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And so, here we are, another week of summer come and gone. Another good week of summer, at that!

Monday I was brutally reminded of why I want to leave Wyoming. Not to complain– most days I love working outside– but the prevailing 40-50mph windspeeds on Monday just made things pretty miserable. And then there were the 70mph gusts. I swear I’ve had less trouble standing while drunk…

I still haven’t found my wallet, yet. Which is to say that I still haven’t accepted the reality that my wallet got ripped off and it’s gone forever. C’mon. I hosted the party for crying out loud. Who steals the host’s wallet? Honestly. I suppose I’ll buy a new one, one of these days. In the mean time, my only form of identification is a poorly crafted fake id (my good fakes were in my wallet). Good lord.

I got a haircut Wednesday night. Accordingly, my ears and the now-exposed skin around my ears were cooked to a tender red over the last few days. At least my hair is short again!

Speaking of which, it’s a sure sign that I’m getting older– I went, entirely of my own volition, and purchased sunscreen and put it on. That, my friends, is a sure sign of maturity!

I went to the drive-in theatre in Fort Collins with Sean and Dan Peterson to see Mr. & Mrs. Smith. The movie was thoroughly entertaining, and the drive-in experience was a lot of fun as well. God, Fort Collins is WONDERFUL.

Tonight I’m headed up to Veadeawoo for some backpacking, and just … time with myself, the trees, and the rocks– the closest thing to a “spiritual” experience that a regretful atheist can achieve, from my experience.

And that’s about it. Sean and I helped out with the neighborhood highway clean-up this morning, which was entirely too early since we didn’t get back till 1:30 or so this morning. But, well, what better thing to do with a beautiful Saturday morning?

Enjoy your respective weekends. Until next time.

Thanks to everyone who came out last night! It was a smashing success.

The best sober estimates put the attendance at somewhere around 80 people.

Lost
-My wallet
-A class ring

Found
-A round, black hat

Who: You, your friends, but not your parents!

What: The Anything-But-Clothes-Goes dance party/party party!

Here’s the deal: don’t make plans for Saturday night, unless, of course, those plans are to be at Goetter’s house wearing anything but clothes. It just might be Cheyenne’s most outrageous party of the summer, complete with a keg, plenty of hard-A, room to dance, and all the kickin’ dance tunes your drunk-ass can handle!

The theme is simple: wear anything but “clothes.” So grab your coconut bra, wear-able rainbarrle, duct-tape thong, Saran-wrap, or whatever else you can think of to cover yourself with, and … get ready to dance, sucka! Or just hang out and have a good time. Not sure what to wear? Swimsuits and underwear are allowable exceptions, but rumor has it that there’s going to be a costume contest and a prize for the winner. So get creative. Maybe get a little crazy. And get ready to, to the sound of the Black Eyed Peas, get retarded!

When: Saturday, June 11th. Starting at 10:00PM and going until the last person passes out on the dance floor.

Where: Matt Goetter’s house

6604 Chickadee Dr.

Cheyenne, WY 82009

Directions

1. Drive East on Dell Range. Go ~1 mile past College Dr.

2. Turn left on Whitney Road. Go up the hill.

3. Take your second right, which should be Chickadee. Look for the big brick house on the left-hand side of the road.

Click here for directions.

And that’s about it. To help with the costs, keg cups will be sold for ~$5.

If you have questions or need directions or anything like that, call my cell phone: 630-5958.

Cheyenne sucks. But for one night, it’s going to be a whole lot better. Bring your friends!

Go see Crash. That’s all I can say right now. I’m floored.

Goodness, what an amazing movie.

aaaaaaaaaaaah! I’m SO sore! I somehow, stupidly, forgot to stretch out last night after climbing, and now my fingers and arms are so stiff I’m being forced to type this with my toes!

…

Well, maybe the toes thing is a bit of an exaggeration, but honest to goodness, my firth thought when I woke up this morning was “aaaaaaaaaaaah! I didn’t stretch!”

Good heavens, I sure do complain a lot, don’t I? Oh well…

…and i am only biding time

only reciting memorized lines

Another weekend come and gone. Sunday, June 5th. 2005. Good god. When I open my Palm Desktop, I can see every day between now and the day I leave for Bangkok in my quick-calendar view. It’s going SO quickly.

On balance, it was a quiet weekend. I read. I listened to music. I played my guitar. I got a bunch of new music from Erik (I’m up to 166gb…). I slept. I spent some time on my slackline. I barbequed (sp?!). Twice.

and i’m not fit to touch,

not fit to touch

But really, having a nice quiet weekend was good. Lord knows nextweekend is going to be more than crazy enough to make up for this weekend (backpacking into Veadeawoo Friday night, Taste of Fort Collins/Gin Blossoms Saturday afternoon & evening, Anything-But-Clothes-Goes party at Goetter’s Saturday night…).

And so life in Cheyenne goes.

Ha ha– conflicted? Yeah. Confused? Always. Uncertain but hopeful. Daring but cautious. On the surface, life is so plain and simple right now. Under the surface? I’m pulling a hundred different directions with nowhere to go but no reason to stay. It’s full and rich and complicated and stupid… and somehow it feels like it’s the sort of drama that emerges in a relationship once in the initual fury of love has faded… things slow down. Passions fade. And to replace it, bullshit drama. There’s really nothing to it, but since everything else is coming up lacking, it suffices for substance. Does it work? Yeah, I guess. Is there something better? God, I hope so. But in the mean time? I just keep playing the games with myself. Keep myself distracted. Every day one day closer to July 31– terror sadness loss excitement adventure alone free foreign.

i have no love but only goals

it is a soul that could easily kill

yellow green black white mountains sillhouette sunset plains green prarie. rain mud sticks stones bricks and bricks and layers of bricks and shovel dirt shovel dirt shovel dirt. i’m too priviledged, white upper-class for this. and what about her? fuck, i don’t know. july 31. but what does that mean? climbing shoes beer music duldrums questions numb tired apprehensive. shovel dirt shovel dirt climb a wall. drive music drive music phonecall. pillow.

it doesn’t make any sense to me, either. no, of course it does. it’s me. it’s here and now. it’s what and how and who and everything but why. it’s not angst, it’s not happiness, it’s not loss, it’s just the words being pulled from the air in front of me.

and i’m not fit to touch

the hem of your garmet…

Apparently I’m going to Bangkok. I haven’t received any of the confirmation materials from Thammasat yet, but no matter– I (finally) have a plane ticket, and I’m sure I can figure things out when I get there. Heh, realistically the confirmation materials should be arriving any day now, but even if Thammasat decided that they hate Americans and that I couldn’t come, I think I’d just go hang out in south-east Asia for a year.

I can’t believe it’s 10:30 on Monday night already. The weekends go SO quickly!

I need to get my clothes out of the dryer and go to bed.

It’s a good thing I don’t have faster internet– I downloaded 5gb of music last night, and at that rate, it wouldn’t be long before I’d need to start taking out student loans to buy more hard-drive space.

Speaking of music, I had an eargasm (to borrow an apt word from Outkast) listening to the high-fidelity, remastered recording of Dark Side of the Moon last night. This would be the part where I gush about Pink Floyd for five paragraphs, except for the fact that this is actually the part where I get off my computer and go to bed.

Right-o.

Love: usually bullshit, and always a bad idea.

Deep, I know. =) I can’t explain why, but as I was trying to drift asleep last night, my last conscious thought was exactly that. A clever little maxim, I think.

Because it’s true! By love I mean in the “romantic,” gag-me-with-a-spoon Padmae: “Oh, Anakin I love you so much!” sense of the word, of course.

My arms are peeling like crazy. Rather gross, I would say.

Tonight I’m cleaning out my closet. But in a literal, not-Eminem-metaphorical sense. Right. For the record, I’m listening to Pearl Jam and U2. Not Eminem. No… really. I am!

So here’s another random thought: there’s an interesting parallel in literary devices between Episode III and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. In Episode III, Anakin learns his fate, and then in order to try to avoid his fate, he becomes evil and fulfills his fate. The only reason that Padmae (sp?!– like I care) dies during childbirth is because she’s lost her will to live because Anakin turned to the Dark Side to try to prevent her death, right? In case you’re not familiar with Oedipus Rex, a startlingly similar turn of events takes place. To make a long play short (you can thank me later), Oedipus learns his fate to kill his father and marry his mother, and only by trying to avoid it does he fulfill it.

Right. So if my blog were an English prof, I would turn this into a whole big long and boring paper instead of a two-line thesis. But it’s not. But you’re welcome to write the paper for me in the comments, if you really really want to. I won’t try to stop you….

So what does this mean? Exactly this: instead of reading FREAKING OEDIPUS REX for the hundred billionth time, classes should now simply watch Episode III because the same discussion about fate vs free will and blah blah blah can be derived from an entertaining and contemporary source. Right. Time for me to go talk to Mrs. Jessen and the honors director at MSU.

That’s it for the deep stuff tonight. Your head is probably hurting by now, so I’ll stop writing so you can go take some aspirin. =P

Nope. Just kidding. I’m going to make an announcement, that for the LAST FREAKING TIME, “good” is an adjective (or a noun, but we’re even going to go there). Not an adverb. Well is an adverb. Good is not. If you did good, you gave money to the poor. But if you earned an A++++++ on your exam, you did well. Not good. So, instead of reading “Crunchy chicken goes good on salads,” the sign in front of Taco Johns should read “Crunchy chicken goes well on salads.” The unfortunate (but logical) deduction from this grammatically incorrect sign being in place for the past three weeks is this:

it started in wyoming

Goin’ on at Taco John’s!

No. That would be a good deduction, but a wrong deduction. The correct deduction is that no one that works at Taco Johns can form a FREAKING correct English sentence, for John’s sake!

(Don’t worry, though– I called one of my buddies that works there and told him that the sign was grammatically incorrect, and I’m sure he’ll tell his supervisor, and they’ll fix the sign. Sheesh.)

(You think I’m kidding about calling. I’m not.)

And I’m really done now. Back to… cleaning out my closet …as it were.

God, I’m a roller-coaster, but god… it feels good to be this high. Emotionally high, that is… =)

I forgot that sometimes Cheyenne has exceptionally nice nights. Nothing raises the spirits like driving down the interstate at night, windows down and stereo blaring, loving the feel of night tassel-ing and flying through my hair..

I was in the park slacklining with Carter till midnight, O.A.R. and Dispatch playing from my car as we laughingly tripped our way from tree to tree in the warm semi-darkness…

I’m only a week in, and already I’ve enjoyed myself so much. And Sagar isn’t even back yet. Cheyenne’s dead, but the people aren’t. And thank god for that.

It’s wonderful to be able to go back and appreciate the things and people I underappreciated in high school. Like Madam Eagan-Wright. I’ve long recognized that she’s an incredible woman, but at dinner tonight (a few “alums” were invited to her annual French dinner becuase some impertinent underclassmen didn’t show) I discovered that I like her. She’s done so much. So much. Speaking of which, next time you’re in Great Falls, check out the local galleries for etchings by Paula Egan– she worked her way through college by creating etchings in the summer and selling them. How cool.

Is there any better feeling in the world than cool, green grass on bare-feet that have been imprisoned in leather shoes all day?

She was also very encouraging of my hopes to go into the Peace Corps, and hearing the stories from her experiences in Haiti (via the PC) just somehow filled me with a sort of awe at the vividness and richness of her experiences there. And god, I want that.

Chester is wonderful. He never fails to make me smile.

Every night, he locks himself in the bathroom. The door swings itself shut, and Chester is never able to resist the allure of a closed door that he can nose his way past. The outcome is always the same: someone in my family asks “where’s Chester,” and soon enough the muffled whines start from the bathroom. Hoping that he’ll someday learn, we typically let him whine for a good five minutes before someone rescues him. But so far… Additionally, the dirty spot where he uses his nose to push open the white door keeps reappearing, despite being frequently washed off. =)

Excerpt from a previous phone conversation: Sean says to me “yeah, do you mind driving, because the last three trips to Wellington have been in my car.” Wellington is the first city in Colorado across the border– about 40 miles from Cheyenne. “What’s in Wellington,” I ask. Sean tells me “well, you see, there’s this gas station.” “Gas station,” I counter, inquisitively. “Yes, gas station,” Sean continues, “where we’ve been buying lottery tickets.”

If you know Sean, you’ll understand why is this, no joke, the funniest thing I’ve heard in a very long time.

That aside, life has been reasonably calm. On Saturday night, Sean and I drove to the Little Caesar’s in Laramie to satisfy an amazing craving for a $5 Hot & Ready. Go figure– we drove two hours (round-trip) for a $5 pizza. It was good though, and so was the pizza.

Sunday my sister and I took my mom down to the Boulder Dinner Theatre’s production of The Wizard of Oz, which was quite enjoyed by all three of us. Most impressive, I think, was the scene with Jitterbugs and Flying Monkeys– the Monkeys actually managed to fly some, suspended from the ceiling by bungee-cords, and did some thoroughly amusing acrobatics.