“All the wrong people remember Vietnam. I think all the people who remember it should forget it, and all the people who forgot it should remember it.” - Michael Herr, author of the seminal “Dispatches” You really get to know someone when you help tile his kitchen backsplash. Not really, but if you pay attention, … Read more
Let me tell you about something so obviously unfair as to be completely sinister. Here it is. One must continue to exist as a normal individual a day between quitting one’s job and going on an international vacation. That space between must be filled. One must carry on. One must fill the dead space. What … Read more
In the latter part of the last decade I spent a year teaching at a small English academy in Incheon, South Korea, an industrial power and seaport about a 30 minute subway ride from Seoul. In one of my many classes sat a little fellow named Rainbow. This is but a hint of Rainbow’s story, … Read more
Will Levandowski is a freak. That about sums it up, I think? Maybe not sums him up, but wraps up in a tidy little bouquet the rock climbing feat he just pulled off on Flagstaff Mountain in Boulder a little over a month ago. I’ve written about the Guinness World Record accomplishment already on this … Read more
Usually, when I run, I don’t really think about much of anything. Random thoughts blow up like balloons, suddenly burst, while others begin expanding, most drifting away into the ether of my vacant mind. Even when I try to think I don’t have much luck. I can’t make myself concentrate because I’m so often fleeting … Read more
ClimbTalk is interviewing Chris Sierzant, a Prana ambassador, this Friday night and Prana asked me to write up a little blurb for their blog, which will go up on Friday morning at www.prana.com/blog. But to my loyal reader (s?), here’s a sneak preview… Da Blog… I remember, my first trip to Bishop, my second year … Read more
There was a time that I lived outside the United States. For nearly three years I had no real home in America, no stable in which to munch the reliable hay. During my time away I filled maybe ten thousand pages of journals…maybe twenty G’s…just obsessively remembering to make myself remember, taking the snapshots my … Read more
Maybe during no other summer in the history of American climbing has a single bouldering area, alpine, desert, wooded or other, seen a quiver of exceptionally hard problems filled like the summer of 2010, five figures of elevation high on the flank of Mt. Evans, in Colorado’s Front Range. Led by Americans either entering their … Read more
Dear Whomever Could Possibly Still Be Interested, Well, for whatever it’s worth, the Mexico article has passed first draft at just under 13,000 words, an almost unpublishable monstrosity that despite the length I really could not be a great deal more happy with, more or less. Well, I could be happier. You can always be … Read more
Oh, boy. I’ve been gone a long time from this blog, and it must be submitted that I loathe when “bloggers” write that statement. Like people are actually waiting to read something. Give me a f**king break. Alas, here I am, dry heaving on the page with nothing important to say. In a snippet, I’ve … Read more