Steak and Waffles

A friend of mine once insisted the only way to truly know where you are at and where you are going is to take the back roads there. By this mantra we traveled the ravaged side streets north into the decaying city of Detroit. These words have stuck with me for a decade. Today, I amend them. The only way to really understand the places you travel through is to run out of gas along the way.

Last night just before dawn my engine slowly revved down accompanied by the red oil light. I switched to my reserve then headed to only open gas station I knew along the way, fortunately at the next exit. I pulled off in the small town of Gorst near the Sinclair Inlet. As I poured gas into my tank I noticed a 24 hour Steak and Waffle House that appeared to sit literally under the overpass. I must have passed this place dozens of times without ever being aware of its existence.

Of all the places along my commute this is the last and simultaneously only place a 24 hour steak and waffle house would be. Down the block from the 24 hour strip club the area is right out of a David Lynch setting. Thirty three miles later I was home with a new understanding of the environment that surrounds me.

Beer

I love a good beer. Tonight when I went out to pick up the Sunday paper for my wife I also grabbed a bottle of Hood Canal Brewery’s Dosewallips Special Ale. The perfection of this extra special ale reminds me both of why I brewed my first batch of beer, how much I want to do it again, and how much I miss camping.

I thought I liked the Agate Pass Amber but this may take the cake. It always seems I’m going back and forth on which brews I like more, Ambers or Pale Ales.

A Tiger Cub’s Pinewood Derby Car

My son’s Cub Scout Pine Wood Derby race was last weekend. I thought it went very well. I always considered the Pine Wood Derby to be the pinnacle of Cub Scouting. This year my son wanted to build a police car. I showed him how to design and build his first car and he along with all the other boys had a lot of fun on race day. The tracks have come a long way since my first Pinewood Derby race in Aurora Colorado twenty-one years ago. The track instantly displayed the race results including place, time, and speed onto a projection screen. Later that night the results were posted on line among race times from around the region.

My son’s car had an average race time over 4 heats of 3.96 seconds and an average speed of 163.57 scale miles per hour.

At the Rent My Track website there is also an interesting history of the pinewood derby started in Manhattan Beach CA back in 1953.

Link: Rent My Track

Swim Bainbridge Island

I’ve been thinking about cynicism a lot lately wondering if I am doomed to become so, or if I have long ago fallen into it’s peril. I read once that cynicism turns to bitterness after you turn thirty. I shutter at the thought of being one of the people I see around the island with the permanent scowl wrinkled into their aging faces. I tried to remember a time when I wasn’t so cynical and realized people have always bothered me, hence my infatuation with society. It’s a love hate relationship. I wonder if naivety and cynicism are opposites. If they are I hope there is a harmonious balance between the two where I can live in.

Swim Around Bainbridge gives me hope of such a compromise. It’s the type of blog that reminds me of why I love it here and how I have been neglecting the things I used to do all but too often. With a writing style similar to nature writer David Gessner, Mark Powell’s blog expresses his insecurities and aspirations of finding harmony with the Puget Sound I am left yearning to kayak, to take to the water again exploring the sound from a different vantage. Reminding me of why I loved conservation before the newest environmental movement left a bitter taste in my mouth.

No Justice No Peace

The Obsolescent of Scouting

With the Pinewood Derby coming up next week I’ve been cutting my self off and on today with a coping saw. My son wanted to make a police car. With most of the dangerous work done and band-aids healing my flesh rather than his, we’ll begin painting the black and white scheme tomorrow.

Leah picked up the box from the table and read aloud from the side, “Promotes Sportsmanship, Craftsmanship and Competition.” We have been discussing the relevance in scouting this year as our son makes his way through Tiger Cubs. Often times we both feel some of what scouting does is obsolete and outdated, and at times a bit awkward, forced, and a little ritualistically unnatural. “I don’t think kids today really care about those sort of things.” She said, putting the box back down on the table.

I thought about it for a moment, wanting to believe those are still contemporary values. I thought about sportsmanship and competition, though in harmony with each other they often clash in modern society. It was reminded of the juxtaposition between Socialism and Capitalism filing the airwaves and a working balance between each of them. The derby is teaching our boys the ethos of competition may be sportsmanship, and more importantly the humility of loss over than the tact of being a good winner.

I continued bending the saw blade frequently testing its durability as my son’s interest waned. I like to think that I am teaching him craftsmanship on some level. At this young age I am doing most of the harder work, and expect him to do incrementally more each year. I like to think introducing him to working with tools, I am planting the seeds of self sustainability in the future. I hope I can instill the type of confidence and ability, that one day my children will be able to fix things on their own and not have to rely on help, making them somewhat more independent. Then I thought of the other fathers truing the wheels of their derby cars and impeccable paint jobs in order for their child to take home another undeserved trophy. I couldn’t help but worry about a future of reward without competition and wondered how close that future if not yesterday may be.

Recommended reading:

A Nation of Wimps
Geek Dad: 5 Quick and Easy Tips for Improving Your Pinewood Derby Car’s Speed
Father Knows Best

Snow Day: Everybody panic.

Disclaimer: I grew up in Michigan. I learned to drive in February’s inclement weather and find it terribly amusing/annoying to watch the region shut down for a few inches and seeing everyone lose their minds.

That being said, to the guy idling his eighty thousand dollar mercedes 4WD SUV with new chains on all four tires into the parking lot near Pegasus… you are a jack ass. If you’re going to make a spectacle of walking on the treacherous parking lot ice and slowly make your way through the island’s thoroughfares you should have just stayed home. I suppose in someway this might be our collective struggle against nature in an over comfortable post industrial lifestyle, something to remind us all that we’re still alive. In the end though, it’s just snow. It isn’t news worthy. It happens every year.
When people such as yourself make a grand spectacle of overcoming the slightest setback nature has to offer, you remind me of the ridiculous hipsters that walked the streets of San Diego during the wild fires a few years ago. When I lived in San Diego it wasn’t uncommon to see the thirty somethings getting out of their Lexus sports cars donning respirators in an effort to show the world that they couldn’t be held back, and that nothing was going to get in their way.

One more thing Mr. Guy who idled into the parking lot with his overcompensating ride, you put the tabs on your plate on wrong, you’re not supposed to put this years sticker over last year’s month. It makes me wonder how you’ve managed this far in life being either too self absorbed or lacking such an apparent attention to detail and yet you are the pinnacle of upper middle class.

Artifacts of Contemporary Living

I don’t know what it is about internet meme’s that I find so intriguing. Maybe the validation I get from them that seem to say, “yes the internet is real, it is a living document and yes you too are a part of it.” Not so much in the way that I need to belong to something, but more so in the manner that I can’t help but belong to it, whether I like it or not. Meme’s remind me that as hard as some of us try not to, that we are all just similar code lines in complex programing.

During the months that I walked to work I cut it pretty close to missing the ferry on a few occasions. Walking in the dark early hours I passed a handful of other walkers, each with their laptop bags, backpacks, and lunch carriers. We are older casings of our former selves. Like kids to school we walked toward the chaotic noise of the city filled with our fellow classmates putting in time for a better grade, higher pay, a faster car, and a second mortgage. Even now the ship’s loud speaker announced our late departure while we wait for an aid car. Johnny got called to the school nurse. The ferry is our bus to school, most prominent in the moments before departure when adults dressed in business attire run, sometimes in an all out sprint to catch the boat before they pull the gangplank away. As soon as the two minute warning is announced we become wild elk spooked by a lioness in the grass. Running with coat tails behind in a panicked flee and wheeled luggage in tow. It’s not every day that you get to see middle aged professionals in an all out sprint, a site usually reserved for natural disasters and acts of terrorism. Before the comedy sets in there is a feeling of uneasiness, I can feel the animal evolutionary psychology telling me to run. Even though I know I’ll make the boat with my long legs allowing me to walk faster than some of their runs, I sometimes join in just for fun. And other times when I don’t give in to my animal instincts, I’ve missed the boat.

These are my artifacts from contemporary living. I wrote an essay once about the contents of my wallet and their correlation to my identity. Today I ponder the same thing. A brown fabric wallet containing a debit card complete with a points reward system to entice me into more spending. A Starbucks Gold card that I bought after going there every day for two weeks with the guys at work. It’s already paid for itself, but the day after I bought it we started going somewhere else. A passenger ferry pass that expires in February. My business card with a stamp of my name and serial number. The eleven dollar rubber stamp is by far the cheapest way to personalize the standard card stock without having to hand write my name on the handful of cards I give out daily. My Washington driver’s license more formally called a Driver License, but commonly referred to as an OL rather than an SID. Two employee ID cards. A ferry vehicle pass which expires in March but will be used up next week. A massage therapy business car with the date of my next appointment. If my coworkers aren’t taking advantage of the twenty free massages a year they’re missing out. My insurance card. An out of dat ferry schedule, one dollar, and a receipt for this sailing.
We used to play the what’s in your wallet game in high school while waiting for food at a coney island or some other greasy spoon dive. It was a way to pass the time and maybe even learn more about ourselves.

A dark grey computer bag containing: A 2.1 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Mac Book. The charger. My sprint cell phone that has no camera phone.
A key ring made from a green Metolius Cam, containing five miscellaneous keys.
A Glock 27. An extra magazine containing eight .40 calibre rounds.

An Anthropological Intro to You Tube

This presentation at an hour long is profoundly touching.

Also check out:
Information Revolution
Larry Lessig Remix TED 2007

Star Wars Ewok Gospel

I didn’t even know there were haters of inhabitants of the moons of Endor!