Human Crashpad's blog

This keyboard is driving me crazy! I've mever typed with a spanish-keyboard before...

 So this is a note to let you guys know what's up and what's happened. I'm coming home in two days and will somehow - between the library job and the soon-to-be written essay on 1800's moral ethics - be typing up a crazy blog on all that happened at Ecuador's Youth Worlds.

 Until then, I must go because my time is already up on this little internet cafe computer. Just know that Crash has seen some

 CRAZY!!!!

...stuff:

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Right now I sit in a Costco, looking across the small white table at a depressing line of condiment dispensers. My hand itches to grab the small black Sharpie in my back pocket and write the word “life” after the word RELISH on one of the machines. However, lacking the aforementioned small black Sharpie in the aforementioned back pocket, I turn my attention to the nearly finished lemonade in front of me and wait patiently for my German friend to finish shopping.

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To ALL,

THIS IS A FORMAL LETTER OF APOLOGY!!!

I'm SO SORRY.

I wrote an apology...a really effing long one...so when I lost it when my wi-fi broke off...I burst into fresh tears. I wanted to throw my freaking laptop across the room. But I'm going to hammer it out again, every bit, no matter how painful it is for me, even if you don't want to read it, - which I would totally understand - because the people I insulted (and those that I've made angry) freaking deserve an apology. And I deserve all their anger.

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She drops onto the crashpad at eleven after midnight, seeking sleep after a brutal day of bouldering. Anything to bring a new tomorrow; a new day; new skin. All the built up fatigue, all the cruel exhaustion has built up over the eight-hour session at Tramway and now crashes in upon her body in manifold waves. First the sore muscles then the bruised fingers begin banging on the door to her brain; and when it doesn’t open, they slip notes to her sub consciousness to pass on later.

One of them reads: “Don’t ever do that again. Sincerely, Your Right Hand.”

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The first thing that struck me quite noticeably was that there was a tram. Okay, maybe I should've figured that part out on the 2-hour drive from LA to wherever, AFTER hearing about it a number of times as "The Tram", AFTER someone told me it was 22 bucks to get to the area, or maybe AFTER...we passed a giant sign that read THE TRAM with letters two feet tall.

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"I can't believe they subject kids to this."

We're watching TV - the brainwashing activity we dive into when we're really tired or just disinterestingly bored. I'm both: sore as hell from the comp and experiencing what we call "post-comp depression".

Yeah, I'm depressed as hell because the comp is over. Everyone leaves, all my friends and fellow competitors, and I'm stuck back into my normal life after the plane flight home. And plane flights are depressing too.

God I hate plane flights.

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My laptop is telling me 1:13AM. I don't feel like going to sleep on a bed. Sometimes you sit somewhere and you just want to keel over and fall asleep on your face, even if room 213 is just on the other balcony and only a hundred feet away. Sometimes you can imagine in your head what it would feel like to just curl up where you are and let the exhaustion soak out of you and into the chair. Why do I hear people's wake-up calls from here? Why are they waking up at 1:20AM?

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Enlightenment is like the top-out of a boulder. Many paths, some hard, some easy, some just flakes, likely to break off in your hand the second you lay a finger to them. The longer or harder the route you take, the stronger you are in the end. And in the end you are standing on top and looking into the distance when you realize:

This isn't Enlightenment. It's just a frickin' rock.

The book in your hand is not the Bible, Qur'an, not even The Dummy's Guide to Enlightenment, but an outdated Yosemite guide with hand-drawn squiggly lines wearing small dots and harboring names of classic problems.

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The 10 Days in Joshua tree blogpost was getting too lengthy so I decided to wrap it up and post another of my shorter, more adventurous return.

It didn't take a lot of planning to go back. I simply expressed my wish to go, and, within a few days, we decided suddenly it was time to leave the green and blooming paradise of Santa Cruz and return to the bug-less, bushy desert lands. I left a small post mentioning I would be gone and began the nine-hour drive south.

Like last time, I arrived at the site with much to be mulled over. The Count of Monte Cristo was flung into the backseat, finished, as we drove through the campsites looking for a possible place to crash. The only one open was on bare rock, so we pitched our tent and stuffed it with everything we could to keep it from flying off. Satisfied it would not be lost to the 50-mile and hour winds, we ran over to Gun Smoke and did several laps along the lengthy 30 foot traverse, working through the initial flash-pump and reacquainting ourselves with the granite.

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I may as well post a blog about my trip to JTree since I've been thinking so much about it. Just to clear the mind.

March 23rd, we drove nine hours south to Joshua Tree. I'd finished reading Crime And Punishment on the way and was mulling over Rastovsky's (sp?) theory about ordinary and extraordinary men when we pulled into the campsite. Madrock had reserved three family campsites for the climbers who were expected to arrive all throughout the week, so with a headlamp and several helping hands we put up our tent and fell to sleep.

I awoke the next morning to the same people who helped us the night before: Joe, Jody, and Kumpy. Joe was the owner of Madrock, a man whom I'd expected to be business-like but turned out to be surprisingly familiar with the climbers and local dirtbags. He put me in mind of Mao Zedong: gaining support among the dirtbags to expand his company. In fact, he later introduced us to two very charismatic (and somewhat wired) locals, Tobias and Nick (I think his name was Nick), and gave them a pair of shoes and a harness each. Jody ran the shoe demo at Coyote Corner, and Kumpy was an energetic climber who'd been road-tripping for five months with no gear but his shoes and a harness. We went to Coyote Corner to buy a bouldering guide and found that our site was surrounded by boulder problems. I worked the V8 traverse next to our site, Guerin's Reverse, and waited for more people to show.

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