so after being drunk for most of two straight days, i finally woke up this morning, got a little bit sober, and hit the metropark for a picnic and some heavy ultimate frisbee action.
after the party on friday night (which i think i already sort of wrote about), i got up "early" on saturday and drove up to kent using my brother's car. i got up to susan's in time to meet with bowes and sit there oogling women who were too good for fucking losers like me while he was studying. then john and dana and some other people showed up and we (of course) ended up at chipotle, hanging out on the patio about a half-mile from where eleventy billion kentites were lining up for the kent fest fireworks. i have lots of pictures from the rest of the night, but i don't have my camera cable, so i'll have to post them later.
we eventually shuffled down to the fireworks, and did some fun carnival-esque (not carvinalesque in the literary theory sense, you fucking nerds) things like buy funnel cakes and get yelled at by some completely insane and aggressive bitch who was way to protective of her kids and decided that everyone between her kids' eyes and the fireworks were enemies of freedom.
i would have thought that, based on the night i had had on friday, that this would have been enough. but no. it was zephyr time. which translates into "ben drinks way too fast and gets crunk time". thus followed a lot of drunken absurdity, including tressel-climbing, train-dodging, and frisbee tossing. oh, and drinking and (sort of) dancing.
this in turn led to the floor-sleeping and waking up and eating while trying not to vomit that i mentioned earlier. i got to eat at mike's, which i haven't done in years. probably since before people became no longer allowed to smoke indoors.
the rest of the day was spent at the gorge, having a great picnic, which i was almost too lazy to contribute to at all, and then some intense frisbee action. i also hadn't been to the gorge for a long time, and forgot just how fucking beautiful it is down there. it's so green...well, and ohio in general is so green (compared to pullman). but also muggy.
this was, yet again, another quintessential kent summer weekend, and there was definitely never a point where i wanted to be doing something else or be anywhere else...but at the same time, i'm totally epically tired now and i'm looking forward to hitting a real bed and some slow, bland working-time before i come back up here for another stay (i've got to get in as much time as i can, when i can...july 26th isn't getting any further away).
definitely one of the highlights of the weekend was getting to see my friend dana again (i saw her over christmas, but only when i was absurdly drunk, so it doesn't really count). due to some issues that we've had (that were at least partially my fault) we haven't talked much for a year or so, so it was very cool today to be able to just hang out and have a normal day-like thing. and maybe in three months when she catches up on my blog entries far enough and reads this, she'll appreciate the sentiment ;)
trey played an acoustic set at rothbury today; his first scheduled appearance since march 2007. he's obviously known for and better at the electric thing...but i'm definitely grabbing the torrent when it goes up. not if, when.
phish has a new DVD coming out too. looks pretty great. probably gonna grab it. wish they'd make a trey band DVD though.
i also wish i had a girlfriend to use as a pillow because i'm about to pass out. oh shit...except i have to drive back to canton. like right now. gah. laterz.
Jul 6, 2008
this damn ship done sprung another leak...
i am about to attempt sleeping on the floor willfully after a particularly indulgent and enjoyable night of drinking. well, willfully in the sense that the couch is already occupied by a girl and i have genetic programming that demands that i don't consider the possibility of throwing her onto the floor and taking her place. fortunately the sun comes up in a few hours so if it doesn't work out i can always just stay up and play GBA games on my laptop.
the rest of my brief kent respite comes tomorrow/today and then it's back to canton for who knows what...
wish me luck on the sleeping.
i guess extra luck for everything and anything else wouldn't hurt, either...
i'm pretty drunk, but i'll spare you any rants about politics or dating or weird psychedelic rantings about space gnomes or fairy giraffes and just take it out on myself. typing is hard when you can't stop laying down anyway.
the rest of my brief kent respite comes tomorrow/today and then it's back to canton for who knows what...
wish me luck on the sleeping.
i guess extra luck for everything and anything else wouldn't hurt, either...
i'm pretty drunk, but i'll spare you any rants about politics or dating or weird psychedelic rantings about space gnomes or fairy giraffes and just take it out on myself. typing is hard when you can't stop laying down anyway.
Jul 5, 2008
a year so far
summer has passed that point again when it stops being all easy and breezy and sitting on the zephyr patio being glad that i've survived another school year and kicking back and relaxing. now it's at the point where i'm forced to face the reality that school starts again soon, and there's a lot of work and moving to do, and a lot of people to see as much as i can in the next three weeks or so. it's usually around the beginning of july that this happens. it's partially because the beginning of july is technically past the midpoint of the summer, partially because there are 89 family birthdays and parties in july, which makes it seem like time is flying by faster, and partially because it gets hot as fucking fuck in ohio this time of year, and being hot all the time turns everything into a bit of a blur.
being drunk all the time is also sort of a time-accelerator. and i've definitely been doing a lot of drinking lately. i have mostly avoided hard liquor since the alcoholic winter of 2003, not really as a rule, but mostly just because it didn't appeal to me, a lot like how i didn't eat potatoes for years after eating them nearly every night for twelve months after first becoming a vegetarian. but lately i've had a chance to go back and hit the hard stuff again. and with a distanced perspective and a decent amount of drinking and being drunk under my belt, i can safely say that there really is a significant difference between drinking beer (even to excess) and drinking liquor. i always thought that it was just sort of an old wives' tale or something of the sort that liquor was "worse" than beer.
but based on a few drinking "experiments" i've recently conducted, i can drink beer all night long and not feel like my fucking face is fucking itself off like i can with liquor. drinking beer is fun. it makes you feel warm and fuzzy and giggly and no matter how much of it you drink (not counting drinking enough to die, which i didn't do) it mostly just makes you feel more fuzzy and giggly until the fuzziness equals dizziness and the giggliness equals opening your mouth to giggle and vomiting instead. for me, this is sort of a concern because i'm one of those vomitophobics (there are lots of things that make me throw up easily, and so i'm afraid of doing so, mostly because it's not fun). but i have ended up in said deplorable state as a result of overindulging in beer. and mostly you just feel like you're having a whole goddamn lot of fun until suddenly you're not having fun anymore. it's that simple. oh, and beer makes you feel like you've eaten, even when you haven't.
liqour, on the other hand, is bad from the start, even if it doesn't feel like it. liquor makes you feel like you're a superhero on a quest for vengeance. sure, it makes you really talkative, and high-energy, and hilarious, but underneath all that is this edge of aggressiveness or something that i can't quite put my finger on, but it's creepy. liquor is darker than beer. in an evil sense. i woke up this morning with a hangover from drinking a bunch of rum, and it felt way more like coming off of a drug than it did having a beer-hangover. i was just bitchy, and hated everything, and felt like my whole life was worthless for something like five hours. i couldn't sleep all night last night, and whenever i did fall asleep i would have these crazy psychadelic nightmares. i've always had this reaction to liquor, but i was never a big beer drinker, so i never had anything to contrast it against. when i started drinking years ago, i immediately jumped into drinking vodka and whiskey and didn't really get into drinking beer at all until about 2 years ago. but now that i can contrast the two, it's really interesting to see how much closer drinking liquor is to something like doing drugs than it is to drinking beer. now i understand why people don't sit around and recreationally drink straight vodka with dinner, but drinking a beer is okay (socially, i mean). because there is really a difference. liquor makes you evil. of course, that doesn't mean i'm going to stop drinking it. actually it probably means i'll drink it even more, at least for the next three weeks.
i wish the blue hair thing had worked out. it would be awesome to have blue hair right now.
i have no idea what this post is about.
being drunk all the time is also sort of a time-accelerator. and i've definitely been doing a lot of drinking lately. i have mostly avoided hard liquor since the alcoholic winter of 2003, not really as a rule, but mostly just because it didn't appeal to me, a lot like how i didn't eat potatoes for years after eating them nearly every night for twelve months after first becoming a vegetarian. but lately i've had a chance to go back and hit the hard stuff again. and with a distanced perspective and a decent amount of drinking and being drunk under my belt, i can safely say that there really is a significant difference between drinking beer (even to excess) and drinking liquor. i always thought that it was just sort of an old wives' tale or something of the sort that liquor was "worse" than beer.
but based on a few drinking "experiments" i've recently conducted, i can drink beer all night long and not feel like my fucking face is fucking itself off like i can with liquor. drinking beer is fun. it makes you feel warm and fuzzy and giggly and no matter how much of it you drink (not counting drinking enough to die, which i didn't do) it mostly just makes you feel more fuzzy and giggly until the fuzziness equals dizziness and the giggliness equals opening your mouth to giggle and vomiting instead. for me, this is sort of a concern because i'm one of those vomitophobics (there are lots of things that make me throw up easily, and so i'm afraid of doing so, mostly because it's not fun). but i have ended up in said deplorable state as a result of overindulging in beer. and mostly you just feel like you're having a whole goddamn lot of fun until suddenly you're not having fun anymore. it's that simple. oh, and beer makes you feel like you've eaten, even when you haven't.
liqour, on the other hand, is bad from the start, even if it doesn't feel like it. liquor makes you feel like you're a superhero on a quest for vengeance. sure, it makes you really talkative, and high-energy, and hilarious, but underneath all that is this edge of aggressiveness or something that i can't quite put my finger on, but it's creepy. liquor is darker than beer. in an evil sense. i woke up this morning with a hangover from drinking a bunch of rum, and it felt way more like coming off of a drug than it did having a beer-hangover. i was just bitchy, and hated everything, and felt like my whole life was worthless for something like five hours. i couldn't sleep all night last night, and whenever i did fall asleep i would have these crazy psychadelic nightmares. i've always had this reaction to liquor, but i was never a big beer drinker, so i never had anything to contrast it against. when i started drinking years ago, i immediately jumped into drinking vodka and whiskey and didn't really get into drinking beer at all until about 2 years ago. but now that i can contrast the two, it's really interesting to see how much closer drinking liquor is to something like doing drugs than it is to drinking beer. now i understand why people don't sit around and recreationally drink straight vodka with dinner, but drinking a beer is okay (socially, i mean). because there is really a difference. liquor makes you evil. of course, that doesn't mean i'm going to stop drinking it. actually it probably means i'll drink it even more, at least for the next three weeks.
i wish the blue hair thing had worked out. it would be awesome to have blue hair right now.
i have no idea what this post is about.
a post about last week from my laptop that i wrote while i had no internet
I spent most of last week in kent, which, for once meant less blogging than being at home, based mostly on the fact that I was doing so many things on any given day in the real world that the amount of time I spent typing madly in the 697 basement was negligible.
I got up there on tuesday evening, thanks once again to the good graces of miss andrea sue, esq. and her hardy toyota corolla. she actually met my family and I at the chipotle in belden village, and we had a pretty pleasant low-key dinner together. the three or four times my parents and I and andrea have all had dinner together since we broke up a few years ago have been pointedly more enjoyable than any of the meals we shared together when we two were dating; yet another indication that that particular move was a good one. I’ve long since made up my mind on that point, but a little extra validation after the fact never hurt anyone.
I got a tour of her new digs afterwards. it’s such an awesome house. I’d seen a little of it back when her and I were looking at moving into it together before I got my original WSU acceptance letter back in 2005 (way back before the dinosaurs, seemingly) and I really loved it. I love it even more now. and bonus points for phenomenal acoustics in the wood-floored living room.
we shipped off from there to giant eagle in stow, where we met bowes and my cargo was transferred to his car (I had planned on staying up there for 5-6 days and so I was hauling this ridiculous case with my belongings and chages of clothes in it around with me). we got to sit in on andrea’s (apparent) first encounter with the robot check-out machine. she survived admirably. but then again, she didn’t have to weigh any produce…
everyone had “jobs” to go to in the morning, so they went to bed shortly thereafter, and if I remember correctly I stayed up until something absurd like 7am, looking up articles on vampire literature and chatting with V.
wednesday was one of the most pleasant days I’ve had in recent memory, despite the fact that our landlord’s mom showed up to do his laundry at 10am and woke me the fuck up after three hours of sleep. a few peanut butter sandwiches, a diet coke and some regina spektor later, I was up and about. we got together with john later at starbucks and had what was (at least to me) a pretty pleasant chill-out session necessitated by john’s waiting to show up until after we’d been there for an hour. it was somewhere also within this intervening hour that I once again had the realization that some girls are attractive and even cerebrally interesting. sometimes I forget this for weeks or months at a time, and this is probably for the best. however, now I’m back in full-on romantic-whiny mode, and it will probably last me for at least a few weeks if not longer.
from starbucks it was off to front campus, and an impromptu frisbee-toss and 2-on-2 ultimate game (as a rule, we travel pretty much everywhere in kent with a frisbee, so frisbee can happen anytime, anywhere). probably the most exercise I’ve had in months. also probably the worst attack I’ve had of being a disgusting, sweaty-ass human being in awhile. I decided to play the last few minutes of the game in bare feet, in the hopes that I would be able to run faster. in reality, this just led to me tripping over a divot and faceplanting in the dirt, and hurting my ankle not quite enough to call it a bonafide sprain, but enough that it would bother me the rest of the week and weekend. it actually sort of hurts right now.
having not eaten all day at that point, it was clearly time to hit chipotle again for about 1500 calories of meal-ness. hitting the patio at chipotle at sunset reminded me of the good old days of 2002-2004, and for once not the bad alcoholic-y parts, but the good parts.
thursday, by comparison, was pretty low-key. sat around a lot working on some things I needed to catch up on, for work and whatnot. I was supposed to go to see “prince caspian” with andrea later in the day, and ended up going to the plaza theatres with her and my erstwhile roommates. it was a good movie. a good sequel. certainly not reinventing the wheel in any sense, but a solid movie for people who liked the first one. it was also fun to watch because I had no idea what happened ahead of time because I’ve never actually read any of the chroincles of narnia (yeah, I know).
that night was the other night that I believe I stayed up reading about vampires and talking to V. this time it worked out a bit better because I actually got to sleep in a bit the next day. getting enough sleep is extra important when you’re sleeping on a too-short couch, and no matter how much sleep you get, it’s at least in some ways not enough regardless. this was another excellent day. got to meet with moe for the first time since christmas, and got to see another friend of mine that I haven’t seen for something like four years. we went to the raj in akron/the falls and had an absolutely enormous dinner, after getting to play frisbee with two really adorable five-or-so-year-old asian girls who were apparently wandering around town on their own.
then more actually-doing-nature/exercise-stuff ensued. we went to this park that I didn’t already know existed in the falls, which had a fantastic lookout point and an open field that put playing frisbee in towner’s woods to shame.
because the last two weeks of my life haven’t already had enough ice cream in them, we went to his custard place in the falls and hung out there for about two hours, and then, being stricken with the sort of night-madness that seems to set in a lot in kent on the weekends in the summer, we went to the zephyr. since I’ve obviously developed horrid impulse control in the last year or so, I managed to get myself moderately drunk in the 45 minutes or so that we were there. this made everything else that happened that night seem really fun. it also made it so I can’t remember what any of that fun stuff actually was.
saturday we had big plans to go up geneva to see moe play in his band. and we did. we almost even got there on time. but upon arrival, we decided for various reasons that it would be better to hang out at geneva-on-the-lake for a few hours. what followed was a parade of culturally-degrading shitsplosions (I’ll let you parse that yourselves). in short, “g on the l” was pretty terrifying, depressing, and hilarious all at once. but we remedied the situation a bit with ice cream and caffeine and by skipping rocks on the lake erie beach for an hour. we caught the end of moe’s concert after that, and then unleashed ourselves on northeast ohio, taking john’s borrowed car all along the north edge of ohio in search of something to do in classic undergrad-at-KSU style. in the process I had possibly the best donut I’ve ever had, after we drove all the way to presti’s in little italy and found it closed and ended up settling on some weird 24 hour donut shop in the middle of suburb hell. we did some other stuff until it got to be almost painfully late, and then bowes and I, both bereft of significant caloric intake for at least about 12 hours, hit luna’s in kent, confusing the hell out of the goths and wannabe punks. it made me wish I had stole parliament lights out of my mom’s purse or something.
then it was back home to canton on sunday morning for my cousin’s graduation party (from high school) and a few birthdays (all thrown together into one party because everyone in my family was born in late june/july). this ended up being really, really fun because it drew out pretty much everyone in my family, including a lot of people I only get to see once a year usually (on christmas). we were treated to the usual summer-in-ohio weather of sudden thunderstorms and deluges every few hours, but we made the best of it, and I at least for one had a good time.
today it was back to sort of cleaning things up and trying to figure out real-life things like buying a plane ticket and get an eye appointment for new glasses and how to afford being alive for the next four years. or at least the next three months or so. starting small helps.
I actually want to write up some in-depth reviews of a few new CDs and stuff like I used to do back in the day, but the fact is I haven’t listened to enough of them to have a decent opinion at the moment. so hopefully I’ll get to that. castlevania: symphony of the night was fantastic, though not as mind-bendingly original as it might have been had I not played aria of sorrow first. now I’m playing sword of mana on the GBA, a remake of final fantasy adventure, a game that I played obsessively as a kid. it’s really cool to see all the modern touches they’ve added without changing the heart of what was a really well-made and excellently paced but elegantly simple game. I’m getting so pumped about starcraft 2 though that it’s likely only a matter of time before I jump back into brood war and don’t play anything else until football seasons starts.
I’m liking the shins more after a few listens.
sooo…my “big surprise” I mentioned was that I was going to dye my hair blue for the rest of the summer. this was something I was really pumped about doing, right up there with the tattoo thing…however, it’s looking like with my natural hair color, the only way to really get a decent shade of electric blue would be by bleaching my hair first. and I’m hesitant to do that for two reasons:
1) my hair is already really thin and though it’s not falling out like I once thought, I’m still paranoid about doing anything that might cause it to do so.
2) I have really bad problems with dry scalp, and I’m worried that bleach would exacerbate that.
3) bleaching would definitely not be undoable in something like 2 months, unless I wanted to shave my head, which I am definitely not going to do. my other option would be going to work in august with part blue, part blonde and part brown hair. not cool.
that’s three reasons.
hopefully this will still happen sometime…just not now. I’ve always sort of wanted blue hair. sigh.
I got up there on tuesday evening, thanks once again to the good graces of miss andrea sue, esq. and her hardy toyota corolla. she actually met my family and I at the chipotle in belden village, and we had a pretty pleasant low-key dinner together. the three or four times my parents and I and andrea have all had dinner together since we broke up a few years ago have been pointedly more enjoyable than any of the meals we shared together when we two were dating; yet another indication that that particular move was a good one. I’ve long since made up my mind on that point, but a little extra validation after the fact never hurt anyone.
I got a tour of her new digs afterwards. it’s such an awesome house. I’d seen a little of it back when her and I were looking at moving into it together before I got my original WSU acceptance letter back in 2005 (way back before the dinosaurs, seemingly) and I really loved it. I love it even more now. and bonus points for phenomenal acoustics in the wood-floored living room.
we shipped off from there to giant eagle in stow, where we met bowes and my cargo was transferred to his car (I had planned on staying up there for 5-6 days and so I was hauling this ridiculous case with my belongings and chages of clothes in it around with me). we got to sit in on andrea’s (apparent) first encounter with the robot check-out machine. she survived admirably. but then again, she didn’t have to weigh any produce…
everyone had “jobs” to go to in the morning, so they went to bed shortly thereafter, and if I remember correctly I stayed up until something absurd like 7am, looking up articles on vampire literature and chatting with V.
wednesday was one of the most pleasant days I’ve had in recent memory, despite the fact that our landlord’s mom showed up to do his laundry at 10am and woke me the fuck up after three hours of sleep. a few peanut butter sandwiches, a diet coke and some regina spektor later, I was up and about. we got together with john later at starbucks and had what was (at least to me) a pretty pleasant chill-out session necessitated by john’s waiting to show up until after we’d been there for an hour. it was somewhere also within this intervening hour that I once again had the realization that some girls are attractive and even cerebrally interesting. sometimes I forget this for weeks or months at a time, and this is probably for the best. however, now I’m back in full-on romantic-whiny mode, and it will probably last me for at least a few weeks if not longer.
from starbucks it was off to front campus, and an impromptu frisbee-toss and 2-on-2 ultimate game (as a rule, we travel pretty much everywhere in kent with a frisbee, so frisbee can happen anytime, anywhere). probably the most exercise I’ve had in months. also probably the worst attack I’ve had of being a disgusting, sweaty-ass human being in awhile. I decided to play the last few minutes of the game in bare feet, in the hopes that I would be able to run faster. in reality, this just led to me tripping over a divot and faceplanting in the dirt, and hurting my ankle not quite enough to call it a bonafide sprain, but enough that it would bother me the rest of the week and weekend. it actually sort of hurts right now.
having not eaten all day at that point, it was clearly time to hit chipotle again for about 1500 calories of meal-ness. hitting the patio at chipotle at sunset reminded me of the good old days of 2002-2004, and for once not the bad alcoholic-y parts, but the good parts.
thursday, by comparison, was pretty low-key. sat around a lot working on some things I needed to catch up on, for work and whatnot. I was supposed to go to see “prince caspian” with andrea later in the day, and ended up going to the plaza theatres with her and my erstwhile roommates. it was a good movie. a good sequel. certainly not reinventing the wheel in any sense, but a solid movie for people who liked the first one. it was also fun to watch because I had no idea what happened ahead of time because I’ve never actually read any of the chroincles of narnia (yeah, I know).
that night was the other night that I believe I stayed up reading about vampires and talking to V. this time it worked out a bit better because I actually got to sleep in a bit the next day. getting enough sleep is extra important when you’re sleeping on a too-short couch, and no matter how much sleep you get, it’s at least in some ways not enough regardless. this was another excellent day. got to meet with moe for the first time since christmas, and got to see another friend of mine that I haven’t seen for something like four years. we went to the raj in akron/the falls and had an absolutely enormous dinner, after getting to play frisbee with two really adorable five-or-so-year-old asian girls who were apparently wandering around town on their own.
then more actually-doing-nature/exercise-stuff ensued. we went to this park that I didn’t already know existed in the falls, which had a fantastic lookout point and an open field that put playing frisbee in towner’s woods to shame.
because the last two weeks of my life haven’t already had enough ice cream in them, we went to his custard place in the falls and hung out there for about two hours, and then, being stricken with the sort of night-madness that seems to set in a lot in kent on the weekends in the summer, we went to the zephyr. since I’ve obviously developed horrid impulse control in the last year or so, I managed to get myself moderately drunk in the 45 minutes or so that we were there. this made everything else that happened that night seem really fun. it also made it so I can’t remember what any of that fun stuff actually was.
saturday we had big plans to go up geneva to see moe play in his band. and we did. we almost even got there on time. but upon arrival, we decided for various reasons that it would be better to hang out at geneva-on-the-lake for a few hours. what followed was a parade of culturally-degrading shitsplosions (I’ll let you parse that yourselves). in short, “g on the l” was pretty terrifying, depressing, and hilarious all at once. but we remedied the situation a bit with ice cream and caffeine and by skipping rocks on the lake erie beach for an hour. we caught the end of moe’s concert after that, and then unleashed ourselves on northeast ohio, taking john’s borrowed car all along the north edge of ohio in search of something to do in classic undergrad-at-KSU style. in the process I had possibly the best donut I’ve ever had, after we drove all the way to presti’s in little italy and found it closed and ended up settling on some weird 24 hour donut shop in the middle of suburb hell. we did some other stuff until it got to be almost painfully late, and then bowes and I, both bereft of significant caloric intake for at least about 12 hours, hit luna’s in kent, confusing the hell out of the goths and wannabe punks. it made me wish I had stole parliament lights out of my mom’s purse or something.
then it was back home to canton on sunday morning for my cousin’s graduation party (from high school) and a few birthdays (all thrown together into one party because everyone in my family was born in late june/july). this ended up being really, really fun because it drew out pretty much everyone in my family, including a lot of people I only get to see once a year usually (on christmas). we were treated to the usual summer-in-ohio weather of sudden thunderstorms and deluges every few hours, but we made the best of it, and I at least for one had a good time.
today it was back to sort of cleaning things up and trying to figure out real-life things like buying a plane ticket and get an eye appointment for new glasses and how to afford being alive for the next four years. or at least the next three months or so. starting small helps.
I actually want to write up some in-depth reviews of a few new CDs and stuff like I used to do back in the day, but the fact is I haven’t listened to enough of them to have a decent opinion at the moment. so hopefully I’ll get to that. castlevania: symphony of the night was fantastic, though not as mind-bendingly original as it might have been had I not played aria of sorrow first. now I’m playing sword of mana on the GBA, a remake of final fantasy adventure, a game that I played obsessively as a kid. it’s really cool to see all the modern touches they’ve added without changing the heart of what was a really well-made and excellently paced but elegantly simple game. I’m getting so pumped about starcraft 2 though that it’s likely only a matter of time before I jump back into brood war and don’t play anything else until football seasons starts.
I’m liking the shins more after a few listens.
sooo…my “big surprise” I mentioned was that I was going to dye my hair blue for the rest of the summer. this was something I was really pumped about doing, right up there with the tattoo thing…however, it’s looking like with my natural hair color, the only way to really get a decent shade of electric blue would be by bleaching my hair first. and I’m hesitant to do that for two reasons:
1) my hair is already really thin and though it’s not falling out like I once thought, I’m still paranoid about doing anything that might cause it to do so.
2) I have really bad problems with dry scalp, and I’m worried that bleach would exacerbate that.
3) bleaching would definitely not be undoable in something like 2 months, unless I wanted to shave my head, which I am definitely not going to do. my other option would be going to work in august with part blue, part blonde and part brown hair. not cool.
that’s three reasons.
hopefully this will still happen sometime…just not now. I’ve always sort of wanted blue hair. sigh.
"crashing the hobo hotel afterparty" or "human wrecking ball"
(for Bloomsbury):
There was no way around it. Because of the way the building was situated atop the hill, and the way said hill sloped away from the fire escape on the south face of said building, the first twenty feet or so of our ascent would have to be done in plain sight of anyone passing on the road to our right. For the rest of the climb, we’d have an unobstructed view of the street, and would be able to see any oncoming traffic before it saw us, but the buildings at our back would make the first few seconds nerve-wracking at best. At worst, the cops who rabidly patrolled this block between two and three in the morning while babysitting the crowds spilling out of the bars would notice and take exception to two guys scaling a fire escape on the back of the tallest building in town. And then there would be running and hiding. And maybe questioning. And then maybe some going-to-jail. All three of those things seemed unlikely or unthreatening enough though, that when Ernie – standing on top of a dug-up old concrete foundation block that served as a lookout point – waved his right arm in a “go” motion, I sprinted the few remaining feet to where the rusty ladder dangled about eight feet off the ground, above some prickly-looking thornbushes, and I jumped.
Over the thornbushes, fortunately. My feet, out in front of me in case I hadn’t jumped high enough, hit the brick wall at the same time that my hands grabbed the lowest rung of the ladder. I would have gladly hung there for a few moments and gotten a better grip, but I knew the time window was small, that breaks in traffic were rare this time of night, that I was currently in plain sight for anyone driving up the road, and that the footfalls I heard in the gravel behind me were the sounds of Ernie winding himself up to jump up to where I was currently hanging. So I heaved my body up until my shoulders were level with the bottom rung and then grabbed the second rung with my right hand and the third rung with my left. From there it was easy to swing my feet up onto the bottom rung and start scaling.
A few seconds and a few rungs later Ernie hit the bottom of the ladder and the whole thing shook back and forth under the weight. I was in the middle of reaching up to the next rung, and I quickly reached back down and secured a hold while I waited out the reverberations of the impact. It was probably fifteen rungs, all told, until the ladder emptied out onto the first landing, a metal grille about six feet long by six feet wide, and when the ladder stopped shaking I climbed the rest of the distance up to it. I pulled myself up onto the grille, and immediately rolled over onto my stomach, facing the street to the south. Ernie did the same.
We laid on the grille for a few seconds, in the watchful silence that makes up so much of urban exploration. A few cars slid by on the road, one a police cruiser, but he seemed more interested in the crowd milling about on the east side of the road and less interested in the usually abandoned lot and fire escape on the west side. This makes me feel like maybe my paranoia is unjustified; it’s not as if Kent has a Creepy Abandoned Building Investigation SWAT team that intentionally searches out urban exploration addicts. They’re way more likely to be interested in drunk and disorderly misbehavior. On the other hand, I’ve been nearly caught by urban exploring with people who treat breaking into a building like going to a frat party and act like they’re never going to get in trouble. So I guess I prefer a certain amount of paranoia.
After the cars pass, the now-visible road rolls out into the distance like a grey lolling tongue, empty at least for the next thirty seconds even if a cruiser would turn onto it from the closest side street moving at fifty miles an hour. We wind up three stories of the fire escape then stop again, crouching against the acrid glare of the orange floodlights on the roof of the building to the east of us. We become more and more visible as we ascend, but it also becomes less and less likely that anyone will bother looking high enough to see us. We wait out a beat-up Geo Metro and then climb the remaining floors of the fire escape.
The fire escape itself dead-ends into a window blocked off with thick wooden planks. In fact, just about every window on all four faces of the Y2K building is blocked off with thick wooden planks. Except one. Since our method of urban exploration doesn’t include or allow breaking when entering, we’ve effectively constrained ourselves into using that particular window for entry. Fortunately, it’s not terribly difficult to get to.
A short leap from the fire escape (made only slightly terrifying by the seven-story drop below your feet as you make it) to a small ledge where the building juts out a bit, creating a small landing three stories below where the rest of the building stops, and then a little tiptoeing across two-by-fours laid across rotting parts of said landing, and you’ve reached the window.
The hole in the window is a little smaller than I would prefer. The window next to it still has a huge plastic hose shoved through a broken pane – the remains of the last futile attempt at cleaning out the inside of the building a year or so ago. One pane in the entry-window is similarly broken, but there’s no hose. In we go.
There’s a lot of twisting, and yelping and straining and trying hard not to cut oneself on broken glass involved in entering. I become claustrophobic really easily, so this is tough for me. The lure of what we might find inside overrides my fear handily enough, though. Ernie, shorter and thinner than I am, comes through the window quite quickly after me.
It’s dark. The kind of dark you associate with a cave, not a building, and the transition is momentarily shocking. As my eyes adjust, I can pick out points in which the sulfur lights outside weasel their weak light in through mostly-blocked windows. The wan yellow light illuminates the inside of a building that could have been taken from a war zone. About ten feet in front of me there is something that would have once resembled a counter; otherwise, everything in the visible vicinity is crumbled, broken, and laying in piles on the floor. Exposed wires hang from the ceiling. Pipes end in cracked, nasty-looking tips halfway down the wall. There’s no way to traverse the floor silently, as plaster and God knows what else cracks and pops under our footsteps. We give up the idea of silence immediately. If there is anyone else in the building (homeless people and squatters are a constant concern in urban exploration), they’ll hear us before long no matter what we do. I honestly can’t begin to figure out how a building used as a restaurant and bar as recently as five years ago could be this absolutely destroyed inside.
After a few minutes of exploration, we find something on the floor that’s intact: a stairwell, on the far side of the building, that leads both up and down.
The next hour or so consisted of exploring the bottom six floors of the building by cell-phone light, and then finding a basement and exploring that. All the floors were pretty spectacularly destroyed, but it was worst on the ground floor, the floor that apparently had served as the main dance floor. We could still make out bits and pieces of late-90s-era wall decorations, and parts of what appeared to be the main bar were still intact. There was a pristine mini-fridge behind the bar with cans of Diet Pepsi with the early-90s Pepsi logo on them. It was a bit like looking into a time capsule and a scene from a post-apocalyptic movie at the same time.
Up on the eighth floor, the staircase abruptly ended, and it took a good amount of searching with our improvised cell-phone flashlights (which were by now rapidly running out of charge) before we found a ladder that actually came down in the middle of the floor from a hole in the ceiling. Climbing up to the ninth floor was easy enough, and there wasn’t much worth examining on the floor itself. Climbing up to the tenth floor was another matter entirely. The ladder continued up, but passed through a hole barely wide enough for me to fit through even if there hadn’t been a ladder going through the hole at the same time. I had a moment that combined claustrophobia with the plain fact that there just wasn’t enough room between the ladder and the wall behind me to reach my arms up to the next rung. Then I realized I could climb using just my legs. It’s not as if I was going to fall backwards.
At the top of the ladder was a small room with what looked like the heating or the cooling apparatus for the building in it. There were a number of tools scattered around on the floor. Then my light illuminated a sleeping pad and bag, and a half-empty bag of groceries. I started for a moment until I realized that the pile of belongings had been abandoned, or at least the room wasn’t occupied at the moment. Whoever was squatting here must be have been out for awhile, or had left for good. Either way, good news for us.
Based on looking at the building earlier from the outside, we guessed that we were in a small room that was actually built onto the roof. Which of course was our ultimate goal. What’s the point of going into a really tall building you’re not supposed to be in if you don’t go on the roof? There isn’t one.
A few minutes of work later, and we had propped open and extremely heavy window with a chair and slithered underneath the sill. Unfortunately for me, there was a pretty significant drop of at least five feet to the roof itself from the sill and I took the drop headfirst, splashing down into a puddle of collected rainwater. I advised Ernie to come out feet first. He obliged.
The entire rooftop, not unlike the landing we had traversed earlier, was pockmarked by holes, some of those holes covered by tarps. You could tell where the covered holes were by looking for accumulation of rainwater. Over the larger holes there were more two-by-fours, forming walkways. It occurred to me now for the first time that maybe those two-by-fours had all been so conveniently placed not by repairmen, but by our resident squatter.
The view from the highest hill in town, crowned by the tallest building in town, was fantastic. Everything was painted in sulfur-light haze on the ground, contrasted with the crystal clarity of a star-filled winter night, for miles in every direction.
I was facing off the north edge of the building, and strangely enough, as I looked down, I noticed that there was a small garden growing on plastic flats in the northeast corner of the roof. Another accoutrement of our squatter, no doubt.
I decided to take a few pictures, with the idea of maybe using one as the cover of the album I was working on. I was still a little skittish about using the flash, not knowing how visible it might be to people on the ground, so the pictures, by and large came out very blurry. And dark. And then I learned a valuable lesson, one that tourists learn by the thousands every year, and which I just happened to learn instead on a rotting rooftop while trespassing at four in the morning.
Do not try to walk and use your camera’s viewfinder at the same time. It is not the same as walking and using your own eyes. It makes you do things like misjudge where you’re putting your feet. And then you put them where they aren’t supposed to be. Like on a clearly rotted and unsafe ceiling beam, for instance.
A section of ceiling about three feet by three feet collapsed underneath my weight with a resounding crack, and down I went. I fell through the ceiling, dropped for what seemed like ten seconds in the agonizing slow-motion of adrenaline, and then hit something hard that crunched underneath me. My left side exploded in pain, and everything went black.
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