I could write a book about my vacation last weekend. The primal conflict would certainly fall under Man v. Nature, and my dramatic situation (which is so brilliant I could never make it up) would be young lovers struggling to escape an army of ravenous ticks in the deep woods of Kentucky.

Our first mistake was choosing the trail marked "Wilderness." No, our first mistake was not bringing any bug spray into such a wilderness.

And there we were, in a struggle for our very blood. In the deep woods of Kentucky against a downpour of thirsty deer ticks. They came from the trees, big and small, and stuck in our socks. I had seen a deer the night before, and it was skinny. It looked almost two-dimensional frozen in the lights from the tennis court. So perhaps the first mistake was not taking this as an omen and abandoning the hike in the woods altogether.

Many mistakes were made, and in hindsight several very obvious considerations had not been taken. Ten minutes down the trail, we were as paranoid as a man who has been hit by lightning seven or eight times.

But this chapter ends in me lighting the tip of my pocket knife and burning off hundreds of insects. I was picking dead ones out of Lisa days later.

(Lisa, as she is bitten)

The rest of my vacation was very pleasant, and so my book would be filled with babies, family, humor and new adventures. Such as boating in our black tank tops.

…and hallucinations after sampling the squeezin's from a hillbilly's still.

The "trash island" in the Pacific is 500 miles wide now and growing quickly.

The article says that its about twice the size of the continental US now and that 90% of the rubbish in the oceans is made of plastic. Hey, at least you can see it from space now!

Well, who says the Europeans don't have it good? Dutch police are asking for sex in parks to be legal:

In Amsterdam's Vondelpark, owners of dogs let off the leash can be fined, but sex will shortly be permitted. "Why should we try to maintain something that is actually impossible to maintain, which also causes little bother for others and for a certain group actually signifies much pleasure?" says Paul van Grieken, the responsible Alderman in the Oud-Zuid district of Amsterdam.

Perhaps more interesting is the rest of the article, which goes on to cite where sex can't happen and the actual reason it might be legal soon:

"Of course there are strict rules attached. Thus, condoms must always be cleared away, it must never take place in the neighbourhood of children's playgrounds and the sex must be restricted to the evening and night-time."

LECD is now calling on Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht to tolerate 'cruising' gays in all their parks. In a letter to the administrators of the three cities, the police institute says that by regulating sex in public, the safety of homosexuals from 'queer-bashers' can be better guaranteed.

Although, reading another quote by the officer where he refers to gays as 'homos' was somehow slightly shocking to me. I'm not sure how I feel about it all — good in one way, but weird in another: 1. does limiting the sex to night actually mean that bashings could happen easier? and 2. cruising in parks kinda freaks me out. R and I went to Griffith Park one Sunday afternoon a few years ago and the number of guys cruising there in the afternoon made the trip less about a stroll through nature and more about loads of men lined up on the paths, waiting for other people. Though perhaps my issue in point 2 would be lessened by point 1.

okay, i need to get over the hump of not having posted in several weeks so that i can start posting regularly again. the following items must be covered.

1) my sister, father, and i got caught in a real-life blizzard when we were in michigan for my grandmother's funeral. i have never experienced white-out conditions before and hope to never again. i definitely flashed back to the feelings i got behind the wheel during the flood and count us very lucky to only have to get towed out of a snowbank.

michigan received 16 inches of snow in 24 hours and in the height of the storm, pulled over on the interstate, i could not see my sister a foot and a half away from me as we worked desperately to clear ice and snow from the defroster at a rate faster than it was falling. bottom line: it was some scary shit and i definitely thought we might die at a couple points.

2) i have pneumonia. perhaps surprisingly, this is entirely unrelated to item #1 above.

okay, regular posting can now commence. let's roll.

I spent a good part of this morning at Council Crest, a city park at the highest point in Portland, where you can stand on a cobblestone dais and, rotating your body, can see a 360-degree view of the city. Just off center, slightly down the hill, there's a park bench. That's where I sit and watch the city like TV. From there, the city doesn't look grandiose or breathtaking–it looks diminutive. It looks as small as it can feel on the ground.

While I sat there this afternoon, staring out over all that nothing, Sleater-Kinney's "What's Mine Is Yours" came on my headphones. Have you heard that song? It's just stellar. It was followed by "Start Together," my favorite track from ninth grade.

My brother was the first person to give me a Sleater-Kinney CD. He brought it home when I was in seventh grade, still hazy from Grateful Dead records and trying to seem erudite with Paul Simon. Things were falling apart at home: Dad was becoming increasingly erratic and more unabashedly abusive. Things were going to shit at school: junior high relational aggression had a stranglehold on all of my friends, and particularly on me. Call the Doctor sang all of that back to me in a way that was as urgent as how I experienced it.

And looking back, most of my favorite and most political records were introduced to me by my brother. X's Los Angeles; Bikini Kill's Reject All American; Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. The weird thing is that while those records were formative for the politics I have today, and while they have stayed with me as my politics disentangled and were fortified, my brother's politics have changed drastically. While he still listens to much of the above, his views have taken a turn–not so much for the conservative, but for the absurd and the xenophobic. He has become anti-choice and anti-immigrant; he debates the need for continued racial justice work; he doesn't think discrimination takes place based on sexual orientation or gender identity; and more and more, the hypotheses he posits in our discussions sound like bad punchlines. (Recently, in a disagreement about how divorced politics' end products are or aren't from individuals' daily lives, he argued that Roe v. Wade "could be overturned tomorrow and it wouldn't really impact anybody. I bet no one would even notice." It almost doesn't matter how you feel about choice–that comment is just ridiculous.)

It wouldn't be so bad if those political discussions weren't synecdochic stand-ins for our relationship as a whole. I don't know whose expectations were first skewed, but now our understandings of one another have become so unreasonably adjusted that we hardly recognize each other. But here we are, wearing this relationship like an ill-fitting suit. It cuts us off–we can't feel our hands, can't breathe freely. We just take our sharp, shallow breaths and wait until we can get out of whatever we're in. What a sad, silly way to live.

1. Being kissed by my wife.
2. My kids laughing.
3. A good night’s sleep.
4. A good bike ride.
5. Getting to watch nature.

So, what makes you happy?

Boing Boing: Inkjet printing with live stem cells: "bio-inks"

i'm a little sad at how excited this makes me, perhaps for obvious reasons. still, i hate myself for actually considering the thought that it might be possible within my lifetime.