Rain In My Butt

Why is everything such a pain in the ass?
Why is everything such a pain in my ass?
Why, when I got to (finally) clean the garbage out of my car, is the last piece of paper just out of reach from the curb side?
Why, when I step off the curb to get a better angle to grab stuff, does my foot slide into a rivulet of dirty water, soaking my socks?
Why, when I bend over to pick up the garbage out of my car, does the rain fall into the back of my pants, and down deeper in my butt?
Why, when I try to grab all of the crap out of the floor of my car (finally) does something fall out of something else onto the floor and out of reach?
Why are things just a little harder than I wish they were?
Why, when I decide to tear up a piece of mail, because I should not have been sent this junk in the first place, do I have to remember to throw it out, so it does not sit on the table and get me in trouble tomorrow?
Why are the every day, every week, every month and every year things worth doing harder to do than not to do?
Why does rain fall in my butt?
Why do our dogs make things harder for us, even though we strive to make things as easy as possible for them throughout their lives?
Why is it difficult to keep in touch?
Why should we feel like taking a vacation from life?
Why do my toes itch so?
Why is it impossible for me to do ballet, like the weightless men in “The Nutcracker”?
Why do I have to go to the store to buy things I need to live?
Why do dust bunnies exist? And why do they grow so incessantly?
Why is really want-able stuff more expensive than decent stuff?
Why do we want some of what other people have?
Why in hell do things break down?
Why do other things linger? Bad, bad things?
Why can’t I go play golf tomorrow, in nice weather?
Why can’t we be totally comfortable, in our own home, regardless of the weather?
Why can’t things turn themselves off when I don’t want them on?
Why can’t I play amazing music, as loud as I want, to my heart’s content?
Why must I cut my hair, clean it out of the drain and use deoderant (with anti-perspirant)?
Why must our laundry never, ever be finished. Ever? Ever. We’re only two.
Why did rain fall in my butt?
Why do things fall down and out, away from our hands?
Why do lights burn out?
Why does beauty fade?
Why does stuff get dirtier, all by it’s lonesome?
Why did I sell my motorcycle?
Why are airports and airplanes and air people and air tickets simply no fun to be a part of?
Why is bad food so good?
Why do things we need, like water, heat, electricity and (intermittent) cellular service, cost money, at all? We need them, like air.
Why does it eventually hurt to just sit still?
Why do thank-you notes need to be sent?
Why are there things I may never know?
Why are there things we may never know?
Why do cells die?
Why don’t people understand?
Why don’t people just believe?
Why do I get itchy in more than two spots at once, obviously one or more spots just out of a simple reach?
Why is good work hard?
Why are all of my pants the wrong length?
Why does the mailperson refuse to take mail back that is not ours? It’s not our mail.
Why is the warm part of my bed spread squeezed out to the corners and edges?
Why did it rain in my butt?

What Was Snowboarding: 1986

It seems like every 4 years there’s a pretty good swing in attitude around here, enough of a change to notice a difference in things. It takes us 4 years to get sick of our leaders, and it takes about 4 years for real noticeable changes to take place in sports, music, fashion and general public attitude towards things. You can speculate that change is taking place within those 4 years, but you can’t define it completely until 4 years of transition is over, and then you’re behind the swing of change again.

Snowboarding is no different, and from 1986 to 2002, every four years you could witness real change happening in the sport, the riders, the attitude, style and progression. You sensed the change happening all along, but the transitions were reborn about every four years. It was if you went snowboarding once in 1986, 1990, 1994, 1998 and 2002, you would barely recognize the sport you thought you knew. Since 2002, that cycle of change has significantly slowed, I think. I will not hypothesize why here on Vinceland. Buy me a beer some time.

From 1986 to 2002, Snowboarding pretty much defined my life, made me who I am, got me where I got to be. I grew up riding on the east coast, riding purely Burton, so this is a purely an east coast, Burton-centric perspective. I have no idea what went on out west, in Colorado, Utah, California and the Northwest. But lately, I’ve been thinking about riding more and more, and maybe it’s the onset of winter that’s pushing me to document my memories of riding with friends. Maybe people will check this out and understand a little more, have a deeper perspective, experience a sweeter day on the slopes.

A day on the slopes as a snowboarder in Vermont in 1986 started and ended like this: (Feel free to add your thoughts…)

• Wake up on a cold morning after driving 4 hours from New Jersey in a cramped, stinky Toyota Tercel with louvre’d windows and no heat. Snowboards, gear, clothing and food were all jammed around you, in addition to 4 of your friends and brothers. The car had 4 gears, bald tires, a racing steering wheel and Burton stickers on all the windows and hood.
• Immediately stick “Winter Waves” in the VCR and play it loud. After 20 minutes, everyone else is awake and getting real stoked. Put “One Track Mind” in the VCR and eat your Wheaties. Begin to unpack your gear in the living room and sort it out. Old, Leather Sorel Boots with ski boot liners and duct tape (I’ve never had better and that’s not a lie.) Mis-matched red ski jacket and Woolrich woolies in green, with your dad’s ski hat, hooded sweatshirt and the gloves from the bottom of the bag.
• Pull your board in from the porch, the one your brother rode last year, the one you hot-waxed last night til 1am. Check the binding screws, they need 2.5-3 turns each since last weekend’s thrashing. NEVER use lock-tite. Add a new Burton sticker to the top of the board, probably up near the nose, make sure it’s warm when you stick it on. There’s no video playing, watch “Winter Waves” again as a group and get lost in the story.
• It’s now 7am. Time to load into the Tercel and go to Stratton, the only local mountain that allows snowboarding. Did you forget your certification pass? SHIT! Gotta go through that crap all over again. What a waste of time.
• Discuss last weekend’s riding in the car and what new tricks you want to try (Backscratcher or 360?), what new trails you wanna ride, claim the first pow slash on the side of the bunny slope. Get up to Stratton and begin to see familiar sites, endless parking lots, shuttles, always check for a spot up front to scam. Find one that’s on a snowbank and jam the car up on it. Climb out and drag all your gear out of the car. No roof rack needed with 4 people in a Tercel with a racing steering wheel and 8-ball shifter.
• Here begins the staring, the questions, the uncertainty, the pride, the attitude. Field some typical skier questions, watch you brother and his friend’s do the same, all on the way to getting on the lift. “Is that fun?” Uh, yea, it’s real goddam fun. Is THAT fun, cause I never skied and never will. Next question. “Is it hard to learn?” No. No need for those clunky boots and poles to get in the way. “How do you turn and stop?” Well, you just think about it and it happens. “Is it fun in powder?” No need to answer. I am convinced that our answers to these questions, a dozen times a day, all winter, was one reason snowboarding exploded.
• Carry your board under your arm, walk normal in normal snow boots, skip the lodge stop, no need, you don’t have lunch or clothes to change into or a cooler or kids. Get in the lift line and hope they don’t ask for your certification, maybe they’re not checking this week. Don’t strap in yet, there’s no need. Strap in right before you get on the chair, it’s easier.
• There are a couple of other snowboarders in line, exchange looks, check out the equipment, a worthy nod shared. The Bogner-clad husband/ wife combo in line behind you edges their new Rossignol skis right over the back of your used Elite 140 with the gloss-top finish. You look back in disgust and a few moments later spit on their ski tips. Your brother gets mad that you’re being a jerk, who’s the friggin’ jerk?
• It’s 7:45 am and the lift is running now. They have not had any new snow in Vermont since Christmas. It’s hovering around 12 degrees and your ears are already cold under the hoodie and crappy ski cap. You pair up without thinking about it, someone always gets paired with a stray skier, which sucks. You nuzzle up to the wanker two planker and onto the old, sketchy double chair.
• Keep quiet, no need to strike up conversation, besides there are lines to spot, new jumps to scope. You hope your binding does not release because the way your sitting, the board has to hang from your leg, there’s no way you can get it way up onto that footrest. Fuck safety leashes. Holy crap, no one even asked for your certification pass! Must be they’re not checking this week. Maybe they don’t bother, since you’re only riding the bunny chair anyhow, no need to go all the way to the top, there’s plenty of rad shit to ride down here, and less people to hassle you.
• Ok, here’s the hard part, getting off the lift without falling. One foot strapped in via Fastex and webbing, one foot on the skid mat between your bindings. Everyone is already off the lift and buckling in, waiting to laugh at you when you bail. Smooth it out, relax, just stand up and ride down the hill. Chairmate the skier decides to cut in front of you and runs a pole right across the top of your board as he falls into you. You know he’ll claim it was your fault, keep your mouth shut, you’ve made snowboarding look bad again. Your friends and brothers don’t laugh, because they’re already heading down the trail. Buckle in and channel your hatred of all things ski on the shred ahead.

So, in 1986, we went on to snowboard til the lift closed in every kind of crap weather, on the bunny slope at Stratton, not because we had to, but because it was the most fun we could have as a group together. We got in 100 runs a day and talked about each one on the lift ride back up. We hit the same, stupid jumps, rode around the same bald, icy spots on the trail, fell in the same steep sections where catching an edge hurt, bad. Once in a while, someone did something insane, like complete a 360 or ride out a nose ride under the lift on a Cruzer 165. The next season, they made it free to ride the bunny chair at Stratton, and added a high speed lift to the top. We spent less money and never left that trail, until Magic Mountain opened up to Snowboarding.

Occasionally, we’d run into other snowboarders like Mark Heingartner or Andy Coghlan, who were teaching and certifying riders at Stratton, as well as riding for Burton. They came by and rode with us, showed us the new bindings and boards, they wore head to toe Burton outfits with Stratton patches sewn on. Mark even told me the secret to not catching my edge on the steep section, right by the lift: Just straight-line it. I never thought about how ridiculous it was for us to ride one trail all day, every day, every weekend. Even when we went over to ride at Magic, we picked the funnest way down the hill and rode that same trail all season. it was full of banks, jumps, pow slashes the skiers never even saw, and had plenty of spots to stop along the way and stoke each other out.

Typically, on the way home from the mountain, the obligatory stop by the Burton Showroom in Manchester preceded the search for free food. We had not eaten much since breakfast, whatever condiments were left around the cafeteria, or if you were ballsy, hang around the garbage can until some skier mom comes by with a tray of half-eaten sandwiches her brat kid barely touched. Anyhow, back to Burton. We had to stop by there a second time, we had already been by the factory on Friday night, the doors long-since closed since it was about 11pm. Sometimes, on Friday nights, there’d be one or two straggler board-builders hanging in the factory and they’d let us in the place. After a 4 hour drive from Jersey, the first place we went was the closed Burton Factory in Manchester, Vermont at 11pm, just in case someone was hanging around to let us in.

Stopping by Burton after riding was a tradition that lasted through the move to Burlington, but soon stopped when we all worked there and got sick of the place. But in 1986, the factory store was abuzz with the stories of riding that day, of course all of the stories were from Stratton, and most were from the lower mountain, which was more fun to ride. We listened, watch videos, drooled over the new Cruzers, Express 175, darth vader highback bindings, and new showroom staffers, who were attractive, college-aged ladies. They knew us by name, they even knew what we were getting for Christmas next year. About 7pm, the place was closing, so we helped them clean up the shop, put away the mags and videos. We even talked about making our own video, from all of the footage we’d been collecting. The girls said to bring it in and they’d play it in the shop, that cemented the plan right then and there. Now, we needed food and a shower.

Bunny chair opened around 7:45am the next day, Sunday, skip church. After another full day of riding, we left to go back to New Jersey straight from the mountain, wet boots, stinky socks and sweaty hair packed into the tan 1980’s Tercel with wet boards, sopped jackets and stoked minds. All we cared about was making the next week of school go by quickly and painlessly, and most of the time it did, because all you had to do was remember the look on those skier’s faces when you hauled ass by them, carving turns, stopping on a dime and spraying snow up into the air with your board, right before getting back on the lift ahead of them. None of your school mates understood you, or where you went each weekend, or why. They only heard the rumors and noticed your broken leg every couple of seasons and your bad haircut. Damn snowboarders…

We weren’t cool, we weren’t core. We weren’t opinion leaders and we had zero style. We were dorks on snow. On to 1990.

Older, Lazier

Today: Play with, feed and clean up after the dogs.

Yesterday: Play hacky sack at lunch. Do ollies to curbs after school.

Today: Sit in the quiet balcony at the Trail of the Dead/ Blood Brother’s Show at the Crystal Ballroom.

Yesterday: Jam my ass right in front of the stage and share sweat with others at the All/ Bad Religion show in Hoboken, NJ.

Today: Worry about mortgage.

Yesterday: Worry about shoe size.

Today: Play golf twice/year with a cart and beers.

Yesterday: Play golf, walk the course and carry own bag, in addition to other people’s bags. Hammer tons of Peach Snapple.

Today: Talk about going camping this Spring and Summer while my gear sits idle and dusty on shelves.

Yesterday: Go camping about 10 times a year, regardless of the weather, many times by myself.

Today: Write myself big checks from my own business account.

Yesterday: Write myself sick notes from my mom’s stationary for the school nurse.

Today: Go snowboarding once a year, maybe. Ride 3-4 hours tops. Be sore.

Yesterday: Drive 4 hours every weekend to ride ice from 7:30 am to 4:30 pm.

Today: Call my buddies from NJ once a month or so, if we’re lucky.

Yesterday: Walk 3 blocks to the school yard where I knew Scotty would be throwing lacrosse balls at the wall.

Today: Look at the ring on my finger and feel great about it.

Yesterday: Look at girls of all shapes and sizes and feel good about it.

Today: Delegate tasks through a web-based project management system for 3 employees.

Yesterday: Get yelled at by my mom while watching TV to go clean up my room get the hell outside and rake the yard.

Today: Help decorate (ok, watch Meghan decorate) our own Christmas tree.

Yesterday: Watch my mom and sisters decorate my family Christmas tree.

Today: Walk up 5 flights of stairs to get to work and sit for 10 hours typing. Go home, feed dogs and play Splinter Cell.

Yesterday: Get up at 7:30 for 8am Philosophy class. Walk from townhouse to classrooms, around buildings, up and down stairs, to the library, to the cafe, mail room. Play lacrosse or go sailing or snowboarding in the afternoon. Drink like a fish that night. Get denied by some chick.

Today: Plan to get drunk. Drive home, mostly sober at around 11:30pm. Call it a decent night.

Yesterday: Plan to get drunk. Get shitfaced and end up face down on an asphalt driveway in pools of my own vomit. Call it one of the best nights ever.

Today: Watch college football and be amazed at the athleticism those dudes have. Realize how much younger they are than me.

Yesterday: Play left guard pretty well for the JV South Orange Villagers football. Look up to the older kids on Varsity and realize I have a long way to go.

Today: Delete email.

Yesterday: Collect, read and re-read letters with pictures from friends over the years. Store them in boxes that still live in our basement.

Today: Play Splinter Cell on PS2.

Yesterday: Play “guns” with a couple friends all over our our neighborhood in South Orange, New Jersey.

Today: Download every Rush album every made for free from some Brazilian blogger onto my G4 Mac and 60GB Black Ipod. Back it all up a third time onto our dual, shared 250GB hard drives here in the office over a wireless connection.

Yesterday: Get a ride to my friend, Brad’s house to use is dual tape deck boombox to tape his Rush cassette onto a blank tape that already had music on it. Scratch out the label and squeeze in the title of the new album: “Moving Pictures”.

Today: Isight with Skype for free.

Yesterday: Badger my mom for a ride to my friend Nicole’s house and end up walking and pissed off, but know it will be worth it to see her. It wasn’t worth it…

Today: WordPress blog with Flickr widgets and custom CSS. Pretty sterile.

Yesterday: Love notes with mixed tapes and lengthy phone calls. More personal.

Today: Worry about the new sewer on our soon-to-be new property. Shit better not back up. Go on with life.

Yesterday: Worry about breaking my leg again snowboarding, skateboarding or playing lacrosse. Go on with life.

Today: Be stoked to be married to Meghan.

Yesterday: Force my dad to drive me to Poughkeepsie, NY for the wrong girl, for the wrong reasons.

Today: Shoot digital photos onto a 2GB card, download to Iphoto, organize, optimize and export to Flickr.

Yesterday: Watch my dad wrestle with the old slide projector, old-ass silver screen, and eventually watch slides of canoe trips on the Delaware river, and cross country ski tours in Vermont.

Today: Consider buying bicycles this spring to ride around our new neighborhood in north Portland. Research suspension bikes.

Yesterday: Ride my self-tuned mountain bike 2 miles up South Orange avenue to the trailhead. Ride the trails in South Mountain Reservation with no suspension for 6 hours. Ride home.

Today: Isight and Skype for free, again.

Yesterday: Yell downstairs to let Nick know I reached a new level on Castle Wolfenstein on the Apple IIE.

Today: Consider flying to Boston, driving to Rhode Island to visit the Illingworths, who have two kids now and a house with a pool.

Yesterday: Walk to Marshall school to slam lacrosse balls against a wooden wall. Scotty’s already there yippin’ yod.

Today: Drive south on I5 to the Pearl district, pay $10 cover at Jimmy Mak’s to watch live jazz and shoot pool while drinking Grey Goose and cranberry’s.

Yesterday: Skateboard down South Orange Ave to GM Starks to buy matchbox cars for .50 each and grape bazooka joe’s for .05 cents. Read the comics on the way home, blowing bubbles.

Today: Listen to Eric Bachmann on Itunes through a wirelessly connected Apple boombox with hi-fi sound while I write for clients.

Yesterday: Listen to a Jackson Browne tape that Mike gave me on a small, crappy radio/ tape player that sat on the small, wooden desk I did my homework on in 8th grade.

Today: Consider the pros and cons of parenthood.

Yesterday: Consider the pros and cons of dropping in a seriously kinked, wet drainage ditch behind the Livingston Mall.

Today: Monitor the levels of our savings, checking and 401k accounts as well as half-dozen credit cards through web interfaces.

Yesterday: Dump all of the pennies out of the jar onto my bed to sort and stack them and be stoked to find a couple quarters in there.

Today: Read a long, well-written email from my brother about managing the success of his surfboard business.

Yesterday: Work hard to help my brother scrape, caulk, sand and repaint the Northern Spy several seasons in a row.

Today: Consider saving enough money each year from our business for retirement, taxes and future business investments. Worth it.

Yesterday: Consider buying a pint of milk instead of a soda for lunch to save enough dimes for a few pretzel sticks later in the day after school. Not worth it.

Today: Post friend’s and family member’s birthdays into Apple Ical and wirelessly sync them via .mac to 3 computers and my Treo 650 smartphone, so I never forget them. Forget them anyway.

Yesterday: Get in the big, old station wagon with bunch of friends and one birthday boy to go a Giant’s football game at the Meadowlands and run around the spiral parking garages during halftime.

Today: Read cnn.com and the New York Times as well as Time Magazine to stay in touch by getting a vague (negative) feeling for how the world is doing.

Yesterday: Read “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure” books relentlessly, over and over, always making sure to choose different paths until I was sure to have read through them all and not missed one word of the book. Go buy another. Reread the old ones after a few months.

Today: Hammering strong, bold coffee brews from large cardboard cups at my desk in Portland.

Yesterday: Hammering as much cold water as my body could absorb from a green hose hooked up in the yard under the fence after a long, hot lacrosse practice with many, many suicide drills.

Today: Writing my thoughts through a keyboard on a 20 inch flat panel monitor and up to a hosted web application that beams my thoughts out to the world, for free. Wondering what the world will think, but feeling better regardless.

Yesterday: Scratch “I love (fill in the blank)” in a poorly shaped heart with an old pen knife from my dad’s room into the wooden desk in our room. Hope my brothers would not make fun of me but feeling better regardless.

Today: Knowing how much more there is to do, how much more there is to write, how many minds there are to reach.

Yesterday: Not knowing how much more there is to do, not really sure what I should be doing, definitely unsure of where I stood in life.

Second Life Lives

Ok, so there’s been a lot of chatter lately around Instrument about Second Life. In fact, we all wasted some time on Friday messing around in there. Justin set up an avatar, and I believe Jason did as well. Within moments of dropping in, Jason teleported to the nearest nude beach and Justin was accosted by men and women looking to make love to his avatar-ass. But alas! he had not purchased his virtual genitalia, so they moved on to one of the other 1.8 million users.

What’s my take? Well, considering the companies, numbers of humans and bustling economy of Second Life, I don’t think we’ve seen the top end of it’s growth. Actually, I believe it’s on the verge of tipping, if not in the middle of the tip-over to mainstream acceptance. I am sure most people currently have no idea what it is, but they will soon.

Will I join? Sure. Will I spend much time in there? No. Not enough time to do what I want to in my first life. Do I think it’s messed up? It’s a mind-bender. But I’ll tell you this: If people play it right, pretty soon, Second Life is going to make the sweetest interactive, Flash website you’ve ever seen look like Pong. It’s the future of marketing to people who use computers. Why go to a company’s website when you can just as easily visit their “world” in Second Life?

I believe the most appealing and compelling feature of Second Life is the ability to make real money in the game. In Second Life, you can earn Linden dollars, spend them and invest them to make more L$. Then you can exchange those for real U$D. The world has spawned all kinds of businesses, the first of which, of course, was prostitution. The second of which seems to be fashion design. But there are architects, graphic designers, restaraunteurs, builders, advertising execs, programmers, musicians, writers and even photographers making a living in Second Life!

The other interesting part about Second Life is to watch the new world develop and try to understand what it shows about people and their motivations. So far, it seems to be completely focused on cheap sex and outward appearance. It’s like, if we earthbound humans were to have a chance to completely start over and create a new world, THESE are the two most important things we’d be compelled to develop? These are the first two motivations of every new Second Life avatar: Buy better clothing and get laid. Fittingly, American Apparel was one of the first businesses to set up shop on their own island in Second Life.

Second Life is the New Frontier. Could it be the new American Dream?

Required website viewing to continue:

1. Second Life.
2. Second Life on Wikipedia.
3. Millions of Us.
4. Bathroom Etiquette in Second Life on YouTube.
5. Jay-Z on Jimmy Kimmel Live in Second Life on Flickr.
6. Nothing to do with 2nd Life, but funny as hell.

Second Life Taglines_Rd1_VRL_11.30.06

• Go back for seconds.
• Your chance for a better life.
• More than a game…
• Be all you can’t be.
• Accelerate your blindness.
• Just fake it.
• The Un-Real Thing.
• The King of Games.
• You Can Get Laid.
• Live Different.
• Try Again.
• Got Cyber?
• Don’t leave home, ever.
• Where’s the beef?
• Tastes fake. Less fulfilling.
• Just do it…again
• Come get a new one.
• Screw your world, live in ours.
• Welcome to the Anti-Social.
• Your Life, Digitally Remastered.
• Please, Come Waste Your Time.
• Everything Means Nothing.
• Yea, you can “do it” in here.
• What Happens Online, Stays Online.
• Monopoly? It’s Fuckolopy!
• W.O.W. is for Nerds.
• Just Be Someone Else.
• Be first at something, quick!
• Reality TV is for wussies.
• Just Say No…to Life.
• Leave the Viagra Behind.
• Why Go Home?
• Lose Weight Permanently!
• The New American Dream.
• A better life for you and me.
• Just Sit There.
• Worship Yourself.