Hello California!

Good to be back, in all of your waterless glory.  Gotta go dip my toes in the Pacific before it gets away.  Got at least a week off, and then maybe another big job for a while, with the best, most ridiculous director I am lucky to be able to work with.  Life is good, X-Games were awesome.  Love is lost, but always sweet when it shows up for a few.

Chill out week, here we go.

The Things That Just Keep Happening

Thoughts from right now:

hello world.

Reporting from Austin Texas now.  Imagine that.  It’s no south american World Cup, but it is the Austin Summer X-games.  Somehow I managed to land myself put up in the Hyatt for 12 days, and I have no idea who I think I am when it comes to things like this.  

Life is behaving pretty greatly.  I should write some more LOV stuff.  I should write some more stuff.  Shoulda, Coulda, Woulda, never does anybody any good. 

Anna sent me this link today for a TED Talk about how some languages don’t have the subjunctive tense and how it seems to serve them well, at least when talking about the past.  If you don’t have the vocabulary or grammar to describe how things could have or should have been, then those things don’t torture you with regret and doubt.  When referring to the future, however, they facilitate the impossible becoming reality.  In that way they are great for mankind.

This Austin trip is interesting.  Seems lonesome, but welcomely so.  A little time for me to spend with me.

(a few hours break)

Ok, i’m back.  So much for lonesome.  Even though it kind of still is… there are people all around.  I was sitting in the lobby for just a few minutes really.  My food hadn’t even come yet and Jason and Josh showed up back from dinner to get a drink.  Of course they bought my next one, as gentlemen do, and we sat on the patio for a while, chatting and appreciating.  

And now here I am, sipping on some sizzurp? how the fuck do you spell that anyway?  All by my lonesome at the Hyatt in Austin, on the patio just on the river, right next to the bat bridge.  I  like to think one day my writing will be interesting enough that someone will research the bat bridge, and they will sit around in an English or history class talking about the reference.  Very, very unlikely.  

When I think about great writers, and the way people study them, and they way we, who are not great writers, have made a list of “literary techniques” to identify and appreciate, I think the truth about the writers is different.  I can't imagine they even try to use the “techniques”.  I suspect it just comes out that way, while editors tidy things up a bit.  Its simply how they see the world, just as true mathematician doesn’t understand why these formulas need any explaining at all.  I do like to think I have a bit of that in me, I’m just a little less dedicated to the calling.  I get distracted by all of the shiny things.  The shiny things are fun and have served me well, so I don’t mind.

I don’t know how to tell a story.  I like to document the story I live though.  And if I’m going to do that, I like to live a good story.  

The most recent story, with photo evidence soon to come:

Left LA to drive solo (the start of the kind of lonesome theme) to Austin late Monday night (technically Tuesday morning at 3am).  I arrived at the Organ Mountains just out side of Las Cruces, New Mexico by dusk.  I camped out (in my car) to wake with the sun and mosey in to the White Sands National Monument by 8 am, where I got to run around in the desert for a while, before driving the rest of the way to Austin,  Texas to work the first ever XGames event in Austin.  This whole thing is cooler than is worth putting in to boring words so far, and the actual event hasn't even started yet.  And now I am where I said I was in the beginning of this post, after driving golf carts around the massive venue exploring all day, standing at the top of insane structures amazing people will ride wheeled boards and bikes down and around, and preparing to host thousands of people who appreciate them for doing so.  After work I took a lovely run by the river, and watched at least the start of what is estimated to be a total of around 1 million or so bats fly out of a bridge to go hunting insects for the night.

Anyway, I think I'll add some pictures tomorrow... Check back if you please.