The dog-in

A brief caesura in the weekend-long ankle-biting contest between Luna and Coogee.

Degenerative fan content

Yes, people, a Mad Men pajama dispatch posted on my unfrequented OpenSalon blog.

Gone to seed

I am tremendously fond of the phrase "gone to seed," used in the context of Joaquin Phoenix-style degeneration (not sure who used the phrase first on Joaquin, but it pops up in half the reviews of I'm Still Here). It is a remarkably apt phrase for any number of conditions: I'm still in pajamas, I've gone to seed; where did that beard come from? He's gone to seed; What a great camping trip that was, we've all gone to seed; Did Aunty Poppy just mistake me for the late Peter Sellers? She's gone to seed. The photo above was taken in our backyard, out by the "lettuce patch" that had provided us, for a time, with boutique heads of butter lettuce. Today, as you can see, the lettuce has gone rogue, spiraling up into a mutant cone of dis-cultivation and frilling its seedy ends in the breeze, like a drug-sodden Hollywood star.

Morning commute edition

Denverites prize their mountainouse backdrop just as the serious Urban Outfitter shopper prizes a vinyl-coated wall mural. An epic wall piece will spruce up the most forlorn piles of scatty mail, old banana skins and discarded underwear; similarly, Denver's Front Range provides a welcome distraction from the unceasing mattress warehouses, evangelical churches and DMVs that huddle across Denver's landscape.

I love the brief view I have of Mt. Evans on my morning commute (long ed.) while crossing I-25. It is pleasing to find myself out in the wind, puffing life into my pillow-imprinted face, while the poor souls below fiddle inside their SUVs with disagreeable coffee (espresso so disagreeable they invented the Americana - who waters down good coffee?) and the haranguing of drive-time radio and traffic.

To my earlier point, though, about Denver's no-frills infrastructure, the serene bike loop I pedal on early mornings needles its way through a tight corridor of greenery along the Platte, skirting the back-end of industrial factories, warehouses and construction sites. Above, the raw beauty of the Platte is offset by high retaining walls and thick traffic on the arterial routes. To me, it is richly evocative of the scungy Venice Beach canals, and it is difficult, blinded by sunrise, to tell if the river is concealing bodies, plague, dead fish, or merely a spot of trash or vandalism.

I do get a nice view of the Denver skyline on a little ways though (close in, the Capitol can be seen), replete with the spires of numerous abandoned power lines and old billboards.

Above, a mysterious purveyor of gases trades nearby the perennially on-sale Cal Spas hot tub outlet ("New! Salt water hot tubs"). The gas shop has a flashing display that alternates between the current temperature, time and "We sell nitrogen." Presumably the flashing call-sign was designed to pull cars off I-25 in pursuit of bargain liquid nitrogen at wholesale prices. To date, though, I have never seen more than a single truck parked outside the establishment, and have reached the conclusion that, like an old missile silo, the bottles of pressurized gas have been left to integrate with the landscape.

I like the idea that factories have been assembled purely on a whim by any spare bits and pieces nearby at the time. I imagine that were you ever to take one apart, no one would ever figure out how the pieces all go together again. This example, located in close quarters of Mile High Stadium, appears to have been constructed from old takeaway chopsticks, broken-down tractors and IKEA filing cabinet kits.


And my favorite, a view I title: "Six Flags Refinery at Dawn."

Holy shit

I just landed here.

An excerpt:

Dear person in charge of new punctuation,

I have invented a new punctuation mark, and I am writing to ask you to consider introducing its usage into the American Punctuation Lexicon.

I would also like to check up on the status of the interrobang (also known as the "quesclamation mark"). You may not remember it, but it was the combination exclamation point/question mark invented by ad executive Martin Spekter to help us with such sentences as "WHAT did you just say to me?!" and "Lindsay Lohan's suing WHO?! Over WHAT?!"

I have thusly been forced to meet my creativity of ills head-on, and to examine the paltry, derivative fluff that pads out this blog, like adobe mud layered on adobe mud year after year. A promise to the non-existent readership: Things of which I shall not write again:

1. new punctuation
2. Scott Baio

Each of these has been effectively covered by my peers in Internettia.

Summitbagger: La Plata Peak edition

Once again the wagon headed west, bound for frontiers unfathomable.

Actually, I have fathomed La Plata Peak, Colorado's fifth highest at 14,336 feet, many times this summer, plotting my triumphant straddling of the kitter litter streusel atop the Sawatch Range. This weekend the window opened up, framed by aspens crisping to tater tot gold beneath a lacquered blue sky.

An agreeable dusting of snow from earlier in the week informed out quest as far more rugged and extreme than was the reality. Much like blonde highlights, a few streaks of white laid into high ravines and crags will do an excellent job of highlighting the "dimensionality" (in Loreal parlance) of Colorado's majestic mounds. Our campsite, above, was at a secret locale known only to ourselves and four or five other RVs, four other dogs, and a broad selection of granola tent-dwellers - in other words, a few thousand people, tops. It looked over the Twin Lakes southwest of Leadville, and was nestled into the navel hair of Mt. Elbert's lowest approach.

The hike into La Plata Peak does a good job of building to a crescendo of thigh-crushing switchbacks over increasingly unstable rock. Above, we scaled a track that beat its way up to the northwest ridge of La Plata, glancing all the way at the impressive outline of Grizzly Peak (an almost fourteener at 13,988 ft). We passed no one until late in the hike, but could see hikers silhouetted high above the rising sun. Much like Shoeless Joe, they bid us into the upper realms where vegetation and sediment seem to explode open against themselves, looking either to take off or plummet to the bottom of La Plata's central gully.

We were accompanied by three load-free dogs, each of whom possessed an endless thirst that quickly dwindled our royal supplies of water. Note that they were all kept on leash, per forest requirements, and all eagerly yanked the leash forward, bringing their steward into awkward ankle-crunches over the mish-mash of steps, gravel, dirt and boulders.

The terrain got sketchy enough that after 2 1/2 hours of climbing, and enough progress over sketchy scree-fields while thinking "how will we get down?" with the dogs, we reached this friendly balcony and paused for a photo-op. Bringing the dogs up the last few hundred feet of gain was unquestionably a recipe for disaster (Gaston later admitted he had walked through the mental possibility of having to bury one of his dogs on the mountain after a calamitous misstep), so we debated leaving one person behind to mind the three dogs while the other two of us bagged our summit. Leaving one person on a boutique-sized plateau at 13,800 with three dogs for an hour seemed a poor decision, though the pull of summit-bagging was strong as ever. Rather than become "those dickheads" who were suckered into a summit campaign only to become shredded to pieces in an avalanche chute and mentioned briefly in the Denver Post the following Monday (Denver man falls off mountain), we made the prudent decision to invest instead in a couple of great iPhone pics. As the photo above proves, a non-summit bag will often make for a far more impressive souvenir pic than will actually standing on the summit. If you peruse the halls of internet summit-bag photo-ops, you will notice that they all look the same: two people, cold, against a blue screen, with some pebbles under foot. On the other hand, a gnarly summit will advocate the hiker in foreground with low growl of topographic contrast: "Ten contour intervals to go, biatches!"

Here, you will notice my dog taking the wussy dry-foot option for the river-crossing, faithfully following his master. Neither dog nor human is too disappointed at chalking up a summit attempt. Indeed, in the trailhead log, I note "Karen and Irene" of Denver whose destination was "until we get tired :-) " Likewise, my response to such a question is always "Up! Then down." To the mountains!

What's cooking - Urban Grl Food Blog

I'm bypassing the cute anecdote. You want to know what I cooked today? Fucking Anzac biscuits. I only cooked them about 20 minutes too long in a scorching hot oven. Their flavor is nuanced with a delicate dash of ginger and cinnamon, and they have a potent and defiant soot aftertaste.