lets face it folks, there are no more jobs up on the mountain. The lodge will close in two weeks, three weeks at a stretch. What few tourists made it up this year will turn to noone, just sun in the pines.
The harsh reality of this was visited on me by a woman with a one and a half foot bouffant of showgirl hair, undeniably perfect genetic bone structure, and the cartoonish make up of a sixties showgirl. She manages a local Denny's and puts on a face like a headliner at Stardust to do it. God bless her, she gave me an application but assured me she wouldn't be hiring for at least four months.

I know what you're thinking: why would you wait until now to apply to Denny's? I don't know either. But at least my rejection didn't throw me too hard, I drove over to Ihop where a decidedly less glamorous manager let me know they had just finished their first round of layoffs.

Well, fuck.

jogged down the alpine bike path by the lake today. What with the chirping birds and the winding path and the shadowy trees, I felt exactly like Snow White must have, getting in a workout before the dwarves got home.

And thats when my million dollar idea hit me: Disney Gyms. Fantastic disney themed gyms with great music, outstanding equipment and themed rooms. Buy a membership, you get outstanding service and your can work out in the Fantasyland room (aerobics & dance) Tomorrow land (machines) Adventure Land (yoga) and whatever. Maybe every work out is set within its own little ride. Anyway there are millions to be made here, possibly billions.

...have yelled, "whatever, fuck you bitch" and then spent the night crying over the same lady they just yelled that at?

We're a savage, lonely tribe on this marooned blue planet.

there are three different bald eagle conservatories each within a few couple miles of my cabin. And  there is a piece of bird shit like a streamer of soft serve down my windshield.

This is a Saturday night and I am busy as a beaver on my laptop, tweaking my web page, writing notes on a script my friend sent to me, applying to any and all art jobs I can find...very productive.
But it irks me, knowing I am spending a Saturday night in pajama pants. Even though I came up here to be a hermit. Even though sitting around at a local bar yelling to coworkers and throwing back beers would be equal parts horrifying, boring, and awkward. Even though I should be growing out of an urge to keep up with the cool kids. (you know...the ones who have to break a string of hearts every weekend as they choose their top ten favorite parties to attend and wind up in a bathrub with several models by morning light, dressed only in strands of fine cultured pearls- euphemistically and literally.)

But I do feel very alone, and tonight being Saturday makes it worse. I miss everyone I know and even people I barely have spent time with. I even miss that one girl I knew when I was about twelve in Norwalk Youth Symphony Orchestra who's name I don't remember. We never hung out outside orchestra but we spent a solid twenty minutes every Saturday talking for about four months. As a relationship goes, thats an acquaintance, not a friend. But I remember her with a bullet point, out of all my "childhood" friends. I guess because she was fantastically funny and cracked me up. I only have one solid mental image of her and she's chewing bagel in that image. Also because we would just, as soon as it was break time and we could put down our violins, we would just walk over to each other and pick up right where we left off and ignore everyone else in the room. I dreaded Youth Symphony until we started talking. (I always hated playing the violin. Everyone told me I'd miss it when I quit it. To this day, sometimes I smile with relief that I never have to play a violin again.)
I don't think I really met anyone I felt that close to until college. I had a best friend in high school who I loved with all my heart and by senior year she dropped out and was high all the time and I have no idea what she's doing now. She called me randomly my first summer back from college and all I could tell you about her these days is she doesn't have a facebook page.

I took a walk today over the two bridges that rise up out of the lake on the East side of the Stanfield Cutoff. Mrs Stanfield, who's husband made the cutoff, apparently can still be seen hobbling around town. The air was perfectly clear and very cold and crisp. I was facing the sun as I walked so everything was that amber haze color. I had to look down as I walked because it was so bright, and at one point found myself picking my way through a family- three generations, the youngest representative being a little baby on the planks of the bridge. It was looking up as three very relaxed and very golden retrievers sent themselves back and forth between the family members holding the camera and the family members attending the baby. The baby had preternaturally blue eyes staring up out of a chubby face, a chubby white bell curve cheek with a violent red tinge from the cold. I paused to make sure I didn't get involved in the iconic family photo that its sure to be, those bright blue eyes the only thing you can make out in all that sunny haze, those blobs of gold from the dogs, the red of the bridge, just this little baby consciousness staring down the camera.

So this is officially my dorkiest Saturday night ever. And I know at some point Im going to have to go to the gas station and get a squeegie and use the back part- not the soft part- to chisel that bird shit off the winshied. Because I tried using the windshield wipers and the windshield wipers lost. That shit almost knocked them off. It was like, "scritchety-scratch I ain't havin' that."

 

man that stuff does not improve in retrospect. some of the most intentional retardation i've ever experienced firsthand.

So there's another cashier at work who I call DeathPlus. This is because every time I talk to her one of her friends has come to visit her and maimed themself. (grammar? themselves? i like themself as a word, though it isn't one)
The other day she was showing me this James-Bond type gadget that you smoke pot with (about the size of a flask, chrome, you press a panel and two flawlessly inset pieces turn about to reveal a little slit with a flame and next to it, what I can only describe as a hash-extruder)

"You smoke pot, Lily?" she asked me "What, are you a cop?" I said.

If you were going to narc out, you'd do no better in terms of deep cover than to outfit yourself with this girl's purse, a rasta-color bag with a strap printed with the official jagermeister logo.

She told me about a friend who had fallen off the chairlift on the main lift a few days previous. Someone had lifted the bar and she had bent over to check her bindings before she realized that and fallen into the snow. Given these chairs are often a few stories high, I was about to offer condolences but the girl was an experience canyon-jumping snowboarder and as such knew how to fall and was okay. Unlike the other visitor of DeathPlus, who's knee I was treated to cellphone pictures of. It was swollen up to the point that it looked like a but with grape jelly coming out of it.

I didnt realize it at the time but I was about to have a harrowing-ass adventure myself. This is about a week and a half ago now, but just thinking about it makes my heart flutter.
I'd heard good things about some intermediate runs on the east side of Summit, so I made up my mind to try them out, since I usually ride on the west ridge area. I woke up very early and got there when they opened. The snow condition was white asphalt style- just iced iced over. Where people hadn't gone, it was a sheet of ice with no hope of digging in toe or heel edge of the board. I had also elected to get hte high performance gear that day, since I've been doing that recently, its lighter and slicker and notably faster.
So I was whizzing along the new run when I got to a part that felt less like a slope and more like a cone. I was on the rounded edge and all sides dropped off. I skirted through some trees to what seemed like a more gradual incline, passing a black diamond sign as I did so.
Shit, that shit is like 95 degrees. At first I just dug my heel edge in and tried to falling leaf, but the hill came up right in back of me and I was sitting, and then I was sliding on my ass, trying frantically to slow myself by pressing the heele edge of the board against the ice, which didn't even chip. I managed to slow myself enough that I didn't start spinning over myself. My heart was pounding but I'm sure if I saw footage of this I would have an incredibly calm face. This is because of my deeply held belief that if you keep your face relaxed you stay chemically calmer, and that the more calm you can be in an emergency the higher your chances of surviving it.

So I got to the bottom of that run, and managed to regain myself and unstrap, with a relief close to tears. There was another run to the bottom of the mountain, and there was the slope I had just ass-rode down above me. I could either climb up, or walk down the slope below. I figured if I got to the bottom of the run, I could get myself to a more familiar part of the mountain, versus trying to climb up and then passing by a blue square run into a black diamond and possibly making the same mistake again. And also its easier to walk down folks. I like sports better than exercise.

Unstrapped and stepping lightling in my snowboarding boots, my 1200 snowbard in the crook of my arm, I started down the black diamond run, chin up, not too proud to walk down, I thought to myself. Im doing the smart thing and besides no one is skiing down this morning anyway.

I am maybe eight steps down when I lose my footing and fall flat on my back, and then my body immediately morphs into a bone-and-flesh tobaggon and I start speeding. I am going maybe 20 miles an hour on my back down an icy hill. My face is as placid as a Tibetan monk's. I dig my heels in and frantically try to use the snowboard like a pick to break my speed, raking it into the ice, but nothing. "This is what it feels like right before you are hospitalized for a major accident. This is the flashback I will keep having during my coma." I momentarily flip positions, so now I am headfirst. I dig in my elbows and get back to where I can see where I am going (down, toward a fence) and now I use the 1200 board like an oar, savagely raking it into the snow and steering my body as much as I can in a j-turn into the side of the run. I slow and then stop in some bushes.

I got up and the back of my sweatshirt was soaked. My bones felt like long Mexican Jumping Beans, twitching around inside my muscles.

On the chairlift up to the westside, i noticed two holes blown out in the sleeves of my sweatshirt. Well, that looks cool at least.

I'm driving around a residential block. Fresh fallen snow on the rows of cabins, each with a streamer of smoke, the tall trees shimmering overhead. I've got my hat on, I'm clutching my wheel with white knuckles, grinning and shouting with tears running down my face, "Oh its REAL PEACEFUL up here! A PERFECT FUCKING PLACE to RELAX!! I'm so FUCKING GLAD I CAME UP TO THIS FUCKING PLACE SO I COULD FUCKING RELAX!!"

I had come up the day before and found two feet of snow behind a three foot birm of ice in my driveway. A birm (burm?) is the compacted snow formed by continous plowing and shoveling through it is like shoveling through old cement. I had spent about three hours shoveling a space out for my car, drove it in, tried to back it out, and found it was stuck. I tried to shovel it out, throw down cat sand, push it from the front, for about an hour. Shaking with exhaustion, knowing I had work the next day, I vowed to wake up early and settle the cars hash at five thirty in the morning.
So I was running pans of hot water back and forth in the morning, grinding on the reverse and accelarator, and nothing, nothing doing. Then my weekend neighbor, a small balding man, came out of nowhere and told me to try a towel. I had tried putting chains on each of my tires (front and back) te day before but not the towel idea. He pushed from teh front, and then his cousin came out and joined him. Through my windshield I could see them bowed with effort pushing a stranger's car at six in the morning. Through sheer brute force they pushed my car up and out of a heavily carved muddy rut and onto the street. I got out and hugged each of them.
On the way back to my house from work, I stopped and got a little mini cake and brought it next door. The guy (name of Levi) said "A gift is not necessary- we are supposed to help each other." he was there with his wife and little three year old girl, they were from the Phillipines and it was their first time seeing snow (they saw a lot of it). That is some motherfucking kindness. I owe so many stranger-favors at this point. Do you hear me world? If you need a ride or someone to carry your groceries I AM HERE.

So anyway. That day, before I pulled in again I shoveled the shit out of my driveway, and then tried to put on chains before I pulled in.
A word about chains- they are exactly that, chains, two narrow ladders of chains you lay out behind your wheels. You back onto them and then wrap them around your tire, hooking them on both sides and then tightening them with a hook and rubber-strap device. It takes about fifteen minutes, its dirty, its cold, its a pain in the ass, and the whole time I swear I will dedicate my life to finding a quicker better design for this shit. "Egg beaters. I will use the principle of that little thing that spins egg beaters" I say to myself. "Cheese graters. Maybe a grated surface. Something that autmatically becomes rigid, like the poles in a tent. Some fucking thing. Plated maybe, like armour. As soon as I get home, getting out the tin foil and cardboard and figuring this out."
I had hooked up one back tire and was moving onto the other one when a car drove up behind me. So I had to get into my car and circle the block, hoping the other chain would still be there when I got back. I returned, pulled the heavy frozen chain out of the snow, lined it up behind the tire, set to work, when another car (unheard of for my quiet street) pulled up behind me. I got back in the car and circled the block,  as I did so I heard my back chain un hook and fly free. Okay, I'd have to redo that one. I drove back up, found both chains pressed into the dirty road snow, hooked up one and moved to the other when a THIRD car pulled up.

So this third time is where westarted, with the laughing-sobs and the white knuckles as i hear the chain I had on fly off. At this point in the past 24 hours I had shoveled for 5 hours and tried to get a car out of a rut for roughly 3. Which isn't a lot for this area, quite frankly, but for my soft arms it was a neverending hell. And thats why I was cursing my fir-lined street. Just so my neighbors know.  I hope they read blogs.

Yes, eventually I got both chains on and got in my driveway. And then I went inside and had a pot-pie.

and i am one giant margarita and three beers to the ill.
its valentines day so let me get a little bit sweethearty about my boo coming up to visit me for the better part of the week
WHY DO I LOVE HIM SO???
he's intelligent, funny, and original
he's brutally honest, emphasis on brutal
handsome as a devil
something something something
a winner with the attitude of a sorrowful man
big love to my one and only boyfriend.

One of the cashiers who looks like a Swiss Madonna comes in from the cold, the tip of her nose pink. Her waist length blonde hair is over one shoulder. She clamors onto the stool and tucks her coat under the counter.
"Well, I took the test just this morning and its official. I'm pregnant." she announces.
"Oh- congragulations- you must be so excited." I beam a smile at her, knowing full well if I were her I'd still be balled up on my bathroom floor staring at my hands.
"Yeah, well, its my fifth pregnancy so," she puts her index finger in the air and spins it in a circle while rolling her eyes.  "But I'm praying the Lord lets me keep this one so who knows."
I must have been pretty friendly in whatever my reaction was, because she pulls her stool over to show me pictures of her pets on her phone.
"We've got a bearded lizard, three geccos, a night snake- couldn't get a picture of her, she hides under a rock until we go to sleep- and here's our cat Marilyn-" a spread legged upshot of a cat which is mostly asshole- "and here's Shitty, my other lizard-"
"Just feeding all these pets must be an ordeal."
"Oh and we just got this puppy- she's a pit and collie mix."
"oh!" i say, " i want a dog so badly."
she looks at me puzzled. "What for?"

Well, for the same reasons you want half a dozen reptiles, your own two dogs, and your pornographic cat, is what I want to say but she's expecting and I don't want to shock her system. She hands me a twenty.
"You got a vehicle, right Lily? Could you run down to the corner and get me some cigarettes? This is my last one." she holds up a single filtered cigarette as she steps out from behind the counter to go smoke. The corner store in question is actually down the access road and two miles down bear valley, almost to the 18 highway.  "Thats the thing, I only want to smoke when I know I shouldn't." she says just as the door closes.

When she gets back I take off to the bathroom and get some fifty cent coffee and hand her the twenty when I get back. "Parking is a mess out there I don't think I can make it out of the lot." I say, unable to tell her plainly that I'm not running errands and losing my job this morning.
"Could you give me a ride to the am pm after work and then bring me back then?" she asks me. She has a very 19 year old face, still a little pink at the nose, big blue eyes. She looks like a kid, and she's really two kids in one. I can't deny the request of a pregnant woman to get some cigarettes.
What I didn't realize was there was a potluck after work.
"I just have to try some of Judy's tamales."she says as I follow her upstairs. She had complained about being nausceous all morning then bought a plate of gravy and biscuits steaming under an X made by two enormous strips of bacon.
 At last she's ready to trek over to the ampm. As we drive, she tells me about her ex fiancee vs. the new guy she's having the baby with. The new boyfriend is a solid 250 pounds and not of muscle. "Its comfortable because that way I can relax and eat what I want. My ex fiancee before this boyfriend was so skinny, he was skinnier than me." she says. She seems just below average weight, and with the right costume could pass herself off as a high school cheerleader.
"The last four pregnancies were all with my ex fiancee. He was a real prick, he started being verbally abusive and then he started hitting me. Thats how I lost the last pregnancy. He punched me right in the stomach." she says matter of factly.
"I'm so sorry."
"Oh no, don't be."
I used to play you in college, I think to myself. I used to play exactly you in college.
Having spent three consecutive work days with this her , I know that aside from some admitted impulsiveness, she has some stunning raw material in terms of brains and beauty. But her circumstances, the pace of her life, makes her consider her pets, boyfriends,and these pregnancies, less as choices than inevitabilities. A child would be an anchor on a ship that docked a long time ago.
I want to shake her by the shoulders and say, if this one doesn't take, get on the pill, leave that chubby ass boyfriend of yours, get the hell out of the high desert and see something outside of California for five minutes before you lock yourself into this situation. And if it does take, congragulations, now consider taking your new son or daughter with you and seeing something the hell else. Apply to a school or something. Stop putting money into exotic pets you don't see and check out somewhere with a building over two stories tall.
I said none of those things aloud.

well after a solid 6 days off the snow, my return was painful. Maybe this is because I finally got off the bunny slopes and took a run from the top down and on my way got into a freestyle type park. I avoided the soft terrain elements but sometimes you drift toward them because the snow is groomed towards them, like scallops in frosting. Anyway it was absolutely wonderful and a great way to force my brain into the moment. Yogis in the ancient days needed to get up off their butts and invent extreme sports. That is the very most intense form of existing fully just exactly in where and what you are doing. Its such a complete relief not to think of anything but what you are doing- especially when what your doing is exhilirating and includes an insane eagle's eye view of the mountains.I did a windmill fall off the lift the very last time...not at all painful but Lord it's embarassing. I call it windmill falling when your board makes a circle next to you through the snow, if I said that to anyone they'd be like "huh?"
All in all a solid trip down to LA, which felt like Hawaii in comparison to the mountain. Fucking fantastic time with my boo and got to see a lot of beloved chums in addition.
Now I have to buckle down and earn rent before the 15th which might be a real problem. I momentarily considered working in some kind of strip club but I am exactly wrong for a strip club. I just have too, too much rythm. Set me down dancing and I will forget about my obligation to entertain the customers and just knock glasses and poles and shit over as I grind deeper into my groove. Once I get lost in that rythm, there's no getting me back. So instead I'm considering dog walking, child care, second part time job like waitressing? and combing craig'slist for illustration jobs.
I'm going to start in on a drawing tonight that I'm excited about- the media I'm using at least. I was cleaning out my fireplace andI realized I could use the butt ends of my scorched up fire logs as my own homemade charcoal. I know it won't be rich and silty like the compressed stuff but this came first so, at least its a history lesson if nothing else. Maybe I can collect berries and crush them for paints. Maybe I can build a loom and make my own canvas. Maybe I can make a crude flag and musket and proclaim my independent state within my cabin like in Mr Show. I live in a cabin folks.