fear. So, of course, one of these trolls with green face paint, purple hair and truly crazy killer clown eyes caught a whiff then came and took my hand and tried to get me to stand up. Nope, wasn't going to happen. I have an almost superheroic ability to NOT move when I don't want to. I am like a human donkey. If I don't want to move, nobody can move me.

Eventually Pierre the Psychotic gave up and moved on to some other sap. By this time my son was so bored he started acting up, yelling "bad clown!" and trying to kick the cavorting evil bastards when they'd get too close (don't know where he got that from). I generously volunteered to my glaring wife to take him out. Tickets were about $80 a piece even in 2000, but I would have paid 10 times that to get out of there.

We made our exit through the nearly empty lobby -- "nearly empty" except for snack bar clerks and, of course, Pierre the Psychotic, who apparently was on his break time and flirting with a teenager selling popcorn.

Pierre saw us walking out and I could see he recognized me immediately. He figured he had a ready-made sucker he could use to impress the probably underage popcorn girl with his brilliant mimicking clown skills.  I grasped my son's hand tighter and said, "C'mon sonny, we have to get out of here.":

Too late.

My son kept turning around and began to say, "Dad!" with more and more alarm. "Dad... Dad... DAD... DADDY!!"  I knew Pierre was right behind us, but I was willing to ignore him if it would make him go away. It didn't work and at this point, my son was crying.

I stopped short and Merde-For-Brains ran right into us. He had been mimicking me, walking about an inch behind me. When I turned he jumped back and pretended it wasn't him, just looking up at the ceiling and miming that he was reading an imaginary newspaper. 

"You better back the fuck off," I said. I'm not a big scary guy, but now I was pissed.

In idiotic silent clown language he mimed, "Who? Me?"

I turned and we kept walking. Sure enough, he did it again.

By this point, Pierre just had too many marks against him -- scaring my son, being French Canadian, ignoring a warning... but worst of all -- being a clown.

I popped him the nose and he went down like a sack of clown crap in ketchup. I think he was faking it a little because I didn't hit him anywhere near as hard as I could have. And yes, he really did have a red nose on, but I don't remember if it made a honking sound when I flattened it. But, at least, he stayed down and wasn't moving -- at all.

My son and I got the hell out of there, but they called the cops and they caught me in the parking lot because I had to wait for my wife. Pierre wasn't hurt, but they didn't want people going around punching clowns (that sounds like a great policy to me). I told the Cirque du Soleil people I would make a stink about their clown scaring my kid and running into us so the clown command staff didn't press charges... they just banned me from all Cirque productions forever and all time.

Ohhhh please.... don't throw me into that briar patch. What a punishment to be prevented from seeing a herd of talentless, French-speaking attention whores for the rest of my life.

"We won't be telling mommy about this, okay son?"

He tried, but it's hard for 4-year-olds to keep a secret -- especially about killer clowns being vanquished. 

I gotta admit it was worth getting the cold shoulder for a week to punch just one of these evil fuckers in the nose.

...and another one planning to steal your soul

because it was spawned without one. 

Dragon...

Jackie Chan's Bruce Lee story:

I can't find anybody anywhere who has a bad thing to say about Bruce Lee.


From John Little, a friend of Lee:

“Bruce had me up to three miles a day, really at a good pace. We’d run the three miles in twenty-one or twenty-two minutes. Just under eight minutes a mile [Note: when running on his own in 1968, Lee would get his time down to six-and-a half minutes per mile]. So this morning he said to me “We’re going to go five.” I said, “Bruce, I can’t go five. I’m a helluva lot older than you are, and I can’t do five.” He said, “When we get to three, we’ll shift gears and it’s only two more and you’ll do it.” I said “Okay, hell, I’ll go for it.” So we get to three, we go into the fourth mile and I’m okay for three or four minutes, and then I really begin to give out. I’m tired, my heart’s pounding, I can’t go any more and so I say to him, “Bruce if I run any more,” –and we’re still running-”if I run any more I’m liable to have a heart attack and die.” He said, “Then die.” It made me so mad that I went the full five miles. Afterward I went to the shower and then I wanted to talk to him about it. I said, you know, “Why did you say that?” He said, “Because you might as well be dead. Seriously, if you always put limits on what you can do, physical or anything else, it’ll spread over into the rest of your life. It’ll spread into your work, into your morality, into your entire being. There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level.”

His grave is here in Seattle, of course, and he spent a good deal of his life here.

Bruce Lee is buried next to his son Brandon

 in Lakeview Cemetery, Seattle.

The thing that always stands out to me is how freakin' fast he was... so fast you'd have to assume they were speeding up the film in his movies when in fact, the actually had to slow it down just to see his kicks and punches. From a recent documentary about Lee: