Dispatches from a Grassy Knoll

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment
It’s been a while since you’ve heard from me, and like a coward I will blame my sloth on something entirely beyond my control: The Missoula XC. Yes, another year has come and gone, and with very few exceptions that whole business is wrapped up (if Amanda Carey happens to be reading this, please know that I have not forgotten about your prize money, and that it is on my correspondence to do list filed immediately between “RSVP to Lizzy’s and Alan’s wedding” and “file my 2011 tax return.” Please anticipate its impending arrival).
This blog over the last several posts has taken a turn towards the pensive and introspective (read: boring). While I believe that self-analysis is necessary and therapeutic, I also believe that a blogger can only induce so much eye rolling before his readers decide he’s gone entirely mad and just start waiting for him to become a household name in the police blotter.  So here is a decidedly non-philosophical update on this and that.
I am currently sitting in the shade of a lone ponderosa pine somewhere between Mount Shasta City and Redding, California, wondering how long Darby can keep putting her nose into strange holes in the earth before one will house a badger and she will be treated to a teachable moment. I am grateful to the minds who saw fit to clear-cut this particular swatch of land, as it has given me an unobstructed (except for a spruce tree which holds a number of not-terribly-intimidating No Trespassing signs) view of the Castle Crags and what may or may not be the northernmost fingers of the Sierra Nevada. I have also found here a clear and more or less level place to park Pigasus. On further thought, I sort of wish that they’d just gone all the way and cut that spruce tree down too, because it’s right in the way of my view and them cutting it down before would be less work than me moving my chair now. For me, anyway.
Pigasus. Pigasus Mk. I is my newest travel companion: a 1983 (watercooled) Volkswagen Vanagon. In almost every previous circumstance I have disapproved of naming cars, bikes, and dogs once you’ve got four, and have never done it myself before now.  The change in heart comes from having recently read Travels With Charley. An in depth conversation on why that book suddenly made me feel like it was ok to name this particular vehicle would probably nudge this post to the philosophical, but I will leave you with Steinbeck’s credo that he himself was a sort of pigasus, “earthbound but aspiring…. A lumbering soul but trying to fly…(with)…not enough wingspread but plenty of intention,” and that the ’83 Vanagon bears unmistakable resemblance in both athleticism and silhouette to a sow.
The noble Pigasus, in her natural environs.

— Page Break —

I have resumed writing, far now from the scarred and quiet California landscape and several days later, from the warmth and comfort of my bedroom. The trip has ended and I can say now what superstition and fear kept me from uttering before: somehow, Pigasus made it! Only several days before my intended departure, that porcine minx left me fuming and glum in East Missoula, refusing to start. After dozens of hours of troubleshooting and misdiagnoses and fruitless repairs, and with less than a day to spare, the problem presented itself as a small red wire that had shaken loose and needed only to be reconnected. I suppose that it’s another lesson for life.
P.S.I saw this sign in Oakland. 

Kidnapped

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment
A few weeks ago I was at a dinner party with friends, recounting my boss’s most recent affront to decency. The details of the offense aren’t important, to be honest I can’t even remember the specifics now. In fact it’s telling that the instances of late night, frantic, badgering text messages about nothing and the infliction of stress from his home life upon his employees are so common that they no longer stand out as news.

“Man, you really need to get out of there,” my friend Shaun reiterated after several years of giving the same advice. “I know, I know,” I dutifully replied as always, “but it’s just so flexible.” And then the excuses kept flowing. “He can’t help it . . . it’s really not so bad . . . I have easy hours and make okay money and can get all the time off to go play that I need.” As I was unenthusiastically cycling through my routine of defenses of the job that I know I shouldn’t still have, I had a revelation: I had Stockholm Syndrome.

To compare myself to a hostage who eventually begins to sympathize with his captor is perhaps a little bit melodramatic. But considering the downturned economy, the current post-college job placement rate for Millenials, and the brutal competition for professional jobs in this recreational wonderland called Missoula, Montana, it really isn’t that far fetched to see that employers can get away with paying low wages and acting like children and still have a constant stream of overqualified resumes coming through the front door. It’s a buyer’s market, and after three years I continued to justify and forgive unacceptable behavior by my employer.

And so I took a leap. I quit. I quit, to the chagrin of my parents, without a long term plan for how I’ll keep myself alive and not move back in with them. “It’s easier to get a job when you have a job,” they’ve assured me time and time again. But there’s a certain complacency that comes with job security; the fact that the checks keep coming I believe curtails creativity and industry. Colin Wilson called it (and went on to document it thoroughly) the St. Neot Margin. His conclusion was that complacency and the lack of stress leads to a sort of creative equilibrium that precludes growth.

Not long ago I complained to my uncle that I was “trying to quit my job.” He replied, somewhat aghast, “What do you mean trying to quit? It takes like 8 seconds. It’s like firing somebody.” I replied that I liked to eat, and that as much as I love my parents I have no interest in moving back in with them. “Yeah,” he said, “you’d be surprised at how scrappy you get when it’s the end of the month and rent is due.” In a way I think this is a pure example of Wilson’s Margin, and had to take my parental advice with a last grain of salt. A year ago I was at a gin-soaked fundraiser, talking myself out of quitting (I’d been considering quitting this job since the first few months I had it) with another guest who was a decade or so my senior. I explained my parents’ position and before I could finish this conversationalist replied, “Your parents’ job is to look out for you. To give you the safe advice. You just have to consider whether the safe advice is the good advice.”

Performance Enhancing Drugs

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment
It is difficult, anymore, to look at elite level athletics without feeling the tingling and hushed stigma of drug use. With accounts of Lance Armstrong’s systematic use and distribution of EPO and other drugs, and his intimidation of those who were resistant to The Program occupying the headlines of publications that just a few years before would not deign to publish the triumphs of the sport, it should come as no surprise that road cycling is now construed by many as a hotbed of doping and unsportsmanlike drug use. And it’s true. Witch hunt or not, the investigations and improvements to testing procedures over the last decade have shown that drug use in the pro peleton has been pervasive, perhaps even endemic at the highest level of the sport. But while drug use in cycling seems to garner much more attention than the same problems in other professional athletics, it would be naive and ignorant to believe that it is not a present and persistent influence in other sports.

The extensive use of banned substances in the MLB and NFL over the last several decades is well documented. Even the NBA, from its ivory tower of lucrative and performance driven popularity was forced recently to confront the issue when Orlando’s Hedo Turkoglu tested positive for steroids. At least in policy, these professional organizations acknowledge that performance enhancing drug use is something that should be stigmatized. While no sport in the US punishes the use of banned substances with the same draconian fervor of elite cycling, each governing body as a system in place for imposing sanctions on players.

Athletes may face fines and suspensions of varying severity, and records set with illegal assistance can be stricken or bear an asterisk to note in perpetuity that they were garnered by dishonest means. But despite the (sometimes vapid) strides that professional athletics have taken to disincentivize drug use, the practice continues. And what’s more, banned substance use is not confined to the highest level of sport. Doping bans, while uncommon, are not absent from the ranks of the NCAA and a recent study showed that of the 1500 high school football players who were interviewed, 6% admitted to using some kind of performance enhancing drug. Clearly the very real benefits to performance still outweigh the just as real detriments for some athletes. The fact that doping is persistent in sports leagues that are associated with academic institutions should not be surprising, as doping in schools has been experiencing a crescendo for years.

The first (and only) time that I used a performance enhancing drug it was not to increase my speed on the bike. It was not to jump higher, or run faster, or pick up heavy stuff better (you can confirm all of this anecdotally by asking me to do any of those things and watching). I joined, by some estimates, 25% of today’s university students when I took a couple of Adderall and sat down to finish an otherwise insurmountable quantity of work (40-50 Ben-Hours) in a day. It was incredible. For 8 hours, I didn’t eat. I didn’t drink water, or go to the bathroom. I didn’t check my email or Facebook once. I didn’t even stand up. I worked in a manic fervor for 8 straight hours and finished the last obstacle between me and a Bachelor’s degree with literally minutes to spare.

While using performance enhancing drugs to get a B.S. in Geology from the University of Montana is sort of like using steroids so that you can win in tether-ball at summer camp, the impulse to attain a competitive edge  in academics is easy to understand. With the increasing competition for positions in prestigious undergraduate  and graduate level programs the pressure to excel can easily overwhelm nagging crises of conscience. What’s more, beyond the difficult-to-enforce laws against selling or using prescription drugs without a prescription, there are no widespread systems for academic or student conduct sanctions if a student is found to be enhancing his or her performance with a pill. There are almost no legal or procedural consequences to this kind of doping. And isn’t this every bit as dishonest as copying answers on a test or committing plagiarism, both of which can lead to expulsion in egregious cases? It seems to me like to keep the academic playing field level, there needs to be some kind of policy limiting the illicit use of concentration enhancing drugs, even if it means that my degree winds up with an asterisk.

Comfortable Enough

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment
Comfortable enough to order a Mai Tai at a bar in Plentywood, MT in January, that is. That really happened. I was in the northeasternmost corner of Our Fair State a few months ago for work and was looking forward to a trip to Hawaii. It was so cold out there that the antifreeze in the generator that was running our test froze. Needless to say that I was brimming with nervous anticipation of spending some time in the tropics with friends (I just checked The Google to see if Hawaii is technically tropical. It is, except for Necker Island. Huh). The Mai Tai has become sort of an emblem of those islands, and Alaska Air even pours you a free (albeit crappy) one on your way there. I was bumming pretty hard because I had maybe just broken an expensive test that might not yield any usable results and even more, might keep me in a hotel room in Plentywood for another two weeks.

The motel where I was staying, The Sherwood Inn, is a Robin Hood themed place that’s next to Fryer Tuck’s Restaurant (which actually has pretty good Mexican food) and the Robin Hood Lounge. In case you’re in the area and you need to unwind a little, there’s also Maid Marrion’s Nail Salon, and Little John’s Tanning Salon. This is real. I understand that during the fall they see a lot of bird hunting traffic, but in January most of the tenants were there as agents of the burgeoning oil and gas interests in the region. On most nights the Robin Hood Lounge was half filled by a mixture rough hewn oilmen and close-knit tables of laughing locals exchanging rounds of Patron.

On one of my later nights there I didn’t feel much like fraternizing and was really looking forward to Hawaii. To get my spirits up I ordered a Mai Tai to go, and the conversation went something like this:

Me: You can’t, by chance, make a cocktail to go, can you?
Bartender: Sure can.
Me: This is the best place ever. Can I have a Mai Tai?
Bartender: I’ve never heard of that. What’s in it?
Me: I’m not really sure. (So I looked it up, and came up with a usable recipe that called for ingredients that these guys stocked. The bartender and I looked it over, and he made it.)
Me: Heck yeah.
Bartender: Say, that looks kind of good. Maybe I should start making those . . . . Sorta looks like a chick drink, though.
Me: Oh, it’s definitely a chick drink.

I took the Mai Tai back to the room and managed to catch a couple episodes of Law & Order: SVU on USA (and also came up with the theory that that show is 98% of their programming). The Plentywood Mai Tai was a satisfying and tantalizing foreshadow of Actual Mai Tais to come, but was entirely too sugary to be actually palatable.

Anyway the test was not a complete failure, I was allowed to return from the Great Northeast, and a couple of weeks later escape for a while to Hawaii. We drank a lot of Mai Tais, and I was thinking recently that we spent some time dialing in the recipe. It’d be a shame for all of that work to go to waste and so I decided memorialize the recipe in The Cloud. So here it goes. This is really just the original Trader Vic’s recipe except with dark and white rum instead of Martinique and Jamaican rum. And with muddled herbs.

– 1 oz dark rum + a splash extra
– 1 oz white rum
– 1 oz fresh lime juice
– 0.5 oz orgeat syrup
– 0.5 oz Grand Marnier
mint or basil

Muddle a pinch of mint or basil in a shaker. Add ice and the rest of the ingredients. Shake and strain over ice. Top with a float of dark rum and garnish with fruit or mint.

That is all.

Photos compliments of Kristine Akland.

Aegis of Wit

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

My most recent plight to publish has been underway for a number of weeks now, and while not forlorn I am discouraged. So not to cause confusion, I should insist that a number of weeks is not a long time. This is a task which has taken the greatest minds of the English language years. But I’ve yet to really have begun, and am far from having dared to submit a piece and endure the slings and arrows of an editor’s pen. I’ve come short of being visited by even a single linear thought. It seems such a shame that meandering, free associating spatter can flow so easily, but at the merest effort to compose with method or meaning the mind’s eye snaps shut and shunts the supply of words. It cripples the brain and paralyzes the fingers, and I trust even that the choice words would follow and scintillate and dazzle if I could just transcend this substantive impotence. Alas, I am hamstrung by clever and pithy one-liners that float naked on the page as I grasp desperately to conjure some context in which they’ll be read.
Which begs the question: what is it to be read? To write for inner discovery or to sneak a private missive is beautiful and pure; to ejaculate notions onto a page and expect that others will read and care and give credence to your musings is to ask the world to stop and wait a moment as you choose between ham and sausage with your morning eggs. I wonder if there’s bacon. But here we have this public forum to experiment at risk of castigation and ridicule, which seems to distract from the Old College Try. So we hide behind sarcasm and wit (and the first person plural, as though there exists some covert alliance of coward writers, sulking in the shadows with silent expectations that the Paris Review will be calling any moment now to lavish praise on our inconsistent and meandering blogs), telling ourselves that when it’s not received that it’s only because it was an off the cuff shot. Not a serious thing.
But sarcasm manifests as a scowling, pockmarked visage of insecurity, and wit for wit so often is that bastion of self-righteous elitism from which we fling oil soaked flaming arrows at guiltless, guileless passers-by: an ignoble pastime; but in pursuit of sincerity we walk that line between what may be art and self-indulgent melodrama, as fine as the razor’s edge that in an instant cleaves life from flesh (on which side that fell, I can’t be sure). To be sincere and received as not is a crippling proposition, much worse perhaps than riding out a jest taken at face value. So this secret guarded coalition of trepid souls will stay the course and sit and gaze inwardly for that past-due flash of brilliant prose which will receive nothing less than it deserves.