Rocky Butte

There is a castle on top of Rocky Butte in Portland, OR; I checked it out with my friend and local guide, Bill. This winter has been unusually clear for Oregon so I go some pretty good shots of Mt. Hood (the pointy one) and Mt. St Helens (the blunt one). My Jeep in the last picture is sitting with the suspension bottom'd out because I have just about everything I own stuffed in it to prepare for my move back to the midwest.

Notes on a Discourse with a Lit Review

Computer's Internet yousdparts@gmail.com RE: Submissionz	8/16/11
to info

Hi! Here’re my submissions. I have my cover letter and stuff below and in the attachment.

Sinking

It saddens us to know that one day, possibly soon, our garbage disposal will leave its earthly bonds, becoming another in a long legacy of appliances whose souls this house has claimed. Last month the George Forman Grill jumped off the counter to its death. A similar fate occurred on a dark night some days later to the weather radio and the boom box. Lovers, they leapt off the shelf together, leaving smashed bits of plastic and silicon in the carpet to remind any bare foot passerby of their sacrifice. We replace what we can but no warranty covers a broken heart.

The World’s Fastest Bike Currier

Over the weekend, I passed a gaggle of young ladies on their way to the bars. The draft wind I produced was such that as I passed, it blew all the young women’s clothes off. I made my delivery and to avoid scandal returned the same way, blowing the their clothes back on. True story.

…Read More >

Computer's Internet yousdparts@gmail.com RE: Whoopsie	8/17/11
to info

hey dudes,

Your lit mag looks baller. I just submitted a couple pieces to it, but after I did so I looked at my cover letter and realized I wrote "to" instead of "too". Here's what I wrote originally:

HI,
I graduated with a BA in creative writing and now I can't find no job. It's alright though because I rob banks. If you want me to not rob the bank in your town feel free to give me a job, but nothing to hard and it better pay well. 
We'll be in touch.

See what I mean? I feel like a total dumbass now. I even proofread like 4 times. Had my mom look over it too. Anyway, please don't make fun of me because I fucked up my cover letter. 

Love,

Scott

HOOT info@hootreview.com RE: RE: Whoopsie
8/17/11
to me

Hey Scott--

Don't worry, we won't judge you. We might have though, if you hadn't sent your corrections. What really would have been disastrous is if you had used "your" instead of "you're" or vice versa. That error is pretty much unforgivable.

Anyway--We're looking forward to reading your pieces. Thanks again for correcting the typo, and for submitting to HOOT in the first place.

Amanda

HOOT info@hootreview.com via email.submishmash.com  RE: [Hoot] “sinking” and “the worlds fastest bike currier” submission	9/18/11
to me

Images are not displayed. Display images below - Always display images from info@hootreview.com

Dear Scott Wilson, 

How are you? This is Dorian Geisler and Amanda Vacharat, the editors of HOOT. We really appreciated--and enjoyed--your submission. Unfortunately, we were not able to include…

My other Blog

Hey readers, I just want to let y'all know about my bike blog, which I update more regularly: http://bikeblogordie.blogspot.com/. Check it out!

Milwuakee Wedding

My cousin Evander got married this summer so Tori and I got to hang out in Milwuakee for a few days. Milwuakee is a great city, everybody was nice- from the bartender who gave us free drinks to the helpful yuppies on the sidewalk. We used the corridor trail to get in and out of the city on our bikes. It used to be a train line but has been repurposed and leads some 10 miles or more into the suburbs, right along the river too. I forgot to bring my camera so here's the motorcycle that I traded for my Jeep which brought me to Oregon some months later.

Sinking

It saddens us to know that one day, possibly soon, our garbage disposal will leave its earthly bonds, becoming another in a long legacy of appliances whose souls this house has claimed. Last month the George Forman Grill jumped off the counter to its death. A similar fate occurred on a dark night some days later to the weather radio and the boom box. Lovers, they leapt off the shelf together, leaving smashed bits of plastic and silicon in the carpet to remind any bare foot passerby of their sacrifice. It is our goal to prevent another one of these tragedies.

The garbage disposal has not lived an easy life. He came into our stewardship, the poor thing, with a bit of an addiction. He craves that which he should never have: glass. We can’t leave a tumbler, shot, or mug in the sink for more than a few seconds before he tries to suck them down to his spinning jaws.

We assume he developed this trait from his previous guardians. We know they were a questionable lot by the condition they left the refrigerator. It went insane on our third week at the house and began drooling incessantly, ruining all the food inside. Maintenance had to take it away.

Sadly, the garbage disposal is forever altered from his cravings and subsequent imbibings. His teeth are badly dented, and if he is working too hard a smoke rises from beneath the sink, and the scent of ozone mixed with dishwater gags whoever is within sniffing range. Only after a few seconds of warm-up is he able to suck anything more substantial than Ramen noodles, but once he gets going the kitchen counter will shake with his vigor.

We’ve been trying to guide him to a more productive lifestyle, and he is making progress. He especially likes to watch celery sticks spin and writhe while he slowly sucks them down the drain. But they say glass is a gateway drug. We’ve caught him taking small hits of fork and butter-knife when he thinks we aren’t paying attention. We’re afraid that he may one day want to try a sniff of can opener, or worse, Pyrex. If he meanders down these paths then surely he is lost.

We aren’t prepared to bury another appliance, but with every passing moment our wayward garbage disposal slips closer to the abyss. Tonight, a traveling repairman is supposed to visit. With him may be our last chance at solace. Until he comes the hours and minutes pass like boulders down an eroding hillside. These troubling times have put immense strain on our household. However, we are a family and will hold together to see our garbage disposal though to whatever conclusion the fates decide.

This letter was originally written to my landlord to remind him of the maintenance issues he’d been ignoring.

OctoBarn!

Some of my buddies an I ran across a local landmark called the Octobarn, the world's tallest 8 sided barn (it actually had 11 sides if you include the attachment). Built in 1883 it's 80 feet tall at the top. Inside it's used as a museum and dance hall. Stored in the former slaughter house part we found a Japanese truck and a catamaran. Lots of artifacts too. Not sure exactly where the barn is, somewhere in Johnson county. Here's a link to more octobarns: http://www.dalejtravis.com/rblist/rbia.htm

From London Heathrow Airport

12/11/08 (or was it 11/12/08?)

India got one last jab at my wallet when a guy offered to escort me through the Bangalore airport to show me where to go. He was completely unnecessary as all the signs were in English and the airport is built on a straight line that leads to the check-in counter, but before I realized that he was on me like a fly. Like so many other people I met in the customer service industry of India, he had no idea what he was doing. He seemed to know as little about the airport as me, since he led me the opposite direction of the gate, then stopped and asked a security guard for directions. He escorted me to the security checkpoint, even though I told him he was not needed, and when there he stuck out his hand for a tip. I gave him a 2 rupee piece. He said, "that is very small tip". Then I began to lay into him. Before I could really get into a good grove of insults I noticed people were looking at us -I was making a scene and the guy still had his hand open to me. I gave him my last American dollar, way more than he had been worth, and left the scene. I now understand that when guides talk about the pickpockets of India, they are speaking metaphorically.
Take this adventure for instance: For our final tourist trap Tori and I decided to go to Bangalore Palace, the summer home of the original royal family of the Bangalore region. We paid a foreigner fee of Rs 200 (locals paid Rs 5) for one of the most disappointing and depressing tours I've ever taken. Before the tour I looked along the wall at all the former princes and rulers who had resided at the palace. They all looked regal and magnificent dressed in silk and gold, until I got the the final picture, that of the current prince. He was in a discolored tuxedo with the top button undone so his rolls of extra flesh would have room, his hair was unkempt, his eyes pointed different directions, he was quite clearly and through no fault of his own - autistic. The prince's unconventional decoration tastes were evident throughout the tour. We'd be shown ancient sculptures and ruby studded crowns then, in a glass case, would be a chewed up and chocolate smeared plastic doll. The prince had a thing for tacky concrete golf statues you see in the corner of garden centers, the one where the guy is holding the club in follow-through position with a cartoonish look on his face as if he hit the ball somewhere he ought not have. These statues were everywhere. Every corner, every hallway, underneath ancient tapestries, in lines on top of grand oak tables, on top of taxidermied elephant feet, where ever there wasn't an ancient artifact or symbol of royal grandeur you'd see a golf statue or some other awful piece of junk, the likes of which you could buy off street vendors just outside the palace gates. The palace had a few redeeming features, such as the head of a murderous elephant who sacked a town in the 1800s, but beyond the austistic juxtapositions of relics and crap that made you feel bad for giggling at, there is only a frumpy tourist guide who demands an extra Rs. 50 for taking 15 minutes out of his busy schedule of daytime TV to show you how far the Indian royalty has fallen.
P.s. I wasn't allowed to take pictures because I didn't want to pay the $20 picture fee.
On our way back to the hotel we stopped at the Indian museum of science and industry. A sample of every piece of technology that has passed through India, from Soviet jets to Chinese steam engines, is represented within the industrial warehouse-looking halls. Posters with advanced math equations and jargon-filled explanations that would make a masters student scratch their chin went alongside models of ping-pong balls zooming around a pneumatic tube, symbolizing electron transfer or t-cells in the bloodstream or whatever.
That night, Tori and my last in India together, we rode rickshaws around town and stopped at the best night club in the world: Nasa Bar. Nasa Bar is what an Indian who has grown up watching sci-fi movies thinks the inside of a space shuttle looks like. Black lights, dry ice mist on the ground, lasers, stainless steel tables, trance music, pictures of American astronauts, movie aliens, and other planets. It was the coolest bar of my life. Even the stairway to the entrance was made from one of those stair-trucks you see docked to local airline jets at the airport.
But I should say that every bar in India is awesome. There aren't many since Indians don't typically drink much or go out at night, so most of the bars are aimed at tourists and they are all more elegant than anything I've ever been to in the states. Waiters wear bow-ties and pressed linen uniforms for crying out loud. This policy even extends to fast food joints where wait staff and glass drinking containers are expected.

A last note on travel in India:
India is big on getting as many people employed as possible. The bus, for instance, has a driver, a ticket taker, a back watchman to catch people sneaking on, and sometimes a guard. Each person has a whistle to alert the driver of whats going on using some sort of code.
Traffic is chaos and operates under the same mentality as a crowded high school hallway. People usually stick to one side of the street to go forward, but not always. People driving too recklessly might get yelled at by the authorities, but usually get away. And the biggest most aggressive drivers have the right of way.
The most common traffic jam occurs at bridges where only one large vehicle can pas at a time. Two big trucks might be at a face off on either side of the bridge. Motorcycles and scooters will fill every in in between and writhe their way through like maggots. If one of the trucks backs up a car might try to squeeze in. Once we were at a standoff like this for six hours, but they can go on for days.
Appointments in India are never for exact times because it is impossible to gauge how long it will take to get around. Even the trains don't have a perfectly exact schedule, though they try.

On the airplane home I woke up in a stupor brought on from flight exhaustion and free liquor courtesy of British Air. I compiled this list of ways air travel could be improved.
1. All seats should fully recline for better sleeping
2. It should be federal regulation that airplanes serve free booze
3. Planes should occasionally fly low so I can feel the speed and experience the scenery better
4. Aerobatics are acceptable
5. People of similar ages and interests should be seated together
6. Turbulence is a fact of life and flight paths should never change to avoid it

Gun and Tourist Trap Hill

My skin is very sweet, like marmalade on a bun or Fruit Rollups. I was born this way and although it makes me popular with women who have a sweet tooth, I attract bugs like a living 5'11", three dimensional fly paper without the stickiness, allowing bugs to swoop in for multiple bites. Cuts and scrapes are quick to infect and slow to heal in the high altitudes so the swollen red bug bites I've been scratching are starting to look cystic. Otherwise today is looking promising, we plan to go to something called Gun Hill and see what trouble we can get into. 11/9/2008 @ 10:00am, after about 13 hours sleep in the high mountain air.

At 6989 feet, higher than any peak east of the Rockies, Gun Hill is the tallest land mass in the area that can be reached by normal pasty tourists. There is a cable car, or "rope ride" that yanks people from the shopping mall below up to the top. The cable car was built in the 1970s and like so many other things in India it looks like it hasn't been serviced since. Miniature models of Gun Hill made of spent grease adorn the ground where the pulley and the cable meet. The engine putts, bangs, and shutters like it's missing a spark plug. Everybody inside the cable car held their loved one tightly as it swayed on its tether a thousand feet above the ground, the cable car of love, it was tragically cute.
Gun Hill is named as such because in the Colonial days there was a cannon up there that used to blow off a shot at noon so people could adjust their watches. The cannon has since been melted to make cheap little bells and miniature Vishnus to sell to tourist or something and what exists in its place is what I call the Tallest Tourist Trap on Earth. Lining the plateau was a host of cheap carnival amusements like the one where you throw a dart at an under-inflated balloon and it bounces back and hits your eye (I had a bad experience once at the Iowa Stare Fair). In the middle a bunch of cheap crap shanties were set up to sell little bells and Vishnu dolls. I bought a bell to give to my aunt which broke the second I put it in my suitcase. It was smelted on site and had air bubbles in the metal, probably a hazard of high altitude metal work. I found a guide who had trained telescopes on certain points on interest such as the Doon Valley road that brought us to Mussoorie. Even at my great height I could make out the terror in the faces of passengers on the busses and the deranged excitement of the driver. Another telescope was pointed at a mountain called Srikantha. At 21,000 feet it is the biggest thing I've ever seen. Even from Gun Hill, over three hundred miles away it stood out like the downtown Chicago skyscrapers viewed from O'hare. The curvature of the Earth, which blocks anything at eye-level over 5 miles away, could only cover the the bottom half of Srikantha. If I ever come back to India I plan on spending the whole time in the Himilayas.
Meanwhile, my deathly ill friend Luther rented a scooter and rode it, sniffling and delirious, for a week into the heart of the Himilayas. He got so high that plants ceased to grow and his scooter hadn't enough air to run properly. He says he doesn't really remember getting back to the scooter rental but his pictures of desolate mountain roads and up-close shots of the very peaks I saw through the Gun Hill telescopes made me resolve to come back to the mountains some day.

A rotating restaurant that has broken down is just an oddly shaped regular restaurant. Tori and I ate lunch in the regular dinning hall of the Himilaya's only stationary rotary eatery and I cried CRIED over how spicy the food was. My chicken tikka masala left chemical burns on my fingers and when I took a drink of my Haywards 5000 Heavy Beer I could hear the phiiiish of steam blowing out of my ears. The waiters were having a grand time watching their poison cook me from the inside. The cooking staff came out at one point to watch me sit, panting, tongue hanging out, gasping for water. Tori got some good pictures.

For most of our travels in Mussoorie we used bikeshaws powered by feeble old men who were barely up to the task of hauling 300 pounds of combined American meat up cliffs. We tipped well but the final bikeshaw made off especially well. He only had to take us down hill from our hotel to the bus station, but midway he stopped for a white cab who said he'd take us straight to the main bus/train terminal in Darha Dun. We payed the bikeshaw guy for his trouble and he got an extra throwback from the cabbie, garnering him about 300 rupees, or a full day's pay for about 15 minutes of downhill work.

The Cabbie drove through the night and the next day we appeared at a bus station that would take Tori and I back to Bangalore where we would spend our final night together until she returned to the states in late December. But before that we had to wait 3 hours, Three Freaking Hours at a one lane bridge. The problem with these one-lane situations in a country without driving rules is that people don't take turns. Everybody on the road charges the bridge from both directions and honks in a gridlock face-off while motorcycles and scooters fill every available foot of room. If a major congestant, like a bus, decides to back down and let somebody through, a thousand motorcycles zoom in to take its spot. The only way these situations get resolved is all the motorcycles wiggle though and pass, then all the small cars, then the trucks, and finally the busses and semis, but this can take hours and the resulting traffic jam can go on for a dozen miles in either direction. From this I've learned that when a travel agent says it will take this long to get somewhere, it is truely an estimate in the broadest sense of the word, nothing is guaranteed in the world of Indian Travel.

Tori bid me a tear filled goodbye at 4AM when I got into the Kia Sorrento shuttle car and headed for the airport. We traveled on the new National 6-lane Expressway at 120kmph (75mph) setting an Indian ground speed record. This may not sound like much, considering American drivers hit 70+ every time they get on the interstate, but in India -where trains are capped at 55mph but rarely get up that high and most city traffic never gets past 30mph, and even the highway has speed bumps and pedestrian crossings- 75 is dangerously quick.

In my next post -the last of my India series- I'll go over my adventures in Bangalore airport and my overall impressions of India.

Austin Part II

I went back to Austin in June of 2009 to visit some friends and got to go hiking and biking on the Greenbelt trail in Texas Hill Country. With 3 drivers on rotating shifts it took us 16 hours to drive from Iowa City to Austin, stopping only to refuel and buy fireworks. Highlight of the trip was when my friend Andy showed up to a Texas bro pool in a extra skimpy speedo. He got some looks, and a sunburn on the side of his butt.
The motorcycle photo came from a Texas size biker rally in downtown Austin. In a parade of bad-ass biker dudes on snorting Harleys there was this one bespectacled guy on a red scooter wearing sandals and carrying a pomeranian who rode right in formation with the 1%ers then parked his scooter with them.

Our Hotel in the Himmys

Nice thing about Mussorrie is that a lot of the local buildings say, "Property not for sale" over the doors. Good to see that the locals aren't selling out to big business. Our hotel is a 100 year old English Cottage. We pay about $10 or Rs. 500 a night. Our room is quiet and faces the valley. The shower is freezing cold but the bathroom is private and westernized. After the debacle in Delhi and the annoyances of Hadiwar we almost gave up on the Himilayas, but I'm glad we didn't. -November 9th, 2008