Desperate Ground

Ground on which we can only be saved from destruction by fighting without delay, is desperate ground. --Sun Tzu

I've been plagued by a sort of exhaustion recently that I was only dimly aware of. Its chief manifestation was a lack of motivation. I doubt it had anything to do with the weather, but thats how the saying goes. Bowing to Luke's constant pestering, I finally went skiing with him yesterday at Crystal Mountain, finally trying out the ridiculously expensive but awesome looking powder skiis I purchased months ago. The good news is the skiis did their job, though they haven't been tested in terrain of pure, deep, untracked snow.

Skiing on the West Coast, or at least in Washington, is different from the East Coast. The mountains are bigger and they get more snow. Unlike the mountains in Pennsylvania, there is so much terrain no vantage point exists, from which you can survey all of the terrain, except, of course, for low earth orbit. The popular lexicon out here contains words that are unfamiliar to the ears of an East Coast skiier: pow, untracked, lines...all concepts that only have meaning in a place where God (and/or atmopheric condensation) dumps foot after foot of natural, fluffy snow on the mountains, with no need for pathetic snowmaking machines that make weird sticky snow. This natural fluffy snow is what my snowboarder friends call pow, I suppose, because telling people that you had a great line in powder yesterday would probably give people the wrong idea.

The sheer expanse of the mountain, as well as the altitude, and the fact that I haven't been skiing all year, left me exhausted after a single run. Luke told me there was food at the top of the mountain, so to the top I went, and for most of the time I was up there I was inside a cloud:


That little rope marks off an edge that you don't want to fall off. Later, I took this shot when the cloud broke enough to reveal what lay behind that curtain of moisture:This next pic is a shot of the way I came, back towards the lift (which you probably can't see). It was difficult to take because people kept walking up from the lift and I didn't want them thinking I was taking a picture of them. I also didn't want them in the shot. I like it; it show the gradual obscuration caused by the cloud, which was technically fog because it was at the ground level. I'm calling it a cloud though, because I was on a mountain and it is more exciting that way.

There was another slight break in the clouds that revealed another mountian for a few minutes. Luke probably knows that the name of the peak is, and he probably told me too.
The reason I took all of these shots at the top of the mountain was because there was a little hitch in my plan to grab a bite to each and stretch out in the warm lodge at the top of the mountain. Namely, there was no lodge at the top of the mountain. There was a building, yes. That building had a skii patrol facility, restrooms accessible only from outside, and a restaurant. Like, with waitresses and wine glasses and table cloths, and that restaurent was "no longer seating." I suppose if I had gotten up that morning and said "I want to go to a restaurant that people think is cool because you can only get to it via a $60 ski lift ride," then I would have been content. However, I had actually gotten up that morning thinking "I'm going skiing" and was therefore severly pissed off about the lack of sustenence, and waste of an otherwise good building at the top of a mountain. They had even posted a sign of a brown paper bag with a cross out symbol on top to make sure no one could go in seeking rest. Unless, of course, they had made a reservation. I can't speak for anyone else, but when I am exhausted and sweaty and had to fall back on a deodorant shower that morning because I got up so early, all I want is a warm building where I can collapse in a chair and scarf some overpriced food off of a plastic tray. I certainly don't want to sit down to dinner in a place where the wait staff is dressed like its somebody's wedding.

Thanks to Crystal's obnoxious restaurant placement I was relegated to the picnic tables outside in the cold. I bought a tiny bowl of "lobster bisque" for $7. This was my first hint that for some people, skiing is more of a rich man's pleasure and less an awesome adventure.

I found more evidence in the lower lodge. The lower lodge was a normal lodge: a big cafeteria style thing with the same crappy food as every other ski resort. The notable thing, here, though, was this sign:
I apologize for the blurriness. I took it quickly, not wanting anyone to wonder why some guy is taking a picture of the Not Welcome Here sign. You see, people who are smart enough to bring their own (good) food are apparently not allowed to eat it in the ground level of the lodge. They have to eat it in the locker room. That is not an exaggeration. There are tables and chairs for food eating surrounded by benches and lockers. I observed this place, and the people eating there, because I was on my way to the toilets. I made a snap judgment that the people eating down there were not dressed as well (no designer ski wear from Hot Topic, etc), however, my mind may have already been primed by that "Brown Bag Area" sign and scenes from the Titanic where the poor people are locked in the lower levels.

None of this really matters much, however. I had a good time. In fact, after the first run my heart was beating so fast it probably counted as tachycardia. It occurred to me while I was halfway down the slope that skiing at high altitude with an undiagnosed heart condition and asthma and without an inhaler was probably a dumb idea. But I was already in it, and there was nothing I could do. These slopes we do don't exactly allow for stopping, especially when you are too exhausted to jump for the turns. It is ride or die--or I suppose more accurately--carve or fall. Thats where the reference to Sun Tzu's desperate ground comes from. In writing it may not sound fun, but that may be one of my favorite things about skiing: the excitement involved when not only is there no turning back, but there is no stopping or pausing or thinking either, unless you want to roll fifty feet with your skiis crossed. You can be fatalist about it, like when I was a beginner and fell deliberately as soon as I thought I was out of control. You don't have to be though. You can fright to stay upright for as long as you can, dragging every second out, balancing precariously after every unexpected hit (from a bump), frantically searching for a place to turn to an area with smoother moguls. Then add to that the fact that you are tired and can't just jump your way out of your mistakes, and you've got some serious excitement.

When we left Crystal I was throughly exhausted, but it was an entirely different kind of exhaustion from before. My body was done...quads all beat up from carving heavy snow, shoulder sore from what must have been one of my falls...overall physical energy was down at the I'm-only-capable-of-napping levels. However, in every other respect, I seemed to be less tired. My mind was more awake than ever, and I itching for another adventure. Things that I didn't really feel like doing now sounded like great ideas. Its a good feeling. I plan to hit the slopes again as soon as my shoulder stops hurting.



[comicon]
Luke and I sent to Comicon (Seattle) the next day. We only caught the tail end. Some guy palmed me his badge thing as we entered. We watched part of a panel on how to do webcomics. I didn't recognize any of the authors except for Scott Kurt(sp?) who writes a webcomic called PVP Online that I used to think was funny. We also sat through most of a Star Trek...thing. It had something to do with Star Trek, and it didn't suck, and I came home afterwards and watched the new Star Trek movie. I also bought a hot dog. There were girls there, but not many. There were a lot of guys there, and a lot of them were the kind of guys I am not interested in being friends with. Also one of the girls we saw was a furry, so that subtracts a few points from the girls side. I suppose furriness could be cool, and by that I mean specifically that if I sat here long enough, I could probably envision some kind of furry-like naughty costume that I would think was sexy. Unfortunately I haven't thought of such a costume yet, and I think that sticking a fuzzy tail thing down the ass of your jeans is a bit of a turn off. Despite all of the negatives that I managed to drag out yet again, I did have a good time and I want to go again. There is something cool about many of the people who go to these things...people whose excitement and passion about some subject is infectious. As long as that subject is not Dungeons & Dragons, I think we could all be friends.

Also, I bought an iron-on thundercat patch. I think I might slap it on my jeans. I'm thinking right leg, near the bottom, so that it might catch someone's eye when I'm salsa dancing and I do a flare thing with my leg. I would rather have dragons on my pants, but they didn't have any dragon stickers, and my current jeans have that hole in the knee from collapsing in front of Rite Aid anyway.

In the immediate future I am planning on more skiing, more episodes of Castle with Firefly Girl, more dancing and more conventions. I am signed up for some thing called sakuracon in April. It has something to do with anime. If Adam's more-girls-than-guys-at-cons prophecy doesnt come true, me and that boy are gonna have words.

Oh, also, for next Halloween I want to be the guy from Memento. You don't have to know anything about it except for it will involve drawing on my chest with a sharpie, and I will (ironically) forget this decision and wonder aloud what I wanted to be for halloween. Please tell me I wanted to be the guy from Memento. Oh man...if more people saw that movie, the fact that I forget girls names...it would be like I'm flirting with them!

I think for Sakuracon I will go as Akira, so long as anytime someone recognized me I can tell them I hated the second half of that movie.

Also I just started skimming this over and there are some terrible typos. I feel kinda bad if you went through all that. Maybe I'll clean them up later.