travel_punk

Heading off to Costa Rica in one week!

Golly, traveling is so different when you do it with another person. I will be so damned prepared for this trip, it's ridiculous.

Went to a Giants game yesterday.

They won.

It was a nice day.

Last weekend was the 13th annual Punk Rock Bowling and music festival. Each year, it's held in Las Vegas and usually it's at an off-the-strip casino named Sam's Town.

Because it was Memorial Day weekend, I ended up getting to Vegas a day early and chilling on the strip by myself. I stayed at the Excalibur Casino, which is a REALLY strange and freaky place to stay for anyone who has done historical re-enactments. The land of chivalry, it is not. Not feeling like being forsoothed and "ye olde-ed" all night, I went a wandering in the hot, desert winds. I didn't go far, when I came across a nice Irish bar in New York New York, Nine Fine Irishmen.

Here are a couple of pics from that night:




The house band was pretty good, I gotta say. Lots of traditional Irish tunes to sing along to.

I ran into a couple of Canadian fellows who were there on business. They run a motorcycle tour company:
www.mctrider.com/aboutUs.html

Jody and Scott were fun guys to talk bike shop for a bit.

I actually was home and in bed by 10:30.

After that, the whole punk rock bowling happened. Here's the nitty gritty details...



And that's how I acquired a howler monkey and a dwarf giraffe.




For pictorial and video images of some of the things that actually happened, you can go to my Flikr account:
www.flickr.com/photos/captdoggle/sets/72157626893528798/

Hi all of you lovely, lovely people.

When I started this Travel Punk journal in 2006, things were very strange and weird and I was going on adventures.

I'm still going on adventures but they've slowly changed and morphed into something completely new and awesome.

And so, it's time for a change. Not that I've been making regular updates to this blog anyway, but it will be even less from now on.

But, Never Fear young Readers!

My lovely girlfriend and I have started a brand, new TRAVEL BLOG!!!!

Here we are: http://twoforksintheroad.tumblr.com/

Put us on your RSS feeder, bookmark us, read us. Read us a lot.

It's going to be a great project, tell all of your friends.

Catch you over on the Tumblr feed, me lovelies.

A dear friend blogged this on another site:

"How is it possible that before Arthur, there was no romantic love, that this feeling is an invention, a patched-together leftover from The Age of Chivalry? Is it the lack of god in my life, the loss of caritas that leaves my heart, my mind, my soul (yes, you better damn well know that I believe in the soul) open to worldy contemplation of my love? These thoughts are perhaps inappropriate to Paschal, yet I cannot turn my mind from them.

I find religion in his body, I find divinity in his voice. I lose my carefully tended agnosticism to his mortality, and i am thankful for it."

To which I say:

Before Arthur, there was Chaucer, who wrote/blogged about down to earth, real time love between folks. He wrote about young men who did stupid things to prove to women that love meant all, but were realistic enough to want something more than simple gratitude, although they could be happy with that. Before that, there were young people meeting in fields on a hot summer's mowing and meeting each other illicitly in the woods and swearing that the moon and stars were pale comparisons for each others' faces.

Before Arthur (we are talking about the king, and not the 1970's movie playboy, right?) there were declarations of love were more private; a prayer carved in lead and thrown into a sacred lake, a birth of a child in a village of twenty people, an intricate headstone carved with all of the desperate, sublimated despair of someone who has lost the center of their world.

Before there were words, there was romantic love. There were cave kids marking walls with art to try to show someone special what they felt. Those beautiful blue and yellow pigments? The color of someone's eyes, or someone's hair in a crystal-pure summer's light. Those red colors that we could never again capture? The heat of that love as they closed their eyes against the sun and dreamed of their love.

Arthur merely crystalized it, put it on a (fairly unreachable) pedestal, made it... safe. Which is something that love isn't. Put on a pedestal, only to be looked at and admired, the only thing romantic love does, is get dusty.

Romance is an ever changing, wild, violent thing. And it is a caring, soft, comforting thing. Much like any wild animal, it has warm, soft fur, deep, throbbing veins, and fangs.

Based on my darling @smartlikeatruck’s suggestion, I recorded a sample of me reading a paragraph from Neil Gaimen’s American Gods. He’s having a contest right now where people can come in and record a chapter or something with him.

So I did.

Now you can go vote for me! Wooooo!

Please?

http://tinyurl.com/3wd5gqj

Oooh, second post in a day.... I'm on FIAH!

I made this quite a while ago, but never got around to hoinking a friend to make me music. Sooooo... here you go:

So... about a year ago, I was wandering around Europe, doing this, poking into that, and I came up with the idea of making bits of paintings and hiding them in the hotels in which I stayed.

Here is the first one I did in Bern, Switzerland:



And then, yesterday, I received this:

"hi there i did get the painting last week i visit the room and i did also hide one thing there look for the video i put it up in a couple of days"

Which means that someone found the painting and liked it! Well, at least liked the idea enough to do it themselves!

I have Started A Thing!

I like the idea that some random stranger found something I made over a year ago and cared enough to look for me online. The piece itself didn't have any identification on it whatsoever.

I wonder if anyone else will find the other things I've made and hidden and, if so, if I'll ever find out about it.

Yay for doing fun, random things!


EDIT:  The Finders have posted their video! Check it out here:

Or something like that.

I'm going to try to start updating this journal more frequently again.

It's been a month since I was released from disability and that is more than enough time to get back into the groove of real life, right?

suuuuuuure...

Ok, to sum up:

I finished up all of my physical therapy and doctor's whatnots. I lost about 20' declination in my right thumb that may or may not ever come back. My left collarbone aches and pings and probably always will. Still waiting for insurance stuff to sort itself out, but... meh. Whatever. Beuracracy is stupid.

I made a bet with a certain Mr. Swan for artistry reasons. We chose three art projects we wanted to work on for February and we'd finish them. Whoever didn't finish would buy a fancy dinner for the winner.

What I intended:
Write 30,000 words to finish off a story for smartlikeatruck , Finish writing and illustrating and bookmaking a children's book for Jack, son of Jay and Flo, and submit a query letter to an agent for Jack's book. 

No, I didn't complete everything. I think I bit off more than I could chew. But I did write, illustrate, and bookmake Jack's birthday present, and I did submit the query letter to the agent. But I was only able to write 11,000 words of the story.

For the month of March, my plan is to finish the story, get most of the edits for a screenplay I wrote updated, and query two more agents/submit stories to magazines.

Um... yah.

(March is apparently also the month to not know how to end LJ entries in an entertaining manner.)

Oh!

Here is one of the illustrations from Jack's book:

And it's true, I was completely surrounded!

It was astonishing, I tell you. Bits of metal here, pieces of fabric and whatnots over there.

I was afeared for my life.

And then I woke up and I was cuddling my computer in my sleep in my bed.

And I should probably stop taking lots of pills for the injuries because they do me No Good when it comes to rational thoughtings. And if you read that sentence again, you'll figure out that me fully sober has enough trouble with that anyways. Ya know?

So... I'm almost certainly going to have to go in for surgery to repair a torn ligament that detached itself during the accident. And I'll probably have to go on disability for a while and there's absolutely No Chance of me wandering off to Europe next year.

And I'm bummed about this.

So I don't want to think about it.

So I found this online and I think you should all watch it because it PLEASES me.

http://nonadventures.com/2010/11/20/wand-ambition/