An open message to Dave, a guy who, like many has seen a lot of changes in his life over the last year or so, some not so good, some for the better, I've been following his exploits in a kayak, on swirling waters, and felt not a little jealous... getting pangs, ya know, to go out in mine, but, after they sat unused behind the house for a year or several, I um... sorta gave 'em away. One had become a bit porous, that was the serious white water toy, me and it had crashed into many rocks, submerged trees, and ice floes, I'd dragged and carried it through forests and, roped it down cliffs, been smashed upside down onto the beach.... Ahh, happy times.
My neighbour, who I gave it to, thought the fact that this much-patched lightweight kevlar reinforced adventure-machine leaked a bit, so you got a little wet, was a fault, and unacceptable.
It was, in fact easily fixable, but fixing it would add a little weight... so I never bothered. Water never bothered me.
One day I came home and Dylan was cutting it up in his back yard. CUTTING IT UP! DAMN!
But, you give something away, you lose the right to be angry when the new owner treats it badly.
Here's my thoughts on Dave's announcement of closing his blog.
Oh how insidious, Dave Mows Grass escapes, how the hell do you think you'll get away from the keyboard?
Blogger enforcement techs are right now creeping up on you, like they did to me, with a great big net, which they throw over you, and use to subdue you, dragging you off into the van. The van takes you to a secret facility, many miles from anywhere any of us would wish to call "home", and you will there be deposited into an empty room. Yes, room, they call it, not cell. There will be sedatives, of course, for a few days... But the lights go on and off at times, and with no windows, no clocks, how do we know time, days? I think I've been here a few weeks, but it may be days or years...
After a while, you sleep most of the time. Then, after one waking, there is a desk, and a computer. "You know what to do", a note on it says. "Blog. Or else".
And after a while, blogworld? seems like reality. You envy those out there on the water, those travelling, those living lives... but hey, there's another picture to cut and paste, hit post... Every time you hit so many words and images posted, you get a reward. I once got a beer, that was for a two thousand word post on a blog about knitting... Oh no, you don't have your own blog! that's too funny, no, you just get assigned blogs to post on, in the style of, I've done blogs on everything from high-altitude cheese-weaving, to the migration habits of pigmy shrews.
Now they tell me I've got one on grass-mowing and kayaking to do.
It seems another blogger has escaped, slipped his chains sometime in the night and left the blogcentrum, I heard the alarms the guards shouting, vehicles starting up. What happened? I think one of the guards has a blog, I'll tell you when he updates.
Come visit, Dave, let us know you're okay?
I am the grit in the gears, the missing bolt, I am the poker of sticks into spokes. I like to know how things work, but sometimes when I take them apart and rebuild them, I have a few pieces left over. I am a man, so I tend to leave reading the instructions until after it goes wrong. And like all men I have a comprehensive mental map of the world and never need to ask directions. I never get lost, only sometimes I'm late, or end up in the wrong place entirely. It's what we do.
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Hiya, Soub, and thanks for this. I've been blogging through some challenging waters this year. It hasn't been the drops themselves that have made it difficult, but the lack of recovery areas between them. It has been one long, continuous rapid! The other day, I hit this big pourover which didn't look like much from the top but I'll be damned if I could get out of the hole at the bottom. If I could have gotten a few penstrokes in, I could have busted through the eddy lines on either side but it was much to squirrely. The best I could do is lift my upstream knee, lean on my downstream pen blade, and try to survive. I did that for a while but eventually I had to make a move. I thought if I flipped over to the upstream side on purpose, maybe I could catch the green water under the foam pile and flush out. Instead I just got beat up and had to swim. Then, from out of nowhere, a rope! It was my uncle Steve, with my old friend Seth up on a rock shouting and pointing at the closest eddy. I managed to hold on to my pen but my blog get tossed in the hole for a while before it finally flushed out. Fortunately, Soub was there to round it into an eddy a bit further downstream. The water in the hole ripped out all the outfitting so it doesn't fit the same--it probably never will--but at least I still have it. Let's go blogging sometime!
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