anarchitectitude

Ugh, finally!
I got up this morning at 5 so my buddy Dan and I could get down to Clear Creek before each of us had to work today. Good God that's early.
We were at the wall by 6, and had some really cool weather to greet us. He and I warmed up and then went to work on Anarchitect, a route I've been trying to send since before I went to Greece. My arms felt like hell, given all the time I've been in Rifle and my complacence in working my antagonist muscles, and on my first burn I fell at the first bolt. Things weren't looking good at all. On my second burn, I managed to make it to the third bolt (of 8) before I lobbed off the wall.

On my third and final burn, with the day creeping on and work calling, I slowed things down and managed to keep it together long enough to make it through the high crux and finish the route, putting the project to bed before I head back to NY for Katie. Psyched on both counts!

Now I'm back at the office, working on a few projects and wishing I could take a nap. Getting up at 5 just doesn't feel as good as sleeping in to a more civilized hour.

I'll attribute the send to my sister Megan, who threw down a fantastic dinner last night of grilled veggie pizza, followed up by a little Glacier Ice Cream on the Hill. She and I were laughing about how nice it was to spend some time on the porch, drinking wine and catching up. It will be great when we can get into the double date themed porch nights, too. Life is going along pretty well, save for the fact that there is remarkable acrimony in the Pharo house given my blog posts about Greece. I'm super frustrated by the whole thing.

bike wreck

I ride up to the street corner, headphones blaring from underneath hair that falls below my ears. A bum is already at the corner, waiting for the light to change. I can't hear what the bum says, though his lips are moving. He is jogging in place, and has a noticeable black eye beneath a pair of coke-bottle glasses. The bum points at my handlebars, and even reaches down to touch the pink bar tape.
I removes the headphones, and asks, "Do you like it?"
Bum: "Well, yeah." He continues to run in place. "I just don't want you to take too much shit for it."
I laugh, and the bum looks up to see that the light has changed. And off the bum runs, across the street at the urging of the LED signal of a white man crossing Broadway.

The music continues to blare, and as the sun sets behind the mountains to the west, I sing along.
"Deniaaaaaaal.......Deniaaaaaaaallllllll........ehhhhhhhhhhhhh.......
ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh."
I let my hands come up from the handlebars, the same pink steering wheel that the bum had just admired. Arms at my sides, I ride down the path as an airplane.
"Just as you take my hand.........Just as our drinks arrive........"

Up ahead, another traffic signal turns to red, and the cyclist slows with the sound of squeaking brakes. He thinks about all the work that needs to be done, but remembers that he has made it this far. The vanity can wait. He has to get home to brush his teeth, and fall asleep.

"Just as you dance, dance, dance."

It'll be an early morning, alarm at 5 AM for climbing before work. Nothing to worry about. No mental haymakers necessary, nor bosses to appease. No cancer to cure, no rent to pay. Just an early fight with gravity. The only fight that's immediately real.

Stranded in Meeker

Eli just called so we could finalize the plans for the weekend. He is on the docket to get married in July, so we are going to do our best impression of a bachelor party in our pseudo mountain-man style this weekend. A group of us are headed up to Independence Pass for a few days of camping, hiking, climbing and beer drinking. The word from Bri, his wife-to-be, was to eliminate the strip clubs, so the wildest we might get is a dinner down in Aspen. Don't spend too much time tuned into the police blotter, I imagine we'll remain pretty tame.

Originally, the plan was for me to get to the camp site early and stake our claim, with the rest of the team arriving later in the afternoon. My schedule already had me on the Western Slope, with work meetings on Friday morning keeping me busy until just after breakfast. The timing was looking good, until I got to the Planing Department. The guy I was meeting with hadn't come into the office yet, and calls to his home came up empty. I gave the office manager my cell number and headed to the one place in Meeker I could count on for wireless - the public library. Lately, I'm having great luck with podunk WiFi.

The office manager called me back, and told me that Jeff and I could meet at 2. So here I am, hanging out and reading about Israel threatening Iran with military strikes, thinking that I'll be a touch later than originally planned. Oh well, we're still on for dinner in Aspen.

Give me the bitterness of too much wine.

Play for me the slow, sad music that sings of every end, but no beginnings.

Grind my enemies into dust and send them into the sun.

Take away the dictators, national and cubicle, to their own private Gulag where I'm not welcome.

Lift away the heaviness that the rabbit feels when the fox is close at hand.

Shout for freedom, pray for the time to love.

Greece Revisited

Kate and I were on the phone this morning. It's the best start-of-the-day we can share 2,000 miles apart, and that's the hardest part of the famed long distance relationship gig. There aren't the cups of coffee in pajamas while getting ready for work. There is no breakfast in bed. There isn't even morning breath. Just a phone call. But when you know that the end of that dance is coming soon, even cell phone bills take on an air of romance. Kate moves back at the end of June.

We generally spoke of how each of us had spent the previous evening. I took my dad out for an early Father's Day dinner, leaving me little time to chat with her yesterday. A fair trade, but as it turned out, not always a comfortable one. Dad and I started our evening together with his admission that my previous post about Greece had left him frustrated and put off. He and Joey had gone to an extraordinary end to take the family on an incredible vacation, and I termed it "monotonous." I failed to mention the fun I had on the trip. In a rush to describe my feelings from the trip, I sounded exactly like a brat. Kate summed it up perfectly, "there's a line between blogging and journaling, and you just crossed it."

I realize there's no turning back on some things, but hopefully there is some qualifying available.

The two most important things in my life right now are Kate and rock climbing. They require constant attention to maintain a level of health and vigor with which I'm comfortable. I am obsessive, and have a particularly hard time letting something rest once I've determined to pay it my mind. In Greece, I was largely cut off from both of these priorities, and the experience left me a bit discombobulated.

Kate moved to DC for a job in November. We have been treading water, hoping to find rescue in the form of reunification, ever since. Faithfulness to the relationship, not physically so much as emotionally, took a strong effort on both of our parts. And while I was in Greece, that lifeboat appeared. Her deciding to take a job in Boulder, to resign from the expectation and opportunity of the East Coast, in some part to nurture our relationship and probe for long term fecundity, took an enormous leap of faith on her part. Instead of being able to share in it with her, I was a tiny speck in a blue sea, out of contact. During arguably the most important two weeks of our lives together, I was unavailable. This wore heavily on my mind.

As Kate called my father's Blackberry to tell me she would be moving back, news which should rightly have been met with Champagne, I was headed to dinner with an Amstel Heavy in my hand. I could briefly share in the excitement, but quickly had to go. I had to go back to a generous, gorgeous, fulfilling family vacation, but I couldn't be entirely there. I wasn't entirely anywhere. And when I'm out of balance, out of whack, out of touch, I go climbing. In the middle of the Mediterranean, I wouldn't be doing that, either.

Before I left for the Cyclades, I was climbing really well. Grades that spurned me last year were coming with unaccustomed ease, and admittedly, I selfishly wanted to keep going with my momentum. Taking time off was, in reality, not going to cost me a bunch of fitness, and would actually in the long run benefit my health, but I lost sight of that just a touch, and allowed a tinge of resentment to creep in and taint my ability to set back and really relax.

And here we are, revisiting Greece. I'm sorry I couldn't be everywhere. I should have given Kate more mind, left climbing at home, and been entirely immersed in the sailing experience. I tried to say this the first time, but swung and missed. Such are the lessons when you're trying to learn how to write.

Spreadables

Simone and Jen, my room mates, get annoyed when they open the drawer containing silverware. This raw emotion stems from the irony that when they open the drawer, it contains very little of what they hoped to find. Specifically, knives are usually greatly outnumbered by spoons, forks, and their donkey-like spawn, the spork. "Where did all those knives go?," one might ask. Let me answer one: they are dirty. Soiled by some culprit (me) in one flavored activity particularly favored, the spreading of spreadables. Peanut butter, almond butter, soy nut butter in chocolate flavor, cashew butter, and certainly the Robin to the Nut-Butter Batman, the fruit jam spread.
At one point while living in New Zealand, I had my mom send me two jumbo sized containers of PB of PB&J fame. One smooth, one crunchy. I love it, and have been disassembling proper clean cutlery ratios since my early years.
On a recent trip to Hueco Tanks to boulder and visit my buddy Nuno, he introduced me to a new use for this, the greatest good: Peanut Butter on cereal in the morning. That, my friends, has become a staple in my life. I get granola and slivered almonds (albeit in their non-buttered form) from the bulk aisle, and combine them with fruit, yogurt, and the PB. I'm a morning person, and I hold no reservations about crediting this upbeat attitude to my early morning consumption habits.
Kate, however, tells me that this AM alacrity is annoying. Megan and Spencer agree. They describe standing over them, staring at their sleeping faces and holding two cups of coffee until they wake up startled, as "creepy." I just thought they might want a beverage.
Maybe if they had a little more spreadable in their lives, they'd understand me better. Relationships: made better by a shared love of food since the late Triassic.

Greece

I'm trying to figure out how to describe my recent trip to Greece without sounding like a spoiled brat. Here goes nothing...

My youngest sister graduated from KU earlier this spring, and in celebration for being freed from the shackles of his children's tuition, my father decided to basically pay for another semester's equivalent in the form of a Grecian sailing trip for the Pharo/Porcelli/Kimball (Dad, Megs, Reilly, me, Joey, Spence) clan. Let's just say that being an oil executive outweighs the horrendous ass kicking the Euro delivers the American Dollar, and off we went.
We hatched the plan of going to Greece while on our last family trip In 2007 we were at the cottage on Lake Michigan for the Fourth of July. Joey loves to sail, so she proposed the Aegean, and as I knew there was no way I'd afford my own personal sailboat for decades (if ever), I gave my support to the idea. We cruised around on a 45 foot catamaran, which sounds huge until you pack 7 people on board (Capitan included). Somehow, and I can only credit the grace and mercy of Jesus Christ, Superstar, we made it home without one single incident of fratricide.
The fact of the matter is that when I look back at the trip, most of the islands we visited blend together. So do the days. There is only so much sitting on a sail boat while playing Gin Rummy that a person can indulge in before a certain sense of monotony sets in. The biggest event of the trip was Kate's decision to take a job back in Boulder. This made being abroad even more difficult, because in reality, all I wanted to do was get back home to my cell phone and talk to her about our plans for finally living in the same city again. When all you can think about is what you're missing back home, it's hard to be away.

And with no segue whatsoever....


Poop. That's all that goes down the drain in Greece. No paper. I'd heard rumors of this astonishing phenomenon in Franco's Spain, but it went the way of his fascism...down the drain, if you'll pardon the pun. Every time I answered the call in Athens or any of the islands we visited, I was reminded that toilets make distinct frowns when you try to recreate what I'll call "The happy housekeeper situation." That is, in Greece, a housekeeper has to empty a trashcan every day, and I can only imagine that this job grows tiresome. I'm no patriot, but at least in the States, all we ask is that they vacuum and dust. There is some good in that, right?

Back to a subject of higher brow. What's good? It's good to be home. It's good to know Kate is coming back to Boulder. It's good to be able to go climbing again. It's good to ween myself off the steady diet of Feta. And it's good to be back to the blog. I'll try not to leave you for such a long time again.