On two wheels at last – Part 1 of 3

This is Part 1 of a three part series. Be sure to check out Part 2 and Part 3!

Ooof.

When we passed a weigh station on Hwy 26 east of Portland, I figured it was calibrated for vehicles in the multi-ton neighborhood and pedaled past it at a crawl. We weighed our bikes and trailers before we left, mine came in at 127 lbs., but that was before adding food, water, batteries, and a few incidentals and I left it to the imagination to account for the last few pounds. Phil is more of an empiricist.

He rolled over the truck scale and registered a GVW of 350 pounds.

These bikes are heavy. Even with reasonably stout frames and wheels, they feel like noodles underway and descending faster than about 20 miles per hour brings on a speed wobble crescendo that I think could easily run out of control.

Fortunately we made it to Government Camp after scaring up some side roads that got us off the highway. A few photos are stuck on here, but keep on eye on Instagram for tomorrow’s first ski attempt: Mt. Hood.

PLODding Along: Explained

A few of you followed along during the PLOD experiment of this past winter’s darker months, wherein I tracked my Perceived Likelihood of Death through ten straight days of three or more hours of training per day. The study was billed not as a way to see if I could make it through ten days of relatively low intensity exercise, but rather how grim that experiment made me feel about my prospects of survival of a future trip, which at the time was laid out ambiguously as something with skis, bikes, and rigor.

Today, I’m pleased to unveil the itinerary and to report that the PLOD Index is registering all time highs. For a couple of weeks in May, Tom Robertson, Mike Wolfe, Phil Grove, and I will embark on a bicycle tour from Portland to Bend, by way of iconic ski lines on the half dozen volcanoes that form central Oregon’s spine. Here’s a map:

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My head is swimming in a frothy cocktail of trip logistics, apprehension, and excitement, and I hope that you’ll keep tabs on the trip as we try to keep updates current on Instagram and right here on this blog. So fire up the phone and follow @thegentlemanatlarge, @thrphoto, @wolfepaw, and @puglife83, and keep an eye out for #bike2skiOregon over the next few weeks. Of course if you’re local and want to do some skiing or you have a line on a good taco bus, we’d love to hear from you!

Doomed to Repeat Ourselves: Taylor Swift, Millennials and the New Romanticism

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OK so Edgar Allen Poe, Taylor Swift, and a bunch of Occupy Wall Street protesters walk into a bar. They don’t have much to talk about, right? I mean, what could a macabre poet, America’s sweetheart, and a handful of disgruntled neo-libs really have in common?

Well, kind of a lot, really, but it takes backing up for a minute to think about in detail.

So go back a ways to your high school lit classes, or wherever it was that you first really started to think about literature and artistic movement. For me, that was not literature class. Most of what I remember from English Lit was Mr. Demos reiterating that “all love is tragic (but lust is fun!),” something about a loss of innocence, and that if you leave your wife for a younger blonde girl your jilted ex will definitely chop up your children with an ax.

While that’s all helpful advice, most of my more rigorous thought on literature has come much later in life. In fact there’s probably something to the idea that we aren’t even really meant to get anything out of our high school lit classes beyond the lesson that there are some really great books out there that aren’t about vampires. At 17 I don’t think I finished The Great Gatsby. At 27 it made me want to be a writer.

Most of my literary education has taken place since high school. Even since college, really, and it’s been after dark, with booze, and usually with a lot of yelling. A few years ago I was in a bar in Guatemala, arguing with a Scottish guy about who Shakespeare really was and the finer points of Jack London’s demons, and at some point in the rum-addled conversation he claimed that the whole Romantic movement was really just a bunch of whiny rich kids who hated their parents.

Now, I don’t think we got to the bottom of the Shakespeare issue, and I maintain that Martin Eden is London’s most underrated work, but that last part is really what stuck with me.

“A bunch of rich kids who hate their parents?” I thought. “You mean like the Millennials?*”

And so think about it. Dig way back into those little crevices of your memory where you store things like the Quadratic Formula and what the hell a covalent bond is, and think about the characteristics of the Romantic literary movement.

It flourished on the heels of the Industrial Revolution, as a rejection of the environmental decay and inflicted order of industrialized Enlightenment thinking. Romantic thought is characterized by an embrace of the natural world as well as the macabre, by a cultural celebration of the medieval over the industrial, and by the pursuit of an aesthetic sublime over brute force rationality. By self-reliance, independence, and a rejection of religiously based moral convention.

Sound familiar?

The burgeoning economic growth fueled by the proliferation of the internet has been widely hailed as a second industrial revolutionAnd if you overheard me mention a person who “considered folk art and ancient custom to be noble statuses, but also valued spontaneity, as in the musical impromptu” would you picture Ralph Waldo Emerson? Or a waxed mustache and a mandolin?

How is the Best Made Company anything but an aesthetic celebration of the medieval?

Is an effort “to escape population growth, urban sprawl, and industrialism” what’s driving the minimalist movement and all those 180 square fot mini-houses in Portland? Or is that why Thoreau moved to Walden Pond? Poe’s writing brought to life horrifying stories of strange death and torture in the 19th century, but that would never be popular now, right? That must be why True Blood, The Walking Dead, and Dexter all flopped.

The first Romantics came of age during the French Revolution, in a time when Europe’s cultural center was embroiled in tumult and popular thought began to strike back against plutocratic traditions. Does this remind anyone else of growing up during the longest lasting U.S. military conflict in history, or of staging sit-in protests during the financial crisis? Sure, we didn’t cut off the Lehman Brothers’ heads, but I bet a few of you wanted to.

Millennials buy homes, marry, and start families later than any generation in history. This may be a manifestation of an uncertain economic outlook, but is certainly a shift in thinking from our parents’ generation on how best to use the resources we have. And who better to challenge the moral order of our parents than the mouthpiece of a generation: Taylor Swift?

Tay Tay’s newest album is a wholesale rejection of the swooning young girl, waiting for prince charming, that won her fame and acceptance by a nascent generation. Instead 1989 assiduously celebrates the individuality and confidence that formed the foundation of the Romantic movement. In her song, New Romantics (really), she extols the virtues of allowing haters to hate while evoking Hester Prynne, the Romantic era protagonist. If you can’t take it from me, surely you can take it from Taylor?

It’s easy to dismiss the Millennial generation and our infuriating hipster movement as the most entitled generation, or as a bunch of cry babies. Maybe it’s even accurate. But what we’re seeing is a shift in creative era that rekindles the tenets of Romantic thought. The conditions that gave birth to the Romantic artistic movement are as present today as they were 200 years ago, and the people that we so easily disregard as stupid hipsters and lazy teenagers are not simply a generational phenomenon, but rather the standard bearers of a 21st century Romantic renaissance.

And so when Poe, Swift, and those people off the street finally agree on a place to get a drink, my guess is that their bartender will prefer the term mixologist.

Bonus Quiz

To further solidify the point, I’d like to add a quick “Who Said It?” quiz. So who said it? Taylor Swift? or Ralph Waldo Emerson?

1) Always do what you are afraid to do.

2) Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself.

3) I’m intimidated by the fear of being average.

4) Whatever you do, you need courage.

5) “Fearless” is not the absence of fear. It is not being completely unafraid.

6) No matter what happens in life, be good to people.

7) When it’s dark enough, you can see the stars.

*It’s probably important here to clarify that I love my parents, and that you likely do too. By this I don’t mean actually hating your mother and father, but resisting the trends and values cherished by the previous generation.

Solace of the Huts

December brought us such high hopes for a winter that never seemed to come. The storms that pounded western Montana in the early season were cold and deep and set the tone for a ski season to match last year’s banner conditions, but January’s doldrums have stuck around through March and what moisture we’ve gotten has come as rain in the high alpine.

When the skiing is bad, though, the living can be great, and sometimes getting rained on in an alpine yurt isn’t the worst thing that can happen.

Poor conditions send the folks inside for group-cooked meals and a reminder that skiing isn’t just about the snow. Retreating to the dry warmth of an adoptive mountain home forges camaraderie or allows for a few moments of respite before descending back to the ringing phones and shirked duties that never seem to take a breath.

The Internet Is Decadent and Depraved

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If you side with the camp that feels like Valentine’s Day is one of those little-man-behind-the-curtain kinds of systemic extortion that guys like Don Draper and Jack Donaghy came up with over afternoon scotch some time in the 50s, then we probably have a lot to talk about. I’m sure that Freud would have a field day sussing out the root of my strong opinions about the holiday shakedown, but it doesn’t seem so different from having a mugger force you to withdraw your limit from the ATM with a broken 40.

It just seems silly to me to further commercialize love and romance with a tradition where the break even cost outpaces Carter era inflation. This may be one of the reasons that I’m poor, but at the end of the day, I feel the way I feel.

And I feel that it’s stupid.

That doesn’t mean that the damned-if-you-don’t seriousness of the charade is lost on me (you don’t let the bum shiv you, right?).

Imagine for a moment that you were driving along one day and noticed that all of the sudden, 70-80% of the other drivers out there (but not all of them) began to stop at green lights and drive through the red ones. It’s not something that happened after some statute change or codified shift or anything like that, they just did it. All at once. As wrong as they all are, I bet it wouldn’t take too long for you to find yourself approaching intersections with caution.

That pretty much describes my approach to Valentine’s Day, so I called in a couple of weeks early and made a reservation at a nice restaurant for Saturday night.

But the Righteous Overseers had my back on this one and Girlfriend found herself out of town for a well timed bachelorette party. And having a supply of something for which there is an artificial demand (V-Day dinner reservation two days before V-Day), I decided to embrace the real spirit of the holiday and sell it on Craigslist.

At first it was just listed in the “Barter” section, but I also posted it under the heading that I suspect gets the most browsing: Missed Connections. Here’s what it said:

Well, you blew it.

You blew it last year, too. Remember? You knew this day was coming, you said you wouldn’t do it again, but then you did it.

Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, and once again you’re going to find yourself in the dog house because you couldn’t get a reservation at the last minute and sneaking beers into 5 Guys only counts as a Valentine’s date the first time.

Well, I’m here to help. I happen to have a reservation for two at 8pm on Saturday night, at once of the finer spots in town: and it’s for sale.

Now while I’d probably take $20 and a fancy six pack for it, extorting money out of desperate men isn’t what Valentine’s Day is about (right?), and so short of that you may reply to this ad with a bit of poetry.

The best poem gets the reso, I’ll let you know Saturday morning if you’ve won it.

Pretty innocuous, right?

I figured I might get a reply. Maybe someone would get into it, but probably not. Most likely I’d wind up seeing if a friend wanted the reservation or wind up canceling it.

Instead I wound up getting a few desperate poems not fit for print, a 50 Shades reference or two, and a laundry list of dudes suggesting that we just have sex instead. And that was before it got flagged for removal for some reason.

After a precursory glance over the face shots and not-face shots of would be suitors I revisited the ad to see if I had unintentionally hinted that I was looking for something other than not wasting a reservation, or that I had perhaps clicked to allow unsolicited offers. Not the case.

What the hell, guys? Stop being sketchy.

This year my Valentine’s gift was yet another reminder that the internet is a strange, depraved place. If you’ve got a V-Day story that erodes your faith in humanity, feel free to commiserate in the comments.