I just get the feeling that not having the wind blowing in through the windows, having more space, having running water, all that, just isn't the right thing right now. I couldn't be happier in the truck.
So anyway. Casey said, ok. Well, the area around his house was unzoned, meaning that I could park there for as long as I liked without a problem. It ended up being perfect. I was in a great little neighborhood, nestled in among Audis, BMWs, and Saubs. I nestled in, ate a little something, read for a few hours, and slept like hell.
When I woke, on the morning of Casey and Mahri's wedding, there was a man outside my truck, facing the street, in meditation. I was concerned about crawling out of the truck at 6 in the morning in front of him, but he meditated in his lawn for an hour, and finally, I had no choice but to exit. I mentioned this to Mahri, and she said something smart and funny, like she always does, 'Oh, then you two were able to pass between you some (peace)'. Such a lovely idea.
___
After the wedding, I had the pleasure of spending a day with an old friend, Mike Bagley. He invited me to sleep in his house, but I said the street would be fine. He was incredulous, but relented.
Mike Bagley
The next day was, if you will pardon the vernacular, pretty much totally and completely awesome. For one, I got a spicy burrito from Taco Del Mar, my favorite west coast only burrito chain. I had this completely punched punch card from when I lived out here before, that was good for a free burrito, just sitting in my pocket for a year. When I whipped that thing out, and showed it to the burrito crafter, it felt like the old days, when I used to go to across the river to St. Olaf to win their climbing competitions. Perhaps it is my Viking Blood that I like to step into hostile territory, and compete, and win. The experience at the Ocean Taco was much like that, and every bite of the spicy burrito tasted like victory.
Mike and I went to this completely bizzare concrete climbing area in the middle of a big park. We played around on the hardest stuff we could find, and found some pretty hard stuff.
After that, back to Mike's place, where we watched this sweet Starcraft 2 tournament thing, which, evidently, is "huge in Korea". I was fascinated by the sheer ridiculousness of the concept, how amazingly good these people are at the game, how much time they must spend training, by how beautiful the game was, by how many hundreds of people were actually in attendance in the audience, and by the fact that there were announcers, who spoke much the same as any other sports announcer. Fourteen hours a day of practice. Upwards of 150,000 dollars a year for the big players. People were holding placards in the audience with the avatar names of the people in the semi-finals, all of whom were Korean..
It was an unsettling experience. It's a huge world out there, and I'm fine with people doing crazy customs all over, in terms of food, sex, partnership, violence, whatever. It's just part of being human in a big world. There's some crazy stuff out there. However, this was beyond the pale. I would never, in thousand years, have considered that any institution such as this existed.
After that, we watched the first episode of the Game of Thrones. I hate that story, writer, books, show, and everything in it with a hateful raging passion that I have almost never felt towards anything else. Except maybe Brett Easton Ellis. He and George RR Martin are assholes, and I worry about the state of the world when people can watch that shit, read that shit, and are not completely disgusted with humanity, themselves, and their stupid filthy existences. I suddenly had to leave Mike's house, and fumed over how much I hate G R R Martin all the way to Leavenworth, where I slept for the night.
Mike Bagley
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