The wheels are back on

It was 1993 and I was facing down my first college town summer, that time of year when all of one's real friends go back to their unglamorous hometowns to take up their old high school summer jobs again, except for me, determined never to go back, and anyway, the call center where I took pizza orders from clueless Sacramentan denizens for three years had closed some time ago.

And so I stayed, took up a desk job at the college office, and purchased this, a Specialized Hard Rock bike with a girl-type frame, for $200-something bucks, at that time an unbelievable sum of money, equivalent to the monthly rent on the spidery closet behind the bathroom door of the dilapidated beach shack you can see me posing in front of, which was my dwelling at the time.

It was a long and strange and mostly lonely summer. I rode that bike past the succession of Santa Cruz beaches, Natural Bridges, West Cliff, the Boardwalk, Seabright, Twin Lakes, thinking morose young person thoughts and mostly ignoring the endless, heart-wrenching perfection of the city as I jumped the curbs and mooned around cafes.

I left that city several years later, taking the bike with me, although I never rode it again. This seems strange, since I moved to another sleepy college town, this one misty and small and charming on the Canadian border, but by then I had been sucked in to the roaring jet engines of start-up company psychosis, and spent my waking hours, and some sleeping ones, formatting callouts on screen shots of report-generating software in five languages. The wheels came off of the bike, and it was propped up in the garages and basements of a small succession of homes for seven years.

Today, the bike has been ressurected from the dead, complete with new fangled grip shifts and un-rusted cables, at the behest of a friend who is new to town, and insists that we hit the Burke-Gilman trail before it's winter again, and night starts at 4:00 pm. He has a point.

It's good to see this bike back on the road again. I don't know why, but it is.

Time does not wait for tiny dog

Hmmm... years ago, I looked into Blogger, and at the time could make no sense of how to use it to publish my site without being saddled with the ugly centered-content-column w/ generic banner page template used by tens of thousands of design-challenged, rambling bloggers o'er the globe. Go to any blog you can possibly think of if you don't know what I am talking about, and you will see it on display. I have literally never once in my life seen a blog that doesn't use some form of it although it is the modern-day aesthetic equivalent of beveled buttons and animated gifs.

I therefore threw in the towel and continued to hand-code page templates and peck around in HTML as I was taught to do while a low-level code monkey at a three-person start up company on a semi-paved lakeside road in the sticks of Bellingham WA in the late 90's. But I am really starting to feel like a clown at this point, being that my site offers no more dynamism than my own updated verbiage. Today's web site clearly demands some type of picture gallery or feed, or whatever kids are calling all of this automatic stuff these days, and time does not wait for tiny dog. It's time to upgrade.

So here it is 2005 and I gave it another random shot today while sitting in the Flip Side cafe, an underrated purveyor of caffeinated beverages, free wi-fi and live music located in the yuppie wine tasting mecca of Woodinville, WA. Seems that it is actually easy to modify Blogger page templates and thus I have no more excuses to not go in the direction of the lemmings and jump off this newfangled cliff of trackbacks and comment spam. So I may convert the site. Stand by.

Old Nisqually

Lately, a fictitious alt country band called Old Nisqually has taken to recording spontaneously composed songs using iTrip. I am sorely tempted to post a podcast of the following work of genius, an ode to the Shakespeare-themed Best Western in Ashland, OR, the first verse which goes as follows:

My friends up and went
and left be behind
in the room with my dog and the TV set
They went to the pool
to have them a swim
And I'm in the Best Western I've ever been

My Summer with the Dursleys

Like a calculable percentage of the public, I am somewhere in the middle of Harry Potter: Beyond Thunderdome, the penultimate tome in the convoluted wizard soap opera that now totals 3341 pages in hardback edition. To no one's surprise, book six begins at the end of yet another summer, with Harry waiting for some chimerical hovercraft to take him away from his aunt and uncle's house, and back to Hogwarts for another year at school. The Dursleys' home, as you're all aware, is a prison of stifling middlebrow values, peopled by guardians who detest their adolescent charge and endeavor to prevent owls from delivering his mail, just because they can.

It is inferred that Harry spends each summer at the Dursleys brooding and tormenting his witless cousin Dudley with wizarding parlor tricks, but generally the author chooses to skip over Harry's summers in favor of long winded dissertations on the family tree of unconvincing villains such as He Who Is Actually Boring And Not At All Scary, a choice that disappoints me greatly. You see, I argue that J.K. Rowling is missing a rich vein, one that would resonate loudly with her target audience: summer anomie in the 'burbs.

I'm seeing Harry in Ray Bans, driving way too fast in Mr. Dursley's station wagon, scaring Christ out of some townie Muggle babe. I'm seeing Harry with some of Dudley's friends from church camp, throwing up in the parking lot of Denny's after smoking his first menthol cigarette. Or: Harry, piercing his own ear with a tack and an ice cube, and making a mixed tape for Hermione that includes The Boy With the Thorn in His Side. I ask you to find me one reader out there who doesn't want to see a teenage wizard trashed on Mason jar liquor cabinet mixture, semiconscious under the swing set at that park on Privet Drive, muttering spells.

Right, you can't. Because there isn't one.

I spent my life until the age of 18 on Privet Drive, more or less, waiting for airborne transport to an alternate reality in which angry, big-haired teenage girls in Levis three sizes too large were taken Very Seriously by sensitive artistic males and basically, everyone else. Instead I had to make do with the unassuming economy cars my friends had borrowed from their parents, cars destined for parties in shabby 100-unit apartment complexes off the freeway, populated by drunken Pizza Hut employees blasting Welcome to the Jungle and talking about their plans to join the Marines.

How would Harry have dealt with this? Would he have glowered in the corner, willfully sober, trying to talk his ostensibly Christian girl friends out of unsavory back room encounters with delivery drivers named Dickie? Or would he have been the first one in line at the keg? (Are you sharing my vision of My Summer with the Dursleys on the big screen, with Seann William Scott as Dickie, and Vince Vaughn somehow worked in as the aging Pizza Hut franchise manager who scored the pot?)

Thanks to J.K. Rowling's disinterest in Harry's summer antics on Privet Drive, we will never know how this kind of muggle conundrum would test his mettle (although I am sure if I read Hello! magazine more often, I could see Prince Harry, another surly British lad of privilege, getting into just these sorts of scrapes). I encourage Ms. Rowling to rethink this omission in time for book 7.