I’ll be anywhere but here for about a week or so, starting tomorrow.

Tomorrow, I’m flying to the West Coast to join the rest of the family, who are already busily visiting grandparents, aunts and uncles. There will be a little time in Tahoe, there will be some time in Santa Cruz (which will most certainly include some time here), and it’ll be wonderful.

But first, I have to spend a little time in the clutches of United Airlines, which is like the Dragon Coach of the Skies. I can already feel the cold seat frame on my back, threadbare and cushionless. Good times!

Two days after that, this blog will be one year old, but I’ll likely be un-Internetable. Happy Birthday, blog!

Four days after that, I will have gone one full revolution around the sun without a cigarette for the first time since I was fourteen years old. At least I hope so, if I fail to make it to the one year mark with a week to go, my next post will be the harrowing tale of how I savagely beat myself nearly to death. I’m confident that won’t be the case.

Have a great week, a stellar weekend, and another bad-ass week after that. I’m outta here.

It’s gray, flat, and mid-30’s. I’m failing to meet my goals for March miles, even though the wife and kids are on the West Coast and I have the time. I keep waking up early, looking at the flat gray morning sky (which looks a lot like the afternoon sky and the evening sky), and checking the temperature. 34 degrees. The part of me that would counter with enthusiasm and desire hasn’t even has a chance to yawn and stretch before I’m looking outside and saying, “Nuh-uh.”

I just can’t do it anymore. Even if we hadn’t flirted with spring last week, even if I hadn’t tasted 70 degrees, I’d have had enough. I can’t even say that there’s anything super special about this winter. There was certainly some bitter cold, though not every day and not as bitter as it could have been. I’ve just had enough, and I’m having a really hard time gearing up to do rides just for fun, because it just ain’t fun. I’m done waking up at first light and layering up in silence to get saddle time when it’s 28 degrees. The goddam saddle can wait until it gets into the fucking 50’s, and I can see at least as much blue sky as the goddam Lorax did before he hoisted himself the fuck outta Dodge.

Bitch bitch bitch, I know. Apologies for the bad attitude, sounds like someone around here could use a heapin’ helpin’ of Grace. Already taken care of.

Have a good weekend, whatever it is you end up doing. I’ll be packin’ away the Cheetohs and watchin’ porn. By Monday, my pecker should look like a goddam carrot.

Check out the gripping story of the world’s biggest diamond heist. Most crimes don’t make for the kinds of stories I’d characterize as fun, even if they’re compelling, but this one’s a classic: impenetrable vault, an impossibly skilled team, a crucial mistake, and even a possible double cross. And it’s true.

(via Bruce Schneier)

You may or may not know that I’m an avid disc golfer (now that you do, you may or may not like how that makes you feel). I caught the bug when we moved back to Southern California and a couple friends from Ventura took me up to Lake Casitas to check out the course. The lake is, of course, a stunning place to be whether you’re throwing, boating, camping, or even flying model airplanes. But the course, man that course just got in my blood. I dived into the sport without restraint.

There’s a lot to love about the game. Courses are typically mixes of forest and field on rolling terrain, the experience of watching a well thrown disc in flight is sublime, and the sweet sound of a solid putt crashing into chains is habit-forming and delicious. One of the things I love most about the game, though, is the community.

The folks I came to know from Lake Casitas are, almost without exception, some of the greatest people I’ve had the privilege to know in my life. I became an avid player that first year, up at Lake Casitas, because I loved playing the game, and no small part of my joy derived from playing with such great people. Even at the pro level, I think you’d be hard pressed to find another sport where the top tier players are just such goddam nice people. It may not be that way forever, but right now it’s a young sport. So even though the purses for the big tournaments are growing, no one does it to get rich, they do it for the joy and the camaraderie.

Anyway, I took last year off from playing and turned my attention to other projects. I’m starting to play again, a little here and there, and peeking at news about what’s happening on the scene. One of the neat things I just discovered is that SoCal local Paul McBeth, who I think was around 15 or 16 when I left California, and was obviously a pretty special talent and a great kid, has become a top-ten player. Wow.

And then I ran into this video on the PDGA site, highlights from the final round of The Memorial, which is an early season National Tour event. Val Jenkins is dominating the top tier of the Women’s Open Division at the game’s highest level, but you’d never know what a stupendous bad-ass she is from her interviews. And check out the emotion, the pure joy pouring out of 20 year-old Nikko Locastro as he drains a 35 putt to win the tournament.

It’s the greatest feeling I could ever imagine. That’s it. I loved it, every minute of it. I had a lot of fun out there. God love ya, Nikko, that shit just makes my heart glow.

The sport’s in a real sweet spot right now. The number of courses tripled between 1995 and 2005, and has more than doubled again in just the last four years to over 3000 courses, and most of them are still free to play. The professional organization is now big enough to provide some quality support to the sport, but it’s not so big that the people are lost in it. Lot’s of folks in the community want to see the purses grow large enough to support more pros making a living farther down the rankings, myself included. But I’m not at all worried about whether the ratio of money to passion is becoming unhealthy for growing the kind of community disc golf has enjoyed thus far, those sorts of concerns are still a long way off.

[Update]: Found this video from Disc Golf Monthly of last month’s Rockburn Ice Bowl. It was a really fun tournament (my first since 2007) and cold as hell. It snowed sideways for a few holes in the middle of the round, and the chili was delicious. I played Intermediate Am, came in 3rd with a 64, and donated my share back to the food bank. Not a bad showing, and, as Mr. Locastro put it so aptly, I had a lot of fun out there.

Whether or not you knew you were involved.

I learned recently that my father had printed out one of these posts, and my grandmother had read it, and remarked, “Someone’s trying to be funny.” When she found out it was me, and that I frequently try to be funny here on my blog, she simply replied, “Blogs are ruining the world.”

Ruining the world! It’s nice to know that my grandmother believes I’m involved in something as important as ruining the world, really warms my heart, but I can’t take credit for it. I wasn’t involved in creating violent video games, movies with ratings of “R” or better, comic books, Howard Stern, pulps, jazz, country, or rock and roll. I didn’t replace live musicians with 78’s, vaudevillians with movies and television, or telegraph messengers with telephones. I haven’t modernized or downsized or offshored anyone’s manufacturing job. I haven’t sold anyone a tranch of anyone else’s shitty mortgage, nor have I sold anything resembling an insurance bet on anyone’s tranches of other people’s shitty mortgages. I didn’t replace human-scaled towns and cities with unwalkable automobile slums, and I sure as fuck didn’t fill these streets with luxury automobiles the size of train cars, complete with cybernetic navigation and personal multimedia systems to absorb all the surplus cognition their drivers have left over from buying these asinine metal mammoths and paying almost no attention to actually piloting them.

But perhaps that’s not the part of the world she’s talking about. Perhaps she’s referring to the world of opinion journalism, a Broderian utopia in which respected public figures like Michael Gerson can take to the pages of the serious, tempered, grown-up pages of the Washington Post and opine…

American conservatism — intellectually ascendant during three decades in which relatively low taxes and a stable money supply produced the greatest accumulation of national wealth in history — is now staring into an abyss.

…without some anonymous scoundrel from a steel town responding…

Low fuel costs, improved communication technology, and the political disintegration of a competing economic sphere allowed companies to shift production overseas. Cheaper labor combined with inexpensive transport made it more profitable to build shit there even if the main consumer market remained in America. With the end of an effective labor movement and the decline of productive industry, real wages stagnated, but financial institutions, ever more central to the so-called service economy, made it increasingly easy to obtain credit. The “engine” of the American economy became the consumption of commodities produced cheaply overseas and sold domestically. The financial institutions playing the credit game conceived of a series of increasingly elaborate hoaxes to make what was at root the provision of seemingly limitless IOUs to individuals and businesses regardless of collateral assets or ability to repay seem like a profitable business model. The only major area of non-military domestic production that remained viable and vibrant was the construction of bullshit, half-assed houses in which Jenn-Aire 8-burner ranges and Sub-Zero side-by-sides gave the nouveau riche sheen to 6,000 sq. ft. houses with 4″ interior walls and brick on the street-façade only. Successive governments, declaring home-ownership a sort of human right, not to mention patriotic duty, along with their colluders in the Fed, made monetary policy to encourage easy lending and financial institutions folded that in right along with consumer credit to drive a go-go economy of trade-up houses, credit-card purchases, and new cars every 18 months. The Ponzi-themed fantasy-game of infinitely rising home prices made everyone feel richer than they really were. The inevitable point at which the money due would become unrealizable seemed . . . evitable. The stocks of the shell-game players kept rising, buoyed by the titanic confidence of those who believed that cycles and bubbles had been beaten. The foreign nations who sold us greater and greater quantities of oil and produced greater and greater quantities of shit for our domestic markets bought our currency and financed our consumption. The greatest, Babelian tower of horseshit phoney-baloney non-wealth ever in the history of everything anywhere amen hallelujah inshallah was constructed over thirty years in an orgy of bland consumptive excess that would impress in a Satanic sort of way were it not so monumentally crass, asinine, soul-vacating, and chintzy. We were not even good at being gaudy, as the above-mentioned mass-produced mansion and its matching driveway Hummers suggests.

I realize, of course, that it’s just a matter of perception. When I look at the discursive world she thinks is being ruined, from where I’m standing it’s a crispy smoldering lump without much in it worth saving. I’ll consider it substantially closer to unfucked when IOZ has a bi-weekly column in the Washington Post, while Gerson checks his mailbox, fingers crossed, hoping he’ll find a check from Pajamas Media.

Also in my unfucked world: Joe Scarborough is arrested, but it doesn’t make the news, because who the fuck is Joe Scarborough? In my grandmother’s unfucked world, by contrast, people don’t say “fuck” on the Internet, or anywhere else. You can understand how we’d be pretty far apart on the most effective route to media Nirvana.

Awesome.

(h/t TheWashCycle)

I have nothing clever to say, no funny stories to share, no stems to wind, no fingers to wag and no hats to tip.

But I can surely offer you, on this lovely afternoon, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer doing an acoustic medley of Spinal Tap and Folksmen tunes, as well as an interview. They’ll have funny and interesting things to say. Enjoy!

Have a great weekend, y’all.