What is normally a barren expanse of rocky washes has turned into an explosion of color. If life can survive in these places, what sort of color is waiting to bloom in the barren expanse of our own humanity?
Last night. Death Valley. Horizon to horizon, an enormous wall of glistening diamonds. Escape the city, escape the noise. Home is where you park it, even if it's only for a few hours. Keep building memories that last forever.
Dear Diary,
I was looking forward to having my first meal at 3pm after an already long day when my staff called me and said our point-of-sale system on 5 of our stores wasn't working. After going through the regular troubleshooting items, I called the guys at the office where the server was located and my manager said "here, do you hear it?" to the tune of a high pitched grinding squeal that sounded like the computer was either going to explode or take-off into orbit. SCSI mechanical errors on the console. Never a stranger to catastrophe, it was a familiar feeling in the pit of my stomach. The hard drive decided to take a dump on this beautiful Friday after the El Nino clouds finally gave way to some California sunshine gold. Yay!!!
Los Angeles rush-hour traffic is the ultimate test of bladder control and patience. I lost $695 dollars and 5 hours of my life crawling through Friday rush-hour pavement to get my hands on a new hard drive with our data restored on it. Same day emergency service - I love the support team of my provider, but the product itself? Not so much.
As I was preparing to finally leave the office, Nickel decided he'd had enough and unceremoniously unleashed a torrent of piss deep into the chair of my manager. In the kerfuffle, he pissed on me too. I was pissed.
LOL. FML.
Rock and rolling our way into the new year, MFers!
Christmas Day Full Moon in Yosemite. Hope your holidays are as magical as the moonlight!
While gifts come in many forms, my favorite are the ones without a receipt.Happy holidays, that we may continually be reminded of the love and friendship that endures all seasons and forever surrounds our lives.
Feliz Dia de los Muertos con mi amigos, Los Zombie Gnomes. Maybe I'll keep them year round because everyday is a day for the living, the dead, and the living dead amongst us.
Taking our boys to their first camping trip of the season. The start of many adventures to come!
Reinstalling engine and transmission took me the better of ten months as the replacement of a $2 pilot bearing escalated into a full blown detail and r&r. Took her out for a shakedown trip - 300 miles up the coast to SF. Can you spot the @heynickel? Camping season has finally begun!
Love takes us to mysterious places. Four years ago, setting forth with the most beautiful souls I could ever dream of. Never stop exploring, never stop living a life of awesome.
The best part about getting older is having the leverage to just not give a damn. Yet at the same time we are aware that everyone is running through their own gauntlets, that we must be kind not because bad people go to hell, but because that's what decent human beings should do. And so it turns out that instead of not caring, I begin to hold friends up to higher standards, and expect them to take life by the horns and stare it down. And it's infuriating when the options remain unexplored, when lots of words are said but the action is far and seldom in between. And then the indifference turns sour. That we may in some dimension be responsible for the perceived shortcomings of our friends, that their shortcomings are somehow a reflection of... us. May it be passively through association or in the extreme case that we've allowed such behavior to flourish on our own grounds, it's hard to subscribe to a passive life that centers on the consumption of all things shallow. Then again, what is shallow for me, may mean the world to others.
Consume less, make more. Talk less, live more. We are the company we keep. Be better everyday. More than yesterday. Or GTFO.
Getting lost in the details of routine presents the danger that we treat time as infinite. To be honest, I forget about this space, because there's just too much going on in "the real world". Maybe this is the drawl they warned us about, the wide eyed dreams of our youth slowly fossilizing into the adult responsibilities of financial solvency and socially acceptable competence. It'll be tricky, they said. It will be hard to do the right thing, they said.
It's easy to pick apart decisions in hindsight, but the challenge is to placate ourselves that we're doing good along a backdrop of social depravity. Do we live today, or for tomorrow? For what purpose? For what purpose, within, and apart from, our own?
Three years ago today, accidentally caught a guy meditating on a ledge in the dark of the night. What secrets do the hoodoos keep?
