Julie & Julia

Just finished reading "Julie & Julia," which is a fantastic memoir and I have a crush on the author, Julie Powell, which she would likely find creepy but also kind of cool.

I imagine she's used to it now, seeing as the book has been out for five years and it's being made into a movie with Meryl Streep and Amy Adams, but her book is a big part of the reason why I've begun blogging regularly again. It's good to have a project.

The book, for those of you who don't know, is a about a 29-year-old actress at a dead-end secretarial job in New York City who averts mental collapse by resolving to cook all 524 recipes in Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" in one year. Powell's book crackles and pops with wit - I found myself laughing out loud often while reading - and when she talks about how it felt to be approaching 30 and working at a job with no future and not feeling like she would ever get her shit together, well, dear Reader, I'm no stranger to that inner-monologue. The only difference is that her neurotic blog (upon which the book is based) garnered legions of followers and got her interviews on CBS and in the New York Times, not to mention a book and movie deal.

Mine got one hit in June. Alas.

That said, I found the experience of reading quite comforting. I used to think that everyone else had their shit together and I was the broken one for not having a clue. Now I realize that the vast majority of people, especially people of the 26-35 persuasion, are groping for meaning and purpose and the "next step." A well-written memoir/blog is the act of making sense out of what seems like a jumble of experiences with no narrative, no common thread. The idea that your everyday experiences can amount to a meaningful, funny story that can inspire others is a really happy thought. I came away from this book feeling a little better about my own quest. Good stuff.

Oh Shenandoah

(I long to hear you)

There is nothing quite like camping to make you appreciate the miracle of hot running water. This, more than anything else, is what separates our era from the ones that came before. The Etruscans may have had their bread, the Spartans their soldiers, the Greeks their philosophies, but goddammit I can take a hot shower whenever I want.

Jess and I had never been to Shenandoah National Park before. It's a shade under two hours from Northern Virginia, and talk about an escape! You endure Interstate 66 south for 20 miles, hop on 29 south for a few minutes, and then disappear west onto 211, past winery after winery, until finally you begin your 2,400ft ascent into "Skyland," aptly named because the single road through the park, Skyline Drive, is literally something out of Gulliver's Travels. Around every bend is a breathtaking view, with blue mountains and yellow valleys and gray mountains even further in the distance.

Our campground (curiously named "Matthew's Arm" for unknown, hopefully lurid reasons) was about 10 miles from the entrance at Thornton's Gate. The park itself is enormous, stretching over 100 miles from north to south, and the two-lane Skyline Drive has a speed limit of 35mph that you exceed at your careening-off-the-mountain peril. The two conspire to make the place seem very, very big. Which is exactly, as it turns out, the kind of place for a soul beleaguered by modernity to vanish for the night.

The campground was clean and well-organized, although the sites were very close together. I could, for instance, follow the plot of an otherwise convoluted ghost story being told across the street and four sites up. We had a site next to the restroom, which to its credit had cold running water and toilets not beset upon by spiders, but which made for a rather noisy night of flushes and blow-dried hands. Of course it figures that the one time I'm camping with a bathroom conveniently nearby, I don't awaken having to go at all.

Tooch and Jeep brought the dogs along, and shortly after we arrived Jess and Tooch set the picnic table with foodstuffs while Jeep and I endeavored to start a fire. I actually remembered to bring a lighter this time, and Tooch had ingeniously decided to pick up some fire sticks at the general store in the park along with the cold beer and makeshift-Gerber multi-tool that I later used to hack open a can of apple pie filling.

Jeep and I wielded all our fire-making know-how, which is to say that we tried every assemblage of wood - the A-frame, the Log Cabin, the Awkward Catamaran - that we could think of before finally deciding to dump all the fire sticks and wood in a pile and light it at the same time, using the air-pump from the air-mattress to feed that sucker oxygen until the wood could boil off enough moisture to stay lit.

The "Awkward Catamaran"

It was decidedly the least inspiring camp fire I've ever been party to, but it was akin to making a fire out of wet bathing suits, and by the only meaningful measure - we got it hot enough to make s'mores and hot dogs and mountain pies - it all went well enough.

That night I slept like a baby on our brand new shiny air mattress.

In the morning we took down the tents, packed the cars, had a breakfast of granola bars, bananas, and water (sound familiar?), and found a trail that looked promising to hike. The "Meadow Springs Trail," at mile-marker 33.1, had a couple of things going for it. For starters, it wasn't the 6.1-mile trail that was listed as "strenuous" and eventually led to a waterfall that "may or may not have any water, depending on if it has been a dry summer." Second, it passed the site of an abandoned cabin, where only the stone chimney remained after a mysterious fire burned it down in 1946. Third, it promised a spectacular view at the top. The three combined were enough to lure us into trying it, and with the exception of the trail involving neither meadows nor springs, it was awesome.

The Mysterious Chimney

The top of the trail actually met up with the Appalachian Trail, which stretches from Maine to Georgia, so we walked along that for a little over half a mile until we got to Mary's Rock, which is this unbelievable stone structure on the very top of one of the highest hills in Shenandoah. We climbed to the top of the rocks and could see for miles and miles in every direction. In any military endeavor where the high-ground mattered, you would want to be the first to capture Mary's Rock. I was convinced you could see DC if you had the right telescope. Breathtaking.

The View from Mary's Rock

We hiked back down the mountain and rode east on 211 until we got to Warrenton, VA, where we stopped for a char-burger at Foster's Grille, which was actually really tasty and had great french fries. After that it was home for a shower (with stunning, amazing, miraculous hot running water) and a nap and a lazy dinner of wild-caught Alaskan salmon with teriyaki sauce and Asian rice, followed by more lounging and reading, and now, mercifully, sleep in a soft bed...

Fog and the Valley

June 28 marked my one-year wedding anniversary. It's amazing to me to think that an entire year has passed since that stormy, memorable day in 2008.

We have yet to print out the wedding pictures, which was kind of endearing before we hit one year and now just sounds kind of sad. We have six weddings to attend in 2009 (three down, three to go) and they're consuming much of our discretionary income, including our picture fund. And you thought planning your own wedding was expensive! Just wait until your friends, who have dispersed to all corners of the country, decide to tie the knot and you're scrounging for plane tickets to Rochester, MN.

Our actual anniversary passed without much fanfare. The weekend was devoted largely to celebrating others. We attended the wedding of Jessie's cousin and the graduation party of her other cousin. I drank so much at the former that I was shot for the latter, and on the anniversary day, once we returned from all the parties for other people, we made a small dinner, popped a movie in ("Zack and Miri Make a Porno"), made love, and fell asleep. Simple and sweet.

Jess, however, had in her heart that we do something special for our first anniversary together, something memorable and worthy of pictures. An idea came after speaking with a co-worker who, for his 30th birthday, had gotten a hot-air balloon ride from his wife down in Charlottesville, VA. Entranced with the idea, I got the name of the company from him - Blue Ridge Balloons - and made arrangements. Our flight was to leave the Boar's Head Inn in Charlottesville at 6 AM on Friday, July 3. All we had to do was be conscious and clothed at 6 AM and meet in the parking lot.

I don't like waking up early, and will take a sunset over a sunrise any day. I especially don't like spending a lot of money on something that *requires* me to wake up early, and ballooning isn't cheap. In fact it's the opposite of cheap. It would have been cheaper to fly 500 miles with US Air than it was to fly 5 miles in a balloon. The journey, when ballooning, is the destination.

I had it in mind to stay at a bed & breakfast the night before, but I couldn't find a room for less than $150, and this month was looking tight enough already thanks to the aforementioned weddings, so we decided to rent a spot at a local KOA and camp out Thursday night. This was a masterful plan with great romantic possibilities, and it would have been effortlessly adorable had the following three things not happened:

1) We arrived at the campsite after sunset.
2) We forgot to bring matches and firewood.
3) We brought nothing soft upon which to sleep.

This all seems comically inevitable in retrospect, us being us. I knew last month, when I bought my first linen shirt for $63 at Macy's, that I had officially become a yuppie in the worst way, although I didn't think that directly translated into bringing all the goodies necessary for hotdogs and s'mores and forgetting to bring anything except the two contacts on the car battery with which to start a fire (let alone something to burn WITH said fire). So we assembled the tent (a wedding present we unwrapped at the campsite) by the parking lights of the Toyota, and then made the 9-mile trek back to town in search of fire.

$18, a BIC lighter, and four Duraflame logs later, we were roasting hot dogs and making s'mores that would curl your toes. Our stomachs full, we sat in silence and watched the fire consume two of the Duraflame logs which, despite their upbeat packaging do not, in fact, light just by burning the wrapper they come in.

Jess laid down a sleeping bag in the tent. I doused the fire. We attempted sleep on the solid ground. A fitful five hours later my cell phone alarm went off and we drooled awake, packed up the tent by the early morning light, and consumed granola bars and a bottle of water on the way to the Boar's Head Inn. It looked like an overgrown English cottage, and I availed myself of the free coffee, served in a room covered in old color prints of Irish Setters and men in polo jackets. Outside, we met our balloon crew, Jim and Liana, who shuttled us in their white pick-up truck to the launch site behind a local elementary school. All of the local balloon companies talk with one another, often launching from the same spot because the more balloons there are in the air, the easier it is to navigate. That being the case, four pick-up trucks with a large wicker basket and brown duffel bag in the bed switched into four-wheel-drive and climbed up a dewy grass hill into the outfield of a small baseball field, their chosen launch site this morning because the wind would carry them southwest of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

The sun barely crested over the valley to the east as Jim lowered the basket off the truck and tipped it on its side, attached the burners, and unfurled the enormous balloon from the duffel bag. It snaked out of the bag like a magician's trick, at least 30 feet long if not longer. Behind us, one of the balloon crews was already "cold-packing" their balloon, inflating it with cold air supplied by a gas-powered fan. The narrow tube on the ground that was their balloon slowly filled with air, taking the familiar light-bulb shape, though on its side it appeared doughy, like a failed soufflé.

Jim put us to work, holding open the mouth of the balloon as he started his own fan and blew cold morning air into the balloon at 60mph. Jess and I, deafened and delighted by the fan, held on for dear life as the fabric slowly took shape. I peered inside the growing rainbow-patterned balloon, and it was like looking into the great hall of some Fairy King, the sun illuminating all the patches of color like a molten piece of stained-glass.

Once the balloon was “cold-packed,” Jim turned the knobs on two large propane tanks in the basket and fired up the burners. “Burners” is really an understatement here – these things shot seven feet of flame up into the hungry mouth of the balloon.


He fired them in short bursts, alternating burners, until at last the hot air pulled the balloon skyward. We quickly jumped into the basket, which had just enough room to fit the three of us. An assistant unlatched a safety tether from the truck, Jim fired both burners, the heat prickling on my scalp (which couldn’t have been more than 8 inches from the burners – yeouch) and the balloon creaked and groaned and slid along the grass for a few feet before lifting magically up over the trees.

We spent the next hour floating serenely 1,000ft over the valley. The sun hadn’t yet burnt off the morning fog, and it hung in pockets over the valley. There were four other balloons in the air with us, all at varying altitudes and distances, and it was amazing to watch how fast they could ascend and descend.


For the first 20 minutes or so of the ride I had an absolutely uncontrollable desire to hurl myself out of the balloon. I have no idea why, but I literally had to hold myself in. I had no desire to die. On the contrary! It’s my same crazy desire to, say, jump off of a cruise ship at night or jump in front of the subway – it’s like a Siren Song, a call to new experience, to “what would happen if…?” – it was nuts, but the ground was a hot orange in the morning sun, and the air was smooth, and the balloon hovered, silent and still, and I Just. Had. To. Jump. Out.

Fortunately the feeling passed, and we landed safely an hour later. Quick aside: You can’t actually steer a hot-air balloon. There’s no rudder, no fans, so when I say “we landed safely” I’m saying, “Seriously, I have no idea how this guy landed this thing without killing us all.” You change direction by changing altitude, because the wind is moving in different directions at different heights. The Weather Channel, when it says “Winds out of the southwest at 5mph,” is just referring to the air at the surface. If you go 500ft up, the air might be moving northwest at 20mph, and at 550ft it might be out of the west at 0mph; this masterful game, with an element of memory and luck, is the real art to ballooning, the reason you have to get a pilot’s license. Because, I mean, you can’t just park that thing anywhere. There are mountains and rivers and highways. Oh, you could put that thing on the ground just about anywhere, but you need to be able to get the chase vehicle to the location unless you want to carry hundreds of pounds of balloon gear yourself. It was amazing. The landing itself was smooth as a baby’s ass, right into a field with a single tree in the center, and the white pick-up pulled right up beside us. We folded the balloon, Jim disassembled the basket; we met up with the other trucks a few hundred feet away and had the celebratory sparkling apple juice toast.

The rest of the day was spent taking a tour of Jefferson’s Monticello, his “essay in architecture,” which was guided by a taut southern woman who kept calling it “Monti-cellah” and chiding everyone for leaning against “these original walls.” We got lunch at nearby Michie Tavern, which is a charming, if touristy, complex purporting to represent the Old South with a tavern and a dress shop and a general store. Lunch was a “Colonial Southern Buffet” of Colonial barbeque, Colonial fried chicken, and Colonial beans. I’m pretty sure they just put “Colonial” in front of everything for effect; I can’t imagine Jefferson eating himself fat on “Colonial New York-style Cheesecake.”

After that we made the 3-hour trek back to DC, barely able to stay awake after the lack of sleep and early rising, and got back in time for a nap on the Love Sac. Then it was off to Bangkok 54, a great Thai restaurant in Arlington, for dinner with Tooch, Jeep, Val, Mike, and Anne. We played mini-golf that night at nearby Cameron Run park (I won by a stroke), and collapsed, exhausted, into bed. Not bad for a first anniversary.

Although next time, we’re taking an air mattress. If I’m going to look like a yuppie, I might as well sleep like one, too.

Validation

Dear Google,

You are not doing a very good job tonight. It's July 4th, and I am in need of some validation from you that my 26 years has left an impression on this planet. It was the kind of night where I was measuring my self-worth based on your search results, and guess what: I'm not feeling fluffy.

The majority of your results were pages I've created myself. Total tweets in reference to me: One. No new comments on my YouTube videos. The few instances in your results where someone else mentions me don't highlight, praise, or adulate as much as they merely mention and enumerate. Yes, I was in attendance at that event. Yes, I performed that piece. But what did you think of me? Did I move you? Did I change you in any way? Or was I like the light in the theater, and just, you know, there?

You may have mapped the globe and revolutionized the internet, Google, but you can't make me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

I've been really obsessed with my legacy lately, actually. Some people, no doubt highly intelligent and precariously correct people, would think it silly for a 26-year-old to be concerned with such a lofty concept as his own legacy. It's like describing the sunset over your own gravestone - it's just not something that you think about this side of the curtain. But I have been thinking about it, have been wondering what I'm going to leave this planet when I do eventually leave, and I've realized that if I'm going to leave something tangible, something that lasts, I'm going to have to do a number of things.

Number One is by far the hardest, and also the most necessary: I have to stop being lazy. I have to make creativity a priority, be it music or film or the written word. Every minute I waste in front of a TV or laptop screen is a minute spent not creating, not refining, not developing, not listening to the muses. I'm all about vegging out occasionally, but there has been a devastating lack of productivity recently that is frittering away borrowed time. I have major projects to finish: HFTH, new CD, new pieces, fantasy novel, grad school application... all of them are languishing, lying in a heap, unblinking, waiting for me to resuscitate them. Which leads me to-

Number Two: I have to finish the things that I start. This means that when I write a piece of music or have an idea for a short story, I actually sit and write them down, print them out, put them in a folder. What happens after that is up for debate, but I have to make them exist in the real world outside of my own brain, have to get them onto something durable and lasting and outside of me. And if I commit to a project, I have to see it through to whatever end may come, regardless of whether it comes out any good. Which leads me to-

Number Three: I have to release myself from the tyranny of good. By "tyranny of good" I mean this: Everything I create has to be good right away, and if it's not good, then I failed. This mindset, which rightfully sounded alien and terrifying when I was younger, has overtaken me in adulthood because I'm now creating not just for the joy of creating, but I'm creating with an end-product in mind. "What is this going to do for me?" A new piece has to be good enough to debut and perform for a live audience. A new story has to be good enough to get published. A new film has to be good enough to get seen. But the problem is you can't create from tomorrow, you have to create from now, and if you're fixated on the outcome you can't enjoy the process of creation, the assembling of disparate strands, the refining of those strands until the form is pleasing. Letting go of "good" is not an easy task, especially for an attention-hound like me.

On a happy note, and in direct contradiction to the aforementioned lack of productivity, I'm nearly done notating a new piece that was inspired by the music of Eubie Blake. It's called "The Newbie Eubie," and I'm thinking I'll debut it at the Indiana Ragtime Festival in August. Music has been one fertile area for me recently, and it's been great. It's hard not to want to make it "do more" for me - more opportunity, more chances - but it's one of the few areas of my life where I'm still able to shut some of that out and just play for me.