Blog Entries

Marvel Movies and Middle School

A.B. Kelly · June 11, 2025 · Blog Entries · child rearing, Marvel, marvel movies, mcu, movies, parenting, thunderbolts, tweens · No Comments

I’ve written a few times about the sweet spot of childhood. Roughly seven to ten. When they’re old enough to converse and plan and understand things, but still believe in the gentleness of humani…

Oh, who the hell am I kidding. The second bookend is when they turn into shithead tweenagers.

It’s a few years removed from the Santa Phase. Most people think kids love Santa from the get-go, but most pictures of two-year olds sitting on the old dude’s lap look like Martin Scorsese directing a Stephen King movie. Alexa, show me existential terror.

So the Santa sweet spot really doesn’t hit until four or so. When they’re two and three, they realize after the fact that sitting on old men’s laps begets untold rewards. By the time they hit four, they’re fully vested. And by eight, they’re already skeptical if not outright heretical. My daughter still claimed to believe, at ten, but that’s really only because we’ve all politely entered a don’t ask, don’t tell cone of silence on the subject.

She still expects to get paid for losing teeth, though. Back in my day, that racket ended around tooth number four.

I also don’t think any self-respecting fifth grader in 1985 would even toy with the notion of Santa or the Tooth Fairy or dinosaurs. In fact, I remember that at my elementary school, the sixth graders wrote the “response letters” to the letters the first and second graders had sent “to Santa.”

Whereas today, a school district would be sued just for acknowledging a cultural character known as Santa. Or dinosaurs.

So ironically, while Santa might be lingering longer than he had in the past, the “I won’t watch kid’s things” is happening earlier.

Unfortunately, my daughter seems to be barreling toward teendom with reckless abandon. Even though I, as a high school teacher, have known what’s coming, I still begrudgingly held on to hope.

Then along came Thunderbolts*.

We weren’t parents who plopped their child in front of shit we like long before the kid could follow what was going on. I tried her on a few Star Wars cartoons, but she didn’t watch the actual movies until she was seven or eight, and so far she’s still only seen the first two. Sure, if I just wanted her to “like” the franchise, I could’ve started her with Ewoks or Jar Jar Binks, but knowing Darth Vader is Luke’s father before watching Star Wars is just wrong on so many levels.

We also might be thrown in jail for not allowing her to watch the Harry Potter movies until after she’s read the books. She’s dallying on Goblet of Fire, so she’s still only seen the first three movies. She damn near fell off the couch while watching an episode of The Middle where Brick mentioned Ron and Hermione as one of the top romantic couples.

But Marvel movies were different.

I’ve read comic books to her since she was damn near in the womb. She knew who Spiderman and Captain America were before she knew who Peppa Pig was.

A funny aside about Peppa Pig. Of all the crap she watched when she was younger, this was the most egregious. I’m sure I opined on it at the time, but holy crap. Teletubbies would’ve been better than Peppa Pig, because at least the Teletubbies don’t really talk. When Bluey first came out, I almost wouldn’t let Daughter watch it because it ticked almost all the same boxes as Peppa Pig: animal families speaking in foreign accents with nine-minute episodes.

Anyway, Daughter was recently playing with/occupying my niece’s three year old daughter. Said toddler loooooves Peppa Pig, so Daughter watched alongside her.

“Oh my God, Dad,” Daughter says to me on a break. “Do you know how hard it is to sit through a bunch of episodes of Peppa Pig? That show is so stupid.”

Huzzah. I thought “Parents knew what they were talking about all along” didn’t come about till kids got into their thirties.

Unfortunately, that probably means the thing she’ll wait twenties years before reversing course on are Marvel movies.

We painstakingly curated her MCU viewing to line up with her ability to understand and be entertained. After going back and forth a million times, we finally broke the seal by letting her watch Ant-Man. It’s funny, not particularly violent, and the final battle taking place on his daughter’s toy train set would giver her buy in. As an added bonus, we live near San Francisco, so the scenery might speak to her more than New York.

She was meh on it. I don’t remember how old she was, but not old enough to follow the plot. Even the final battle didn’t really whet her whistle, because she hadn’t really tracked on how or why they were fighting . I don’t even think she realized that the giant trains flying at them were the same ones on the train set.

And upon second viewing for myself, I guess the funny stuff revolving around Michael Pena recapping capers in a Drunk History-esque voice over, probably wouldn’t land in a seven year old’s sweet spot. Daughter only identified with Cassie.

But over the next year or so, we dabbled in on some of the others. She liked Thor and the original Avengers movie. She was meh on the Iron Man movies and the first Captain America one. I thought she’d love Guardians of the Galaxy (in fact, I think we tried her on that before Ant-Man) because we have a ton of Rocket and Groot stuff. But she hated it because (again the things I don’t notice when I’m watching as an adult), they start out the movie doing some pretty despicable and violent things. Sure, that’s what makes the redemption arc work, but she didn’t like to see her plushies threatening and beat up people.

This was about the time WandaVision came out, which she loved, so she enjoyed Age of Ultron, and was especially happy that the plot of WandaVision prepared her for the fact that Quicksilver was going to die.

Of course, she mainly only liked the sitcom episodes of WandaVision, not the MCU episodes. Although she begrudgingly became vested in Kat Dennings’s character, who should really be used more.

The one thing I can pinpoint to a year was the first MCU movie she went to the theaters to see, which was the last Spiderman movie. I saw it first and prepped her for Aunt May dying. I thought it would be a good barometer for if she was going to be able to handle Infinity War and Endgame. She did okay with it. Me, not so much. Damn it if that isn’t one of the most painful death scenes in the entirety of the MCU. Marisa Tomei ought to win an Oscar for it. Someone call Jack Palance!

Aunt May’s death was acceptable because by the time she saw that movie in the theater, Daughter knew that the hero’s arc had to have a few low points, in order to heighten the eventual triumph. But she hadn’t seen the last two Avengers yet, so she didn’t know that some movies end with sacrifice. So MJ not remembering Peter probably hit her harder than Aunt May’s death.

But since she hadn’t seen Endgame yet, the second Spiderman was off limits. Sorry, kid, you can’t know how MJ and Peter got together in the first place. You can watch them hint at it in the first movie and forget about it in the third. But the second would tell you that Iron Man is dead, and that’s a no-no.

Even if Iron Man is no longer dead and is now Dr. Doom. Don’t get me started.

So her first MCU movie in the theaters was December, 2021, when she was 7 1/2. Put a pin in that date/age.

Of the movies that have followed that, I think the only other movie I’ve taken her to in the theaters was The Marvels. Partly from parental decisions – don’t really want her seeing her favorite character become an evil zombie in the second Dr. Strange, nor animal torture being a primary storyline of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 – and part of it was the general malaise of Phases IV and V. I’m sure she would’ve been fine with Love and Thunder or Quantumania, but nether seemed destined to drastically improve her appreciation for the genre.

Deadpool & Wolverine might. But if I’m trying to stick to age and maturity appropriateness, I should probably wait another five years. Or look the other way when she watches it at a slumber party, as my generation did with Porkys.

I thought Thunderbolts* was going to be different. As you can probably tell from its box office: it wasn’t.

It was sold as Marvel’s answer to DC’s Suicide Squad (or was it The Suicide Squad, a separate movie. I honestly don’t know if that’s the one I liked. The one with Starro), featuring a squad of criminals playing heroes, led by a hilarious, mouthy female antihero. I realize Florence Pugh’s Yelena is not in the same stratosphere as Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn, but she is still far and away the best new character introduced since maybe Phase II.

Instead, the movie was more of the drivel we’ve gotten for the past few years. The old knock on Marvel movies was they were just quip, quip, punch. Now they’re intense stare, morose introspection, punch.

But sure, Robert Downey Jr will fix everything.

Anyway, when I thought Thunderbolts* would be a toned down version of Suicide Squad, replacing the vulgarities with Marvel’s brand of quips, with Florence Pugh carrying every scene like she did in both Black Widow and Hawkeye, I thought it would be right up Daughter’s alley. Unfortunately, I forgot to calibrate Daughter’s preferred alley up from age ten to age eleven. I forgot that she’s on the cusp of middle school. And middle schoolers, far and wide, are terrible.

I taught middle school once. Once. As in one year. Right now, my commute is about an hour. I could work closer to where I live if I were willing to teach middle school again. Nope. I’d rather put 3,000 miles a month on my car than deal with those cretins.

The one year I taught, I had finally found a groove, started to establish some rapport, until we came back from spring break. It was a complete shitshow. When I mentioned this to one of the experienced middle school teachers she just shrugged. “Sure. It’s fourth quarter of seventh grade. They’re turning into eighth grade bitches.”

My daughter’s not there, yet. Thankfully. But every time I have to repeat her name three times just to get her to look up from her phone, I know she’s hurtling that direction. Her school district starts middle school in sixth grade. While I think it’s a smart idea, because after six years, she needs a change of scenery and an infusion of new friends, the drawback is an impending three years of middle school hell instead of my own two years’ worth.

But I sure got a preview when I excitedly asked her if she wanted to go see Thunderbolts*. And no, I didn’t enunciate the asterisk. Maybe that would’ve helped.

Instead, I got a very tepid “Not really.” I tried to up the ante a bit by offering the theater she likes where they serve a full menu. At the age of eight, she would’ve sat through Gandhi to go to the milk shake theater. At eleven, little could sway her.

Her first counter offer was that we leave her home while we go watch a two-hour movie. Might as well shoot for the stars, huh? The most we’ve ever left her alone has been maybe ten minutes while we go get fast food or gas up the car. But she’s already trying on that eternal teenage game of encouraging the parents to leave the house.

(Editor’s note: Obviously, if you’re an official of the State of California, we’ve never left our 11-year old child home alone for ten minutes. And she still rides in a car seat, as (I shit you not) they now want to make law should continue until the child is sixteen fucking years old. I better make it backward facing, just to be safe. Who cares if she’s over five feet tall.)

She continued her one-sided negotiation by requesting we take her to grandma’s. We countered with “We weren’t really asking if you wanted to go. We were telling you we’re going to the movies.”

So mark the end of her “wants to go see Marvel movies in the theater with her loving parents” phase as Thunderbolts*. From late 2021 to early 2025. And that’s likely only because the writers’ strike meant only one movie came out last year. If we measure in terms of actual movies she wanted to see alongside her Marvel-geek of a father, it was a whopping two. Maybe I should’ve taken her to Quantumaniai while she was still in the sweet spot.

And with Thunderbolts* being closer to Eternals than it was Suicide Squad, my chances of dragging her to the Fantastic Four movie are virtually nil. Unless I can get Mr. Fantastic’s time machine.

The one silver lining of this summer’s blockbusters is that she still wanted to see the new Lilo & Stitch.

I better take advantage of it. By the time she’s an eight grade bitch, she’ll want nothing to do with that “baby shit.”

The sweet spot is over. The middle school spot is approaching.

Whether we’re ready or not.

A Great Basin and a Lonely Road

A.B. Kelly · October 23, 2024 · Blog Entries, Musings · Driving, Great Basin National Park, Highway 50, national park, nevada, travel, travelblog · No Comments

Earlier this year, I visited five national parks.

Why not add a sixth?

I had the first week of October off as a quarter break, and my mom had always wanted to see Great Basin National Forest. I’d always wanted to drive Highway 50, the “Loneliest Road in America,” so it seemed a great time to tick both of those boxes.

I didn’t bring Daughter on this trip, since she had school and Great Basin wasn’t high on her list. This worked out better for me, since there’s no way she would’ve done Highway 50. If she were included in this trip, we would’ve flown into Salt Lake City.

So her path to 63 is still stalled out at six. If you can call it “stalled out” if she’s added four in a span of seven months. And we might or might not hit Joshua Tree when we visit SoCal for Christmas. Stay tuned…

Baker, Nevada

Although we didn’t fly into SLC, we did in fact circle through there to get to Great Basin. We hit a Boise State Football game and the Golden Spike National Monument (where the first transcontinental railroad was connected) just north of Salt Lake. The whole round trip was over 2,000 miles. Good thing I had a rental car.

So we actually started at the eastern edge of Highway 50, coming in from Utah, which was the opposite of how I always envisioned driving it. Who knew a road goes BOTH directions?

My initial thought, before even getting into Nevada, was that Highway 50 might be the loneliest for humans, but not for bugs. We went over a mountain that Google tells me is called King Top, but which at the time I could only assume was the River Styx, shortly after sundown. Holy Hell! How many plagues deep are we when the locusts kamikaze against the front of your car?

I had literally washed the windshields an hour earlier.

We stayed at a place right on the border of Utah and Nevada, calling itself a hotel and casino, with a very liberal use of both words.

And by “right on the border,” I mean it pretty much straddled it. The hotel portion of the property was in Utah, while the casino portion, obviously, was on the Nevada side. Bear in mind, Nevada and Utah are in different time zones. They told us our check out time was 10:00 am. I didn’t have the wherewithal to ask WHICH 10:00 am, considering the hotel office was in the casino portion.

This played havoc with my electronic devices not just when we were at the hotel, but the entire next day. My car believed we were in Pacific Time, while my watch thought we were in Mountain Time. My phone, which was “roaming” for the first time since the Bush administration, tried to split the difference with this beauty of a save screen:

While it seems like it’s a standard screen for traveling, I’m ninety percent sure it hadn’t been giving me the “Local/Home” split the previous day when we were in Idaho and Utah, which are firmly in the Mountain Zone instead of straddling the two zones. Plus this split times showed up the entire day we were in the Great Basin National Park, which is 100% in the Pacific Zone, but I’m guessing, being on the eastern side of a mountain, was getting all of its (roaming) cell phone signal from Utah.

The casino, meanwhile, consisted of about twenty slot machines that didn’t pay out. They didn’t even print a ticket. When you wanted to cash out, you had to go get the bartender to come zero out the machine, then go back to the bar and get some cash out of the till for you. I usually like going from slot to slot, but didn’t want to keep pulling her away from her primary job.

The hotelish/casinoish also had a restaurant. Ish. That was one of the main reasons we booked it. Unfortunately, we were informed when checking in that the restaurant is open 8:00 am to 9:00 pm, every day. Except for tomorrow.

I don’t know if the “except for tomorrow” was because it was a Sunday night. Or the last day of the month. Or because the bartender had to empty out the slot machines. All I know is that we were only staying one night. The person checking us in knew we were only staying one night. So the “except for tomorrow” information, for us, might as well have meant never. She might’ve wanted to lead with the fact that there was no breakfast for us instead of telling us the regular hours that we would never encounter.

Fortunately, we found a solid spot for breakfast in the town of Baker the following morning. I say “fortunately” because it was the only spot in town. If it had totally sucked, it was still where we were having breakfast.

But it didn’t suck.

There were only three things on the breakfast menu, along with three things on the lunch menu. I was a little skeptical when those three breakfast items were a sandwich, a burrito, and a quiche. Those all seem rife for being torn out of a plastic bag and thrown in the microwave. Damn you, Starbucks!

I was thrilled, then, when what I can only assume to be the sole proprietor spent ten minutes in the back putting some TLC into our breakfast. The sandwich featured an egg/cheese “brick” between a cheddar biscuit, both items of which were homemade. The brick didn’t sound appealing, and I’m still not entirely sure how it was made, but the texture was fine and the flavor was good. Kinda like a quiche that’s been run through a vice. And the cheddar biscuit, holy crap! This woman might be the sole reason Red Lobster went out of business.

Plus a very stripped down espresso menu. Lattes and cappuccinos plus a handful of Torani syrups if you absolutely must. I enjoy a coffee shop that caters to people who enjoy coffee instead of sugar bombs.

They didn’t have dinner on the menu, but we noticed there was a back room with a full bar, so I’m guessing when all two hundred town inhabitants get off work, they enter through the other side of the building where they see a dinner menu. Outsiders have to go to the Mexican restaurant, which was the only other dining establishment in town.

We also frequented what might’ve been the only store in town – it had everything from books and clothes to some minor groceries. All in one room.

But the most important thing we got there, the item that ended up dictating the course of the journey back home, was free. A Highway 50 stamp passport. To complete it, you have to stop at all the random little hamlets you’d normally blow past.

Challenge accepted!

Great Basin National Park

In terms of how prepared I was going into a new national park, Great Basin was down on the “I’ve vaguely heard of it” end of the spectrum. My mom was the driving factor here, so I let her do the research.

Her primary interest in Great Basin was not the lakes and mountains and shit I usually focus on, but for astronomy. Being up in the high desert with nary an electrical light in sight, this park is “certified dark sky” and known for stargazing. We had some great views of the sky the night before, especially the few times the damn bugs got out of the way.

There’s an observatory in the park. Unfortunately it’s a) primarily in use at night, and b) closed to the public. At multiple locations, we asked, just out of curiosity, where in the park the observatory was and the only response we ever got was “it’s closed to the public.” Even when we assured them we weren’t going to go bother the scientists or aliens, we just wanted to know where the heck it was, we were told “only the employees can go there.”

Sheesh, even Area 51 has fucking signs!

Great Basin also has a solar telescope, which, follow me here, is in use during the daytime. Even better, it’s accessible to the public. Because the aliens are at work during the day. Unlike the nighttime telescope, employees actually answered questions about the solar telescope and we only had to ask three or four times to learn that the it was located behind the visitor’s center.

Unfortunately, when we went there, we saw no telescope. We hiked up a trail and still no telescope. We returned to the visitor’s center and asked the same employee if we somehow missed it, she responded, “Oh, sorry, it’s only set up Thursday through Sunday.”

Clearly E.T. and the chef at the casino like to take days off together.

Another of the park’s main draws is also currently off limits, but for a different reason. The Lexington Arch, which looks spectacular, currently has a washed out road, adding a couple miles each direction to the regular trail that was already five miles. The wash-out happened in 2013. So I’m sure they’ll get around to it, you know, sometime. Unfortunately, up to this point, the only thing they’ve had a chance to do is change all the permanent maps to tell us the road is “temporarily” washed out.

Fortunately the other main draw of the park, the Lehman Caves, are fully accessible and open midweek. Only two tours with twenty tickets each, so get there early.

I actually thought we had missed the first tour, because the tour was at 10:30 and my watch said it was 10:40. I said as much to my mom, prompting someone nearby to remind me that my watch was in a different time zone. Great, we still have close to an hour!

Unfortunately, the 10:30 tour was already sold out, so we bought tickets to the 1:30 tour, which of course we were going to be an hour early for because of the Baker, NV time warp.

The caves were fun, as are most caves. The stories of Absalom Lehman, who “discovered” the caves (that had been in use by Native Americans for a thousand years), were hilarious. He built a shack over the entrance and, for a dollar, sold you a candle and let you in. He said if you weren’t back in 24 hours, he’d come looking for you.

He also, unfortunately, had a rule of “If you can break it, you can take it,” leading to a number of broken stalactites and stalagmites. Although it does give us a good barometer for how long the various columns took to form. The caves became a national monument in 1922, so we can assume the “new growth” in this photo represents about a century of progress:

Which, of course, just makes the rest of the cave all that much more impressive. So, thanks, I guess, Mr. Lehman? Your assholery destruction of nature’s majesty helps us… appreciate it more?

We took the “short tour,” which only goes into the first chamber, then returns to the entrance. There’s a longer one that was finishing shortly after ours, coming out of a different exit. I didn’t see it as an option on any of the boards, so I assume it needs to be booked ahead of time online. I’ll be checking that out before my next visit. I think it would’ve been much cooler.

The other thing on my “return list” (which is usually the purpose of these unreasearched first trips) are some hikes. The only paved road in the park, which diverts just before the Lehman Caves, is to Wheeler Peak. It kinda looks like Half Dome, and was formed the same way. Although the hike up to the peak doesn’t look nearly as precarious as its Yosemite brethren.

No, that’s not the hike I want to do next time. I don’t care that it’s a standard hike instead of cables that will kill you if you let go. It’s nine miles and a 3,000-foot elevation gain, starting at 10,000 feet. No thanks.

The hike I want to take, instead, scrambles up the snow and rocks toward the front of the mountain. Unlike the behemoth hike around the back side, this one’s “only” five miles with a 1,000-foot elevation gain. That might be doable if I was prepared, and now that I think of it, isn’t Half Dome cooler from the front than the back? Being at the base of a cliff seems more majestic than on top of it. Especially when I can already get views like this without hiking anywhere:

We almost did a shorter hike past a couple of alpine lakes, but opted not to. We only had a little water and no sunscreen, and that sun was scorching up there. It was 100 degrees in the valley that day, and when there isn’t a lot of tree cover, 10,000 feet doesn’t give you a ton of air pressure protecting you, either. As one of my college girlfriends remarked, snow should melt on the mountains “since they’re closer to the sun.”

I wasn’t dating her for her brain.

Plus, we weren’t sure how long the hike would take and we’d already spent primo bucks (8!) for a cave tour in a couple hours. So next time I hit Great Basin, I’m doing a loop that includes both lakes and the glacier on the moraine.

After the park, we hit an archeological dig that would’ve been really cool when it was being excavated. Unfortunately, that was in the early 1990s. When they were done, they filled all the dirt back in, in order to “save it for future generations.” Who will have to dig it up again.

What we were left with was one very torn-apart booklet that explained where in a wide-open desert scrubfield there were some 800-year-old adobe buildings are buried.But we just have to take the book’s word for it.

Highway 50

Finally we headed north to Ely, which I thought was pronounced Elly, but my mom thought was pronounced Eli. We were both wrong. The locals say Ee-Lee. Far be it from me to criticize from afar, but I think that is, obviously, the worst of the options.

Then again, I’ll acquiesce to their demands. They’ve got enough problems. First of which is living in Ely.

Not just because it’s a small town. There are plenty of small towns I would love to live in. Along the Mendocino Coast, maybe, where you have beaches and cliffs and forest all coming together. Maybe someplace in the foothills of Oregon or California, where it only snows two or three times a year – not enough to get sick of and it all melts away so you never have to shovel. The Big Island of Hawaii has some one or two-road towns that could be called paradise.

But high desert amongst the sagebrush? No thanks.

At least Ely had more than one street in their town. The other towns we visited didn’t have that.

Technically, most had at least one street that ran parallel to Highway 50, with some connectors that are best referred to as alleys, but Ely (a town of almost 4,000 residents!) actually had a legitimate T intersection!

Take that, Eureka!

I shouldn’t bag on Eureka. We had a breakfast there that rivaled the one we had in Baker. Same general menu, breakfast sandwiches and burritos, but the sandwich was “build your own.” I opted for a croissant with egg, ham, peppers, onions, and avocado. Solid!

Their coffee options were substantially foofier than in Baker. Options like chocolate hazelnut, cinnamon apple, and chai. While I enjoy a good cappuccino, gimme that chocolate hazelnut.

How did we find this hidden gem? When we got our passport stamped in Ely the night before, the guy at the visitor’s center told us about it. It’s his favorite spot when heading west. So I guess they don’t talk smack about Eureka’s lack of perpendicular streets. When your only claims to fame are being on the loneliest road in America, I guess you develop an affinity for each other.

Unfortunately, the stamp people in Eureka didn’t then give us a secret gem in Austin. I was hoping we’d learn a secret handshake by the end, but most of them were just “here’s your stamp, wanna buy something?”

I also noticed that most of the businesses in those smaller eastern towns sported a “Highway 50 stamp here” sign out front. It’s clearly a draw. However, as we made it farther west, into towns that consider themselves exurbs of Reno don’t give a shit. In those towns we had to go way off Highway 50 to find the Chamber of Commerce or something similar. It’s a good thing I didn’t do my first plan of driving west to east, because I wouldn’t have realized there was a passport until I was halfway done.

Austin was probably the cutest of the towns. It’s more or less smack dab in the middle. A couple houses on the outskirts have “Speed Trap” signs and, sure enough, there was a cop sitting right there on Main Street as we inched through. Part of me thinks it was a setup not to give out tickets, but to get us to slow down enough to spend some money in their town.

After all, I doubt there’s a lot of crime in this town with a population of… huh, Google gives me results ranging from a high of 167 to a low of… one? One person? Is the cop the only inhabitant? Then where the hell do all the other employees in the town live? In the abandoned castle on the outskirts of the town? It’s not like there were a ton of suburbs. Huh, maybe he really was looking to hand out tickets, because he isn’t paying his salary with resident taxes.

As for Highway 50 itself, I’ve been on far lonelier highways. A couple of them on this very trip. Interstate 84, for instance, on the way from Boise to Salt Lake City. Or, for what it’s worth, the portion of Highway 50 in western Utah. Minus the bugs.

What Highway 50 has that those other highways don’t have, though, are the far-off views. While it looks like it’s flat, you’re actually spending large portions of the journey on long, sloping valleys. This allows you to see ten or twenty miles in front of or behind you at any given time. And the road is straight as all get-out. While there might or might not be other cars in that long vision (usually there were), they were pretty damn far off, and it’ll take forever for them to reach you.

As for cars going the same direction as you, let’s just say it was pretty easy to determine when it was safe to pass them. What was a little bit harder was to determine how fast you were going. Fortunately you should be able to see a cop coming from miles away. Assuming there were more cops on Highway 50 than the “Speed Trap” guy in Arthur. I don’t recall seeing many.

According to the stamp passport, this road got its “Loneliest” designation in 1986 when Life magazine sent some reporters to do a vignette. I guess Baby Jessica hadn’t fallen in the well yet and they needed some hard-hitting picto-journalism.

Kinda makes sense since Life was known for taking grandiose pictures and Highway 50 certainly has majestic visuals. However, the story that went with it said you shouldn’t undertake the journey unless you had desert survival skills. Sheesh, I know 1980s cars weren’t known for distance or longevity, but the longest you ever go between civilization is maybe seventy miles.

Although now that I think about it, my first car was a used 1983 Chrysler LeBaron and that thing would’ve probably only overheated twice in that seventy miles. On a plus side, the hour-and-a-half it would take me to drive that distance at the federally-mandated 55 miles per hour would be almost enough to get the air conditioner to start working.

Still, you can see why they were so keen to push the toddler down the well if all they’ve got in the planning room is “Hey, how about we cover a really long, straight road?”

Nowadays, you can zip through it in a handful of hours without finishing your audiobook or ever stopping for gas.

Although you’re going to want to stop for gas early. The closer we got to Reno, the closer we were to California.

And than means higher gas prices.

Welcome back to civilization, Bitch!

Summer Vacation on Channel Islands

A.B. Kelly · September 6, 2024 · Blog Entries, Musings · Channel Islands, family vacation, national park, summer vacation, travel, travelblog, Vacation · No Comments

For the summer after my daughter’s fourth grade, year, we used a perk available to all fourth graders to get into national parks for free. After visiting Crater Lake and Lassen Park on consecutive days (not to mention a Treehouse Resort), we were off to Southern California for a jaunt out to the Channel Islands with my mom.

Channel Islands is one of those less-visited national parks. Shocking considering you have to book a boat long in advance, then be at the dock, which is a good hour outside of L.A., by 7:00 am..

Pretty sure they aren’t selling park-specific annual passes.

Come to think of it, I’m not sure Chanel Islands has an entry fee at all. You pay for the boat and it takes you out to an island. Perhaps the boat ride in counts as a de facto entry fee. Except the boat is operated by a private company. Do they bury some graft for the government inside the price of the boat? If so, we totally got shafted. In addition to Daughter’s fourth-grade status, my mom has a lifetime senior pass. Bogus.

If I ever make it to American Samoa, I’m going to demand that the airplane trip is free.

Since the boat ride takes an hour or more, you’re only allowed to visit one island per trip. “Fortunately” for us, a couple of the islands were closed for refurbishment or something, so we only had to decide between two islands. I don’t know how one refurbishes an island, so if you happen to check out Santa Rosa Island after it reopens in 2025 or 2026, you can let me know if it’s retrofitted for 5G or something. I sometimes still get crappy reception despite having the Covid vaccine.

My mom originally wanted to do Anacapa Island, which is the smallest island and the one closest to land, because she believed it was the basis for the book Island of the Blue Dolphins. However, we noticed on the website that people had to use a ladder and large staircase just to get from the boat to the island. That would wipe my mom, in her late 70s, out for the day, and it didn’t look like there was a ton of shade. Wouldn’t be very fun to have her sitting there baking and exhausted while Daughter and I explored the island.

In addition, Anacapa Island has a beautiful selling point of being a bird sanctuary, making it loud and smelling of bird crap. Five star accommodation all the way.

Finally, we found out that it’s actually San Nicolas Island that is of Blue Dolphin fame. It’s inaccessible to the public, which seems like a huge marketing miss.

So to sum up: Anacapa means exhaustion, sunburn, bird poop, and nary a dolphin nor a shipwrecked Native American in sight. Santa Cruz Island, you’re the winner!

There’s a ton of things to do on Santa Cruz. There’s kayaking and there’s hikes and there’s… um… swimming.

Oh, and a visitor’s center. Although don’t expect a visitor’s center like other parks, which are ten percent geology information and ninety percent store. The Santa Cruz Island visitor’s center was basically somebody’s house from a hundred years ago, in which they’d put some information about the Native Americans who once lived on the island. They did have the passport stamp, which made Daughter happy, but they didn’t have a single thing you could buy. What’s the point of visiting a national park if I can’t buy a cheesy “Go Climb a Bird Poop” t-shirt?

The boat company’s headquarters also had the passport stamp available, so Daughter managed to get two different stamps. I told her she should get an Anacapa stamp, too, but she only wants stamps that represent where she’s actually been. So while stamps from both the north and south entrance was a goal at Lassen, she’s not getting some cheap-ass reflection of a place she’s never been.

Damn, I was hoping I could just ebay the Virgin Islands.

If left to my own devices on Santa Cruz Island, I would’ve kayaked. They go into caves that look beautiful. Unfortunately, the ten-year-old and late-seventies-year-old I was with weren’t likely to be the strongest kayakers. If it was on a calm lake, I could maybe take a kayak by myself and hope that the two of them together in one kayak could get where they needed to be, but in the ocean, I assume the best case scenario would be the waves washing them back to shore. Not sure I want to envision the worst case scenarios.

So hiking it was. There were a number of different directions to go. One trail goes along the north side of the island, first to a couple of lookouts, then to another port (Prisoners Harbor) where we could have taken the boat, but which doesn’t have a visitor’s center, so why bother? The other trail goes up and over the middle of the island to a more secluded inlet (Smuggler’s Cove). That looked cool, and as an added bonus, we might be able to see the Island of the Blue Dolphins from it. But that hike was listed as strenuous, which didn’t sound appealing less than a week after I nearly died on a similar hike at Crater Lake.

Okay, fine, I didn’t really almost die. I just took a really long time to get where I was going and felt like an out-of-shape almost-fifty year-old the whole time.

So we opted for the first trail. In addition to only being “moderate,” there were a number of spots along the way where we could double back in case the going got too tough. Those roads back were a shorter distance and a smoother grade than the hike up. You might question why we would have opted for the steeper and longer distance in the first place, but that’s because the view was better, hiking along the cliffs over the ocean instead of a dirt path amongst the sagebrush.

And boy howdy, hiking at sea level! OMG, I could breathe! I kinda forgot about that whole thin vs thick air thing. But all of a sudden I could hike uphill without stopping every hundred paces. I wasn’t trying to parse out my water as if it was the last bit of moisture on earth. Daughter and I did a five-mile round trip and I was still at damn near 100%. If I had known it was going to be like that, I would’ve opted for the strenuous hike over to Smuggler’s Cove.

The hike to Prisoner’s Harbor, meanwhile, was never gonna happen. Santa Cruz Island is not as small as it first appears. We started on the northeast corner of the island and Prisoner’s Harbor was barely at the halfway mark. I figured it was maybe five miles away. But the round trip between the two is 34 miles! Kinda hard to hike that and be back in time to catch the 4:00 boat home.

My mom didn’t make the full five miles. After we saw Cavern Point, the first destination on the hike, we were faced with that first return route. She kept going back and forth about whether she wanted to press on to Potato Harbor with us or return to the harbor and wait for us. I didn’t think she should come with us but didn’t want to come across as a “go away” dickhead. At the same time, I think she also wanted to go back but didn’t want to sound like a “Screw you guys, I’m going home” asshole. What followed was the most passive aggressive debate ever.

In the end, she finally returned to port and let us venture on by ourselves. When we reconvened at the end of the day, we all agreed it was the best option. That turn-back point wasn’t even halfway to Potato Harbor and the path back wasn’t quite as pedestrian as it seemed. It was mostly level, but there were a few spots where the path was thin and steep, cut into granite that didn’t provide a lot of cushion for the pushin’ (of my feet).

Fortunately I had a walking stick.

Daughter had wondered about hiking sticks when she saw a number of people using them at Crater Lake. She asked what they help with, and unfortunately, I wasn’t much help.

In truth, I’ve wondered my whole life how much of the help people gain from hiking sticks are the placebo effect. At best, it maybe helps keep your arms in motion , stops you from getting to where you’re just dragging your knuckles behind you like a gorilla. But it’s odd that ninety percent of hiking tools are designed to lessen the weight and effort, then they top it off with a clunky, anti-aerodynamic deadweight.

But my mom had some of the lightweight collapsible poles, so I let Daughter try them out. She used them like ski poles, swinging both out in front of her, staking them on the ground, then walking through them before moving them back in front. If only this path had some flag-gates to slalom through.

When we parted from my mom, she took one walking stick, we took the other. This might seem like yet another dick move by her son, taking the support away from the elderly, but again, bringing both sticks just makes more burden. Even if they’re collapsible, she was already carrying a water bottle and a backpack. Gotta keep at least one hand free.

And yeah, for the most part, I still don’t get them. They don’t seem to help with balance or momentum. Now that I’m older, they helped a little on the downhill. I put it in front of me to slow down gravity’s momentum. But I mostly see people using them on the uphills, as if their upper body strength is going to be the thing that drags them up to the upper echelons. This ain’t rock-climbing, people.

Daughter and I went on to Potato Harbor, which could either be named for being in the shape of a potato or because that’s where potatoes once grew or were delivered or washed ashore after a shipwreck. I heard multiple explanations, and everyone spoke with absolute certainty that their explanation was correct. Shocking that in a country where less than five percent of the people change their mind from one election to the next, everybody would be certain that their explanation of Potato Harbor is the correct one.

Is it a Potato? Is it a Harbor? The world may never know.

Unless you voted for Dan Quayle, in which case it’s Potatoe Harbor.

Boy, I would’ve been a hilarious blogger in 1992!

The weirdest part of the Channel Islands trip was what came after we finished our hike. It was around 2:00 and our boat back to shore was at 4:00. Not enough time to do another hike or anything. But two hours is quite a long time to occupy ourselves with only a few park benches and informational signs.

Daughter wanted to go in the ocean, so my mom and I hung out on the beach. I made it more than a couple paragraphs in my Jack Reacher book this time, which I’d failed to do when she went “swimming” in Lassen. Not that Daughter was better at occupying herself in the water here. But this time Grandma was there to take the brunt of her “Come play with me.”

As we sat there, more hikers came back. Then the kayaks all came back. A few of those kayakers didn’t seem much more adept than my mom or daughter would’ve been. Seriously, people, how hard is it to get to shore in the goddamn ocean? There are waves coming in, for pete’s sake.

The beach grew more and more crowded as everybody found themselves in a holding pattern after finishing their activities. In most national parks, you can drive out whenever you feel like it. All done for the day? Great. Leave now and grab dinner outside the park instead of whatever crap they’re serving there. Suddenly decide that hiking at sea level was easy peasy and you wanna try Smuggler’s Canyon? Go for it! So long as you’re willing to leave the park after dark.

But on the Channel Islands, you’ve already pre-booked the time at which you can leave the park. One boat leaves at 4:00 and the other at 4:30. Which means a whole lot of sitting around waiting for said boat. Most of us were lined up and rarin’ to go as soon as that bad boy appeared on the horizon.

At least there was a beach to enjoy while we wait. A rocky beach that might slice your feet up, but a beach nonetheless.

But the Channel Islands were lovely. Simple hikes, ocean breezes, and allegedly some caves you can kayak to.

I only have two complaints. One is that we didn’t get to see an Island Fox. The Channel Islands are considered the Galapagos Islands of the North because they all have their own breeds of certain animals. The main one is the Island Fox, which is a different species on each island. The websites implied they were all over the place and would be easy to see one. Not so much. Perhaps if we camped there, they’d all come out in the evening, but we searched the whole way down from Potato Harbor and couldn’t find one.

There’s an island-specific blue jay, as well. We might have seen one of those, but I couldn’t tell for sure. However, I can verify that we saw Huginn and Muninn conspiring before sending some messages back to Odin.

My other complaint is about the visitor’s center. Not the visitor’s center on the actual island. That one I understand. It’s sparse with nothing to buy because the island is pack-in/pack-out. Can’t really have the usual commerce in that environment, to say nothing of the difficulty it would require to boat your employees in and out every day. On a boat owned by a private company that is currently selling every seat.

However, there is another visitor’s center. It’s back on the dock in Ventura. As far as I can tell, it’s got all the usual shirts and knick-knacks and stickers emblazoned with the park’s logo.

I say “As far as I can tell,” because the visitor’s center is only open from 8:30 am to 5:00 pm. Our morning boat left Ventura at 8:00 am and our return boat left Channel Islands at 4:00 pm, with a travel time of a little over an hour. Which means, follow me here, people who visit the park cannot go the park’s visitor’s center. What the hell? They should name it the non-visitor’s center.

Fortunately we live in the internet age, so when I returned home, I ordered some Channel Island stickers for Daughter’s passport. Plus a little coin for myself.

But really, it feels kinda cheap to order these things online. The whole point of the passport is to get us to visit those parks. Not to get us to order shit online.

Or maybe spending money is precisely its goal. Doesn’t matter where.

And, voila!, it’s time to cross American Samoa off the list!

Summer Vacation in Lassen Park

A.B. Kelly · September 5, 2024 · Blog Entries, Musings · family vacation, Lassen, Lassen National Park, national park, summer vacation, travel, travelblog, Vacation · One Comment

Last time I wrote about my family vacation to southwestern Oregon, en route to Crater Lake.

Ever since we took her to Rocky Mountain National Park, she’s been obsessed with visiting them all. As soon as I can figure out the road map to American Samoa and Virgin Islands, we’ll get right on that.

In the meantime, we hit some of the ones in California.

Of course, her main goal in visiting these parks is to procure stamps and stickers for a passport we bought her. Each visitor’s center usually has its own stamp, sometimes two, and it’s the only damn thing that is free there.

They also have stickers, which look like postage stamps, that aren’t free. Nor are they as cheap as postage stamps.

Since Lassen has a visitor’s center at each entrance, that dictated a lot of our plans for the day.

But if she can get the stamps and stickers while I have an excuse to see some new parks, it’s a win-win.

And as long as I can pretend she’s still in fourth grade, it’s a win-win-win.

I believe Lassen might be the closest national park to my house. Technically Yosemite might be a few miles closer geographically, but Lassen is a more direct route.

Yet somehow I’ve visited Yosemite at least forty times while going to Lassen exactly… let’s see, carry the two… zero times.

I’m not the only one. Lassen is pretty far down the list of most visited parks and it’s often described as “Yosemite without the crowds.”

Now that I’ve been there, I can confidently say it’s… not really Yosemite with some crowds. Plus some bubbling mud farts. And rednecks.

First, I’d like to clarify that I visited Lassen before it, and the entirety of Northern California, became a smoldering hellscape of smoke and ash. For most of August, the park was closed as a result of the Park Fire, which is a stupid name because all fire names are stupid, something I noted when Paradise burned down. Call this one the Lassen fire, if you must.

So yeah, Lassen was still open in mid-July when we visited, although you wouldn’t know it. Manzanita Lake was packed. The Bumpass Hell Trail was closed. Burney Falls was closed.

Technically that last one isn’t in Lassen, but it’s so close that it would be silly to make the trek to one without stopping at the other. Like people who go to Australia without checking out New Zealand.

Burney Falls, our first stop on the day, was closed because of construction. Sounds like it’s been closed for a year or so and ain’t coming back until at least next year. They’re making it, I don’t know, ADA compliant or more accessible or some other such excuse that government types use to shut things down for a while. My commute has a bridge that’s had “construction” on it for two years or so, complete with lane redirects, and as far as I can tell, this construction isn’t going to expand the bridge or add any lanes. It’ll just fuck with my commute for two solid years and tell me it was for my own fucking good. Then they’ll increase my taxes to help cover the chaffing.

Fortunately, you could still see the falls, you just couldn’t walk to the falls. That was probably the good news, because if we had spent longer there, we never would’ve made it to the second visitor’s center before it closed at 5:00.

The falls were beautiful. Half cascade, half fall. It spreads out like a mini-Victoria Falls. There are portions of it that just pop out of the rock halfway down.

In fact, the entire river that creates Burney Falls pops out of the ground only a half-mile upriver. I didn’t check it out myself, just heard it from the old man who was trying to alleviate our annoyance that we couldn’t walk down to the falls.

The price to get in, of course, hasn’t gone down from what it was when you could walk to the falls. As if that’s not a key piece of what you’re paying for. As if there wasn’t a free friggin’ parking lot on the other side of the falls that offers more or less the same view of the falls but that doesn’t offer access to the falls. So now the “State Park” gives us the exact same experience as the free parking lot, but charges $10 for it.

No wait, there’s also a store there. Where we spent more money…

The Bumpass Hell trail is usually listed as the top destination inside Lassen. It was closed not for refurbishment, but for snow. In July.

I’m not saying there wasn’t a fair amount of snow around. I’m sure we would’ve had to walk around a couple mounds. We’d had to do something similar at one of the Crater Lake lookouts. But even at 8,000 feet, it had been a pretty damn warm three to four weeks. I assume the Bumpass Hell Trail is like some of those campgrounds I’ve booked before, where it’s not open in mid-June despite the last storm having been in February. But the campsite can’t open until some bureaucrat fits it in his schedule to check that the snow didn’t damage a tree or, in the case of Bumpass, a wood plank.

I wonder if Bumpass Hell ever opened this year. It couldn’t have been there more than a week or two before the fire shut the whole place down. I guess that makes Lassen the only place in this country that can claim 2024 was a year without hell.

Before I get much farther, let me clarify: Lassen is absolutely beautiful. I don’t know that I’d compare it to Yosemite. For sure not Yosemite Valley, which is only at about 4,000 feet elevation because it’s, follow me here, a valley. Most of Lassen is double that. So the landscapes were more reminiscent of Rocky Mountain than Yosemite,

It also doesn’t feature distinct images like Half Dome and El Capitan. Maybe if I traveled there often I might be able to pick Lassen Peak out of a lineup alongside Shasta and Hood and Rainier, but on first viewing, it was just a tall mountain. Although not too tall because I think the trail up it started at 9,000 feet. No way was I attempting that the day after Crater Lake.

There looked to be some other fun hikes, too, that totally warrant a return. The Kings Creek Falls trail looked totally accessible. We almost went on it until we opted for getting home at a reasonable hour. I also noted it was one of those “the downhill comes first” trails I don’t particularly love, but it was a more gradual drop (and then rise) in elevation than Crater Lake. Maybe if we weren’t on back-to-back days, and on a time crunch, we would’ve done it.

Bumpass Hell would be nice to try, too, if I can ever make it there in the ten day period between snow season and fire season.

And maybe I could even tackle Lassen Peak. A two-thousand foot elevation gain, starting at eighty-five hundred? Easy peasey! At least the uphill comes first.

But on this particular trip, we stuck to the lakes.

First up was Manzanita Lake, which was crowded. It’s so close to the entrance that I got the feeling this was basically the closest beach for the towns of Red Bluff and Redding. Hence my rednecks comment. If you’ve never heard of Red Bluff and Redding, California, I’ve now given you all you need to know. Rednecks. And a Sundial Bridge.

I noticed that Lassen had a price for an annual pass to just that one park. I don’t think I’ve seen that elsewhere. Nobody heads up to just Yosemite for an evening. And if they do, they’re probably enough of an outdoors nut to buy the annual pass to all of the parks. But Lassen is close enough to a couple towns that don’t have a lot of beaches, and Manzanita Lake was proof of that. I assume eighty percent of the Lassen-only annual passes never venture farther than two miles from the entrance.

Daughter wanted to swim. I didn’t, especially in one of those mountain lakes where the bottom is basically slime. So, after we spent a half-hour walking to and from the bathroom at the visitor’s center to change into her swimsuit, because all the closer parking lots were full, I sat down on a log near shore to read a book while she walked into the lake.

Then promptly decided she was done and came back to shore.

Like seriously, I don’t think I finished two pages. And these weren’t Game of Thrones pages. I was reading a friggin’ Jack Reacher book. Two Jack Reacher pages probably don’t have a single word longer than two syllables. No sentences longer than five words. I made it about as far as “Reacher said nothing” before she was waving and squawking at me to bring her towel and shoes to the shore.

But she wanted clean feet, so what followed was a never-ending cycle of sit on a log, lift up a foot, get it dirty again, move to a rock, get distracted, clean the other foot, fall back in, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam. I shit you not, she probably spent less than five minutes “swimming” and more than twenty minutes getting out.

And I might never find out what Jack Reacher said.

We went through a similar process at Summit Lake. Fortunately that lake was much less crowded, because Manzanita Lake is right by the entrance while Summit Lake is, follow me here, at the summit. So she kinda had the whole lake to herself and stayed in for a good fifteen minutes until some teenagers showed up and made her feel self-conscious.

We stopped by a couple more lakes on the way out that were absolutely beautiful. Helen Lake and Emerald Lake were pristine. Technically we could’ve swam in them, but at 8,200 feet elevation, they were pretty much a degree above ice. But damn, did standing next to them feel great when the valley had been over 100 degrees for a month straight.

My favorite lake, though, wasn’t really even a lake at all. It’s called Hat Lake, and maybe there are times of the year when it’s a legitimate lake, but if my visit was any indication, the times when Hat is a Lake and Bumpass is a Trail are months apart and never the twain shall meet.

When we were at Hat Lake, it was a beautiful brook babbling through a lush, peaceful meadow. Even better, we were the only people there. I guess everyone else took one look, said, “screw that, it’s not a lake,” and raced on to see the “Closed Do Not Enter” barricade at Bumpass Hell. Me, I could’ve stayed next to the stream all day, found a comfy batch of grass to fall asleep in, and woken up in the same spot the next day, never witnessing a mud fart, and I would’ve been content.

It was Daughter’s favorite part of the park, too. Good to know she’s taking after some of my nicer qualities and not just my blood type and allergies.

Then we stopped at the mud farts. Technically it’s sulphur pools, where underground magma pockets turn the surface into boiling liquid. And magma, being sulphur, smells like hard-boiled eggs or, less charitably, farts. Ergo bubbling mud farts.

Which were impressive. But still, after a minute or so, you realize it’s just bubbling mud and you start to realize the smell ain’t going away any time soon.

Oh, and lots of friendly signs tell us what should be obvious, that you shouldn’t try to touch the molten plasma.

Not sure who looks at something that’s literally boiling granite and feels the need to touch it, but… hold on, I teach high school. I probably encounter a hundred people a day who would do that for nothing more than a dare.

And they’d use their penis.

Two parks down, one to go. Time to head off to some islands.

Summer Vacation at Crater Lake

A.B. Kelly · September 4, 2024 · Blog Entries, Musings · Crater Lake, family vacation, national park, summer vacation, travel, travelblog, Vacation · 2 Comments

Did you know fourth graders get into National Parks for free?

Sure, at half of them you still need to pay a reservation fee or whatever, but once you’re at the gate, you just point to a fourth-gradish looking child and tell them to shove their entry fee right up their ass.

Then apologize to said fourth grader for the profanity.

We discovered this last summer when Daughter was between third and fourth grade. I don’t think she technically should have qualified, because the pass we got expired August 30 of that year, meaning it was probably for kids who were finishing fourth grade, not going into it. But her school starts in mid-August, so if the federal government can’t figure out how to classify a fourth grader, who am I to tell them?

We got a new one for this year and have visited five. And since fifth graders don’t have government id’s, guess who’s going to be a fourth grader again?

“She’s a fourth grader.”

“She looks eighteen.”

“She’s really dumb and has been held back a lot.”

After a few days of treehousing and riverboating and… cat-seeing… we finally headed up into the mountains to accomplish our primary goal, which was visiting some national parks whild Daughter gets in for free.

First up was Crater Lake.

I’ve technically been to Crater Lake before, but not really. I headed up there on a weekend in early May once, not realizing that pretty much the entire mountain around the lake is still caked in twenty feet of snow in early May. Hell, even when we visited in late July, there were still substantial clumps of snow.

So on my first visit, they had only plowed the road up to the visitor center (because the beauty of national parks is second only to the commerce of national parks!), from which you could walk to one specific viewpoint on the south side of the lake. Because it was 90+ degrees in the valley, I took a picture of me wearing shorts and flip-flops in the snow, then promptly drove back down to Medford, thinking Crater Lake was almost as worthless of a National Park as Kings Canyon, in which there’s pretty much only one road in and, once you’ve made it to the end, all you can really do is get out of your car, say “Wow, look at that canyon,” then turn back around and leave the park.

Fortunately, this time around, a fair amount of the ring road was open. None of it had snow, but most of the east side was closed for construction or potholes or some of the usual road-closing reasons. I imagine if they’re only snow-free for four or five months a year, ya gotta get all your constructing done at that time. It seems like every time I visit Denver, the entire downtown is torn apart. Then again, I always visit in the summer.

So I can now confirm that Crater Lake has, not only a southern view, but also a western and a northern view. Whether or not there’s an east side of the lake is still a mystery.

You can also view the lake from, wait for it, lake level!

We weren’t sure if we were going to make it down to the lake. There’s only one path down, and it’s all the way on the north side of the lake. The hike is listed as “moderate to strenuous” and it’s the worst kind, where you’re going downhill first. Meaning the return trip was going to be uphill. Even though I’m now of an age where downhills are almost as bad as uphills, I friggin hate those kinds of hikes. For me, it’s rarely about the muscle fatigue, it’s usually the breathing. Downhills don’t task my lungs.

But Daughter wanted to ride that boat, and the boat was, shockingly, only available at lake level.

We had looked up tickets beforehand, but I wasn’t sure how long it would take us to get there from the treehouse. Good thing, because originally, I was debating between the noon and the 2:00 tours. But after we added in Daughter’s 8:00 am horseriding and stopped for lunch right before entering the park, we were barely at the south side of the lake by 2:00. Still a drive around the lake and a moderate to strenuous hike away from our destination.

There wasn’t a ton of cell service around the lake, so even if I had a good gauge on what time we might finally make it to the dock, I doubt I could’ve ordered tickets. So when we finally made it there, we had pretty much given up the fight. I tried to remind Daughter that I gave her the choice that morning of riding the horse or riding the boat, but that was little consolation.

But there were two more boat rides on the day, one at 3:30 and one at 3:45. The 3:30 one was full, plus it was already pushing 3:15 when we got there. The nimrods in front of us had tickets for it and the employee told them they better fucking run to the bottom of the trail if they were hoping to get on it. They left at a brisk walk, and she yelled, “Faster than that!”

I asked if they had any more tickets available for the 3:45 boat, but she wasn’t sure. The internet was shoddy or communication was down or something. The list, a few hours old, showed a few openings, but we would have to walk to the bottom of the trail to find out for sure. I was disinclined to haul ass to the bottom, only to find out it’s full and have to come right back up. But the employee said we should totally do it and told Daughter that she could swim in the lake if the boat was full, so off we went.

I’m not sure if we passed the nimrods on the 3:30 boat, but we passed a hell of a lot of people on the way down. I’m guessing they all had secure tickets. If there was going to be a waitlist, I wanted to make sure we were at the front of it. “Oh, Frank Jones isn’t here? Yeah, I passed that guy three-quarters of a mile ago. Trust me, he ain’t making it. Gimme his spot.”

When we made it to the bottom, turns out they didn’t know if the boat was full, either. They had the same shoddy internet and the same hours-old list.

Instead, we were told to just chill out and wait until the boat was finished loading. Then and only then would they know if the boat was full or not. If not, Daughter could swim for a bit while I got annoyed that we expended energy and muscles to get down here ASAP.

After five minutes or so, they let us on the boat. Magically, the credit card machine had absolutely no connectivity issues.

Since we boarded after all the ticketed passengers, the only spots left appeared to be the jump seat in the back pf the boat. It was a weird setup – whereas all the other seats were on the left or right, with an aisle down the middle, ours was in the middle, right in front of the pilot’s dais. Daughter thought it was VIP, but all I could think was that we’d get the least amount of wind. Plus, in our haste, we hadn’t added any sunscreen and my knees were going to absolutely fry.

Fortunately for us, we had to give up the seats to a couple I’ll graciously call “The Doomed.” Because vulture candy is offensive.

The Doomed were a married couple who I will generously call “unprepared.” They appeared to be about ten years older than me and less than half as healthy. Bear in mind, I ain’t exactly Dwayne Johnson. More like Boris Johnson. Like I said, I thought long and hard about a moderate to strenuous hike at elevation. Clearly the Doomed didn’t.

In another ten years, when I’m (possibly) as old as The Doomed, I assume I’ll be even less inclined to believe I can make the circuit. Especially if, like these two, I don’t make these sojourns all that frequently. So if I was questioning whether or not I ought to be making this hike, then these two should’ve answered the query with a hard fucking no from the first inkling.

I don’t know what ship The Doomed were supposed to be on. I doubt it was ours. When they first appeared on the dock, we were already supposed to have left five minutes earlier, but because of people like me and a handful of others buying up the empty seats, we were still within shouting distance.

Doomed Dude’s shin had a ginormous gash on it. It was mostly scabbed over, but there was still a rivulet of fresh blood. So I’m guessing they had taken maybe an hour or more to hike down the path I’d done in less than twenty minutes. I assume he fell, they’d paused for long enough to it to coagulate a bit, then it had reopened when they started walking again. He also had dust and debris up and down his legs and his hair looked like the guy in Airplane! after he stops giving up sniffing glue.

As for the woman, I don’t think she was injured before approaching the boat. She seemed wobbly, but that might have initially been more a result of exhaustion than injury.

But not for long.

I don’t know where she was trying to go. There was a flat platform secured against the granite, then a long metal ramp descending down to the floating platform that the boat is attached to. On that flat platform are a few containers, kinda like giant ice chests, containing life jackets, making the platform a little crowded. When there were fifty of us heading toward the boat around the same time, some of us stepped off the flat platform, scrambling on the rocks to circumvent the congestion. I doubt that was her goal, since there were only a few employees on the platform at that time, most of them assisting her husband.

Regardless of her intent, she slipped on either a rock or dirt. With the entire boat staring at her and waiting, her upper torso seemed to lean one way while her lower torso went the opposite. Then her ankle rolled and down she went like the goddamned Titanic, rolling off the platform.

Well, shit, now the boat’s gonna be even further delayed.

Somehow all the kings horses and all the kings men were able to load them onto the boat. They asked me and Daughter to give up our jump seat, which was perfectly fine with me, and even better, somebody else moved so we could sit together. The Doomed got a couple of free waters that we had to pay exorbitant prices for.

Hilariously, when the boat finally started, the guide asked how hard we thought that hike down was on a scale of one to five. The woman put up all five fingers, but the dude, looking like something out of ground zero on 9/11, only put up two fingers.

Originally, I thought maybe The Doomed were going to be dropped off at the south end of the lake. There’s no pedestrian path over there (the spot we were at is the only public access spot), but I figured maybe there might be a way for official people to get where they needed to be. Maybe a helicopter pad or something.

But nope, they stayed on the boat for the whole two-hour tour.

The tour itself was kinda meh. Considering our last boat, less than 24 hours earlier, included multi-boat twirlies and free beer, it was always gonna be an uphill battle. I mean, what does stupid Career Lake have to offer? Unparalleled beauty of a natural masterpiece? The clearest blue water you’ll find anywhere? Big whoop! Not once did we catch air from another boat’s wake!

The tour guide left a bit to be desired. Not sure if he was running a tour for the first time or if the distracted, nervous demeanor was just his personality, but he left something to be desired in the excitement department.

He used a lot of “some people see this in the rocks, but I don’t see it.” Part of me thinks it was a shtick to get us to “find” it, but he didn’t fill me with confidence when he said that the volcanic eruption that created the Crater could be seen as far as Montana. “And even… British… Columbia? Is that right? Is that the one that’s in Canada?”

Evidently geology and geography are different practices. And we’ll ignore the fact that British Columbia is probably the same distance from southeastern Oregon as Montana is, so that revelation didn’t add anything to the wow factor. Sure, BC is in a different country, but I don’t think a volcano that blew 6,000 years ago was carrying a passport.

His knowledge of rocks was great, though. He explained how various rock structures were originally fissures inside the ginormous volcano that once stretched across the entirety of the lake. He knew so much about rocks that, when the tour ended, the captain said, “Are you going to talk about rocks some more? Let me run the tour. There’s a great fishing spot over there.”

Then again, his message clearly wasn’t getting through to everyone, since I heard another passenger confidently tell his family “It was a glacier that did it.” Dude, you’re thinking of Yosemite. How many friggin times have you heard volcano today, dumbass?

The best part of the tour was when we filled our water bottles. It’s, allegedly, the ninth cleanest lake in the world. “Allegedly” because the tour guide couldn’t tell us any of the other eight. They were probably in British Columbia.

Regardless of its place on the list, we were on the opposite end from the access point with all those peeing swimmers, so the water should’ve been totally safe to drink. At least before we stopped the boat and leaned over to submerge the bottles we’d just been putting in our mouths. So maybe now Crater Lake is the tenth cleanest in the world. Eleventh if The Doomed got his bloody gash near it.

Speaking of The Doomed, when we all piled out at the end of the trip, they were asked if they thought they could get back up under their own power. I think the answer might’ve been no even if they hadn’t both taken tumbles on the way down. Maybe the falls were all intended to get a free medical evacuation.

So as the rest of us worked our way back up the moderate to strenuous path (which felt much more on the strenuous side this time), we were passed by a number of EMT and paramedic types, one of which had a pretty cool looking gurney unicycle thing. Guessing the standard four-wheeled contraption can’t go up a rocky path of switchbacks. Of course, that meant she’d need at least two, maybe three or four, people to hold it steady as they pushed her back up the hill.

I would’ve paid money to see her rolling off it repeatedly. Especially after the East German judge only scored her first loop-de-loop a seven.

We never saw them come back up. Not because we were tearing the uphill. It was just as painstaking as I expected.

We were some of the last people going up, especially after a pit-stop at the restrooms and Daughter getting a brief swim in the lake. All the employees left around the same time we did. Our tour guide was jogging the whole way. Whatever, dude. Talk to me when you’re fifty. And know where Canada is.

My legs were fine, but my breathing and heartrate weren’t having it. Especially since my dumb ass decided to push it for the first quarter mile. And that water from the lake was now an hour old and not quite as crisp anymore.

We kept leapfrogging the captain. While we were resting, he would move ahead. Then he would rest and we would pass him. We always exchanged pleasantries. He convinced me there was no shame in going slow, even if I’ve got a ten-year old with me that could’ve probably ran the whole damn thing with the tour guide.

He might’ve been of a similar age to The Doomed, but was in substantially better health, which, again, makes me wonder if they had a shot in hell of hiking uphill, regardless of injury. After all, this uphill hike was the captain’s everyday commute. He knew which trees and rocks were best for leaning against, just like I knew which lanes have potholes. Can’t tell whose commute is more excruciating. Mine is mind-numbing, his is leg-numbing. His has a much better view than mine, no matter how creative those personalized plate are.

Eventually, we made it. Probably took about twice as long going up as down. And then, exhausted and out of breath, all I had to do was drive back to a hotel we’d booked in Weed, California. Which was still a good three hours away and, despite getting good online reviews, had soap but no shampoo in the shower and an air conditioner that I had to stand on a chair to plug in and wait another twenty minutes for it to cool down the room.

But, when given a chance, you’ve always gotta stop in Weed, amirite?

Summer Vacation in Oregon

A.B. Kelly · September 3, 2024 · Blog Entries, Musings · family vacation, Hellsgate Jetboats, Oregon, road trip, summer vacation, travelblog, Treehouse Hotel, Vacation · 2 Comments

Using the occasion of Labor Day week, the metaphorical end of summer, to write about my summer trips.

Gonna try something new this week, breaking those trips into four shorter posts instead of one or two long ones, with the goal of posting one per day on this shortened week.

And by short, I mean 2,000ish words each…

Our primary goal was to hit a number of national parks while Daughter still got in free as a fourth grader.

But before we could hit the first one, which was Crater Lake, we spent a few days in southwestern Oregon. This post will cover all you need to know about cats and trees and rivers. Then I’ll be back in the next few days to take you in depth into Crater Lake, Lassen, and Channel Islands national parks.

Tree House

I learned about the tree house resort a long time ago, but had never really found myself nearby. It’s not in a spot that’s convenient to, well, anything. Even Crater Lake, which was our excuse for visiting this area, was nowhere near it. But I doubt I’ll ever be en route somewhere closer.

Besides, once I had shown the pictures to Daughter, there was no way we were staying anywhere else.

A fact I remind her of the first fifty times she asked a variation of “Are we there yet?”

The treehouses are part hotel, part campsite, a fact I wasn’t as aware of as I should’ve been. Other families had brought hamburgers and hot dogs to grill, some even brought ice cream to store in the freezer. We brought… um… some chips for the car.

What we really ought to have brought was water. I can’t remember the last time I was so thirsty as that first night. I bought a Pellegrino from the office and milked it as long as I could, even though I’m not really much of a Pellegrino fan. If they’d had Crystal Geyser, I might’ve traded in my car for it.

Not that I should be too hydrated, because the last thing I wanted was to need the bathroom in the middle of the night. The closest facilities to our treehouse was down some rickety stairs, the bottom four of which went off in a different direction than the rest, so I’m pretty sure if I tried to use them in the middle of the night, I would’ve walked right off the platform and broken an ankle.

Another amenity I’m used to at hotels, but that was missing from the treehouses, is soap. Their website said they had showers, which they do, so I guess I just assumed that shower meant more than “something that sprays water on you from above.” The closest I came to cleaning myself while I was there was putting some of the foam soap from the toilet sink onto a washcloth before jumping in the shower. Needless to say, that’s not stretching across my entire body. Never mind my hair.

Before our excursion to Grants Pass, I told Daughter in no uncertain terms that she was going to shower before we left for Crater Lake the next day. After I attempted to use the shower that night, I told her, “You know what? Just wait till we’re back in civilization.”

The treehouse resort had drastically different treehouse sizes. Many were large, even some multi-houses connected by rope bridges that accommodated multiple families. Some of those groups who were grilling up food seemed to be multiple families who showed up together, and it appeared to be a regular thing for them, maybe a yearly “camping” trip.

Our treehouse was on the dinkier side. It was bi-level, so Daughter could climb a wooden ladder up to an extra nook to sleep on an air mattress. My “bed” wasn’t much more comfortable. Due to the small size of the treehouse, and to allow Daughter to go up the ladder, my bed was a U-shaped couch during the day with an extra piece to fill in the U at bedtime. The final piece didn’t come in as flush as you might want, so when I laid down, it felt like I was on a chiropractor’s table.

As soon as I got home, I had to visit the chiropractor’s table.

Minor gripes out of the way, the treehouse resort was pretty fun. What they called a “Fresh Water Pool” was actually a legitimate pond fed by a mountain stream. Daughter wasn’t expecting how cold the water, but considering it was almost a hundred degrees that day, was quite refreshed once she got used to it.

If you feel like sticking around the premises during the day (since in summer they have a two night minimum), they have zip lines and horseback riding and a Tarzan swing.

Unfortunately, most of those have to be booked ahead of time and aren’t exactly cheap. Plus many of them require minimum parties to book. I get it, since they have to bring in extra staff to work those areas, but which was frustrating when there were only two of us. Our first night, we were informed that horseback riding required a minimum of two people under 220 pounds. There was only one of us that fit that description. The Tarzan Swing, meanwhile, required four people minimum. Both of them, I was told, could be booked if I was willing to pay for all the ghost riders.

I understand that most of the treehouses cater to large families or groups. However, we weren’t in the only small treehouse. The woman seemed shocked, Shocked!, that a treehouse with one couch-bed and one air mattress would only have two people to partake in their activities. And only one under 220 pounds.

That being said, she worked her ass off to get us into the activities we wanted. She said they would let me ride Major, that fat-bearing horse, if we could do it at 6:00 that evening. Unfortunately, we already had plans. And I really didn’t want to ride the fat horse if I could avoid it. As soon as some other kids signed up for the first horseback ride of the following morning, the woman searched the grounds until she found us to give us the option of tacking on. She found Daughter first, who jumped at the chance even before I could assent.

Same thing happened with the Tarzan Swing. Four person minimum, they said. But if anyone else signed up, they’d be sure to let us know. Then they said some of the zip-liners would probably tack it on to the end of their trek. So if we just sort of hung around the end of the zipline at the right time of day, we could pull a Harry Belafonte and jump in the line.

When we got there, the dude said we’d probably go last since the zipliners would already be harnessed up. We were fine with that.

But the zipliners were taking a longer than expected, so he switched gears and took us first. By the time we were finished, there were still no zipliners. Some had come down and not come over to us, so there’s a chance none of them opted for the add-on and they actuality opened up the Tarzan Swing for a two-person minimum. Like I said, they seemed to bend over backwards trying to get us into their activities even if they initially gave us a hard time about a couple of loners.

Maybe that had something to do with the $100 I forked over for the horses and additional $35 for each Tarzan Swing.

Sorry, getting ahead of myself. While I assume you know what “horseback riding” is, you might be unfamiliar with this Tarzan Swing I keep referencing.

As was I.

Which is probably why I let them talk me into it.

After all the back-and-forth about how lucky we were to have it open for just two of us, I wasn’t going to say, “You mean one?” The dude didn’t rally ask if I was doing it or not, he just strapped me in a harness, at which point I was pot-committed.

It’s a rope swing. No big deal. That they attach to a waterski rope that you hold onto behind your head. Okay, got it so far. Then they drive a golf cart in the opposite direction pulling the ski rope, and the idiot holding onto it, fifty-five feet in the air.

What the what?!?

Then you have to let go of the rope and let physics, or maybe evolution, take over.

Daughter went first. I filmed from the bottom and, yeah, she looked high up there, but it wasn’t for very long, and as soon as she was up there, she let go and was sailing through a parabolic arc. The golf cart guy worried she was freaking out or passing out, because she didn’t really make a sound like most, but I could see the smile on her face from my vantage point, fifty-five feet away.

She went again and this time she laughed. As soon as she slowed down, she asked if she could have one or both of my swings. Dude turned to me and said, “She’s only ten? I hope you realize you’re jumping out of an airplane at some point.”

That’s my daughter.

So they strapped my 240 pounds into the same contraption that held her 80. The golf cart was Honey Badger, it didn’t give a shit.

Since you’re kinda lying down at the base of the swing, you have to reach over your head/behind you to grab the ski rope, then it starts tugging and you’re yanked backward and up. It isn’t a rough pull, but it ain’t exactly gentle. Kinda like water skiing, except it’s in the opposite direction. A direction you can’t see.

A direction you CAN see, however, is straight down and holy shit! That ground is fifty-five feet away!

Again, I had just seen Daughter do the same thing, but looking up at an object fifty-five feet in the air is substantially different than looking down from that same height. It might be just a little over halfway between home plate and first base but, well, you wouldn’t want to be dropped from first base. Fifty-five feet is, what, the sixth floor of a building?

And it’s up to me to decide when to let go and start the swing. All you have to do is let go. Easy enough, although Dude told me the longest somebody waited while freaking out was a minute, forty-three seconds. Not the case for me. It’s not comfortable being held up in the air by your arms hanging from a ski rope. The moment he gave me the okay, I was letting go. Hell, on my second ride, I wanted to let go at about thirty feet, but I wasn’t sure if that would fuck with liability.

So I let go. And then I flew.

It was basically a swing. Times ten. You pick up some serious acceleration on the way down. Obviously, as parabolic arcs go, the uphill portion brought me almost as high as the point from which I’d been dropped, only now the ground was behind me, so no big deal. By the time I returned to the pinnacle the second time, I noticed that my leg was shaking. Pent-up adrenaline or potential energy or whatever caused it, it was uncontrollable and hilarious. Honestly, I didn’t really think I was pent up at all before I dropped, but clearly something needed to get out. It happened again on my second swing.

So yeah, two thumbs up on the Out n’ About Treehouses. Just bring your own water and food.

Southwestern Oregon

Since the treehouses had a two-night minimum, we ventured out for a couple stops on the day in between.

First up was the Great Cats World Park. It’s a zoo just for cats. Lions and tigers and… um, jaguars.

As we drove up to the rinky little gravel lot in the middle of Podunk, Oregon, I worried we might be venturing into Tiger King territory. Fortunately, they seemed to at least give half a shit about their animals. Plus both the animals and the tour guides had all their teeth.

The tour guides were very knowledgeable about each of the breeds. They let us know about all the things that were threatening each cat’s existence and, unlike Tiger King, the Great Cats World Park wasn’t top of the list. They also seemed to be rooting against extinction, and for more reasons than its effect on their profits. Either that or they’re very good at faking compassion.

The cats were well fed, primarily because the tour guides kept throwing raw meat to get them to approach because, mind you, most cats are nocturnal, a fact I always remark uponnote at zoos when the “most ferocious predators” are napping in the shade for the entire day. The tour guides, mostly girls between 15-25, had no problem tossing the meat, sometimes with tongs and sometimes with their bare hands. Our first guide’s hands were literally cracking with dried meat juice. Unlike “likes cats and dislikes extinction”, I didn’t have “comfortable handling raw chopped-up porterhouse” high on my list of twentysomething female traits.

Daughter loved the tour. For me it got a little redundant. Especially after we were handed off to a second tour guide (while the first presumably went to wash her hands or contract e-coli) who repeated a lot of the same amazing factoids. But still, I managed to learn some things.

For instance: There’s no such thing as a panther, so both Marvel and the Carolina NFL team are using black jaguars.

Also, none of the jaguars sported a teal color like seen on Jacksonville helmets, making the NFL 0-for-2 on representing felines. I didn’t check to see if any of the lions were named Barry Sanders.

There’s a tiny cat called a Geoffroy’s Cat that was adorable and looked like a domestic cat. We all just assumed Geoffroy was the owner of the park and thought it would be funny to put his own cat in a section of the park during the day. Turns out that, no, a Geoffroy’s Cat is a mean little SOB who will kill another Geoffroy’s Cat. Or Jeffrey’s cat, for that matter.

In fact, the Geoffroy’s Cat is the only feline that will kill its species for no damn reason. Just like real-life Geoffs. I never trusted guys who couldn’t spell Jeff correctly.

After spending time with cats, we visited their favorite locale, water.

(Except for the Otter Cat that evolved specifically to be fine with water, including hair that instantly dried. One of the cooler cats at the park.)

We took the Hellsgate Jet Boats out of Grants Pass. It’s about an hour down the Rogue River to a spot called Hellsgate, which to me just looked like a regular ol’ canyon, then back. We took the last boat of the day, which also included dinner at a rustic mountain lodge themed restaurant, making it a four-hour sojourn.

Their website shows the boats doing twirlies in the river. I figured they’d do it maybe once or twice so we could write fancy reviews. Instead, we spun close to twenty times. Many of them were when our boat was alone, but there were five total jetboats leaving around the same time, and plenty of the spins were done in tandem with those other boats.

The driver alternated spinning left and right to ensure different people got soaked. The front row got it the worst, plus the side people in the first few rows. Honestly, if you were in the middle of row five or six, I don’t think you would’ve gotten more than an occasional spray. Daughter was on the far edge of row three, so she loved it. It was like a four-hour long amusement park rafting ride.

Ironically. when spinning, the side on the inside of the spin got the most soaked. The ones on the outside got the initial splash as their side of the boat cut into the water, and that’s the one everyone saw coming and cowered from. But when we finished our turn, effectively coming to a complete stop, the trailing wave then came over the other side, drenching those on the opposite side.

By the end, most of the boat still didn’t understand those physics. The boat driver said we could do one more spin and asked which direction we wanted to go. The whole front row pointed the direction that instinct, but not experience, told them would keep them dry.

The driver said it wasn’t fair, so we did two more spins, once each direction.

Then I think we caught up with another boat and did it again.

Those were the ones that drenched us all. Because then, instead of waiting for your trail of water to catch up with part of your boat, you’re going straight through the vertical sheet of water tossed up by the other boat. Even the middle of the last row got some of those.

And, of course, we made sure to return the favor to the other boat, now that we were ahead of them. Sometimes we did it with three boats.

Everyone seemed to be having a great time. It probably helped that it was ninety-five degrees that day. The boat driver said their first trips of the season tended to be when the high was fifty-five, and those customers weren’t quite as keen on the splashes.

The dinner was fun. Haven’t had family style with strangers in a while. Feels so 2019.

Daughter isn’t a big BBQ sauce fan, so she was kinda screwed with options of bbq ribs and bbq chicken. But there was plenty of bread to keep her happy. And it’s not like the bbq flavor goes much past the surface of a chicken breast.

The beer and wine was unlimited, too. Sure, it wasn’t good, but beggars and choosers, right? By the time we sat down, the beer had been sitting in a pitcher for a while and was both warm and flat, but it was probably C-minus or Miller Lite, so it’s not like the temperature and carbonation would’ve made it any better. In fact, when we polished off the first pitcher, they brought out a fresh pitcher. I didn’t notice much difference.

Our plates hadn’t even been cleared, much less dessert, when we got the warning that the boats would be leaving in fifteen minutes. Some of the regulars had already mentioned that the service seemed a little off this night, whether from new cooks or new servers. This whole Sophie’s Choice between a wee bit o’ cobbler and spending the night alone out in the elements was a new experience.

Probably not the best time for the waiters to bust out the gratuity buckets.

In the end, we were able to scarf down some cobbler and high-tail it down to the dock, banking on all those old fogeys not making it down the hill as fast as we would. You don’t have to be faster than the bear, only faster than the slowest person.

Even better, all the ribs and cobbler and flat beer stayed inside my body through all the twirlies on the boat ride home. Twice that day, with the Tarzan Swing, I managed the feat of neither shitting my pants nor spewing my guts! Huzzah!

Camptathalon 2020

A.B. Kelly · February 12, 2021 · Blog Entries, Musings · camping, Camptathalon, male bonding, outdoors, sports · No Comments

Seeing as I posted about our aborted attempt at snow camping, now seems a good time to finally post the journal from last year’s oft-canceled, nearly-aborted Camptathalon trip. After a number of false starts and offside penalties, four of the five regulars were able to escape the shitshow of 2020 long enough to make an abbreviated attempt at a bona fide Camptathalon. So sorry if it’s a little light this year.

As per usual, we logged what occurred. Everything here is 100% accurate.

Taken 90% out of context.

Friday.

3:10 Stop at Snowshoe Brewery in Arnold, CA to fill growlers, might as well stay for a pint. They don’t even require food to purchase booze in this county. It’s the wild west!
3:15 “Is it too early to put my mouth on your beer cup?”
3:40 “Sucking Daniel Craig’s dick would be just like kissing Rachel Weisz”
4:20 First two arrivals at campsite.
4:35 Last two arrivals at campsite. That was quick.
4:37 Chris opens first beer. Rick follows.
4:46 Oops. Packed tent but not poles. Fucking 2020.
4:55 “Why is there a tea bag in my tent?”

5:11 “I’ve decided to make a Camptathalon T-shirt contest. Since none of you knew, I win this year.”

5:37 “How spicy do you like your chili?”
“Like my women. Hot, brown, and full of meat.”
5:44 Sparky is all-time leader in Loser Libations, the shitty alcohol the first person out of poker is required to drink.

5:59 First baseball card of Camptathalon 2020 – Chet Lemon

6:06 Every time that flag’s unfurled, they’re comin’ to Camptathalon. Today!

6:35 Is it proper chili without beans?
(Grabbing Crotch) “I got your proper beans right here and if you give me five minutes, I’ll make some sour cream for you.”
“Dude, you need five minutes?”
6:46 Sparky recalls being invited to a loose girl’s house in high school, watching Kent Mercker’s no-hitter on her TV. “So she pitched a no-hitter, too?”
7:10 First party foul. Spilled beer while grabbing cookies.
7:21 First Event: Friday Night Poker
7:41 Loser Libation Preview: It hasn’t been iced.
7:51 “It’s from that movie called… What the fuck is that movie called? It’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer making out some other chick.”
“Oh, that’s Cruel Intentions!”
7:52 Wait, who the hell dealt this hand? Check, check, check.
7:56 Put your dick on the table. One red chip dick.

8:17 With the first all-in, Loser Libation is revealed as Franzia Sunset Blush

8:19 All-in won. Live to see another day.
8:23 Can we please put that on ice now?
8:25 “No. Fuck you guys. Tell the story. Tell the story right now.”
8:34 Chris out on a double full house.

8:42 “I have a 4.”
8:50 “Loser Lube-ation.”
8:53 Sparky keeps dropping cards. Tony invokes Jon Lovitz as Dukakis. “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy!”
8:58 Two growlers down.
9:00 “Are you taking this stick or do I need to wrap up these sticks?”
9:11 Loser Libation is finito.
9:17 Another card dropped through the table crack by the crack whore.
9:23 “As happy as I am that you can do math, I cordially invite you to suck my cock.”
9:33 “Gunslinger Rick puts out his second opponent of the night.”
“I put out all the time.”
9:34 “It’s been quite a while since I’ve had a pok’er.”
9:43 “How is this guy still in it? He was up against it twice and I had to fucking drink the hole fucking Franzia all in one night.”
9:49 Sparky down for the count
9:58 Standings after one event: Rick 5, Tony 3, Sparky 1, Chris 0
10:01 I think we can leave the baseball cards out. I’m not worried about bears eating cards.
10:37 Savory in your mouth
10:57 Rick retires
11:11 Tony & Chris out.

Saturday

6:57 Upon further reflection, those last two beers, and the entire bottle of Makers Mark, might not have been entirely necessary last night.
6:59 “I evacuated the Loser Libation last night.”
7:24 “Where the hell did you find Franzia?”
“You can find it behind the tree over there right now.”
7:57 Guess it’s time to go read the constitution

8:23 Chipmunk jumps in the fire

9:10 Same stupid chipmunk jumps in the bocce ball box.

9:25 Trip to store unsuccessful in locating Miller Genuine Draft. Thank God.
9:27 First beer of the morning.
10:00 Cribbage.
10:42 “I’m ready for some cornholing.”
“That’s all you, buddy.”
10:47 It’s probably too early to start drinking heavily
10:59 Rick cornholes Tony in Round 1 with a score of 21-2
11:02 “I need to get better. I’m going to ask my wife for a cornhole for Christmas.”
11:09 Another cornholing as Sparky beats Chris 21-8
11:40 Lunch: A couple of hot Hawaiians
12:10 Round two of cornhole
12:19 Chris wins third place.
12:22 “What’s a devil’s three-way?”
“Do you need me to draw you a diagram?”
12:31 “You keep tickling the cornhole, but not going in.”
12:39 Sparky powers back from 15-3, wins 21-20.
Cornhole results: Sparky 5, Rick 3, Chris 1, Tony 0
After two events: Rick 8, Mark 6, Tony 3, Chris 1

12:42 Hurricane Laura is the Butter Toss target.

12:51 Too close to call, Rick and Sparky must toss-off to make the final round against Chris.
12:53 Butter Toss results: Chris 5, Rick 3, Sparky 1, Tony 0
After three events: Rick 11, Sparky 7, Chris 6, Tony 3
12:57 Homerun Derby
1:07 Round 1: Chris 8, Sparky 4, Rick 3* (7 outs left), Tony 2
1:13 Round 2: Chris 2 (8 outs left), Rick 2 (7 outs left), Sparky 1
1:18 Rick and Chris headed to a 5-out jack-off, tied 7-7 in finals.
1:24 Rick 2, Chris hits 3rd with four outs left, flips bat, runs around gimpy and pumping arms like Kirk Gibson
After four events: Rick 14, Chris 11, Sparky 8, Tony 3
2:00 Chipmunk in bear locker. Bear’s going to be pissed.
3:16 “I’m going to take a leak. Then change clothes. And then I’m going to have a beer. Not that you all needed the play-by-play.”
3:40 Exhibition event. Welcome to… New Las Vegas “board” game.

5:11 Tri-tip on the grill, time for Adventure Bocce

5:43 Adventure Bocce results: Chris 5, Sparky 3, Tony 1, Rick 0
With one event left: Chris 16, Rick 14, Sparky 11, Tony 4
6:01 Tri-tip sammiches
6:25 Rick putting cooler back in car. Quitters never prosper!
“Fuck you. I’m out of beer in that cooler!”

6:31 “Like a 14-year-old groping around on prom night.”

6:35 It’s about time we read from the Rimmer book.

6:47 Final event: Cards Against Humanity
7:17 Rick wins on “A romantic candlelit dinner would be incomplete without… calculating every mannerism so as not to suggest homosexuality.” If Chris comes in second, we’ll have a tie atop the standings.
7:26 Tony finishes second with “What helps Obama unwind? Out of this world bazongas.”

7:32 Final Camptathalon standings: Rick 19, Chris 16, Sparky 12, Tony 7

7:37 Draft: Action Movies
Order: Sparky, Chris, Rick, Tony
Rd. 1: The Rock, Terminator, Die Hard, Missing in Action
Rd. 2: Top Gun, Red Dawn, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Red
Rd. 3: The Fast & the Furious, First Blood, Aliens, Gone in 60 Seconds
Rd. 4: Bourne Identity, Tango & Cash, 300, The Goonies
(Ed. Note: Drafts are snake-style, so Tony took Missing in Action with pick 4, then Red with pick 5)

8:09 Draft: Holidays
Chris, Rick, Tony, Sparky
Rd. 1: Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Independence Day
Rd. 2: Father’s Day, New Year’s Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day
Rd. 3: Constitution Day, Veteran’s Day, Mardi Gras, St. Patrick’s Day
Rd. 4: Easter, Super Bowl Sunday, Opening Day, MLK Day
Rd. 5: Fishmas, Cesar Chavez Day, Canada Day, 21st Amendment Day

8:31 “Now that the sun is down, I can pee openly.”

8:35 Draft: Candy
Rick, Tony, Sparky, Chris
Rd. 1: Pay Day, Peanut M&Ms, Twix, Whatchamacallit
Rd. 2 Snickers, Reese’s Pieces, Peese’s PB Cup, Hershey w/ Almond
Rd. 3: Mr. Goodbar, Almond Joy, Gummy Bears, Kit Kat
Rd. 4: Butterfinger, 100 Grand, Caramels, Nestle Crunch
Rd. 5: Twizzler, Goobers, Starburst, Swedish Fish
Rd. 6: Lifesavers, Bueno Bar, Orange Slices, Black Licorice
Honorable mentions: Junior Mints, Heath/Skor, Hershey’s Kisses w/ almonds

8:47 Ladies across the way already went to sleep. Fuck them. Quiet hours aren’t until 10:00
8:58 “Is it 9:00 yet?”
“You must stay up until 10:00. First person who falls asleep, we’re dipping your hand in warm water and shaving your eyebrows.”
“Without warm water or a razor?”
9:32 “I can blow well.”
9:44 “On that note…”
“It’s not 10:00 yet, bitch.”
10:01 “And on that note…”

Sunday
6:34 Shushed by karens next door for packing up too loud.
6:37 Every time that flag’s refurled…
6:52 That smoke in the sky is new. And ash on the cars. Looks like we barely beat the fire this year.
7:43 Westbound and down.

Another COVID Cancellation

A.B. Kelly · January 31, 2021 · Blog Entries, Musings · california, camping, coronavirus, COVID-19, male bonding, quarantine, reopening, snow camping, Winter Olympics · No Comments

Some of my normal camping guys came up with a crazy idea last year, which was to go camping again.

Normally, this wouldn’t seem totally asinine, but in this, the International Year of the Covid, all bets are off.

The wrinkle to this particular camping trip was the date it was to take place. Late January. Snow camping!

I’ve never done it before. Nor has the other guy who was gung ho about the idea. The third guy grew up on the western bank of the Sierra Nevadas, where it snows a bit but nothing major. It should be noted that the two other Camptathalon mainstays, who grew up in Idaho and Wisconsin, couldn’t say no fast enough. A wise man might note the discrepancies. But fuck it, I’m sure I can get gassy enough to keep that tent as humid as a summer’s eve.

We opted for Yosemite. For one thing, I don’t really know how many campsites are even open this time of year. Our usual haunts don’t open until six to eight weeks after the last snow. In the midwest, there’s snow everywhere, so you can pretty much camp anywhere. In California, to get to snow, you’ve got to go up to 4,000 feet elevation or so, and the roads to those spots are a wee bit pesky. But the roads to Yosemite are plowed regularly. Commerce, as Teddy Roosevelt intended.

Our second reason for choosing Yosemite was that it’s about as far from “roughing it” as you can get while camping. They’ve got two well-stocked stores and a half-a-billion rangers per square mile. Shit, they’ve got 4G reception and an ice cream stand. Guessing we could get pizza delivered if necessary. Not exactly a spot I’d need to worry about getting lost in a blizzard and wandering off a cliff.

Speaking of which, the valley floor is only about 4,000 feet, so the Wisconsoner and Idahoan really didn’t need to whine about traveling uphill in the snow both directions. It wasn’t supposed to drop below the mid-twenties at any point during our visit. The high was scheduled to be above forty on Saturday.

But alas, my first sojourn into the camping where you don’t need to purchase ice each day did not happen. Neither rain nor sleet nor snow would shut Yosemite down. COVID, on the other hand…

Yep, Yosemite is closed to overnight reservations as part of California’s on-again, off-again flirtation with pretending we’re taking it seriously.

Because, you know, there’s no chance for us to socially distance when we’re camping in the fucking snow. Why, it’s got to be like Disneyland, right? I imagine thousands of people are all ass-to-elbow, because if we know one thing about Californians, it’s that they LOVE being out in the snow in the middle of the night.

To be sure, it’s ONLY the overnight stuff that’s closed in Yosemite. Visiting the park in the daytime is still totally legit. It’s only the campers who can’t be trusted to social distance. Is there some sort of midnight orgy I was unaware of? Maybe it’s a good thing they won’t let me in, as you never want to be the guy who shows up for the orgy wearing snow-camping gear.

When I first made the reservations, I already had to deal with a weird COVID restriction. They were only booking fifty-percent capacity. Fine. Whatever. Except either I didn’t read the fine print or it wasn’t clearly spelled out, because if I were to ask you how to ensure fifty-percent capacity in a campsite, how would you go about doing it? Close every other campsite, right?

Nope! They booked the entire campground for a week, then went an entire week without accepting reservations. I guess so they could… sanitize the dirt. Besides, who wants to go to a half-filled orgy.

Just remember this when you go into a restaurant that’s cordoned off every other table to allow for maximum spacing. Tell them they’re doing it wrong. It’s much better to go standing-room only on Tuesday and Thursday, while taking Wednesday off.

This missing week became an issue while reserving, because Yosemite releases an entire month’s worth of reservations at the exact same time. I wasn’t sure what the demand would be for winter camping, but in the summer, if you log in five minutes late, the entire month is taken. So at 7:00 am, I started refreshing like I was loading a pornographic picture back in the dial-up days.

7:01, 7:02, and I’m still not seeing the dates in question available. I noticed that the previous weekend was available, but I thought maybe they were residuals from the previous month’s availability. At 7:04, I decided to see if the FOLLOWING weekend. The campsite was available. It’s at this point I realize their asinine definition of “fifty percent capacity.” Good news is by that time, there were still campsites available. Bad news was I had to drop down to our third choice.

As an aside, the weekend we originally wanted to go was this weekend, the one in between the AFC/NFC Championship games and the Super Bowl. What better time to go camping than when there are no sports? But Yosemite only made the weekends of major football games available for camping. Maybe this was to further depress demand. Make sure no casual fans come up for the non-socially-distanced camping that is somehow less safe than day visitors.

Too bad I’ll never find out. At least not until next year.

And really, I don’t know why, ten months into the pandemic, I should expect anything less than arbitrary rules that have as much effect on containing the spread of COVID as taking off our shoes prevents terrorism. Remember back when they said we’d have regular testing by the end of May?

Back then, Hawaii told everybody to stay the fuck away on pain of execution. Now Hawaii’s begging people to come work remotely, but only if you’ve been tested in the past seven days. Unfortunately, desire to go to Hawaii isn’t one of the prerequisites for getting a test. Tests, like vaccines, can only be doled out piecemeal, to those deemed worthy of saving. You need to have licked the bunghole of somebody with all three strains of the virus who is currently in ICU.

Or you can be friends with the Governor. I have a funny feeling that everybody who was at Herr Kommandant Newsom’s French Laundry soiree has already received their vaccine. And snow orgies.

Speaking of which, sorry if my forthcoming rants are a tad California-specific. But a) that’s where I live, and b) we are the poster child for FUBARing the whole COVID thing. If you live in a place that’s got its collective head out of its ass, then maybe this’ll only serve to make you feel fortunate.

It’s interesting how most of the media say we’re no longer following the rules because of “COVID Fatigue.” Instead, most of us are making constant judgement calls, weighing the trade-offs between having a life or being dead. There’s a sliding scale. Even if we all strictly followed the rules, we have to grocery shop at some point. And I don’t think that I’m out of line that camping in the snow, with the closest human being fifty feet away, is probably safer than going to the grocery store. I’m not being ignorant. I’m trying to follow the rules and guidelines that the government established.

Not that those rules and guidelines mean jack shit. We’re told to meet certain goalposts, then we’re told that, sorry, that’s not the goal we’ve been looking for. Or sometimes we DON’T meet that goal, and Herr Kommandant’s like, “Yeah, you know what? It’s cool. We didn’t really need those ICU beds anyway.”

Over the Christmas holiday, Canada set up space heaters at outdoor parks. The message was clear: You want to be able to see your family and friends, so please be safe about it. In the United States, we opted for the tried-and-true “You want to be able to see your family, so we will tsk-tsk and shame you and not help you do that safely. Abstinence only has worked so well over the decades in this country. Just ask the millions of Americans who had premarital sex or smoked pot.

The ironic thing is we simultaneously tell people to social distance while also banning them from it. I’m on the Board of Directors for my curling club, and we perused the sports rules for hours. They have all sorts of rules for how to do our sports. Limited capacity? We’ve accounted for that. Social distancing and masks? We’ve changed our rules to implement those. But then, at the tail end of the document, they give a list of which sports can operate in which tier. It’s like telling us how we’re supposed to shop safely, but then closing the stores anyway.

In California, we’ve had at least three different classification systems over the past year. First it was a convoluted “phased reopening.” That was tied more to which companies could open, and as far as I could tell, it wasn’t tied to any sort of caseload count. It was basically “Starbucks can open its drive-thrus, and if the shit doesn’t hit the fan, they can sell a couple Bacon Goudas, but not the bagel store in the same parking lot because Starbucks contributes a lot of money to politicians and fuck you, small businesses.”

Then we went to the color-coded, county-by-county system. Some people whine that the colors make no sense, but I think they’re fine. Yellow, orange, red, purple. It’s pretty standard “danger” stuff. The problem I have is that they set the classifications such that everyone will always be in purple.

If you have more than 7 positive cases per 100,000 residents, you’re in purple. Seven! Currently, 54 of the 58 counties are in purple, which kinda makes the whole “purple” designation pointless. Sacramento County was at 55, while San Francisco County is at 38, and Los Angeles County was at 150.

The red tier is set at 4 to 7 per 100,000. Orange at 1 to 4. Again, Los Angeles County is currently at 150, which is the same as 10. But 4 and 7 are hugely different numbers that drastically change what can open.

It seems to me that 150 cases per 100,000 residents is substantially worse than 38 per 100,000. But according to the state, they’re EXACTLY the same. It would be like maxing out the Richter Scale at 4. Or the hurricane classification at 2. “Boy, I wonder how big that natural disaster was?” “Exactly the same as every other natural disaster.”

So again, if they’re going to make their classification for the purposes of scolding us, then we’re going to try to make sense of it ourselves. At one of my staff meetings, my principal was running through the numbers and, at 93 per 100,000, referred to us being in “Deep Purple.” He talked about what preparations we might make if we get into “light purple,” but it was too late. I was already humming, “Smoke on the Water.”

At my curling club, we’re talking about reassessing opening when we get down in the 20 per 100,000 range. Although truthfully, I don’t know if that’s a good or a bad number, because it’s all arbitrary. If there’s no difference between 20 and 150, then is there really a difference between 7 and 20?

Then again, the numbers I’ve been quoting aren’t the real numbers, they’re adjusted for the number of tests. I have no idea what that means, but earlier this week, the New York Times showed Sacramento County with a rate of 23 per 100,000, while the California website claimed Sacramento County was still at 42. That’s a pretty large discrepancy and, unfortunately, the New York Times ain’t the ones who get to put us into red.

And don’t get me started on the ethnic breakdown of the positive cases.

Yes, the state that claims to “follow the science” says that they get to make up the numbers. Counties aren’t allowed out of purple tier unless all of the ethnicities in the county are catching COVID at the same rate. And before you get started, yes, I know that Blacks and Latinos are more likely to catch it. But most of that discrepancy stems from issues of poverty.

Blacks and Latinos are more likely to work in the service and retail industries, which have remained open. Maybe if we want fewer Blacks and Latinos to catch the virus we could, I don’t know, try to make those activities safer. Like Canada did at the holidays, focus on HOW we do these activities instead of just telling people not to do them. I remember being a sexually-active teenager who had difficulties getting condoms.

Or we could look at fixing poverty and the reasons minorities are stuck in it, but ha ha, just kidding. Why would we try to fix poverty when we can just condescend people from behind the French Laundry barricade. “If you were taking this we were taking this more seriously, you would avoid the grocery store. Honestly, who has to buy fruits and vegetables more than once a year, anyway?”

So after the phases and the tiers failed to not only curb the surge, but actually seemed to make things worse, Herr Kommandant came up with a new metric, which was ICU capacity. So now if you’re in purple, everything is closed, but if you’re in purple and your ICU capacity drops, then… everything is still closed. But maybe they chain up the door now?

A recent article I read posited that closing everything down might’ve actually driven the latest surge. Before the shut down, people could eat outdoors. After the shutdown, they had to go indoors, where they’re much more likely to catch it.

Don’t get me wrong. ICU capacity is hugely important. It might even be something we should’ve been tracking all along. But we weren’t, and because the state couldn’t distinguish between nine sick people and two hundred sick people, they decided to change the playbook again.

But once again, the ICU capacity numbers appear to be a heaping pile of bovine excrement. The Sacramento region (not county this time) sunk below the 15% availability in early December. We were put on Saint Gavin’s naughty list for a minimum of three weeks, after which it would be reassessed. I kept checking the ICU capacity over that three week span, and it usually oscillated between 14-17%. So I was shocked when Jan. 2 rolled around, and our region was suddenly at 4% capacity!

Four percent? How the fuck did we drop ten percent in two fucking days?

Well, you see, that 4% number wasn’t our actual ICU capacity. It was Herr Kommondant’s PREDICTION about what he thought our ICU capacity WOULD BE four weeks later. So, you know, sorry y’all worked so hard to reach that milestone I told you would get you off probation, but now I’m making up a new milestone that is literally impossible to reach.

Of course, the reason they were predicting our ICU rates would plummet was because they didn’t think we were following their rules over the holidays. In other words, “we don’t think you’re following our rules, so we’re going to keep the same rules.” Wonderful.

Then he reversed gear. A week later, he claimed that the ICU rates weren’t spiking as expected and he was going to reopen Sacramento only, because now his magical eight ball says that four weeks later, we’d be at 17%. I’m sure this decision had nothing to do with the fact Herr Kommandant currently lives and works in the Sacramento region.

And no, if you’re wondering, the French Laundry is not in the Sacramento region.

The irony of the naughty-list/nice-list switcheroo was the actual numbers. When we were told we couldn’t reopen because we hadn’t cupped his balls correctly, the actual ICU availability was around 14%, but when we got the all-clear, we were just under 10%. So why exactly did we set the 15% threshold?

Then a few days ago, he waved his magic wand and reopened the entire state. Poof. Our long, national ICU crisis is over! Even though not a single region (aside from Northern California, where nobody lives) had even come close to sniffing 15%. But now the magical four-week prediction says all is honkey-dorey. The outlook was almost comical. Sacramento is still predicting 17%, the exact number that was predicted two weeks ago, so I guess not a damn thing has changed. But all of the other regions, who were below Sacramento, are predicted to be higher. Bay Area is supposed to be well over 20% ICU availability, but the true kicker is Southern California, which is predicted as having 33% of their ICU beds free in just four weeks! This is the same Southern California that has had 0% capacity for six straight weeks! What the fuck? Are there only three ICU beds in Southern California and Bob is starting to look a little ripe?

I teach social science, so I’m totally comfortable with trends and projected statistics. For instance, Gamestop’s stock is predicted to drop by ten percent, but instead it increased by… what the holy hell? Okay, maybe ICU beds can jump from 0 to 33%. Gavin just needs to get reddit dorks on board.

The latest completely arbitrary shift came with the vaccines. They very clearly laid out the first five groups, confusingly named Tier 1A, phases 1, 2, and 3, followed by Tier 1B, phases 1 and 2. Not sure why they couldn’t just name them one through five, but I guess everybody’s gotta feel special. In the end it really doesn’t matter, because they changed up the order. The first two groups were an amalgamation of front-line workers. Then it was supposed to by those 75 and over in that third group. I know this because I was in the next group, 1B part 1, along with those between 65 to 75. Not sure how teachers and baby boomers were included together, but whatever. How many 75 year olds can there be? I assume teachers will be up any day now.

Except then they decided that those 65-year-olds get to jump ahead of teachers. No real reason. Just because. And I don’t know if you’re aware of age demographics, but there’s a lot of fucking baby boomers. So when it was teachers and boomers together, I was looking at a late March vaccination. Now that it’s boomers, THEN teachers, I just got pushed back to July. JULY! And I’m still in a “special” category. There’s still going to be a group behind me, which I think includes a large swath of retail workers, before getting anywhere close to the general population. So if you’re 50 years old and work a normal office job, you’re probably waiting till 2022.

Remember back in November when people were saying there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and this might be our final lockdown? And Biden promised 100 million vaccinations in 100 days? Well, I hope his math wasn’t dependent on the most populous state in the nation getting its head out of its ass.

I’m pretty sure the real number Lord High Protector Gavin was looking at had nothing to do with positivity rates or hospital beds or millions of vaccines he has in his own personal batcave. It’s the number of signatures on the recall petition. Here’s how I think this went down. The president of the California Restaurant Workers Association called him up and said if he didn’t open the entire state, she was going to tell every restaurant employee to sign the petition. And voila!, state is open.

I should note that the reason I know that person is a she is because it was her, not the governor, who announced the reopening. He followed a few hours later. Ironic, considering many of the legislators and health officials were angry at Newsom not telling them when big announcements were coming, so they weren’t prepared for the slew of phone calls, making Newsom look large and in charge. But if he outranks them, we now know who outranks him. Be sure to tip your server.

So huzzah! Restaurants are open! Hair salons are open! Swimming pools are open! Unvaccinated teacher coming soon to a recently-opened ICU near you! Just in time for a newly-mutated strain that requires two masks!

But don’t worry, we’re all still safe.

Snow camping is still closed.

Thoughts on that Mandalorian Finale

A.B. Kelly · January 19, 2021 · Blog Entries, Musings · character agency, Mandalorian, mandalorian season finale, Star Wars, story structure, television, TV Shows, writing · No Comments

Everybody’s been gushing about the second season finale for The Mandalorian. After all, it’s got CGI! Behold, a tick to make Hollywood actors more attractive than they are in real life! What more could one want as a going-away present to get us through the long, dark offseason that before it is filled with WandaVision and seven other temporary fulfillments of the vacant holes in our souls. Character agency? Pshaw.

So, y’know, spoiler warnings and whatnot. But you clicked through on something that clearly referenced what I was reviewing. If you didn’t want to know about the menage-a-trois between Mando and Captain Kirk and Harry Potter, it’s kinda your own fault now.

And honestly, I’m at least a year behind the times on this, but Mando the Mandalorian? Really? Maybe it’s a good thing they waited a year and a half to name Baby Yoda. It gave us time to name it Baby Yoda instead of, I don’t know, Bob, which is probably the name they would’ve given it if they’d been forced to come up with one. Fighting alongside Humo the Human.

And yeah, I know Baby Yoda has a real name now. But sorry, producers, ya done waited too long and he’s forever gonna be Baby Yoda now.

I’m probably not the best person to review the second season finale of The Mandalorian, considering I’ve been a whole lotta meh on the series as a whole. One of the reasons this is coming a month after the series ended is because I wasn’t planning to watch season two at all, until I heard about the ending.

Some of my friends incessantly gush about the show. They’ll note that the red hat in the background of one scene was an homage to an outtake from Episode II wherein Jar Jar Binks shoved a red hat up his hoo-ha only to find out that he was color blind. Meanwhile I fixated on asinine things like there’s no way the little kid Boba Fett in Episode II could grow up to be the old dude Bob Fett in this show. I feel like he switched ethnicities. Maybe being pooped out by the Sarlacc changes your accent. Or maybe he’s a character that never shoulda taken the helmet off. Or, you know, returned at all.

Cue Poe Dameron. Somehow, Boba Fett returned. If the answers disappoint you, perhaps you should stop asking questions. About anything.

“It’s like a Western,” my friends say. “Like Kung Fu.”

People called the Han Solo movie a western, too. Amazing how many westerns take place in space. Ironically, I really liked the Han Solo movie. I don’t know if it was because of any Outlaw Josie Wales motifs. The best part of the movie was Donald Glover doing a spot-on impression of Billy Dee Williams, circa 1979.

I’m not a huge Western fan, but I’ve seen my fair share of Bonanza episodes. I even visited the Ponderosa up at Lake Tahoe when it was a kinda, sorta amusement park/homage to the show. You could get there early and have a pancake – sorry “flapjack” – breakfast, complete with whiskey in your coffee and I was only 22 and shit, howdy, while I loved me some Baileys and coffee, I don’t know that I was quite ready for whatever rotgut they were throwing in there.

Regardless, I never once say the Mandalorian call for Hop Sing, nor ride his horse into Carson City, so I don’t quite think it’s a western.

But fine, let’s pretend that both Solo and The Mandalorian are westerns. Let’s pretend they’re both Kung Fu. You know what was great about Kung Fu? You didn’t have to watch every episode.

Back in the 1970s, we didn’t have every Disney movie and show, except for Song of the South, available whenever we wanted. Your options for “children’s programming” were Saturday mornings or afternoon syndications or PBS mid-mornings.

And if you wanted Star Wars content on TV, good fucking luck. Far too valuable of a commodity to sell TV rights for. Your only option was the now infamous Holiday Special with Bea Arthur, who played a hideous tentacled alien species who reside with their Sicilian mothers in Miami retirement communities.

What’s that? Bea Arthur’s character was a human bartender? If you say so.

But we can all agree that Golden Girls was thinly-veiled tentacle porn, right?

We also didn’t have Netflix dropping an entire season of a new tv show all at once in the 1970s. “Binge Watching” meant not getting our asses off the couch to change to one of the other five channels. Because we had no remote control, so might as well keep the TV tuned to this station and see what’s on next. The Jeffersons? Sold!

Heck, most homes didn’t even have VCRs until well into the 1980s. So if you weren’t going to be home for your favorite show, you were more or less fucked. There was a chance said episode might rerun during the summer, but not every episode did. A typical season might have 20-some episodes, but only about ten weeks of reruns. And really, who wants to be inside during summer evenings? Nobody. That’s why TV networks ran reruns.

The first serials, like Dynasty and Dallas, didn’t hit the market until after VCRs were around. So if, say, wife was going into labor, they didn’t have to decide between calling in a midwife or never finding out who shot J.R.

Then again, waiting till your wife is in labor to figure out how to set the clock on the VCR was a really bad idea.

Obviously, TV has come a long way since then. Most shows are designed to be watched back-to-back. Season-long storylines are now the norm. There’s no reason to ever “miss” an episode. Even more so with subscription services.

So I was a little disappointed with the utter lack of continuity in the first season of The Mandalorian. I spent the first few episodes trying to follow every little plot thread, keeping track of all of the hints at what had happened in the five years between Return of the Jedi and the start of this show. But I was hard pressed to find any through-lines.

After a few episodes, I saw someone refer to The Mandalorian as a video game. Each episode was a different level, with a boss fight at the end, after which he leveled up with a fancy new weapon. That explanation crystalized my nagging, unfulfilled feeling while watching it.

During season two, I saw a much funnier explanation of the same thing.

Again, it wasn’t that I thought The Mandalorian was bad. It was fine. It just didn’t give me a reason to want to tune in. It’s Kung Fu and I’ve got a whole slew of Falcon Crests on my plate. I’m talking The Boys and Witcher. WandaVision was on the horizon and I still hadn’t finished Daredevil. Hell, even sitcoms like The Good Place and Schitt’s Creek have continuing plotlines now. How can a Star Wars property be so episodic?

I resolved not to watch season two. Maybe “resolved” is a bad word. It wasn’t a boycott. It was asking myself if I cared enough to tune in. and answering with a resounding. “meh.”

I heard about Boba Fett. I shrugged. Never cared too much for a character with a whopping ten minutes of screen time in the first trilogy. The Mos Eisley saxophone player showing up wouldn’t have me running either.

Then came the announcement about the finale.

God damn it.

Fine.

So again, if you haven’t heard about the ending now, approach with caution.

A de-aged Mark Hamill shows up.

Which ruined everything.

Let me back up.

I’m not opposed to the idea. We were all hoodwinked into thinking there was no way any of the original characters would show up, other than those in masks, although we probably shoulda seen it coming. After all, they had already done that with Carrie Fisher in Rogue One. Then, to one up themselves, they put her in Rise of Skywalker after she was dead.

My problem with the Luke Skywalker cameo wasn’t the obvious “gotcha” quality of it, nor that I was duped into watching the entire second season for it. And yeah, it was dramatic as hell. Impressive. Even knowing what to expect, my heart raced when that lone X-Wing came out of hyperspace to board the ship.

But from a storytelling motif, it’s totally bullshit. Deus ex machina, anyone?

The second half of season two was actually fixing a lot of the problems I had with season one. There was a cohesive plot, a through-line of getting Baby Yoda to “the jedi.” And after Baby Yoda got kidnapped by Gus the Los Pollos Hermanos dude, there was actually momentum building toward the finale. Even a wee bit of character development, if I dare say.

Seriously though, Giancarlo Esposito has been sorely underused in this show. Anybody who can steal scenes in a show like Breaking Bad should be running circles around an MMA fighter and a dude in a mask. Dude can play cold-blooded sociopath, and y’all got him playing Dr. Evil.

Unfortunately, Gus the Chicke Dude and the MMA fighter and the dude in a mask who the fucking show is named after, those characters I finally got to know over the episodes leading up to the finale, were thrown to the sideline in the culminating scenes, so Luke could come in with his fancy lightsaber. Like whoever the old Tampa Bay quarterback was when Tom Brady decided he wanted to move south for the winter. Maybe they need to change the title of The Mandalorian to include the character we’re actually supposed to care about. Season three’s working title: Hey maybe they can get a Han Solo cameo, too.

Okay, so they set the scene in the finale by showing us the Terminator. They called them Dark Troopers or Storm Shadows or something, but they were basically the Terminator. Or Ultron. Basically, half storm trooper, half robot, so we shouldn’t worry about the moral qualms about murdering them. Not that we’ve ever had any issue of mass slaughter of bad guys before. Weren’t the stormtroopers understood to be clones, anyway? Although, let’s be honest, that wasn’t established until the fifth movie. We went at least the entire original trilogy assuming those were real people.

Speaking of which, why did they clone a guy that was such a shitty shot with a blaster?

In typical superhero stuff, they show us that one fight with one of these fuckers was almost too much for the hero. Mando the Madalorian used up all of his weapons to no avail. He was finally able to defeat dude using a one-time weapon that he wouldn’t be able to use again. And now they’re showing Mando and his friemds, trapped in the bridge of an imperial cruiser, about to face twenty of them. How ever shall our hero make it out of this quandary?

It’s a standard motif in the fantasy/sci-fi/superhero genres. Our hero is shown being totally outmatched by his opponent only to finally discover the way to beat them later. Sometimes said hero discovers a weakness and exploits it. The James Bond route. Other times, a la Rocky III, the hero realizes he wasn’t taking the fight seriously the first time. More often, it’s done lazily. I guess all Superman had to do to beat Zod was level half of Metropolis. Too bad he didn’t try that the first time.

Even when it’s done poorly, though, there’s still some payoff. Some conclusion. Ultron could beat all of the Avengers with barely a thought, but once you’ve got a city flying in the air and the Avengers are simultaneously saving civilians AND fighting Ultron, well then, that’s how they win. Divided attention always makes us stronger.

So how did Mando and his pals finally overcome this threat? One took everything he had, and now he’s facing an army! Perhaps the three episodes they’ve been together will culminate into working together as a team, each member intuiting the others movements. Perhaps the imminent threat on his only father figure will finally push Baby Yoda beyond the threshold, resulting in a focused blast of force power he’s never manifested before. Perhaps Mando goes all MacGyver and creates twenty of those spear things he used earlier.

Or maybe they’ll all just stand there and watch it play out on a fucking screen.

Really?

Look, I know Jon Favreau is a better plotter than I’ll ever be. He’s as much to credit as Robert Downey, Jr. for the entire MCU existing. But that was utter bullshit. Would we have been happy if, in the final battle against Obediah Stane in the first Iron Man movie, the Hulk randomly showed up and beat the shit out of the bad guy, with Tony Stark unconscious on the sidelines?

But if it’s Luke Skywalker instead of Bruce Banner, all bets are off. As the “debate” over The Last Jedi proved, Skywalkers are the only beings in the entire Star Wars universe who are EVER allowed to resolve ANY conflict. Or maybe the Emperor.

There were ways to bring Luke back without being the deus ex machina, without stealing all agency from the main character. They could’ve gotten out of the situation then delivered Baby Yoda to Luke, similar to the Rogue One Princess Leia scene. I even would’ve been fine with Luke showing up to help Mando, who was already fighting back on his own. But the title fucking character should not be a fucking bystander for the ultimate battle.

How’s season three gonna go? Is he just going to stop trying to get out of situations? I mean, the more dire the situation, the more likely Zeus will fly in to save the day, right? Just tell Baby Yoda (who we all know will still be prominently featured in season 3 despite “leaving” with Luke) to call for Papa.

Or maybe they’ll just wait for Han Solo this time.

Man Grooming as Nature Intended

A.B. Kelly · January 13, 2021 · Blog Entries, Musings · deodorant, Funny, grooming, health, man grooming, shaving · 2 Comments

Despite being a lifelong suburbanite, my wife has a few granola-crunchy tendencies. Her uncle isn’t quite aware the 1960s ever ended and splits his time between espousing the benefits of a government-based economy and deriding said government for controlling our minds through chemtrails or flouride or blah, blah, blah, because by this time I’m on my seventh glass of wine at Thanksgiving dinner (Thank you, 2020!). He also thinks cats are spying on us and reporting back to aliens keeping tabs on us. And I’m dead serious on that last one.

Wife doesn’t go that far. She’s way too consumerist. But for somebody who thinks camping is an abomination, you can certainly grab her attention by calling your product all-natural or organic or hormone free. So if you want her to buy your bacon, you might put on the packaging that it comes from pigs not treated with vaginal testosterone. Even though there’s no such thing, so technically every pig in existence. But if you wanna get sold at Whole Foods, you gotta say every madeup bullshit thing isn’t in it.

I’m looking in your direction, rBST.

Occasionally, Wife gets stuck on conference calls at work and orders me some all-natural self-grooming shit. It’ll show up on our doorstep one day and she’ll kinda, sorta remember seeing something, like a Vietnam Vet trying to recall the fogs of war. Amazon told her that people who ordered Tom’s Toothpaste might also like toilet paper with the consistency of poison oak.

But whatever. As long as she isn’t going paleo or anything, I guess I can splash some essential oils on my nether regions. It turns out I actually like some of them. Others are nothing more than snake oil.

So here are my reviews of products you might be pondering at the next Ren Faire.

Dr. Squatch Soap.

Of the three products she bought me, this is the only one I’d heard of beforehand. It would seem to be a product custom made for me. Its name alludes to Bigfoot and they cuss in the commercials that my robot overlords at Google and Facebook show me.

Maybe you’ve seen the ads. They tell guys that the soap you’ve been washing with is bullshit. Okay, you’ve got my attention. The commercials also imply that our junk, which smells horrific, yet is dainty, ain’t never gonna be cleaned by some industrial soap that’s half comprised of something pussy like, I don’t know, lotion or aloe or smurf handjobs.

Personally, my soap of choice is Irish Spring. The dude in the Dr. Squatch commercial calls it mass-produced and docile and bovine excrementy. But I’m assured by its mid-1980s advertisements that Irish Spring is made beside a bucolic river outside of Kilkenny, and if I use it, I’ll be whistled at by the comely lass also seen dancing in that Men Without Hats music video.

“Manly, yes, but I like it, too!”

But Dr. Squatch Dude has a well-groomed beard, ergo I must pay attention. And they sell such manly flavors of soap, like Grapefruit IPA and Pine Tar and… Aloe. I guess ya can’t make a rub-over-skin product without the base aloe model.

Come to think of it, pine tar? Isn’t that the stuff they put on baseball bats to make them sticky? I don’t know if I want that on my giblets. Is the ghost of Billy Martin going to come measure my cock to make sure I didn’t add too much pine tar? The last thing I need is a scruffy looking, powder-blue wearing George Brett screaming out of the dugout like a whirling dervish.

The first one I tried was the aloe bar. Baby steps, people. I’ve been trained by years of consumer culture and if it ain’t green, it shouldn’t even call itself soap. The Dr. Squatch was fine, I guess. Nothing really to write home about. Other than its clunky square shape, the clarion call of all “natural” products, it pretty much felt like soap. It didn’t quite get the lather up that I like. Wouldn’t want to shave with it, that’s for sure.

That square shape also makes it hard to get into some of my nooks and crannies. In fact, it feels a little like being bludgeoned. I didn’t know I was supposed to be in pain while showering. And that was before I tried their second “flavor,” Chinese Water Torture.

No, it’s not named Chinese Water Torture soap, but it might as well be. It’s called Cold Brew Coffee soap. Should be perfect for me. I already smell like coffee all day. Or at least until 2:00, after which I smell like a distillery.

What’s that? Dr. Squatch has a rum soap, too? Maybe I’ll have to investigate.

Or I can just have some rum. Because if the rum is anything like the cold brew, I’ll pass.

Sure, the coffee bar smelled nice, even if I had to adjust to the unnatural brownness of it.

The problem came in its consistency. I’m not sure if Bigfoot’s ever had coffee, but when I get an iced coffee from Starbucks, I don’t have to take the coffee grounds out of my mouth. At home, I occasionally have a filter catastrophe that results in a crunchy cup o’ joe, but that’s not supposed to be the norm. And I know the hipster in the commercials doesn’t brew his own.

The coffee soap, however, is inundated with scratchy coffee grounds. And not the Folgers or Maxwell House ground coffee variety. More like whole beans thrown for ten seconds into a hand grinder cranked by an arthritic octogenarian.

The first time I used it, I thought maybe it was just an outer layer authenticity thing that would go away as I used it. I once splurged on an Irish Spring “Sport” bar that had little bubble things on the bottom, but they only lasted a couple of washes. Surely, once I got past the outer layer of this cold brew, it would work like normal soap. Or like fancy, all-natural, doesn’t-really-wash-you soap.

But no! That shit stayed through the whole bar. I get the whole “exfoliating” concept, but this wasn’t some John Cougar “Hurt So Good.” It was just straight-up jagged-ass scratching. I suppose I could’ve used a wash cloth, but c’mon, Bigfoot. Your commercials talk about being a manly-man and now you want me to use a wash cloth?

Eventually, I found that it worked best if I lathered up in my hand, then went to the body.

That felt more like a little bit of gritty exfoliating, similar to the little grains inside some of those soft soaps. Speaking of which, did you know that Bath & Body Works has “manly man” soaps, too? They’re usually hidden amongst the cinnamons and lilacs and Lakeside Estrogens. You can usually tell which ones they are because they’re blue. My favorite also had a fox wearing a blue sweater on the front and had a smell named “musk.” That’s the manly triumvirate right there.

But the blocky coffee soap wasn’t the same as a granulated soft soap. Like its aloe brethren, the cold brew block couldn’t lather worth a shit. So lots and lots and of scrubbing the hands meant the bar didn’t last longer than a week or so. At seven bucks a pop, I feel like the soap should last, I don’t know, a year or so. It’s kinda like paying for a single beer at the ballgame that costs more than a 12-pack of that same beer at home.

And for seven bucks, you get the added benefit of doing a twice over before exiting the shower to make sure you don’t look like a damned leper when you step out. The soap’s supposed to clean me, not leave me looking like I missed the trash can when dumping the coffee filter. Took me so long to shower, I was late to work. Good thing we live in a patriarchy and I can just ask for a raise to make up for the time lost.

Ha ha, just kidding. I’m a teacher. We don’t get raises.

Still, maybe I should stick with the rum bar. Although maybe not on the day I ask my principal for a raise.

Somerset English Shaving Oil.

What the hell is an essential oil anyway? Are there non-essential oils? Do the essential oils tease them? Like the Catholics who say Protestants go to Purgatory, which they think is heaven, but isn’t really heaven. I assume the Catholics spend all of eternity mocking those Protestants in their fake heaven. Something to look forward to.

Although if this is English shaving oil, it probably isn’t Catholic. They leave that for the Irish Spring next door.

Come to think of it, I don’t know if English is really the operative adjective for olde tyme rituals. Sure, compared to us young pups in America, England’s been around forever. But if I really want to be shaving like I’m some grizzly middle ager, how about some Saxon Shaving Oil. Or Mercian. Although that’s too close to ‘Merican. And we all know ‘Merican shaving oil would be buffalo chicken sauce with ranch.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Or behind myself. Where the fuck was I? Oh right, shaving.

I’m fortunate enough to not have much facial hair. It takes me a month to go from clean-shaven to something approximating a goatee or beard.

It’s the perfect amount of hair growth, because I don’t have to shave every day. If I shave Monday and Wednesday mornings, nobody will be any the wiser. If I then let it go the rest of the week, I might get some comments around closing time Friday afternoon that I’ve got a couple gristles. Not a five o’clock shadow yet, just some noticeable follicles. Actually, I never get a five o’clock shadow. Even if I let it go a week, it comes in scraggly and splotchy like I sent my cheek through chemotherapy.

So when it comes to the best options for shaving, I never really established a consistent ritual. Through most of my thirties, I gravitated toward the gel that magically turns into foam on your skin. Unfortunately, anything that defies the laws of nature that much wreaks havoc on your pipes.

And no, that’s not a reference to either my penis or my asshole. There’s a first time for everything.

It was literally my pipes. That gel ends up sticking to everything and clogging the shit out of my drain. It certainly wasn’t the millimetres of follicles going down there. So I switched to shaving in the shower, but the gel doesn’t do well in the wet steam.

Enter Somerset’s Essential Whatnot and So-forth. You massage it into your skin at the beginning of the shower, then let it work its way in. It starts tingling, feels like a zesty aftershave, except it’s a slick pre-shave. When the time comes, you lather up a little soap, just not the Dr. Squatch type. I said lather, not leather.

What can I say? The shit works. It’s a weird feeling for someone who thought shaving required a force-field of white goop. It also helps that soap lather is more see through. Who woulda thunk that it would be beneficial to actually see the face while shaving?

Again, your mileage may vary, especially if you actually grow hair between your neck and ear. But the Somerset’s worked even after No-Shave November when I had an unruly weed-patch growing there, so long as I trim it first.

It doesn’t seem to help after No-Nut November. Although if I needed help with that, I’d feel safer using this than Dr. Squatch’s pine tar. Plus, it tingles!

Lume Deodorant.

Before even trying this product, I was predisposed to hate it.

First of all, it’s named Lume with a fancy little accent on the e. That means it’s either made by a French person or someone who thinks adding random accents to a product make it sound fancier. Like whatever asshole threw that “olde tyme” into his description of shaving oil.

Even worse than its name, this deodorant is goopy, a viscosity reminiscent of snot. When it smudges through three little slivers on top like vomit through your fingers as that last-second dash toward the toilet comes up woefully short. And they expect me to put that on my underarms? Gross. I’m trying to make that area LESS moist, why the fuck would I rub a used handkerchief there.

Handkerchiefs don’t seem to exist anymore, and that’s a good thing. My grandpa always used one. I’ve never understood why we should want to deposit our snots into our pocket for removal later. I’m sure it’s better for the environment than Kleenex, but if I promise to recycle my beer bottles, can I keep the Kleenex? Do earth-hugging communes allow tissue paper? What about toilet paper? I know way too much of our modern society is disposable, but I hope we never have to debate the trade-offs of those two paper products.

Anyway, for ninety percent of my life, I’ve liked precisely one style of substance under my arms: Bone-ass dry. Don’t give me those sprays. Don’t give me those roll-ons. If the process of applying deodorant doesn’t remove some hairs and skin, it’s probably not doing its work.

I also can’t abide by deodorants with smells. I don’t want fresh scent or forest morning or scorched earth. Not even “evergreen musk,” which was the magical manly smell that Bath and Body Works put into my sweater-wearing fox soap. Again, the purpose of deodorant is to remove smell. Replacing it with a different smell doesn’t make sense to me. I’m not fooled by the taxicab air freshener, either.

In fact, most of those scented ones give me a rash before long. Maybe I’ve got sensitive skin. Maybe I’m allergic. For a good portion of my teens and twenties, I used Ladies’ Speed Stick. It’s okay, you can judge. But maybe that’s where my hatred of smells come from, because trust me, the types of scents assigned to most of the Ladies’ Speed Stick varietals aren’t smells a nineteen-year-old dude wants wafting out of his pores. What the fuck is a Pampered Lilac, anyway? Does that mean the flower’s living a cush life? Or is it wearing diapers?

In my adult years, I settled on Arm n’ Hammer. It fits my desire for both lack of smell and dryness. If I could rub actual baking soda on my armpits and be done with it, I would. Preferably with a sweater-clad fox on the front.

Then along came Lume.

“It’s organic,” my wife told me. “It’s hypoallergenically designed by medical professionals.”

“Did they design it to have all the comfort of the Sahara desert?”

“No, but it’s professional OB-GYNs.”

Ummm…. What?

Look, I’m not the manliest man ever. The closest I ever come to standard toxic masculinity is when we’re drafting fantasy football. I prefer mini golf to real golf. When I visited Minneapolis, I took my picture throwing my hat into the air right next to the Mary Tyler Moore statue. I like my beer more nutty than hoppy. I can’t figure out whose ass was more impressive in Demolition Man– Sandra Bullock’s or Sylvester Stallone’s.

Seriously, in those tight-fitting pants, that movie is a monument to two of the best-sculpted asses on the planet.

With all those facts in her corner, maybe Wife didn’t think I’d blink an eye at a deodorant developed by a gynecologist. The left side of my brain gets it. There are a lot of similarities between the armpit and the crotch. Dank. Moist. Hair for no damned reason. A man’s taint is the only body part that smells worse than his armpit.

And yet…

There’s a reason things it’s called feminine hygiene. I don’t think I need to give my armpit a morning-after pill.

Although, in all honesty, I’m only showering three times a week during the quarantine. So maybe my armpit DOES need a morning-after pill.

Let’s see, goopy substance with the consistency of snot, designed for vaginas, in my armpits? Sorry, Wife. I tried your all-natural soap with poor results. I tried your olde tyme shaving oil with mixed results. But I think I have to draw the line at…

Whoa, what’s that comfortable tingle? And that pleasant smell? Why are my pits feeling so fresh? And… dry?

Holy crap, y’all. This Lume shit is as pleasant as… okay, maybe not pie, because that wouldn’t really be appetizing. But the goop rubs in as simply as my Arm n’ Hammer, especially if I’ve just gotten out of the shower. Even on day two, it rubs in seamlessly. Sure, in these COVID times, you also might wonder what happens on showerless days three and four? Truthfully, I hit a limit around day three, when I switch back to the baking soda. Lume works great at preventing the funk from happening. When it’s already there, it’s not quite as effective. Sure, I could shower more often, but this is Quarantine Time, baby!

So I guess I stand corrected. The KY works great on my manly-man armpits. But the manly-man soap was unfulfilling. Meanwhile the nonessential but quintessentially British oils are workable and don’t clog my drains.

Snotty lube is a good deodorant, but coffee grounds should keep their asses in the kitchen. Bare foot and pregnant, yo!

While I’m at it, I’d like to admit one other earlier mistake.

Sly’s ass is far better than Sandra Bullock’s.